The Naked Island | Page 5

demanded the orderly.
"Don't feel like it," I explained.
"Don't give me that, mate," said the orderly, disagreeably. "Now come on: fill it up and I'll test it for sugar."
Although the prospect of being tested for sugar struck me as (so far) the only interesting event of the entire day, I had, reluctantly, to refuse. I had to confess, sadly, that at that moment I was as dry as the Sahara: utterly arid, in fact. There was not the smallest pos sibility of Messrs. Swan's ink bottle being even dampened. At this, the orderly looked most ill done by. Tarzan, however, intervened on my behalf.
"The kid's nervous," he said. "Turn on the tap. A running tap'll fix him up."
The orderly, though obviously aggrieved, was a good-natured lad and turned on a tap. He, Tarzan, and two newly arrived recruits watched my reactions with absorbed interest. I remained arid. I was not nervous, but definitely I was arid.
Wanning to his task, the orderly went into the closet in the corner of the room and gave the chain a lusty pull. There were loud rushing water noises, but I remained arid.
Tarzan and the other two recruits turned on all the rest of the taps in the laboratory and at once the room filled with the sound of falling water but I was unmoved. Three more recruits entered and one of them a young ex-milkmansuggested whistling. It worked with his spaniel pup, he said. Soon the whole building resounded to watery splashes and sibilant and insinuating whistles, as the entire medical staff and a dozen potential soldiers united in bringing to its successful conclusion Operation Ink Bottle. But finally, when it be came obvious that my bottle (the milkman's spaniel notwithstanding) now the cynosure of twenty pairs of eyes was doomed to remain empty, everyone admitted failure. Taps were turned off; cisterns slowly refilled and became silent: even Tarzan desisted from a particularly seductive line of whistle.
There was only one thing to do. I dressed and went out and drank three chocolate milk shakes. I then returned and filled my bottle with consummate ease, and was thereupon tested for sugar which turned out to be not interesting at all, and I still can't remember whether I have it or not, though one of them I know to be an extremely bad thing.
This done, we were hustled down to the main hall in the barracks to take the oath, which is the final act of enlistment. The recruiting sergeant was ponderously jovial as he herded us along.
Like children repeating the alphabet, we mumbled out the phrases of the oath as they were gabbled at us by an individual whose voice glowed with all the warmth and patriotic fervour of a manual of Military Law, And at the second upon which the last word of the oath fell from our lips, the recruiting sergeant, his bonhomie shed with all the speed of a heavy coat upon the arrival of a heat wave, started screaming: "All right now, you blokes git fell in. C nion, c mon. Shake a leg or you'll be doing some spud-bashing you're not civvies any longer, you know. * And straight away, to the accom paniment of his hysterical screams of "Left, right, left, right" and of mutinous backchat from ourselves, we ambled off.
"Rck it up there, pick it up," screamed the sergeant. "Left . . . Right . . . Left . , ." But the small squad of recruits only burst into a squall of abuse and, sturdily ignoring all his instructions, straggled along looking remarkably un-military.
"Silly old bastard," Tarzan remarked during a comparative lull.
"What's that you said?" bellowed the sergeant, bringing us to a violent halt.
"I said," stated Tarzan with awful calm, "silly old bastard." And, to remove all doubts, the milkman added: "He meant youl"
Uproar ensued. Everyone enjoyed themselves enormously. Colour ful Australian phrases filled the air with lurid insubordination. And into the midst of this chaos exploded an overwhelming and humour less bellow which informed us in incontrovertible tones that we were in the Army now, not a bloody rabble! It blasted us straight on to the end of the vaccination queue. It was our first experience of a sergeant major.
"Stick by me, kid," said Tarzan, TH look after you." Three minutes later a woman doctor pricked the huge man's sun-tanned arm with her needle. Uttering a small sigh, Tarzan swayed dizzily on his feet and crashed, all six feet four of him, to the ground in a faint.
"Mug lair," commented the milkman dispassionately as he sur veyed the prostrate giant. He held out his arm to the woman doctor. I followed suit. Then bereft of my protector, who still lay uncon sciousI was marched off with the rest of the squad to the sleeping quarters. Marched off