It was on the Superb that I ran into Norton again. I had been aboard her for some months as an ordinary seaman, the lowest of the low--a bloody OD, in the patois of the trade. I had been in officers' school with Norton, as it happened. But while he was commissioned, I was found lacking in “Officer-Like Qualities,” OLQ, and was washed out. The Royal Navy obviously didn't need people like me, a Jew, on its quarter-deck. I hadn't been to even a minor public school, and my name ends in a vowel.
It was true that discipline was punctilious; the ship was run with Jesuitical adherence to KRAI, King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions. Norton, shortly after his arrival in the Middle East had had some business to transact aboard the cruiser, and I chanced to encounter him. I don’t know what he was doing below decks with all that gold braid on the shoulders of his tropical rig.
"Norton! Norton! You old buzzard!" It was a term of endearment in those days. It was rank insubordination to call an officer by his first name, let alone the epithet, but, hell, at Cambridge we had been in the boat club together and then I was captain. The boats of course were smaller.
He was momentarily brought up short. Then, recognizing me, he looked quickly over each shoulder in turn--there was a rear admiral aboard somewhere. Then sharply, almost in a whisper, "Speak to me ashore sometime," he said.
Well, that was Norton in those days, in the strait jacket of his damn uniform which dominated his behavior and his mind. He never reached a higher rank in the navy, nor, it occurs to me now, a lower rank as a human being.
When we were at Cambridge he had told me of the incident on the school cricket field when the school master had admonished him for his rigid commitment to form, and it came quickly to mind. I shouted, "Step over the wicket, man, and make a cow shot. Slog it into the pavilion!"
It was a pretty silly thing to say, I suppose, because I wasn't really mad--just a bit disgusted that the stupid bastard should be so controlled by the gold wire on his stupid shirt. But it was a bad idea too, because just then the Jaunty came by and witnessed the encounter. He was a cockney: "What's all vis ven?" he demanded.
"It's all right, Chief," said Norton. He nodded to me and left, and in that nod he was saying, "I'm bailing you out, my friend," which of course he was. Without that word from him I could have been in the rattle: Number Elevens, for sure; that would have been the punishment--running around the ship holding a rifle above my head for so many circuits, and other contrived pains and discomforts. He saved the situation for me, and in so doing, of course, he claimed a moral victory: he had done me a favor.
All the same, I think he got the message, which called on him to back away from this absorption in the navy and his slavish devotion to its protocols. There is a place in the existentialist literature in which the author describes a waiter. The man is totally waiter, nothing but: he bows, he walks backwards washing his hands, he has a towel over his arm, he shuffles empty plates, and he says the stereotyped things that all waiters say. There is nothing about him at all except waiter, in himself he is nothing. I felt Norton was that way--all naval officer, nothing but: a tailor’s dummy in a uniform dressing it. And perhaps my grievous indiscretion in that incident weighed with him later, when he shook himself free. Ever so slightly, perhaps. Who knows? As he left I noticed a button undone on his shirt just above the belt. At the time I thought that an encouraging sign.
At any rate in fairness I must add that I did encounter him ashore, and he lent me some civilian clothes (pretty loose around the waist) and took me to dinner at the Officers' Club in Haifa.
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