Good Enough For Nelson by John Winton Read Free Book Online Page A

polysyllables of his name had been bawled aloud, at staff meetings, at social gatherings of all kinds, and whenever he was introduced. The introducing voice seemed to him to speak in accents of ever-increasing clarity and mockery, until Mr Tinkle became quite neurotic about his name, to the extent that even now, seven years later, he dreaded every morning that he would come into his lecture room and find some scurrilous play on his name chalked up on the blackboard. Mr Tinkle could see it in his mind’s eye: it would begin, inevitably, Tinkle, tinkle, little chap...’. It had never happened yet, but Mr Tinkle daily feared it.
    Mr Tinkle had never felt more ambiguously about the Navy than he did that summer. He had applied for his Dartmouth lectureship in a spirit of bravado. He had accepted it in a mood of rebellion. He now found that he enjoyed it, and could not have left of choice. But he daily braced himself for intellectual combat, only to find there was none. Nobody ever took him on. Intellectually, the College was a vacuum, a desert, a nothing. And yet he had found some naval officers deceptively naive. They talked a strange, primitive non-language which could nevertheless inflict a numbing defeat on the unwary. Mr Tinkle sometimes compared himself with the tutor of radical convictions employed by a rich and powerful Whig family in the early nineteenth century. He felt himself attracted by status and repelled by its ideology. No addict trying to break his habit ever struggled harder than Mr Tinkle against the temptations of romanticism, but he felt himself succumbing. He experienced this dichotomy of sensibility, as he himself put it, most acutely when he lectured, as now, to a class of men from the lower deck. They were his own mates, literally his own class mates, and his colleagues in the class struggle. He should warm to them. So why did he despise them? Why did he secretly hanker after what he thought of as ‘the old Navy’ and yearn to teach a class of Old Etonians? He was a socialist, and yet he remembered with longing and approval those tremendous words of Virgil’s with which his Oxford tutor had opened his first lecture on imperialism . Tu regere imperio populus, Romane, memento. Their confident iambics were the very motto of empire. Roman, remember your imperial destiny. Look to it, that you impose dominion over the peoples of the world. Those imperious syllables were only equalled in their arrogance by those infamous words written across the front of the College. But if he quoted them now, to this class, these cretins, these clod-hoppers, they would only gape at him.
    Lionel Tinkle was more than usually pensive that morning. He now believed that he was in love, mirabile dictu , with a Roman maiden of the patrician class, the Assistant Captain’s Secretary, a Third Officer WRNS. Her name was Polly, and Polly was fair and rosy of face. Polly was peaches and cream. She smelt of cologne, and sprig muslin, and milk. Furthermore, her breasts nearly burst out of her uniform blouse, and the movements of her hips under her navy blue skirt made Lionel Tinkle break out in a sweat of longing. Lately, he had started to wake up in the middle of the night, chanting her name, as though responding to some call from somewhere up near the ceiling.
    Mr Tinkle took up the little red book from his desk. ‘Let me read to you,’ he said, ‘the lesson for today. I quote. “History shows that wars are divided into two kinds, just wars and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all that impede progress are unjust. We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars, we actively participate in them. As for unjust wars, World War I is an instance in which both sides fought for imperialist interests; therefore the Communists of the whole world opposed that war.” Unquote. That, gentlemen, was from Mao Tse Tung’s