oblivious; the result was a series of bumps, scrapes, collisions, and furious protests from outraged voyagers, culminating in a regatta event in which he dismasted one competitor, caused another to capsize, and added insult to injury by winning handsomely. That he was promptly disqualified did not lower the angle of his jaunty cigarette-holder by a degree when he turned up at the prize-giving, bronzed and dashing, to applaud the garrison beauty, Ellen Ramsay, when she received the Ladies’ Cup. She it was who christened him the Sea Hog - and was his dinner companion for many nights thereafter, to the chagrin of Lieutenant MacKenzie who, until Errol’s arrival, had been the fair Ellen’s favoured beau.
None of which did much for Errol’s popularity. Nor, strangely enough, did an odd episode which I thought was rather to his credit. The command boxing tournament took place, and as sports officer I had to organise our regimental gladiators - which meant calling for volunteers, telling them to knock off booze and smoking, letting them attend to their own sparring and training in the M.T. shed, and seeing that they were sober and (initially) upright on opening night. If that seems perfunctory, I was not a boxer myself, and had no illusions about being Yussel Jacobs when it came to management. Let them get into the ring and lay about them, while I crouched behind their corner, crying encouragement and restraining the seconds from joining in.
The tournament lasted three nights, and in winning his semifinal our heavyweight star, Private McGuigan, the Gorbals Goliath, broke a finger. Personally I think he did it on purpose to avoid meeting the other finalist, one Captain Stock, a terrible creature of blood and iron who had flattened all his opponents with unimagined ferocity; he was a relic of the Stone Age who had found his way into the Army Physical Training Corps, this Stock, and I wouldn’t have gone near him with a whip, a gun, and a chair. Primitive wasn’t the word; he made McAuslan and Wee Wullie look like Romantic poets.
Left to find a substitute willing to offer himself for sacrifice at the hands of this Behemoth, I got no takers at all, and then someone said he had heard that Errol used to box a bit, and must be about the right weight. There was enthusiastic support for this suggestion, especially from the older officers, so I sought the man out in his room, where he was reclining with a cool drink at his elbow, shooting moths with an air pistol - and hitting them, too.
“What makes you think I could take Stock, if you’ll pardon the expression?” he wondered, when I put it to him. “Or doesn’t that matter, as long as we’re represented?”
“Someone in the mess said you used to be pretty useful …”
“Did they now? That’s handsome of them.” He grinned at me sardonically. “Who proposed me - Cattenach?” This was the second-in-command, Errol’s principal critic. “Never mind. It’s not on, Dand, thanks all the same. I haven’t boxed for ages. Too much like work.”
“There’s no one else in the battalion,” I said subtly.
“Stop waving the regimental colours at me.” He picked off a large moth on the wing, bringing down a shower of plaster. “Anyway, I’m an interloper. Let Cattenach take him on if he’s so damned keen; God knows he’s big enough. No, you’ll just have to tell ‘em I’ve retired.”
So I reported failure, and there was disappointment, although no one was daft enough to suggest that Errol was scared. The Adjutant, who was a romantic, speculated that he had probably killed a man in the ring - his fiancée’s brother, for choice - and vowed never to box again; he would have joined the Foreign Legion, insisted the Adjutant, if it hadn’t been for the war. Others joined in these fine flights, and no one noticed the Colonel sauntering out of the mess, but later that evening he told me casually that I could pencil in Errol for the final; he had been persuaded, said the Colonel, filling his pipe in a contented way. Knowing his fanaticism where the battalion’s credit was concerned, I wondered what pressure he had applied, and concluded that he probably hadn’t needed any, just his gentle, fatherly insistence which I knew of old. He could have talked a salmon out of its pool, the same Colonel - and of course the possibility that his man might get half-killed wouldn’t even cross his mind.
It crossed mine when I saw Errol and Stock face to muzzle in the ring; so might Adonis have looked in the presence of a silverback gorilla. Stock stood half a head taller, two stone heavier, and about a foot thicker, especially round the brow. He came out at the bell like a Panzer tank - and Errol moved round him as though on rollers, weaving and feinting until he’d sized him up, and then began systematically left-handing him to death. It was Carpentier to the town drunk; Stock clubbed and rushed and never got near him until the second round, when he had the ill-judgment to land a kidney-punch. Errol came out of the clinch looking white and wicked, and thereafter took Stock apart with clinical savagery. The referee stopped it in the third, with Stock bloodied and out on his feet; Errol hadn’t a hair out of place, and I doubt if he’d been touched more than half a dozen times.
But as I said, he got no credit from that fight. It had been so one-sided that all the sympathy was for the battered Stock, and there was even a feeling that Errol had been over-brutal to a man who wasn’t in his class as a boxer. Which was unfair, since he had been reluctant to fight in the first place - my guess is that he knew exactly how good he was, and that Stock would be no contest. But if he compared the polite clapping as he left the ring with the thunder of applause for his groggy but gamely smiling opponent, it didn’t seem to worry him; he strolled back to the changing-room cool and unruffled as ever.
It was immediately after this that he finally fell from grace altogether, and the mixed feelings of the mess hardened into positive dislike. Two things happened to show him at his worst; neither was earth-shattering in itself, but in each case he displayed such a cynical indifference that even his friends could find no excuses.
In the first instance, he stole another man’s girl - and it wasn’t a case of cutting out someone like MacKenzie, the battalion Lothario, with Ellen Ramsay, whose admirers were legion (including even the unlikely Private McAuslan, whose wooing I have described elsewhere). Boy met, dated, and parted from girl with bewildering speed in post-war garrisons, and no harm done; Errol himself must have been involved with half the nurses, A.T.S., Wrens, and civilian females, and no one thought twice, except to note jealously that while the rest of us had to pursue, he seemed to draw them like a magnet.
But the case of Sister Jean was different. She was a flashing-eyed Irish redhead, decorative even by the high standard of the hospital staff, and her attachment to a U.S. pilot at the bomber base was the real thing, what the Adjutant called Poignant Passion, engagement ring, wedding date fixed, and all - until Errol moved in on the lady. I was on detachment at Fort Yarhuna during the crisis, but according to MacKenzie it had started with casual cheek-to-cheek stuff on the dance-floor at the Uaddan Club, progressing to dates, picnics, and sailing-trips on Errol’s dinghy while the American was absent on his country’s service, dropping sandbags on the desert (I quote MacKenzie). In brief, Jean had been beglamoured, her fiancé had objected, a lovers’ quarrel had ensued with high words flying in Irish and American, the ring had been returned, the pilot had got himself posted to Italy in dudgeon, and the hapless patients in Sister Jean’s ward were learning what life was like under the Empress Theodora.
“Talk about hell hath no fury,” said MacKenzie. “She’s lobbing out enemas like a mad thing. You see, not only is her romance with Tex kaput, bus, washed up; on top of that, the unspeakable Errol has given her the gate and is pushing around the new Ensa bint - who is a piece of all right, I have to admit. What women see in him,” he added irritably, “I’m shot if I know. The man’s a tick, a suede-shoe artist, a Semiramis Hotel creeper of the lowest type.”
“Didn’t anyone try to steer him away from Jean?” I asked, thinking of the Colonel, who when it came to intervening in his junior officers’ love lives could have given Lady Bracknell a head start. “Why didn’t you tackle him yourself?”
“Come off
