Otherwise, Tangier was noted for the sumptuous palace occupied by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. It was also a magnet for elderly European gays, because the Moroccan boys were numerous, willing, and cheap.
My parents played the tourist out of the El Minzah Hotel, but I could not, like them, retire to bed at ten p.m., so I would steal back out and explore the bars and dives of the port quarter. It was here I met the
Marine Commandos.
There was a British warship moored in the outer harbor on what is called a “flying the flag” mission. The idea was to spread pro-British goodwill along the African coast. It was in a dockside bar that I came across a group of Marines who were having terrible trouble making themselves plain to the bar staff, who spoke only Moorish Arabic and Spanish.
I tried to help and was promptly press-ganged as unit interpreter by the senior sergeant. They were all from Glasgow, from, I believe, Gallowgate, or the Gorbals: about five feet tall and just as wide.
The problem was not between English and Spanish. That was easy. It was between English and Glaswegian. I could not understand a word they said. Eventually a corporal was discovered whom I could decipher and the three-language enigma was solved. We moved from bar to bar as they spent their shore leave and accrued pay on pints of beer and triple-scotch chasers.
Another problem, and quite a big one on a goodwill mission, was that they tended to leave each bar looking as if a bomb had gone off. I solved this by suggesting a gratuity for the staff. Contrary to rumor, Glaswegians are not stingy. When I explained the Tangerines were dirt poor, the Marines chipped in generously. But I explained to the bar staff that the extra money was the house-repair budget. Smiles all around.
Each morning, I was decanted from a taxi outside the El Minzah at about five, just in time for a short nap before joining my parents for breakfast at eight.
On the third day, the Royal Navy warship weighed anchor and cruised off, taking the commandos to continue their friendship-building mission somewhere else.
After six days, my parents and I went back by ferry to Gibraltar and then by plane to London. I had reached seventeen and a half and needed to get on with the serious task of wangling my way into the Royal Air Force. But in three months, all on the tab of the late Mr. Knightly, I had learned fluent Spanish, collected a Granada University diploma, learned how to handle a cape in the face of two charging horns, discovered what to do in bed with a lady, and developed a rock-hard head for alcohol. I was out on the “dusty high road” referred to in the Tonbridge School song and enjoying every minute of it.
LEOPARD-SKIN SOLUTION
April 1956 seemed to be racing by, and still I could not persuade the Air Force to let me in. It was a very odd position to be in. Compulsory National Service was not popular and it was becoming even less so as the mood toward a fully professional army, navy, and air force strengthened.
The rumors grew that by 1960 it would be abolished. All my contemporaries were seeking ways of delaying their call-up until abolition. Some invented maladies that would enable them to fail the medical. Much of a generation claimed to have flat feet, fallen arches, defective vision, or shortage of breath. If they were all to be believed, one would conclude the young manhood of Britain was the unfittest on earth.
And yet I was trying to get in against an oncoming tide of youngsters trying to get out. I went to two recruiting offices in East Kent, and in each the result was the same. The flight sergeant in each welcomed me with something approaching disbelief, a surprise compounded on learning I was not trying to sign up for a whole career but just for the two-year National Service that everyone was trying to avoid.
There was a reason for this. I did not want to spend a working lifetime in a blue uniform if I could not fly. In fact, the RAF was extremely generous in that regard. If you failed the selection tests, you could leave immediately, but I did not know that.
In each office, the senior NCO beamed a welcome, drew out a long form, and began to fill it in. Everything went swimmingly until the query about date of birth. When I gave it, there were several seconds of mental arithmetic, then the sad smile as the form was torn up.
“Nice try, son,” they said. “Come back when you are eighteen.”
It was my father who cracked it. Ashford had an Air Cadet Corps and the corps had a band, and up front marched the big drummer, in both senses. He was a big lad, and jutting out from his chest was the big drum. But he had no leopard-skin tabard or poncho. Everyone knows that the big drummer has to have his leopard skin.
Dad was a furrier, and in his basement store he had a magnificent leopard skin, deposited for safekeeping before the war by someone who had never come back and probably never would. He took it from the chilled vault, trimmed it, backed it with red baize, cut a slit for the drummer’s head, and presented it to the corps.
The drummer was in seventh heaven and the corps commander deeply grateful. The point was, the corps had a patron in the form of a retired air marshal who lived out at Tenterden. He rang my father to express his appreciation. The conversation ended with the perfunctory “If there’s anything I can ever do . . .”
“Well, as a matter of fact, there is,” said my father.
The warmth at the other end dropped several degrees. “Yes . . . ?”
“I have a son.”
“Good.”
“He wants to join the Air Force.”
“Excellent.”
“There’s a problem, Air Marshal. He’s just a couple of weeks too young.”
There was a thoughtful pause, then, “Leave it to me.”
This is where the luck came in, though only later did I discover the story behind the story.
During the war, the air marshal had been a group captain commanding an air base in the middle of Iraq called Habbaniyah. Serving under him was a certain junior officer, a flight lieutenant. In the intervening years, the group captain had become an air marshal retired to Tenterden. The flight lieutenant had become a group captain and director of personnel at the ministry. To this day, I have a fantasy of the conversation between them. Something along the lines of: