The club very much goes into “irons,” to use a nautical term, during these sleepy summer months, allowing the old place to be cleaned and the exhausted staff to frolic about on their hols. I have suspended my normal “Matrimonial Difficulties” outreach duties on Wednesday mornings in order to facilitate the scrubbing of the club. I now just shoot in for a small lunch, a large martini and a brief chat with a few of the remaining mems.
I found two the other day, the One-Armed Colonel and the Blind Admiral, having a chin-wag over the club’s delicious raisin pie. It appeared to me as I joined them that the Admiral was extremely vexed about something while the semi-winged Colonel stared at his glorious club dessert.
“I have been deserted by God, left to my own devices. In short, abandoned in unsheltered shoals,” he complained.
I don’t think I am revealing anything of a secret nature when I say that the club, in his own argot, considers the Admiral somewhat “intellectually becalmed” but not a bad fellow all in all and rarely given to emotional outbursts.
The Colonel excused himself and legged it for the front door, which I don’t blame him for. I suppose he had already been apprised of the Admiral’s situation during the ham and pea soup and again as he struggled through the club’s overdone roast beef. I started to say, “I am sure you will manage….” when the old sailor gripped me with the strength of one who has tied more than a few knots and I felt the curse of Coleridge’s mariner descend upon my shoulders. I slumped as I acquiesced to my fate and put a fixed smile on my cake-hole.
“You see she, Helen that is, has gone away for the summer and left me in the hands of some Tartar and he is flogging me,” he blubbered. This from a man who had two ships blown from beneath him in the North Sea en route to Archangel, not a man known to blubber.
If I recall the story, the last time they pulled him from those dreadful northern waters so long ago, the only thing amiss outside of a severe case of prolonged frozen testicles was that he insisted he had fallen in love with a nearby seal and wanted her saved as well.
There was a huge coverup as the Royal Canadian Navy captains were discouraged from personal relationships with heavy- lidded sea animals sporting “come hither” smiles. Another time certainly, but not then. Today, of course, this might be referred to as Relevant Diversity or some sort of thing.
Nevertheless I decided to investigate, for my wife Kitty always goes Up Island in the summer months to visit ghastly friends, and so I had time to indulge my friend’s needs. I chugged up to the sightless Admiral’s home, which was built to resemble a ship’s stern. The name “HMCS Bat” was embossed above the front door, which was disguised as a rudder, and gave a unsure knock.
My tentative enquiry was answered by an efficient- looking fellow holding a feather duster. I explained that I was there as a mediator to discern what the problem could possibly be between the two of them. This came as a stunning surprise to the clean- shaven servant. I was invited in.
I gratefully sucked on my tea cup as I watched the chap, “Perkins,” go about his tasks in the living room. Then suddenly it came to me. He was moving the furniture!
Years before the Admiral’s wife had put little spots of paint on the floor indicating where the chesterfield etc. must stay, in order for her husband to become familiar with his surroundings. He soon could unerringly throw his peaked cap at the coat rack, flinging himself onto his comfy couch with no fear of an injury. His wife, it seemed, had neglected to pass this on to Perkins before she left, turning the Admiral into a human pinwheel every time he arrived home.
Perkins did admit that he found it unsettling to watch the old sailor appear to do cartwheels about the place. We quickly located the worn spots beneath the carpets and arranged the room as before. The Admiral, still scarred from the seal business all these years later, took awhile to trust the fellow, but once fortified with several straight rums, he began that lopsided smile we so admire at the club and all was well again. Smooth sailing is resumed.
Copyright The Major’s Corner 2014
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Allan Prout
Pea and ham soup. Yikes. I hate pea and ham soup, anything but !0
Keith Murdoch
If only my wife would go up Island more often!!! K.