Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies. John Walsh

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СКАЧАТЬ never, ever, looked at you. He stood with eyes cast down at the glum brown carpet, waiting for you to say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ like a good little victim and take yourself off to the lavatories where you anointed your stinging hands with soap and running water.

      The worst bit, though, was the waiting. From sentence to execution, hours would pass when nothing entered your mind but the prospect of what was to come. Bluebirds could circle the playing fields, grocer’s boys could whistle on their bicycles in a sonic emblem of the freedom beyond the school gates, but none of it would alleviate the pain of your imminent tryst with The Lash in the headmaster’s study.

      So we watched with lively professional interest as Mills, stripped to the waist, was tied to a trellis and Quintal hissed in his ear, ‘Now just remember this, mate, it ain’t me that’s whipping yer.’ I’ve never forgotten those words. The crimson sock from the teak chest yielded up its baleful cargo of a cat-o’-nine-tails, Quintal shook it out and, before the ship’s crew’s incurious gaze, proceeded to lash Mills’s remarkably white flesh.

      Counting off the lashes, we took in with our young eyes the blooding and flaying of Mills’s back, the wincing of the more sensitive crew-members, the gloating interventions of Captain Bligh (‘You’re going too soft, Quintal – lay on with a will or you’ll take his place’ – a classic piece of schoolmasterly brinkmanship) and the gradual sinking down of the victim.

      Bligh’s mouth twisted in a smile. God I hated him. He reminded me so much of Mr King, the sports master, who always had me in his sadistic sights. Once, when I had weedily underperformed at some football practice, he actually picked me up by the ears and held me dangling in agony. But you didn’t fight back or argue with Mr King. You accepted that he had every right to do horrible things to you, because you were a nasty little boy who was probably in the wrong. All you would say was ‘Flippin’ heck, sir,’ like a Cockney droll, and take your punishment in good heart and not complain. You weren’t allowed to make a fuss, even to answer back, when you were eight, in Wimbledon, in 1962.

      When Quintal had delivered the final lash and his shipmates had thrown a bucket of water over the flayed and knackered Mills, we breathed a collective sigh, we innocent choirboys and altar servers – half relief that it was all over and half a perverse satisfaction in cruelty that would live in our impressionable hearts for years. But something more important happened in those five moments, something that was to change us all. It was the first time we’d been confronted en masse by the grotesque unfairness of corporal punishment, a system that had changed little since the days of Tom Brown and Dr Arnold. At school, we sympathised with the boys who were on their way to the punishment room, and afterwards noted their tears, the weals on their flayed hands. But we’d never all witnessed it taking place in front of us before, never watched it as a hostile, wounded, grumbling, collective unit. You could almost hear a mutinous sigh from the fourteen schoolboys in the cinema stalls. We’d all experienced it as individuals. Seeing it portrayed on screen as an example of capricious revenge by an autocratic authority figure was something new.

      It was shocking. No, it was outrageous. Why was Mills being subjected to such treatment? Because the Captain said so. Whose rules allowed the Captain to say so? Some naval statute, thousands of miles away in London. For the first time, we considered the possibility that the rules might be wrong – that it shouldn’t be possible to flog someone half to death because of some gubernatorial whim. And that it shouldn’t be possible to find oneself beaten in a book-lined study because some ancient ruling dictated that it should be so, because you had forgotten to bring your sports kit on a particular day. A shock-wave of rebellion passed through us. Mr Breen looked down the line of boys, checking to see that we had all come through the trauma of the flogging scene and nobody was weeping with distress. We weren’t. We were thinking how we’d all put up with it for so long. And how we might change the system so that we wouldn’t have to go through it any more. But where did you start?

      In the captain’s cabin that evening, Bligh and Christian discussed punishment. Christian advocated leniency and charm to win over a crew and make them sail a happy ship. Bligh rejected such piffling liberalism. He was an advocate of ‘cruelty with purpose’, the efficiency brought about by pain. When a sailor has to be ordered aloft in freezing weather, Bligh maintained, it was better that he feared the retribution of his captain for being a bad sailor more than he feared death itself. ‘When a man has seen his mate’s backbone laid bare, he’ll remember the white ribs staring at him, he’ll see the flesh jump and hear the whistle of the lash for the rest of his life.’ Against which, all Christian had to say, with a glass of port in his hand, was, ‘I’d steer clear of this cheese, sir – I think it’s a bit tainted.’

      I’d never heard the like of it before. Christian was subtly alluding to the cheese-stealing incident, criticising the captain in his own study and getting away with it. This would have been described by our parents as cheek. It was a smart remark on the lips of an inferior, directed at a figure of authority, its implied condemnation of the man and his attitudes sleekly concealed behind a veil of polite warning. It was cool. I was beginning to like Fletcher Christian.

      There was another significant row, when Bligh announced his intention of sailing round Cape Horn. Rather than declare him an outright madman for steering them into a Force 12 inferno of crashing waves, 200 m.p.h. tempests and certain death, Christian said, ‘Well, we shall have ourselves quite a little adventure … Of course, Admiral Anson did it, but not in a 91-foot chamberpot.’

      Bligh lost his temper at last and told Christian that he possessed only one emotion, namely contempt.

      And Marlon Brando said this marvellous thing. He didn’t deny the accusation, but replied: ‘I assure you, sir, the execution of my duties is in no way affected by my private opinion of you.’ And he left the captain silent and fuming, unable to out-sleek his hated rival, glaring uselessly at the sea with his lower lip petulantly stuck out like a drawer in a Regency dresser.

      You have by now, I’m sure, realised what was going on, though we hardly knew it ourselves, in the Odeon, Leicester Square, in 1962. We were watching the world about to collapse. We were watching a film about school, in which the whole system of masters and students, bound together in ancient protocols of supposedly common ideals, was about to founder. It was the moment with the crimson sock that did it – that collective shudder about a punishment we couldn’t evade – that made us realise the Bounty was a huge floating metaphor of school. Everything on board had its counterpart in the inky purlieus of Wimbledon College.

      Captain Bligh was a classic headmaster – Mr Quelch from the Bunter books, Jimmy Edwards from the Whacko! television series, and Father Egan from our prep school. The sailors on the quay were second-year rude boys, joshingly welcoming the new bug, Wilson; they’d even watched him sign on for the voyage at a stained and pock-marked old desk. They’d told him to beware of the head’s frightful temper. The uniformed midshipmen were prefects, boys you couldn’t be friends with because of their little tin badges of authority and their direct line to the caning room. The three miscreant sailors, played by Richard Harris, Chips Rafferty and Gordon Jackson, were the anarchic naughty boys in class, always getting into trouble with the beaks as if they longed for punishment

      And there, right there on screen, was a blueprint about how you could deal with the beaks, if you had the nerve. You could be cool. You could be sleek and inscrutable. You could fight back with words which couldn’t get you into trouble, either because they seemed to be about something else (like saying the cheese was tainted) or because they were simply too polite. We suddenly learned, at eight years old, the vital weapon of irony.

The rest of the film passed in a blur. I came out of the cinema with my head full of sea water, Pacific sunsets, rolling barrels, Tahiti dances, half-naked native girls holding nets in the sea, and disjointed images of the mutiny itself. After three hours of sadism, storms, death, topless women, breadfruit, romance, attempted escape and the final drama of the Bounty in СКАЧАТЬ