Work Text:
One of the most cherished aspects of my regular visits to Aldershot and my friend Corporal Henry Wood, late of Her Majesty’s Army in India, was our complete understanding of each other as sub-Continental soldiers. We could speak, or not-speak as was often the case, of our shared painful memories of abduction and torture, the fear in combat, the fear of letting down one’s comrades – and the more prosaic memories of heat, dust, and being stationed in a foreign land. Corporal Wood’s companionship was also a great comfort to me in the three years in which I believed my closest friend, Sherlock Holmes, to be dead.
But as fellow soldiers, some of our visits were pure raucous enjoyment, of a sort I would never indulge in with Holmes – and to the dismay of the staff of the Musket and Shot, the tavern frequented by the young recruits. Occasional songs or jokes in Hindustani or Pashto never failed to put a frown of incomprehension on poor Sallie, the barmaid. But the only time she threw us out was when the Lieutenant came in.
A very new lieutenant, I deduced, for officers do not patronise enlisted men’s pubs and vice versa. The youngsters stilled their speech and watched him come in, barking orders about drinking off-duty (“Oh Lord save us, a blue-lighter,” one lad whispered) and representing Her Majesty at all times.
Fortunately Corporal Wood and I were well-versed in the ways of real war in real hellholes; such little men could not intimidate the likes of us. And three pots of porter do not soften my tongue.
I stood and called out my name and rank (Captain John Watson, retired, late of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, veteran of Bombay, the Maiwand Retreat and Peshawar’s bloody hospital), and innocently asked where the Lieutenant had practised his shooting – perhaps upon the merciless quails and pheasants on his family’s estate in the Cotswolds? I hid my smile as the tall blond man started at the direct hit (I am no Sherlock Holmes, but my constant exposure to a master of the art of deduction has sharpened my own eye).
Before the spluttering officer could regroup and bring himself to reprimand a war hero, a second such stood. “Corporal Henry Wood, also late of Her Majesty’s Indian Army, prisoner of war during the Mutiny!” The feckless man recoiled at the sight of a man bent and crooked and brown and seamed as an oak-branch. “You see before you what the enemy can do to a straight-backed soldier after 20 years of abuse, sir! Are you prepared to see such duty? Or shall you run back to Mummy’s knee and tell her you’ll be a sailor after all?”
“Oh God there’s a rat in my beer!” the lieutenant shrieked.
It was Teddy, Corporal Wood’s pet mongoose, who had found the pint-glass and was happily bathing himself in its contents. Wood and I burst out laughing at the sight, and at the lieutenant’s face.
“That’s no rat, Lieutenant!” I cried. “It’s only a Scottish gander!”
“Aye,” Wood choked out, following the terrible joke I’d started perfectly. “It’s a mon-goose!”
We set the room howling at that one.
We still would likely not have been thrown out of the pub had Wood’s cobra not gotten loose at that precise moment. Nag had no fangs and was as harmless as a newborn kitten, but that information never reached the patrons.
Within the minute the pub was emptied, the angry Sallie set to mopping up broken glasses and spilled drinks from the panicked retreat, the lieutenant was heading pell-mell for the officer’s quarters never to darken the doorway of the Musket and Shot again, and Wood and I were outside still holding our sides.
And somehow, what made me laugh all the harder beside my friend was the thought of how puerile Holmes would have found the entire business.