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 flames, I was overwhelmed by sensation, jaded by extreme emotions, exhausted by proxy passion, and ready for bed. But all the action stuff was superfluous to the two crucial events, the flogging and the shipboard spats between Bligh and Christian. We had all, I think, learned collective outrage, although the actual chances of organising a decent mutiny at school seemed desperately slim.* More important was the personal lesson I’d learned – about the power of words to help you stand up for yourself.
A week later, at Saturday morning rugby practice, Mr King, the sadistic sports master, stopped our listless passing and tackling and delivered a pep-talk about our lack of energy and attack. We’d heard it all before. We knew he’d pick on someone to hurt, as he always did. He called out Paul Gorham, a small fat boy upon whose prodigious folds of warm flesh we used innocently to rub our freezing hands when nothing much was happening at our end of the pitch.
‘Gorham,’ he said, ‘you’re useless. Why are you not trying harder? Mmm? Mmmmmm?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘So it’s just ignorance, is it, Gorham, rather than just indolence, mmmm?’
‘No, sir. I’m a defender, sir. I thought I’d better wait at this end, sir, in case they tried to break through, sir. And,’ he concluded pathetically, ‘it’s very boring, sir.’
‘Well,’ said Mr King nastily, ‘we must try and make life more exciting for you, mustn’t we?’ And, as he’d done a dozen times to a dozen other boys, he ran his hands over poor Gorham’s face, circled them around the boy’s cold-reddened ears and began to hoist him up off the ground.
‘Aaargh,’ said Gorham. His portly frame dangled agonisingly, four stone of small fat boy held up in the air by two straining lumps of cartilage and flesh.
‘Don’t do that, sir,’ I said, out of nowhere. ‘You’ll hurt his ears, sir.’
Mr King put Gorham down and ambled over to me.
‘What did you say, Walsh?’
‘You’ll hurt his ears, sir, picking him up like that. My father’s a doctor and he says it damages the ear-drums.’ It all came out as a rush. It must have sounded a little too prepared, but I’d been thinking about Mr King’s casual savagery, and I was fed up with it.
‘Do not tell me what to do, boy,’ said Mr King. He sounded momentarily puzzled. Had the parents, urged on by my father, been talking about him? ‘This team is a disgrace to the rugby pitch, and you, Walsh, are one of the worst offenders.’
‘Yes sir,’ I said.
‘You run about aimlessly, you can’t tackle for toffee, you’re positively lily-livered in the scrum. You don’t even try to play rugby. And to cap it all – to cap it all – you are cheeky to my face. I don’t like your attitude, Walsh.’
I looked into his eyes. They were a milky shade of blue. I’d never looked him in the eyes before. You didn’t look a teacher in the eyes. You looked at the ground. You muttered ‘Flippin’ heck, sir’ while he punched you in the stomach or hoisted you aloft by your ears. But for the first time, I looked straight into his blue eyes.
The words came into my head, unbidden, perfect: ‘I assure you, sir, that the execution of my duties on the pitch is in no way affected