A Sink of Oujamaflick

CAPTAIN CAT (222 pp.)--Robert Holles--Macmillan ($3.50).

Those who do not know what it is like to wallow in a sink of oujamaflick will be enlightened by the sad story of Harry ("Dinger") Bell, child soldier of the Queen.

He is a member of a peculiar British institution, half open-air reformatory and half military kindergarten, known as Army Boys' Technical Training Battalion. "Belsen" is his name for Hurlingford, the battalion's base, and his judgment on civilian life is "oujamaflick"--his word for "iniquity," which the outside world is a sink of. Dinger Bell is the narrator-hero of an autobiographical novel by an Englishman who himself became an "apprentice" soldier at 14. As he remembers it, "the junior intake" at Hurlingford is possibly the most pathetic body of British men-at-arms since Justice Shallow filled his draft quota with village idiots, misfits and no-hopers.

Indes v. Packers. Dinger is only 15 ("My mother didn't kiss me when I left to join the Army . . . All she said was 'Don't go and get knocked over by a tram or anything' "), and his memoir gives horribly credible, detailed illustration of Poet Randall Jarrell's line: "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State." Shrewd, wary, knowing, and precociously cynical, Dinger is yet troubled by Wordsworthian intimations of immortality. Dimly, he is aware that the presence of a soul is a handicap in his strife with life. Of the soul, he observes: "I'd rather have a sock full of two-bob bits." Thus, it is not a tram but a moral issue that runs over Dinger Bell. By the time he has won his first stripe, Dinger also wears the common wound stripe of moral cowardice.

The focus and occasion of Dinger's social rise and moral downfall is Rex Boone, a "bozzle bonce," meaning a chap who is handicapped by intelligence, good manners and a U-type accent. Boone, also facetiously known as "Gangster" or "Gangst," is fatally crippled by having a gentle nature. Like Gunga Din or Sir Philip Sidney, of whom Dinger has vaguely heard, Boone is a "real mug" with "no future." Yet for a while, Dinger and Boone are "chinas," or buddies.* They try to assert their individuality against the khaki mass, against superior officers who are "189% swine," and against the witless cruelty of a state that knows nothing but its own welfare. They form a club of two--the "indes" or independents--against the "packers," the Pack Faction, whose boots, they realize, they must lick or wear. Their club HQ is in the branches of a huge oak, where, in the ancient fashion of children, they rewrite the world's laws.

Instead of Standing Orders, they write their own Standing Suggestions, and lay absurd and intricate plans for defying their adversaries. Their mutinous fantasy gains just one recruit--a cat. Instinctively they recognize in this starveling stray a truly independent spirit. The rebellion is, of course, doomed. The HQ tree is cut down, the cat tortured and killed, and Dinger is "sentenced" to eight "horse-bites" by a sadist comrade. Gangst's own tragic fate is honestly worked out by Novelist Holles; in the telling, he has drawn a stringent moral theorem. By cruelly inevitable steps, Dinger plays traitor to his friend to protect himself.

Vulgate v. Mandarin. Studded with rhyming slang and juvenile jive talk (British variety), the book is noteworthy for its language, marking as it does a lively trend in the British novel--use of the vulgate. Until recently, most British novels, though far better written on the Mandarin level than their U.S. counter parts, have been shy, inept or totally ignorant of the language spoken by most of the population. Whereas the industry of U.S. novelists has given demotic American speech an international status, the British writer clung to the tradition, set since Shakespeare's time, of using the language of the lower orders only for comic effects. But Holles' ranker speech is rich and authentic. At worst, it may illustrate the objections of the legendary Victorian statesman to an Act of Parliament lowering the age for compulsory school attendance: "After all, it only means the dirty words will be written lower down on the wall."

At best, it touches the native spring of English, undefiled by grammatical or upper-class inhibitions, so that Dinger speaks, if that can be imagined, like an urban and English Huckleberry Finn.

For all the surface comedy of speech, the novel has a bitter theme of innocence outraged, strangely reminiscent of a very different book--Humphrey Slater's marvelous but little-known allegory of the Children's Crusade, The Heretics (1947). Even saints, Novelist Holles seems to be saying, need common sense if they are not also to be martyrs. He also carries the bleak and conservative conviction that sin is what the theologians say it is--original; it does not have to be taught.

*In British rhyming slang "china" stands for "china plate," which stands for mate.

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