The Sheik and the Dustbin. George Fraser MacDonald
GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER
THE SHEIKH
AND THE DUSTBIN
Contents
The Servant Problem
Captain Errol
The Constipation of O’Brien
The Sheikh and the Dustbin
McAuslan, Lance-Corporal
The Gordon Women
Ye mind Jie Dee, Fletcher?
Extraduction
Author’s Note
Glossary
Praise
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
One of the things I never learned from my tough grandmother (the golfing Calvinist, not the Hebridean saga-woman) was how to deal with domestic help, and this although she was an authority, having been both servant and mistress in her time. As a girl, straight from the heather, she had been engaged as kitchenmaid at one of those great Highland shooting lodges to which London society used to repair a century ago, and being a Glencoe MacDonald of critical temper and iron will, she had taken one cold Presbyterian look at the establishment with its effete southern guests and large inefficient staff and decided, like Napoleon contemplating the map of Europe, that this would never do. Within six weeks she had become senior housemaid, by the end of the season she was linen-mistress, and before her twentieth birthday she was head housekeeper and absolute ruler of the place, admired and dreaded by guests and staff alike. I can only guess what she was like as a teenage châtelaine, but since in old age she reminded you of a mobile Mount Rushmore, handsome, imposing, and with a heart of stone, it is a safe bet that living in that lodge must have been like being a galley slave in a luxury liner. Knowing her zeal for order and reform, I suspect that her aim would be that of an enlightened prison governor - not to break the spirit of the inmates altogether, but to see that they went back into the world better and wiser human beings.
Whatever effect she had on those sophisticated ladies and worldly gentlemen - and I’m sure she taught them that there were higher things in life than grouse-shooting and flirtation - they can have been in no doubt that the Highland servant, whether lowly menial or autocratic housekeeper, was very different from the southern domestic. My grandmother was not alone in her generation in simply not knowing what servility meant; indeed, mere civility was no commonplace, as witness the famous John Brown, whose devotion to Queen Victoria was matched only by his rudeness. My grandmother, who gave respect only when she felt it was due, which wasn’t often, used to recall (without a glimmer of a smile) an event from her early years in service when the lodge’s head cook, another stern Caledonian, noted for her prowess at whist drives, was called in by her employers to take part in a bridge game, there being a shortage of players among the guests. As luck had it, the cook partnered a Prince of the blood, who took mild exception to her bidding, whereon the cook rose in her wrath before the Quality assembled, and hurled down her cards, exclaiming: “Away, ye crabbit auld Prooshan, and play by yersel’!” Nor was she dismissed; a Prince may be a Prince, but a Highland cook who knows the secrets of venison and cold salmon is something else.
It may be significant, too, that grandmother’s only joke was based on the English master-Highland servant relationship. It described how a chimpanzee escaped from the circus and was found dead in a ditch by two ghillies employed at the local castle, then occupied by a London shooting-party. The ghillies had never seen a chimpanzee before, and didn’t know what to make of it. At last the elder said: “It’s ower hairy for a MacPherson, no’ broad enough in the chest for a Fraser, and too long in the lip for a Cameron - away you up to the big hoose, Erchie, and see if ony o’ the gentry’s missing.”
[I told that joke in the mess once, with mixed success: the Padre worked it, with Gaelic subtlety, into a sermon, but the second-in-command looked puzzled and asked: “And was anyone from the big house missing? No? Oh … bit of a mystery then, what?”]
However, you will note that there are two butts of the joke - the foreign gentry and the ignorant ghillies - which says something about grandmother’s outlook on life. Her censure knew no class boundaries; dukes and dustmen alike (and grandsons) had to be kept in their place, and she was the woman to do it, even when she was very old. My heart bled for her own maidservants when, as a small boy, I used to visit her home, that still, immaculate domain with its softly-chiming clock, redolent of beeswax and lavender, all swept and polished to perfection. I lived on tiptoe there, giving ornaments a wide berth, wondering at her bookshelves where Cruden’s Concordance and Bunyan’s Holy War lay beside long outdated fashion magazines from Paris, pushing in my chair to the exact inch when I received the almost imperceptible nod of dismissal from the stately, white-haired figure at the end of the table, straight and stiff as her own ebony walking-cane; dreading the cold eye and sharp, quiet voice, even when they were addressed to her maids and not to me. How they endured her, I’ll never know; perhaps they knew what I sensed as an infant: like her or not, you could be sure of her, and that is a quality that can count far beyond mere kindness.
Anyway, with that background I ought to have mastered the servant problem, but I never have, not from either side. On the occasions when I have had to serve, I have been a disaster, whether shirking my fagging duties at school, or burning toast, dropping plates, and letting the cookhouse boiler go out as a mess orderly and assistant scullion at Bellahouston Camp, Glasgow. Nor am I one of nature’s aristocrats, born to be ministered to and accepting it as my due; anything but. I hate being waited on; servants rattle me. I find their attentions embarrassing, and they know it, damn them. There was a butler once, about seven feet tall, with a bald head and frock coat, who received me at a front door; he looked me up and down and said: “Good morning, sir. Would you care to wash … at all?” I can’t describe what he put into that pause before the two final words, but it implied that I was filthy beyond his powers of description. Nor am I deceived by the wine-waiter unctuously proffering his bottle for my inspection: this bum wouldn’t know it from turpentine, is what he’s thinking.
Such an advanced state of doulophobia is bad enough in civilian life; for an army officer it is serious, since he has to have a body-servant, or orderly, or batman, call it what you will, whether he likes it or not. This did not trouble me when I first encountered it as a cadet in India; we had native bearers who brought our morning tea, cleaned our kit and rooms, laid out our uniforms, dressed us on ceremonial occasions, and generally nannied us through a fourteen-hour day of such intensive activity that we couldn’t have survived without them; there was even a nappy-wallah who shaved you as you sat bleary-eyed on the edge of your cot - and never have I had a chin so smooth. It seemed perfectly natural forty years ago; it would not have seemed natural from a white servant - and before anyone from the race relations industry leaps in triumphantly with his labels, I should remark that the Indian cadets were of the same opinion (as often as not, so-called race prejudice is mere class distinction) and were, on the whole, less considerate masters than we were. My own bearer was called Timbooswami, son and grandson and great-grandson of bearers - and proud father of an Indian Army officer. So much for the wicked old British Raj.
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