Books: 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.