towel were his only other stage properties. Sister Morgan would take the thermometer from him gravely, and he would say: ‘Hello, boys and girls, I’m Queen Victoria as a young wife and mother!’ or ‘Beware, you wicked old men, I’m the Widow Twankey,’ or‘Give ear, O Benjamin, Iam Saul the son of Kish in search of his father’s asses,’ and she couldn’t help laughing. And he would insist on talking in character until breakfast came up. Biblical parts were his speciality.
One day I was watching him at work on a complicated paper-cutting trick. He folded a sheet of newspaper this way and that, snipping it carefully here and there with a pair of nail scissors; he had toldme that when it opened out it was going to be what he called ‘Bogey-Bogey Ceremony in Sumatra’. He was full of tricks of this sort. I quoted a verse of the Psalms at him about it – I forget which it was – and he said, shaking his head at me sorrowfully: ‘No, no, little Gravey-spoons, you’ve got that all awry. Never misquote the Psalms of David to Old Papa Johnson, because he knows them all off byheart.’ And so he did, as I found when I challenged him, and Proverbs, too, and St Mark’s Gospel (‘It’s the one that reads truest to me,’ he said, ‘the others seem to me to have been played about with by someone who wanted to prove something’), and most of Isaiah and the whole of Job. Also Shakespeare’s
Sonnets.
I was astonished. ‘Where on earth did you come to learn all that?’ I asked. ‘At aJesuit College as a punishment for independence of character?’
‘No, no, no; bethink yourself, child! Do Jesuits use the
Sonnets
as a textbook? I learned most of my stuff in the Antarctic – I was on two expeditions there – while we were snowed up. Some of it in the Arctic. But I learned most when I was Crown Agent on Desolation Island.’
‘Where’s that? Is that one of the Fiji group?’
‘No, no,no, child. That’s in the Antarctic, too. It’s the most southerly land under the British flag. The appointment is made yearly – it’s well paid, you would say – but others wouldn’t agree – £1,000 a year and everything found. Usually a Scot takes it on. The Scots don’t mind living entirely alone in a howling wilderness as much as we English do; they are a very, very sane people. But my Scottish predecessorstuck it only for nine months, and I stuck it for two years: you see Old Papa Johnson is just a little bit insane. Always was so from a child. So he didn’t come to any harm there. Besides, he had company for the last ten months.’
‘If the island’s a wilderness, what’s the sense of keeping an agent there and wasting all that money on him? Is it just to keep the British claim from lapsing? Mineraldeposits waiting for development?’
Johnson carefully laid down his ‘Bogey-Bogey’ business before answering. It was, by the way, a birthday present for Sister Morgan. Johnson went out of his way to be friendly with Sister Morgan, though I couldn’t understand why. She was a V.A.D. nurse, middle-aged, incompetent, and always trying to play the great lady among the other nurses; they detested her.But with Johnson she behaved very well after a time and I came to like her, though when I was in another ward I had thought her impossible.
‘As Crown Agent, I would have you understand, Captain Graves, I hadto supervise His Majesty’s customs, and keep a record of imports and exports, and act as Postmaster-General and Clerk of Works, and be solely responsible for maintaining the Pax Britannicain Antarctic regions – if necessary with a rope or a revolver.’
I never knew when Papa Johnson was joking, so I said: ‘Yes, your Excellency, and I suppose the penguins and reindeer needed a lot of looking after; and what with their sending each other so many picture postcards and all, you must have had your hands full at the office.’
‘Hignorance!’ snapped Papa Johnson, in the idiotic tones thathe used for the
One day I was watching him at work on a complicated paper-cutting trick. He folded a sheet of newspaper this way and that, snipping it carefully here and there with a pair of nail scissors; he had toldme that when it opened out it was going to be what he called ‘Bogey-Bogey Ceremony in Sumatra’. He was full of tricks of this sort. I quoted a verse of the Psalms at him about it – I forget which it was – and he said, shaking his head at me sorrowfully: ‘No, no, little Gravey-spoons, you’ve got that all awry. Never misquote the Psalms of David to Old Papa Johnson, because he knows them all off byheart.’ And so he did, as I found when I challenged him, and Proverbs, too, and St Mark’s Gospel (‘It’s the one that reads truest to me,’ he said, ‘the others seem to me to have been played about with by someone who wanted to prove something’), and most of Isaiah and the whole of Job. Also Shakespeare’s
Sonnets.
I was astonished. ‘Where on earth did you come to learn all that?’ I asked. ‘At aJesuit College as a punishment for independence of character?’
‘No, no, no; bethink yourself, child! Do Jesuits use the
Sonnets
as a textbook? I learned most of my stuff in the Antarctic – I was on two expeditions there – while we were snowed up. Some of it in the Arctic. But I learned most when I was Crown Agent on Desolation Island.’
‘Where’s that? Is that one of the Fiji group?’
‘No, no,no, child. That’s in the Antarctic, too. It’s the most southerly land under the British flag. The appointment is made yearly – it’s well paid, you would say – but others wouldn’t agree – £1,000 a year and everything found. Usually a Scot takes it on. The Scots don’t mind living entirely alone in a howling wilderness as much as we English do; they are a very, very sane people. But my Scottish predecessorstuck it only for nine months, and I stuck it for two years: you see Old Papa Johnson is just a little bit insane. Always was so from a child. So he didn’t come to any harm there. Besides, he had company for the last ten months.’
‘If the island’s a wilderness, what’s the sense of keeping an agent there and wasting all that money on him? Is it just to keep the British claim from lapsing? Mineraldeposits waiting for development?’
Johnson carefully laid down his ‘Bogey-Bogey’ business before answering. It was, by the way, a birthday present for Sister Morgan. Johnson went out of his way to be friendly with Sister Morgan, though I couldn’t understand why. She was a V.A.D. nurse, middle-aged, incompetent, and always trying to play the great lady among the other nurses; they detested her.But with Johnson she behaved very well after a time and I came to like her, though when I was in another ward I had thought her impossible.
‘As Crown Agent, I would have you understand, Captain Graves, I hadto supervise His Majesty’s customs, and keep a record of imports and exports, and act as Postmaster-General and Clerk of Works, and be solely responsible for maintaining the Pax Britannicain Antarctic regions – if necessary with a rope or a revolver.’
I never knew when Papa Johnson was joking, so I said: ‘Yes, your Excellency, and I suppose the penguins and reindeer needed a lot of looking after; and what with their sending each other so many picture postcards and all, you must have had your hands full at the office.’
‘Hignorance!’ snapped Papa Johnson, in the idiotic tones thathe used for the
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