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one might have expected and had yielded little.
    The Gunner, with that inevitable suspicion and cunning with which a ranker encounters his new officer for the first time, was wary and close-mouthed, restricting himself to “Yes, sir. No, sir” and “Very good, sir.” In the main it had been obvious to Tim that Lovejoy had been trying to make out what his predecessor, Major Patterson, had told him. Furthermore, he had been anxiously estimating how much Tim intended to interfere with his way of life. The interview had ended with the Gunner apparently satisfied saying, “Just you leave everything to me, sir,” and taking his dismissal with alacrity.
    Strange, Tim thought, how much, how very much more he now knew about Gunner Lovejoy.
    Physically Gunner Lovejoy of His Majesty’s Royal Artillery was small, just a half an inch over minimum requirements for height. He had the agility acquired from years of nipping round corners or popping into doorways to avoid meetings with sergeants or officers, who invariably had work for him to do. He was fortyish with a mop of ginger-coloured hair which was usually down over his eyes or sticking out in untidy wisps from his Gunner’s field-service cap. His face was seamed and leathery and small, with a button nose, and perhaps it was the slightly flaring nostrils which led Scruffy to the belief that John Lovejoy was really one of them. Lightish-coloured blue eyes were deep-set in the weathered countenance, eyes that could mirror innocence, when innocence was wanted, but mostly reflected that cunning resulting from years of skrimshanking in the Army, ducking responsibility and anything which looked like hard work or interference with the pleasures of private life.
    Actually as a regular in charge of apes, a post he had filled with distinction for twenty years, Gunner Lovejoy from time to time worked far harder and longer and weirder hours than any of his colleagues in Anti-Aircraft Battery 5.
    But the point was that they were hours of his own choosing and in a field where he was the unquestioned specialist. In his denims and khaki jacket he was the most unsoldierly specimen on the Rock, and when compelled to appear in regulation uniform not much better, since he contrived somehow to make it look ill-fitting and too large for him. It had been twenty years since Gunner Lovejoy had fired a round from a field-piece, or so much as laid a hand clutching a polishing cloth to muzzle or breechblock of anti-aircraft guns. Instead he had made himself indispensable to a series of O.I.C. Apes, and had remained through practically three generations of apes, feeding, guarding and nannying them.
    He was attendant at births, marriages and deaths; he rooted them out from under culverts or plucked them out of trees; he guarded the infant apelets from jealous members of the pack; he broke up savage and vicious battles, often too late to avoid a fatality; he nursed them in illness and when necessary gave them what-for in health. He knew every quirk of their mischievous little minds and every trick of which they were capable.
    Tim understood that the Gunner’s anthropomorphic attitude towards his charges was quite natural. He saw in them a kind of third-class and wholly underprivileged people, since Lovejoy’s opinion of the human race was very low. Reflecting upon this, the thought struck Tim that there was no reason why this anthropomorphism should be a one-way street, and it was quite possible that Scruffy and the rest of the pack regarded their keeper as only another and larger species of tail-less monkey.
    However, the facts were that if there was anything in the world the Gunner loved, it was his apes; he was devoted to them and in particular to the bad boy of the pack, the intransigent and practically uncontrollable Scruffy. Something of Scruffy, Tim felt, was present in Gunner Lovejoy. He, too, was in constant rebellion against life as he had found it, or as it had been inexorably welded about him.