ššØļøCherry is clearly at pains to write with clarity and respectability (he notes that after an education at Winchester and a degree in Modern History at Oxford, he is finally starting his schooling and learning a little about writing - "My own writing is my own despair, but it is better than it was, and this is directly due to Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw." [!] ) However, he's also at pains to give us a sense of how it really was, and this includes the slang. I cannot quite work out if calling an assistant a "snotty" may be put down as ship's lingo, academics' lingo, a general period-ism, or leftover school slang, but he cracks me up every time he describes himself as such in the middle of an otherwise very serious and proper sentence.
Tangentially, I am delighted to know Cherry's a Winchester boy, and thus would not only know all the "notions" (slang) in the Winchester School Word Book which delighted me so much last year, but would have been made to sit a mock exam on it in his first term.
"How about that cocoa?" says Campbell. Cocoa is a useful thing in the morning watch, and Gran, who used to be Campbell's snotty, and whose English was not then perfect, said he was glad of a change because he "did not like being turned into a drumstick" (he meant a domestic). I am going to start saying I don't want to be turned into a drumstick whenever anyone asks me to do something I'm not in the mood for.
