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Final thoughts (or are they)

The Mister G had disappeared at the Acton Recruiting Depot; Private 6297283 the new product of Shorncliff Dover was there to start a new quality of life in the Buffs. Some years later returned to the Dover area to replace his Private status with that of Mister.

Were there any regrets? The answer was not as obvious as he had thought; maybe the change over from youth to adult had lost that vital understanding of the difference between the need of youth and the liabilities of adult life. The stress to ‘grow up’ and comply with the adult world of booze and cigarettes removed personnel choice, some of the things touched in previous chapters. With an abundance of youthful ideas perhaps the pluses outweighed the minus experiences; he was single and all those things experienced by others would have looked so different if he had a wife and children. Letters from home with bad news and a bad army day made it a thousand times worse for them.
Home station wasn’t too bad with a possible compassionate leave and the chance of extending it but the overseas posting was totally different, the fact was that there was little they could do. It would take the lad’s peace time marriage to understand just how much they must have suffered.
The strange thing about the earliest days, it only took a short time to accept the army system, the odd chap that challenged it lost even the small privileges of a Private. He never imagined that one of his first barracks job’s was to fill his mattress with straw from the quartermaster store a thing considered good enough for the rankers, then at a later date it would have been considered a luxury in some of the active service periods.

Many other things have not been touched in previous chapters. One of the early Christmas dinner meal’s with all the trimmings, the thing that was so different was that the ‘ORs’ had their dinner brought to them by the officers and senior ranks. There were the usual laughs and the speech from the RSM, it went something like this, ‘Well you Blokes it’s ok to take the piss today but remember I’ve got three-hundred and four days to put it right’. It wasn’t a threat it was a fact. If the story is to be understood there are two stages the Private must go through, the rookie and the old soldier syndrome. The rookie was about as low as army life could go but the ‘old’ soldier syndrome produced a way to survive within the system and even beyond. There was no limit to the power held in the hands of the ‘leaders’, the better ones used it wisely but other pea brains would find delight in making life a misery with the power that had to be accepted. Within time it was necessary to find a way to work with both and enjoy the middle section. Free-time was a precious commodity to be used as you would the nectar of the Gods. It was time to steer clear of the badie and live only for that moment. Maybe it would be a good thing to round of this story with the visit to Madonna di Campiglio and trying to ski in the whiteness of the snow with the added pleasure of climbing up the mountain and the joy returning down the slope. Within a short time an added bonus of a real brown tan. Then to the other end of the snow scale the stay at Lake Como, getting there was as picturesque as any other beauty spot, it was so good it was felt that he could have lived there for a thousand years. Just to establish the date of the visit, Mussolini had been killed with his Mistress. Lots of photographs were spread out on the News Paper but as messy as they were it didn’t stir much emotion within the group. The main occupation at that time was rowing in a boat and enjoying the food and sunshine little else mattered, but like all good things it was a return to the old camp and be involved in an Educational Course.

What has all this writing done for Charlie G. firstly he reflects just how lucky he was, he was with good people, people he could trust and goes without saying the army thing gave miles of travel experience and in most cases the time to see other people working in their own environment and seeing that all their aspirations were similar. Writing this has also established for him he is an army man and still thinks as an Army man very often using his army vocabulary to express his annoyance? Maybe the loss of so many of names of regiments seems to the old head such a loss, possibly unavoidable but then that’s the way of things. The photograph is important, it shows him with the lady that was to be his wife and still is in 2004. Perhaps the war was instrumental in giving him the most important period in his life.

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