´óÏó´«Ã½

I had done some army training at the Cambridge University Senior Training Corps but was not really accustomed to military life and was apprehensive when my call-up papers came, summoning me to a Primary Training Wing at Perth, in Scotland. I had never been further north, from London, than Bedford. I changed trains at Edinburgh and by chance was in the same carriage as another recruit, a chap from Leeds. He had been to University and had graduated and had been deferred from call-up, up to then, because of a hearing deficiency. At Perth we walked to Queen’s Barracks, the depot of the Black Watch and were allocated a hut, one of a few built alongside the main square. I assume they had been built for the militia, the first peace-time conscripts who had come into existence before the war, in 1939. The unit was staffed by Black Watch and Argyll and Sutherland Highlander NCOs, many of them regulars. One I remember, a Corporal in the A and SH, had recently returned from seven years service in India and the Middle East. He told us of his nocturnal adventures with the Perth wives of overseas soldiers.
Almost all of the men in the hut were Scottish, some of whose accents I could understand. Most were of my age or slightly younger but one was aged over 30 and he mentioned that he had had venereal disease more than once and he described in some detail what he had undergone as a remedy on at least one occasion - consisting of a tube of some sort being inserted through his penis. Another young man was a bed-wetter. There was a young lance-corporal who, as is the rule in recruit depots, was quite strict. Towards the end of the six weeks he one day marched his platoon to a meal, the recruits carrying knife, fork and spoon, and one-pint china mugs. He was dissatisfied with their marching and returned them to their starting point more than once to do it properly. One of the recruits got fed up with this, lifted up his boot, smashed his mug against his heel, and pushed the jagged remnant into the lance-corporal’s face. He was instantly marched to the guard-room. I don’t know what happened to him as our six weeks were shortly up and we were posted to new units.
After a short period of training we were released from the barracks in the evenings. There were three of us who palled up and we spent our evenings together. One of the other two was the chap from Leeds whom I’d met on the train from Edinburgh; the other was a man who had joined as a regular, all three being English. The regular had been to Oxford University but only for a very short time. I recall being surprised that when the Leeds chap and I were talking, and we mentioned Friedrich Engels, he said he had never heard of him. We must have been a rather boring, serious couple. We used to walk around the town and normally had a snack in a café for soldiers, run by volunteer women. I was introduced to Scottish baps there and on other occasions we usually went to an Italian café (called, I think, Rabaiotti) where we had a Bovril drink costing one (old) penny.
As to the training, I was at first pretty unfit as I had had an appendectomy operation some four months before call-up and had spent the intervening period sitting about, convalescing at home. (In those days, unlike today, operations were long affairs. I was in hospital for six weeks, in the first part having tests of various kinds, then the operation, after which I was on my back for five days, then gradually up.) I had not had the usual appendectomy, consisting of a small cut above the appendix, but an exploratory one, a laporotamy which involved a large incision down the middle of the abdomen. Thus I found the physical exercise at Perth very difficult, the scar aching greatly. I went sick and while waiting to see the doctor tried to read Walter Scott’s Fair Maid of Perth (I didn’t get very far). The doctor had a look at my stomach and told the orderly to attach a large piece of wide sticking plaster across the scar, to give me some support. A little later, when I returned to see him, the orderly was instructed to remove the plaster. As part of it was on the scar this was painful procedure. I gradually got fitter although early in the training I had found it hard to ascend a hill with the other members of the platoon, but on the other hand it was quite pleasant and enjoyable to go on short route marches behind a pipe band.
My life at the unit revolved around the hut, the square and the mess. All the cooks were men and the food was very good indeed. The Staff-Sergeant cook would stand at the exit where was placed the dustbin as a receptacle for any food left on the plates. He inspected each plate and you had to explain why you had left anything. I found that the unit was bigger than the few huts and the square. Attached to it was an old building which had belonged to Pullar’s of Perth, a well-known company of dyers and cleaners - at least it was well-known to the chap from Leeds but not previously known by me. I visited it one day and found that it was occupied by a very large number of troops, occupying bunk beds, one above the other, in what seemed to me to be over-crowded conditions. It made our single beds in small huts almost idyllic in comparison.
Strangely, a couple of years later, having been trained as a Personnel Selection Sergeant at the Selection depot at Lingfield (said, no doubt apocryphally, to have been located there so as to be near the racecourse) the first unit I was sent to in my new role was the Queen’s Barracks at Perth. One memory of the second visit concerned two old Argyll sergeants, both wearing World War I ribbons, who described their sexual adventures thereby introducing me to a new word for sexual congress. It was ‘ranching’.
Of my two companions the chap from Leeds accompanied me to my next unit but he was released on medical grounds for being deaf. A little later, when I was stationed in Yorkshire I visited him on a weekend pass. He had wanted to be a schoolteacher but his hearing problem had denied him that chance. The other one, the regular, I believe was killed in action in the Korean War.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.