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UNDISTINGUISHED SERVICE by Patrick Taylor PART 4.

POSTED TO A TRANSIT CAMP
It was at this camp that I learned another lesson - That life is not fair, and it is childish to expect it to be or to get angry when it is not. This is best expressed in part of a long poem on friendship, published in 1992 in a book of poems of mine called "A View from Suburbia". I, as a temporary Lance Corporal, had been befriended by a full corporal and we got on like a house on fire; but let the poem tell the rest. It was a salutary lesson.

I turned to you,my next great friend.
Where all the rest around were strange and drab,
We shivered with the frost with each new jab
For typhus or for tetanus. We'd bend
And touch our toes in nothing but our socks
As doctors searched impassively for pox.
While winter battered at the Nissen door
We sat recalling old civilian ways,
And talked of tea-and-buttered-crumpet days.
Where huts were cold and food was scarce and poor
We opened wide the portals of our dreams
And giggled at a score of silly schemes.
Our names were posted on a board,
You to twist old Rommel's tail,
I to ride the channel gale.
Thirty strangers in our hut
You had your pick of - but
They asked for one to do that chore;
You looked straight down, down at the floor
And took the weak and easy way
"You do it first" you said "today."
And thirty sullen men relaxed.
One blow, my friend, and you had axed
The slender line I threw to you;
One blow, and this time I withdrew.
I turned away from you, my friend.

After a mercifully short time at the transit camp - a damp and dismal place - during which I received a battery of inoculations against various ailments and bent over endlessly for various doctors checking for venereal disease, I was posted to 557 Assault Squadron A.T.R.E.30 Corps under General Horrocks, to look after their radio and telephone equipment, together with several others in my hut. 557 were a special assault unit with variously adapted Churchill tanks. These had Petards - huge portable mortars for the demolition of concrete emplacements - flails with chains for beating the ground ahead and exploding mines and various "fascines" and other contraptions, including portable bridges, for getting troops quickly across deep trenches and depressions. We also acted as an experimental unit for other such complex devices fitted to tanks and as a training unit.

The apparatus we had to deal with was the same for the rest of my war. First there was the 19-Set fitted into the tanks. This was an extremely cleverly designed unit of enormous complexity containing three different sets on one chassis. The first was a transceiver which enabled the tank to communicate over quite long ranges with base over various frequencies which could be locked mechanically into place on the tuning knob, adjusted with a screwdriver and from then on "clicked" into place instantly without hunting about the dial - a fiddly job which defeated quite a ,as I mentioned in my earlier account of Radio Operator training about "getting on net", but fairly reliable once the netting had been done. The second set was an ultra high ultra short (for the time!)frequency transceiver using what was known as a super-regenerative principle - also advanced for the time - with only a short range which was used for communication between the tanks when manoeuvering and in battle. The super-regenerative principle is extremely hard to understand in theory, and the ultra short frequency made it extremely sensitive to the slightest physical movement of the , shielding and adjustment of the wiring in the high frequency areas. It used the new and very tiny all-glass "acorn" valves which clumsy people or people with very large hands did not like at all. The coils consisted of only one or two turns of thick wire which were wildly sensitive to physical contact or even the approach of a screwdriver, and this made fault finding extremely difficult. Often the whole set had to be sent back to REME for repair when only this part went wrong, a distinct drawback in this otherwise splendid piece of equipment. I soon determined to master the complexities and, as we shall see, eventually did. The third set within the set was a simple amplifier, with complex Yaxley switching, for the internal communication of the tank crew, who all wore headphones. Apart from valve changing this caused very little trouble, but the headphones and their leads were another matter. I never understood how people could to be so clumsy, but there was a constant stream of these into the workshops for repair. People dropped them, often into the water that could collect in the bottom of a tank left on a slope,, trod on them, pulled the plugs off the end, lost the microphones out of the mouthpiece, cracked the plastic mouthpieces, crossed the threads of the screw-on microphone cover and generally misused them in every way.

Next there was the 38-SET, a small dry-battery operated back packing mobile transceiver used by the ground crew and command staff for short range communications. This was an adequate but not particularly brilliant piece of equipment that was comparatively easy to service, with only one Yaxley switch of any complexity to switch from "receive" to "send"; it was rather like a civilian portable radio, and an average employee from a wireless shop used to "fixing" small portable radios could manage to put them right without any extensive theoretical knowledge.

Finally, of course, there was the telephone equipment for the unit which we had to maintain. This included the telephone exchanges and the headsets used in all the tents and offices, to-gether with the various pieces of subsidiary equipment, including line amplifiers, required for communications in the Army. I particularly disliked this work, which was extremely tedious and repetitive; nor were we, sitting in our warm and "cushy" backs of lorries all day, particularly popular with the linesmen, who were out in all weathers laying or retrieving mile after mile of line along roads and across fields between the units and back to base.

All this, of course, was yet to come. I arrived as a complete rookie and was pitched into it with no preparation at all. Luckily for me, it soon became clear that no one else was prepared to dive into the depths of the 19-SET, particularly the super-regenerative transceiver in it, so this job was passed to me when I blithely volunteered. Apparently, in the Unit's short life so far, when a 19-SET went wrong it had been sent back to REME. Not being an outdoor type this suited me fine, and from then on I lived in the back of a truck apart from isolated and unusual circumstances! Some of my early unpopularity in the army returned to haunt me, even though I offered to let others "have a go"; although they knew the task was beyond them, even my fellow Radio Mechanics resented the comfortable life I, and occasionally a fellow signalman with an electronic turn of mind, enjoyed in
our warm and comfortable truck. This was exacerbated by the fact that we were "excused parade" in the mornings. Lesser signalmen, as I rather arrogantly considered them but of course, having had
the army's crash course in human relationships, tried not to show, were sent all over the place each day in all weathers, to repair tank slip-rings, collect broken telephones and radios, lay and retrieve telephone lines and generally do the donkey work. They were given their daily task on early morning parade, whereas I was allowed to slope off each morning to my truck without standing about waiting for officers and NCO's to sort out the disposition of their men. Later on, as we slipped into our familiar fixed routines and finally became operational, this antagonism died out, but it left its mark for a long while on my popularity. Later, the whole signals troop as a body was to became unpopular with the rest of the unit as we all sloped off after breakfast to our specialised routines while they stood about on parade!

Life became very different as we settled down to training and being shaken into an operational unit. I was billeted in a suburban house in Worthing, opposite the local drill hall. I don't know who used to drill there - boy scouts, girl guides and territorial army I suppose - but the army found it very handy as a dining hall, drill hall on wet days, PT hall and even a canteen/dance hall during the evenings. We slept on the floor of the empty houses that had been commandeered along the Brighton Road - now the A27 - and I remember very little about this period except walking down the front path of our billet one day on the way to a dance and casually asking a soldier walking behind me if my belt was twisted behind to be told in a mincing voice - "Oh it looks lovely ducky!" Lesson number umpteen; I had never come across a homosexual in my life before and it must have been a considerable shock, as a vivid picture of it remains in my mind to this day. I mention such a silly little fact in case anyone should doubt the innocence of the ordinary youngsters of my era - apart, I suppose, from bohemians, artists, theatre people and intellectuals; most of us would not have come across overt homosexuality by the age of nineteen, and that includes the young and much maligned young men from public boarding schools. There was a lot of "messing about" at boarding school, some exploratory activity and mutual masturbation, often in groups, but any cuddling, kissing or climbing into bed would have been greeted with howls of "come on - none of that now!" I never came across or heard of any practising homosexuals among any of the people I knew at public boarding schools or in the army. I am not saying it did not go on - it probably did and always has - but it was by no means as rife in either institution as novelists like to suggest. On the other hand novelists are often unjustly accused of stretching the long arm of co-incidence in order to concoct a story. I remember soon after arriving at the unit seeing a head popping out of a tank and recognizing a senior boy named Semmence who had been a prefect at my preparatory school in Herne Bay and reminiscing for a while with him. It takes a wild novelist to create an unbelievable coincidence, for I can testify that meetings like this in an army of millions were quite common.

Having done a short period of close technical training with all the vehicles and equipment parked close together behind the drill hall, testing the equipment and learning to "net" the wireless sets, we were moved on for operational training in the open, and posted to Parham House near Storrington in Sussex. The tanks exercised on the downs while we set up comfortable billets in the grounds - huts for the men and the main house for the officers - with a pleasant NAAFI canteen hut also in the grounds. Here, in order to get my feet under the table as usual, I was soon walking out with one of the ladies of the house, I cannot remember which member of the family she was. She was highly sophisticated, very beautiful if rather plump, much older than me and obviously found my rather unsophisticated callowness highly amusing. Looking back I can now see that the rather limited sexual activities I indulged in with her could have been far more advanced, but I was put off by her very sophistication, believing at the time she "wouldn't have any of that" in the way a more "common" girl might have. Oh dear! I blush to think of my attitudes; after a year in the army I was still so snobbish and ignorant of life. But I was learning. Anyhow, it was just as well, since she could not get away very often from her voluntary canteen duties and a passion waggon started running into Worthing where on my first night I met my future wife at an Assembly Hall dance! Having bought a raffle ticket which was going to be drawn after the passion waggon left to take us back to Parham House, I arranged to call at her house next day to see if I had won. Strangely enough, I had won a bottle of port! The followingromance has no place in this story, but it does illustrate very vividly that high speed wartime romances as well as being a frequent occurrence, did not necessarily end up in divorce; we are still very happily married and approaching our golden wedding! Anyhow, my feet were soon firmly under the table and once more the domestic comforts of stable family life were available to me for many evenings and weekends. D-Day came and passed without our being required and we soon began to wonder what all the training was for. For the next five months I took up my architectural studies again during the evenings we wereconfined to camp and the war seemed very far away. Then suddenly
the call came and we were off.

The next thing I learned in the army was that I did not suffer from sea-sickness. The flat bottomed landing craft we went across in was a truly claustrophobic vessel. The centre was occupied by the tanks and vehicles, but the sides were a two or three storied corridor full of bunks receding into the distance with limited access through manholes on the deck. There was an intense smell of frying bacon, stale fat and oil the whole time and the sea was appallingly rough. It is probably untrue to say that everyone else was being sick all the time except for myself, but it certainly seemed like it at the time. I remember gleefully accepting other people's sausages and bacon, so there must have been a few people down there with me, but most had gone on deck. When I went there after my meal the whole deck was awash with sick and people hanging over the rail, so I came back down in the warm and sent a letter home to my wife in which I proposed to her! I may not have been seasick, but I was certainly homesick, and the thought of letting all her loveliness and all that proven homely domestic skill slip away concentrated my mind wonderfully.
(Continued in Part 5)

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