大象传媒

Undistinguished Service Part 5 by Patrick Taylor

So it was a tired and miserable unit containing one rather light-headed member awaiting a reply to his letter that set off on the other side of the channel for our first operational station on the banks of a canal. It was a small Belgian town called Gheel. You can imagine our reaction on finding out that it was a town celebrated for its Institutions for the mentally ill. "Coals to Newcastle" we all said as soon as we had arrived, and christened it "Loonyberg" at once with callous disregard. It was here that I formed my first close friendships in the army as we settled into our improvised billets. You will see from my sketches how improvised these were, generally in barns and outhouses, with a few proper rooms in houses which were the subject of great jealousy and connivance to take over when people left. And here cometh another lesson I learned - hide your light under a bushel in any new situation. There was a Bren Gun on the wall above my bed. In the haphazard way these things happened in the army our little group was sent off on a short weapons course, where I applied my natural affinity with things technical in the same manner as I had in my electronic studies and passed out top at the speed with which I could assemble and test fire a Bren Gun from all the little bits laid out on a bench. It was a beautiful machine gun of the most simple and ingenious design - probably the best weapon we designed in the war; light, reliable in single shot or machine gun mode and with very little kick-back into the shoulder and it absolutely fascinated me. Anyhow the upshot of this demonstration of my skill was "Right, Taylor, you are in charge of this gun for your section. You will clean it regularly, maintain it in good firing condition, and keep it close to you at all times, right?" "Yes Sergeant". "Right -sign here." "Yes Sergeant". My feelings about this responsibility were mixed. Of course, as soon as you become the butt of a funny story you gain the affection of your fellows in some mysterious way, especially if you frequently tell it against yourself, and I had by now learnt to do this sort of thing. On the other hand it was a beastly nuisance lugging the thing around and cleaning it regularly.

I was not too keen, either, on being the first target to be "taken out" by any Germans who might break through to us should I have to defend the section. As I have said before - the officer in the transit camp did have a point. Here were we, miles behind the lines servicing the equipment in the tanks which were regularly coming back for repair from the action in front of us while we suffered no more than occasional machine-gunning from stray Messerschmits using up ammunition on the way home. In fact I only just avoided "copping one" from one of these raids myself. One less lucky person was killed, but the danger was less than that I had experienced in the blitz at home. Our life could only be described as comparatively cushy. Cold was the main discomfort we suffered. The small fires we rigged up connected to batteries in draughty barns and outhouses had nothing like the effect they did in the back of a truck. Warm water for washing had to be "brewed up", and lying in late often meant shaving in cold water. Our beds were piled high with all our clothes at night as the blankets were insufficient; greatcoats came in especially handy for this. We even slept sometimes in our uniforms. No one who went through the winter of the Germans' Ardennes breakthrough will forget it. The only warmth we could find was in the cafes where we spent our evenings drinking and chatting up the local residents - especially the girls, which was great fun and caused great laughter when we tried out our French, as the Belgian version of French - used reluctantly in place of their own Walloon - was idiomatically very different and almost unrecognisable to us in its pronunciation. They seemed to get very angry at our very classical school French pronunciation.

The Belgians were very kind to us, and the girls even kinder to those soldiers able to take advantage this. I was not able to take part in any of this activity beyond a bit of innocent kissing and cuddling in the cafe, as I had soon received a letter from my future wife accepting my proposal and so the girls were out of bounds for me. However my education in life continued with the stories that came back to me of my friends' adventures. My conversations with some of the ladies were also quite broad and I saw my first pornographic photographs, which were often handed round for examination and ribald comment. I also managed quite a bit of enjoyable drinking for the first time in my life, but strangely never acquired a taste for beer or cigarettes. We also had a local and quite hideous nymphomaniac who would come and lounge in the doorway until someone got up with a silly grin on his face and accompanied her through the curtains or back to her house to the accompaniment of great cheers from everyone else, to return after an incredibly short while with his detailed story to tell us all. This I can vouch for, but the tales which circulated of people who were walking with others up the street and caught sight of the lady in her doorway, popped in for a "quicky" and then caught their companions up before the end of the street may have been apocryphal; however, they pointed up her notoriety and illustrate the sort of story we all loved to circulate in the army.

COMPANIONS

What sort of people ended up as Signalmen in the Army? The very close group of friends I made during this extraordinary period were all so different from each other that they provide a very good cross section and at the same time showed that some at least of my gaucheness and snobbery must have worn off and emphasise the advantages of being thrown, when young, among peoplewith lifestyles other than those of one's own upbringing. There is nothing today like that conscript army to promote the sort of understanding and maturity it quickly produced in most people; particularly among impressionable young people and between the classes. Class simply ceased to matter, as far as I was concerned.

In the first place we were all either tradesmen of some sort - in the craft sense - or we were used to using our hands, our senses or our brains or a combination of them. Although a clerk, I had built a lot of flying model aeroplanes, had to some extent mastered the rudiments of mechanical and architectural drawing, enjoyed making things and even then had an encyclopedic knowledge of first world war aircraft, their flying characteristics, performance and armament which remains to this day. So what of the others?

Bill Church was an electrician who owned a wireless shop in a London suburb and also worked as a contract electrician, which was his real trade. A short and stocky man with an almost music hall cockney accent and married to a wife about whose sexual appetite he would go on and on about, regaling us with long and detailed adventures of their love life which were an education in themselves. This preoccupation he carried into his army life without regard to his marital status; he even hinted he had an arrangement with his wife and that she could not be expected to refrain from such activity while he was away. They nevertheless appeared to be devoted to each other if one were to believe him. In all our travels through the continent up to our demobilisation I neverknew him without his feet under the table and his spare slippers by the bed of some girl. An astonishing man, as he was certainly no good looker. I got on famously with him after an uneasy initial period. This is worth going into as it throws light on the precariousness of relationships in the army when strangers are thrown together willy-nilly; your popularity could depend on the most extraordinary circumstances and judgements. Bill Church arrived in our workshop a little after the rest of us, and finding me ensconsed comfortably doing the complicated fault-finding and repairs on the 19-SETS all day while everyone else was sent out to do the chores outside on the tanks, resented this, as he was a wireless repairer by trade, and I was just an army trained office boy. He used to sit glowering a bit sometimes when I held forth in the cafe or canteen about some abstruse fault I had cured in a wireless set that day. I sensed the resentment building up. Then one day he was without a task and in the workshop with me when someone brought in a civilian wireless set he had been given by a Belgian for his billet which had never worked but which he could keep if he could get it working. I took it out of its case and started work on it while Bill rather sourly looked on with a lot of scepticism. Within a very short time I looked up. "Good heavens," I said, "this set
has never worked since it left the factory - there is absolutely no cathode bias resistor on the output pentode and never has been one." He looked even more sceptical. "Don't be silly," he said "You're just trying to be clever. No factory would let a set leave the premises without testing at least that it produces a sound!" "Perhaps this has been salvaged from a factory that was bombed" I replied......found at the end of a production bench." Anyhow I went to the repair box and found a 600 ohm resistor and soldered it in place. The set worked perfectly at once. (I should explain for those who understand these things that it was a simple RF/AF amplifier and not a superhetrodyne receiver, which would have required to work and have its intermediate frequency and local oscillator coils tuned for it to have received broadcasts instantly on being switched on for the first time. Such sets were still in use on the continent) Bill Church was visibly taken back. His whole manner changed as he patted me on the back. "Now I really believe you know your stuff as everyone says." he said to me. "A lot of people can be lucky and get easy faults in a set which can be put right by a knack for trial and error - but to work out that a complete part is missing in the circuit means you really understand what you're doing." From then on we never had a cross word; he even admitted to me couldn't draw up the circuit of a radio if he tried, and we remained friends until he left the unit a long time later. No doubt you are thinking this story has been included as piece of outsized self congratulation, but it is in fact just the opposite. The knowledge required to do what I did was more than contained in the very first lesson on the function of valves we had all received. It was elementary beyond belief! What it does point out was the extraordinary amount of repair work quite adequately carried out by signalmen who simply had no idea of what they were doing. Valves got changed, switches were cleaned, obvious broken joints were soldered, others found by poking about and producing a crackle when moved and so on. This covered most faults and people like me got the rest! If we were not available they went back to REME. What it also illustrates is the extraordinarily arbitrary way people become popular or unpopular in the most fickle and ill-informed manner when thrown together. An irritation no doubt first set in train by my "posh accent" grew and grew then suddenly the little contretemps that was brewing up between me and Bill Church was blown away on the completely false assumption by him that I was some sort of genius. On such slender foundations were built any respect felt for you by your fellow conscripts if they came from a different social background.

My two closest friends in our small group were as opposite as could be. First there was Andy Tawse. He came from a wealthy and very upper crust family of bankers who lived in a large Tudor house with extensive grounds. He was a terribly nice and completely useless type who had drifted through public school in a very unspectacular manner and had no idea what he wanted to with life. Being a far more amiable and un-pushy character than me he had avoided getting up anyone's nose in spite of his "posh" accent and background, simply smiling away insults and leg-pulling in a shy manner, but was only part of our little group through me; he never could quite understand my affinity and obvious liking for such "working class" types. Like me he found their continuous foul language objectionable and was simply unable to see beyond this. He was nothing if not practical however and seeing that I was happy in their company he joined in without any sign of condescension, and they took to him well enough after a bit of ribbing. Andy suffered from the most appalling migraines, and I have vivid memories of accompanying him often when he could not bear lying in bed with the pain and would go for long walks in the middle of the night, sometimes well into the small hours. There were no drugs available for people with migraine in those days - there are not many effective ones now for serious cases - and he suffered terribly with attacks that lasted for days. I lost a lot of sleep, often in freezing weather, accompanying him in these walks, but we became very close and unburdened ourselves of all our problems and worries apart from those involving our sex lives. We never discussed this subject as he considered it too personal and private. School, aircraft, photography (to which he introduced me), politics, architecture and family, yes, but no sex! He would sometimes take my turn at night-time guard duties when he knew he was not going to be able to sleep, or join me walking round on mine when we were on duty the same night. Our talks helped to take his mind off the pain and, I think, were a considerable help to him. I think this was possibly the first time in my life I did anything for anybody else.

My other close friend was Arnold Ogden from somewhere like Bradford or Leeds - I forget exactly - and was a jobbing carpenter. Tall and lanky, he was recently married and somehow managed to find a room somewhere in most of our postings in which to continue making a dining room suite for which he managed to get the necessary timber carried around with us in army trucks
and shipped the completed parts bit by bit back home for assembly after the war. They were beautifully made and it was a joy to watch him planing the expensive seasoned timber with complete confidence and never a spoil a piece. The chiselled joints fitted to a hairsbreadth, which he would demonstrate to me before pulling them apart and packing them in sheets of corrugated cardboard for safe transport home. Arnold was an extraordinary character who, unlike Andy, was wholly unreticent about sex, and yet without a trace of schoolboy prurience - it was all a great laugh to him. The tales he told of "quickies" in lifts between floors with giggling groups of girls while he was working on their installation in a department store and similar adventures were quite enthralling, but all this changed when he married a diffident, quiet and very unpromiscuous girl who, as he explained to me, he had to "break in" very gently as because he both loved her very much and realised that he would continue to have strong sexual requirements he "did not want to put her off". As I was about to get married he went into great detail about the different requirements of men and women and even greater detail about what "put women off". This was probably the most important information ever given to me, and revolutionised my smutty attitude to the whole subject, as well as confirming very solidly in me the respect for women that had instinctively come to the surface when I had first heard the obscenities emerging from the back of trucks full of soldiers as they passed girls in the street. Needless to say I put all this advice to good use, and never had any of the sexual problems or frustrations that I still hear of in people's marriages to this day. Good old Arnold!

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