大象传媒

UNDISTINGUISHED SERVICE PART 3.
by Patrick Taylor

A CHANGE IN DIRECTION

I don't know what my meeting with Mary could have led to, because I had a really soft spot for her, but it was not to be. Because, I am sure, of our long sojourns on the grass by the Thames at Putney, through some long chilly nights, I developed an acute pain in by back, together with a dry cough. After several sick parades at which disinterested doctors told me to stop making a fuss over nothing I fainted on parade and this time was given a proper check by an older doctor who announced that I had caught pneumonia. I had already had double pneumonia as a child of six, so this really worried me, but I was whisked off to hospital and given the new M & B tablets which put me on my feet just as I was beginning to enjoy the comforts of hospital life and the gentle attention of the nurses; I've never forgotten how feminine, soft and sweet smelling they seemed after my hard-bitten, chain smoking heavily made up and sophisticated Mother. I'd never been fussed like this before! But better was to come. I was sent for three weeks to a convalescent home in the middle of the country where I was to build up after an illness which had certainly debilitated me. This was sheer heaven, with billiard rooms, table tennis rooms, a library and above all cod liver oil and malt. I loved the stuff. Mary's moral ministrations had not done me all that immediate good as I must confess to frequently going to the back of the queue after my first spoonful to get another if I thought I could get away with it. This was sometimes difficult, as the real war - apart from the very real one in Africa - had not started yet and the place was empty. The blue uniforms we wore got us a lot of sympathy and cosseting in the town and at dances; I cannot honestly remember saying to anyone that I was a pneumonia case and not recovering from war wounds! The army seemed very far away.

But of course it wasn't. I was soon posted to a transit camp in Godalming for re-posting to a unit or another signals course. Transit camps were one of the horrors of the war. They were always muddy, cold and cheerless. The staff were a bunch of useless officers, embittered NCOs and rankers entrenched in privileges they had stealthily built up over the years, unchecked by constant command changes as senior officers came and went. They saw to it that we did all the nasty work from potato peeling and lavatory cleaning to painting white lines and rows of stones with frozen hands in the bitter cold. We lit the fires, cleaned the windows, washed up the plates (I was an old hand at this by now) swept the floors and picked up the litter until we were posted out; no sitting about in the huts in front of the fire unless you were an old hand yourself who knew the right people in the place, or managed to latch on to one. The effect all this had on us soon disillusion anyone like me who had joined up in any spirit of patriotic fervour. We soon lost that fervour. I saw how the wind blew, and made up my mind when I was interviewed for my next posting to get away from all this sort of thing.

Although I had been happy enough training to be a radio operator, it had become apparent to me that the job, though preferable to that of an infantryman, was not all beer and skittles. You very often had to sit up all night on signals duty, to receive and send urgent messages. Hour after hour taking down or sending morse can become a bit samey, and was a tremendous strain. Mistakes were not treated lightly, and the operating procedures, code signs and calling drill were constantly
changing. Morse at 21 words per minute is not easy, even for the apt, and if you were apt enough to take it in your stride you were posted to the fewer and fewer stations using it - and did it all the time! More and more messages were sent RT (Radio Telephone) but you had to keep your morse up, without much field practice, in case it was needed. I made up my mind to do a switch to repairing and looking after radio equipment rather than operating it. This required a certain amount of bluffing

When my interview came, I went in with some trepidation.

"Well, Taylor, I suppose you want to get back to your training".

No sir, I was wondering if I could get into REME."(Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers)

Nice job back at base - eh". Do you have any electrical qualifications".

"Well - no sir. But I like messing about with electricity and we did a bit in the ATC."

"Hmmm. Not enough I'm afraid. Tell you what - the Signals are training up some Radio Mechanics to service the stuff closer to the front; sending the difficult stuff back to REME. I could
put you down for that."

It was as simple as that. Don't take this as gospel army history. I am sure there are some ex Royal Corps of Signals officers who would have apoplexy at the idea of their radio mechanics being there only as a new experiment to handle easy repairs and send the "difficult stuff" back to REME. Nor would some REME servicemen care for the implication that they were always "back at base". This officer, probably in the RASC and doing a temporary posting at the depot, explained it that way and who was I to argue? This sort of thing was always happening, as anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh's wonderful army trilogy will know. Anyone who went through the last war, while acknowledging the vast amount of individual sacrifice, bravery and conscientious application to winning the war, still wonders how we won it.

I cannot for the life of me remember where I was sent for my training as a Radio Mechanic, but it was somewhere within reach of Darlington, where we used to go in the passion waggon for our after-hours entertainment. I can remember my Father's astonishing arrival on one weekend to visit me, an unheard of thing which was quite out of character. We had nothing to talk about and the whole thing was a frost which left me rather bemused but feeling very lonely. There was still a bit of the prig left in me, and I had no desire to get my feet under the table of anyone in that ghastly town. It appeared to me to be a place where the whole town was populated with people as common as dirt who got drunk every Saturday night and staggered round the streets arm in arm singing disgusting songs. I had got in with a hard drinking crowd of men much older than myself with whom I went around, and followed their lead in order not to be left out or thougt snooty. The drinking gave me no pleasure. I hated beer - it made me sick, literally, in any quantity, so that I felt disgusted with myself and even more on my own. I still had a feeling of mystery and sweetness about women, and this particular set I was with were intent on picking up women purely for brief sexual adventures which excited me in a prurient way and at the same time disgusted me and caused me enormous embarrassment when they put their plans for picking them up into practice in my presence. The tables in the pubs were swimming with spilt beer, everybody was shouting or singing, they were always full of cigarette smoke and filthy ashtrays and the women my friends went off with were coarse in the extreme. At the same time I could not understand why they would have nothing to do with me and envied the physical liberties the others were taking with them around me quite blatantly. Of course I see now that everything was not so simple. None of the women were at all interested in me because I was an an innocent youngster to be left alone not corrupted. They were, of course, the sort of semi-professional and amateur camp followers that hang about army camp areas, going with men for free meals, drinks and a good time, a class of person I knew nothing about, and I am eternally glad now that they were uninterested in a baby like me. A" dose of clap" - and there was quite a bit of it about - would not have helped me at this stage, and it was from this type of activity that it came. Confused and unhappy by all these sudden complications in life, and my irrational state of mind, I found my adjustment to the world suddenly taking several steps backwards.

But this was all at the weekends. I was far happier during the week, where I came into my own. The barrack rooms were smaller and inevitably, because of the nature of the job we now had to learn, there were more intellectually inclined people around me. In addition to this, the others were not so quick at picking electronic theory up from books and a blackboard as I was, and many lectures would be followed by a gathering round my bed while I explained to them in slow detail what had just been fired at them in class at high speed. Soon, when the practical work started, I would be asked advice, particularly in fault-finding when equipment would deliberately be put out of order by the instructors in various ways so that we could put our theory to the test by attempting to find the induced fault. I acquired the nickname of "The Professor", and once you get a nickname in the army, provided it is not a perjorative one, it means you have been accepted. I was accepted by enough people to make my life much happier, but of course being popular with some often means being unpopular with others who are jealous of your popularity, especially if it is because you have something, or some talent, they have not got. It was soon very apparent that a few people hated this "clever clogs" around whose bed those who wanted to pass their end-of-course exams regularly gathered and who was always being consulted at the work-bench. So the next thing I learned about in the army was jealousy and envy.

This all arose from a very real problem which my history has already illustrated. Bored officers in temporary postings to administrative units - amateur soldiers as most of them were - had to decide who was suitable for what training. Inevitably there were misfits. At Putney, when it became apparent that morse code or the technical expertise with which to operate the equipment was beyond a trainee, there was nothing else they could do, so they were sent back for re-training in some other capacity, as I have described. As a Radio Mechanic, the situation was somewhat different. Each unit only required one or two people able to find faults in the complicated electronic equipment and the rest could be used in a multitude of ways. Those who could not master radio theory were often very good at soldering and meticulously wiring up telephone exchanges; they became linesmen. Others were quite able to climb about tanks and find simple circuit breaks in the intercom. The turret of a tank had what were known as slip-rings - strips of copper running round the top of the opening of the gun turret against which contacts on the turret itself pressed so that the microphones and earphones of the turret crew could connect into the intercom. These got dirty, broken or bent; it required only patience to put that sort of thing right - no great knowledge. The same applied to the headsets,which were constantly being trodden on and otherwise mauled about; replacing them or doing a simple repair on the spot with a portable soldering iron and insulating tape required no great brains. Some hefty people found a place for themselves heaving batteries around for charging. And so on.

As a result, we "radio mechanics" were a very mixed lot and there was a lot of sarcastic banter from the linesemen, battery chargers and those who were out of their depth diagnosing faults inside complicated wireless sets; they were always sent out all day to mess about in wet or freezing weather in tanks and scout cars and directed this banter towards those of us who sat all day in a cosy room or truck prodding about with an Avometer inside a radio set with one hand and warming the other against an electric fire rigged up for from a spare battery. Visitors coming in from the cold with equipment for repair, or collecting spares, were not amused. We tried to placate them with unofficial coffee from the pots which always seemed to be on the boil, but it was uphill work. But this is to anticipate a little. It is sufficient at this stage to say that I saw how the land was going to lie and prepared myself studiously for the soft and, let us be fair, more interesting (and important?) type of work. That officer had a point about a "safe job at base" but he was not quite right. I was no brave hero, but what a lot of people do not realise about conscripts - perhaps regulars also for that matter - is that we did not think in those terms. There was a minority that did; they volunteered for the commandos or the paratroops and so on. Most of us thought in terms of comfort, privileges and soft options to make our life more agreeable. I never met anyone who actually made a deliberate attempt to get a "safe" position in the army - only a comfortable one. If we were asked to do dangerous things, or were sent to dangerous front lines, we'd go and that would be that - we'd do our duty and that sort of thing - but meanwhile our minds were preoccupied with warmth, comfort, good food and facilities for recreation - a town handy to walk into to meet girls and get our feet under the table or a good NAAFI canteen with lots of buns to supplement the army food, plenty of newspapers available and chairs to lounge in, with table tennis tables and so on available. That is all we thought about and, and of course, cushy jobs to do all day that preferably excused us from parade and guard duties. There were a surprising number of volunteers for telephone exchange duty at night; it was better than wandering about outside in the cold carrying a heavy gun for two hours at a time in the middle of the night!

Weekday evenings would find us with time on our hands, and our meagre pay seldom allowed is enough spare cash to spend every evening buying beer and buns in the NAAFI. I had acquired a taste for study and had always been interested in architecture, so as a change from electronics all day, I somehow managed to get in touch with the Royal Institute of British Architects through a letter I wrote to my Father, and the first books and papers arrived for a correspondence course in architecture. I promptly set about studying for the Intermediate exams of the RIBA in the evenings. I got on like a house on fire, getting excellent marks from the examiners I sent my weekly test papers back to. This boosted my confidence in myself a great deal and seemed to make the war worth getting through.

Sadly, my studies were to be interrupted. Another case of what might have been? I shall never know, as our course came to an end and we were posted once more into the wilderness; believe it or not that same dreadful camp in near Godalming. My stay this time was short, thank goodness, but I found time to visit my friend of the fire-bombing incident in London which had helped me make my mind up to "do my bit". It had had no such effect on him. Two years older than me, he had still managed to stay in a "reserved occupation" and was currently working in an evacuated Insurance Office somewhere near Haslemere and the famous Devil's Punch Bowl valley in the area. He managed this throughout the war, moving afterwards into machine tool designing, which I always thought rather odd; one could understand a machine tool designer having a reserved occupation - but an Insurance clerk? However, apart from a slight feeling of envy about his comfortable circumstances - they all lived in at a comfortable hotel - I felt no resentment and certainly no feeling that he ought to join the army. I often think of him when I read novels or accounts of the war which assume that there was a universal contempt for people who escaped military service. There was not. When I got back to the camp and spoke about him the universal reaction was "lucky sod"! No doubt wives and parents of people killed in the war and a few others thought differently, but not the rank and file. I am afraid most of the people who did think this way were civilians, from whom, of course, the white feather brigade came. We were far more philosophical.(Continued in Part 4

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