大象传媒

UNDISTINGUISHED SERVICE
Part 2. By Patrick Taylor
TRAINING AND THE SHOCK OF THE REAL WORLD

The bleakfullness of Catterick, in the words of Hurree Van Singh of the Greyfriars School Famous Four, about whom I had not long finished reading in the Magnet, was terrific in every way. The shocks came in quick succession very early on. Washing and shaving in cold water. Parading naked at the showers, sometimes cold and often lukewarm, when I had been used, in my Catholic boarding school, to dressing and undressing under the cover of my dressing gown and bathing by lying privately in piping hot baths behind locked doors. Eating porridge without sugar and meat full of fat and gristle. Sleeping with forty men in a freezing barrack room with no control over the lights and the noise, and having to take my turn getting up half an hour before everyone and fetching thick brown sweet stewed tea from the kitchen; or being duty fire lighter and attempting to light the stove with damp sticks and newspaper at some unearthly hour in the morning. The endless and to me pointless cleaning of equipment from brass cap badge down to shiny boots, boned with spit and shone to a mirror finish, and the almost daily stacking of them by or on the bed for inspection by vindictive NCOs who had to find defaulters for the endless chores to be done around the camp - many of them in our eyes equally unnecessary. Above all having to answer to others for my behaviour; not just to foul mouthed NCOs and supercilious officers - they were rather like bosses and could be endured, but answerable also twenty four hours of the day to my fellow men who seemed to have the most extraordinary codes of conduct to which one had to adhere in order to avoid dislike and approbium. I remember once being laughed to scorn and being accused of being dirty because I used one finger to get the soap into the corners of my eyes and ears. The whole barrack room seemed to mince around imitating me performing this delicately feminine action rather as if I were a Jane Austen lady holding her tea cup with one finger up in the air. What one had to do, of course, was splash torrents of water up over the face from the wash basin in a macho manner - not actually see that the soap got into every corner! On another occasion when I was excused parade for some reason until mid-morning, I did not get up until the last minute before breakfast - being dead tired from our previous day's exertions - and washed and shaved after my breakfast. Someone spotted this and I was the butt of various accusations of lazy uncleanliness for weeks after. It was no use pointing out that I had rinsed my hands quickly first. Jealousy over my lie-in soon dismissed that excuse!
Conformity was the name of the game. I soon found this out when I rebelled in any way, as I did in two cases, one trivial and one serious. To take the trivial one first, there was the morning tea. I could see we all ought to take turns at cleaning, lighting fires and any other chores contributing to our general welfare, but I hated both early rising and not just hot sweet tea but tea of any sort. I wanted my lie-in every morning I could get it, so I opted out. Those who want early morning tea can arrange it between themselves, but I don't, I said. Several others agreed, but the majority were howling mad. (This was not a standard arrangement in all the barrack rooms, which would have been different, but a special concession because someone in the draft had a friend in the cookhouse.) The others gave in but I stuck to my guns and became the butt of sarcastic remarks for months. The other matter was more serious. I had never heard any four letter words used before, and the continuous use in conversation of the both the 'f' word and the 'c' word, as well as other vulgarities I found truly shocking. Even worse were the obscene suggestions and gesticulations made out of the back of lorries when we passed any reasonably attractive females. I was in no way a prude, and would join in the most bawdy conversations in the barrack room; neither, I am afraid at that age did I have the respect for women I ought to have had in my private thoughts either, but to subject them to embarrassing behaviour in public was objectionable on two accounts. Firstly because it was bad manners and plain vulgar, as well as being cowardly - they could not answer back before the lorry was gone - and secondly because I could not understand why when a group of men got together en masse, they should behave in a manner they would not have dreamed of on their own in a public place. I let this be known quite clearly and was as a result highly unpopular and considered a self-righteous prig - and was told so!
But apart from these two things I adjusted. I never joined in the vulgar catcalls out of the back of trucks, and never used any obscene language in my whole time in the army, but I took the opportunity when we left Catterick after our basic training and were split up in our postings to Signals training schools to keep my views quieter and keep in the background so that any differences in my behaviour went unnoticed. It was my first great lesson in life and leads on to thenext two lessons I learned in the army.

Like all young men, the search for feminine company was one of the things at the front of my mind most of the time, and I joined the "passion waggon" into local towns whenever I could in the evenings to attend the frequent dances held in the area for the troops, and "get my feet under the table" of some nice family as soon as possible. Ripon was a great centre for these, and there I went quite often, coming back by a later train if the "hunt" was successful. I went quite dotty about a local girl and was invited to her home - very different to any homes I had known and full of her family, both visiting and resident, at all times. All meals except Sunday lunch were taken round the kitchen table - a strange thing in itself for me - invariably seating six, eight or ten people. This is no place for details of my romance, but an important effect on my life of being involved in a way I would never have been but for my army service was in meeting a typical northern family. I noticed a certain reserve in the attitude of the family and an unhappiness in my girl friend after meals which puzzled me. In one of the few opportunities this very strict family allowed me to be alone with her it all came out. Why didn't I offer to wash up after meals - or even help? I had never washed a dish up in my life. The army, of course, had asked me to peel potatoes, but not to wash up! (Apart from my own dixie, mug and cutlery). Even my Father - and of course my Mother or Grandmother with whom I had lived in various boarding houses since coming to London, and who provided my evening meals, never expected me to wash up. I had been spoilt rotten. It was women's work. I was finding out about life.

I was also finding out about ordinary families and the cosy environment they provided after being shunted about as a child and youth between boarding schools (or seaside boarding houses for the holidays - where I was never asked to wash up!) and seedy Bayswater or Paddington rooms. These were always being changed as my parents moved about, with all of us living on top of each other, and sometimes eating, sleeping and taking our recreation in one room. Oh the bliss when I stayed one weekend and had my own room, my own bedside radio, and Sunday lunch round a dining table with gravy boats and silver salt cellars....to say nothing of a roaring fire to sit round afterwards with cheery people and roast chestnuts! It was then I knew what I was after in life, and as we shall see - I found it! I also discovered to my intense surprise that in order to find people with whom I could get on, I did not have to restrict myself to those who talked with the same accent as I did - or have the same upper middle class background. Here ended the second and third lessons!

I shall not list the lessons I learnt any more - there were so many of them. Sadly, however, my budding romance was not to bloom. Our basic training course came to an end and I was posted to Prestatyn in north Wales for field training before my technical training. I can still vividly remember my last journey from Ripon to Catterick in a blacked-out train straining to see by the dim ceiling light the features of my girlfriend in the photograph she had given me ; I had climbed up on to the rack and was reclining there most of the journey to be near the light! There were the usual pledges to keep in touch, but circumstances and the presence of an Irish girl in Putney put paid to all that.

I can remember very little about Prestatyn except for the terrible fatigue of carrying a bren gun up and down the sand dunes above the town and endless marching with full equipment in between daily physical training schedules and weapon training sessions. Eventually the potential Wireless Operators were posted to Putney, in London.

My extremely limited acquaintance with the morse code and elementary electronics, acquired in the Air Training Corps, had induced me to plump for training as a radio operator, and I was duly posted to a training establishment in Putney. Our home was a large boarding school taken over by army - its previous occupants presumably evacuated to the country away from the bombs. Our relief at the release from PT, weapons training, drilling and marching knew no bounds - at least for most of us. The bliss of getting up at a reasonable hour and sitting in a classroom taking notes in between bouts of morse code and learning to operate the radio and telephone equipment was not quite so apparent to outdoor types who had entered this part of the service without much thought or had been simply been drafted into it. Bricklayers, gardeners, miners and such people became very restless at the physical inactivity and did not take so kindly to note-taking and peering at blackboards. We very soon became divided into two distinct social camps. This was familiar ground of course from my public and boarding school experience, where the sportsmen and the swots soon separated out with mutual dislike of each other. However, I was lucky enough to have grabbed a room to sleep in with three similarly inclined companions and only two outdoor types, so we were in a majority.This was a very happy time of my life. As a person with an ear for music, the morse code came naturally to me, and slightly complicated the dividing lines between us, as of course many outdoor types are musical. To get up speed in the morse code you have to rid your mind of a dot - dash - dot approach, but think of it as a rhythmical di-dah-di; the words are separated by a short pause, with the letters flowing as a single stream. A double 'r' comes out as di-dah-di'di-dah-di, with the apostrophe in the example being not so much a pause between the letters as a minute delay of the first di or dah, caught up in time by the end of the next one, rather like rubato in music. You felt it rather than heard it or decoded it.

People soon fell by the wayside, either because they simply could not get the hang of it or because the operation of the equipment was beyond them. "Netting", or getting a group of transceivers all on to exactly the same frequency, and physically locking the radios on that frequency with small screw adjustments on the tuning knobs was a delicate matter, not for insensitive ears or bumbling fingers - or for that matter, people not technically interested or inclined. They went back to depot for infantry or Service Corps duties. Quite a few became lorry drivers.

Others fell by the way rather more dramatically. Our little group settled in a room which soon became a home of sorts as we added luxuries like radios, tables, mirrors and so on to it, purchased or scavenged; it had by some strange co-incidence two other Taylors in it besides myself. I had gained some fame by painting the three of us on a wall executing some cheery drill, and we always went out together to the town and local dances. After a while, however, I was eager to "get my feet under the table" again, and met an Irish Girl named Mary who was introducing me for the first time in my life to various delights I had not yet experienced, unlike my rather more reticent Yorkshire lass - but "nothing below the belt"; Mary was a well-brought up Irish Catholic who had drawn up strict boundaries. This was all par for the course as far as I was concerned as young men in those days did not expect to get away with anything more than limited activities "above the belt", and I pursued her with a mild intensity. The first time we met away from the dance hall a bomb fell on it killing a very large number of our course including the two other Taylors in my room, with whom I usually went. This was my first experience of death, and very salutary it was; people I had known, talked to and become friendly with were suddenly no more! In spite of being soldiers none of us thought much about the dangers to come as we were too busy living and extracting as much irresponsible pleasure from our life as we could. There is a curious freedom about having all your decisions taken for you by people higher up and simply letting yourself go without a thought for the morrow in between carrying out the orders they give, and having bed and board available at all times without any effort! To have this heedlessness interrupted by death long before you got anywhere near the front was a bit much, and it sobered us all. I was certainly sobered by the thought that I would have been dead had I gone with them that night.But life went on, and I have often wondered what the next turn of events saved me from - the D-Day landings and death, perhaps? My pursuit of Mary had reached the stage of "night out"leave passes, so that we could lie side by side on the grass until late into the night making what now seems to be very innocent love; excursions "below the belt" were still strictly forbidden, but the cuddling, the kissing, the hugging and the limited excursions beneath her clothes above the forbidden territory were extremely pleasant; breasts, anyhow, were very exciting to us youngsters in those days of Betty Grable and the other cinema star "sweater girls." They were certainly heady stuff for me. The Vaga Girl double page spreads in furtively obtained copies of Esquire from America, with their long legs and diaphanously revealing clothes - I had never seen a nipple drawn before - were our "pornography" in those days. Even more pleasant, looking back, was the undivided attention for long periods of another human being who was interested in me; I had never known this before in my emotionally barren upbringing. She took me to Irish Celids - I have never forgotten the kicking up of the heels of the women, who seemed to me all to be fat, and therefore gave the rather comical and contradictory appearance of being inordinately light on their feet. Mary was no sylph herself, and I have always seen the Irish as fat people ever since - quite unfair, I am sure! She talked about her family and simple domestic things - as well as improving my manners and pointing out certain moral deficiencies I had acquired - with a simple certainty about the way decent ordinary people should live that was an education in itself after the empire builders, artists, bohemian friends of my mother and other brittle people precariously perched on the complexities of their sophisticated lives that I had known before joining the army.(Continued in part 3)

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