大象传媒

UNDISTINGUISHED SERVICE by
Patrick Taylor PART 8

I ended my war in the Baltic Town of Flensburg, with the rest of the unit, tanks and all, in the sort of cold I had never experienced before. This was a most beautifully preserved old town which I took great pleasure in photographing. Andy Tawse and Les Denyer were still with me. While Les kept an eye on my morals as far as the local girls were concerned - I was married now of course and even more beholden to restrict my activities - and Andy taught me all about photography, I made the best of things. Neither Andy or I smoked, and we piled up endless quantities of army issue cigarettes which we exchanged with the Germans without any qualms, and against all the rules, for splendid cameras: a Rolleiflex for Andy and a Robot (the latest German wonder with a Leica quality lens and shutter for me. This superb machine had a clockwork automatic wind-on mechanism and took 48 square pictures on 35 mm film. I could never have afforded one on the 5 a week I was to get when I was demobbed.) For more weekly cigarettes we acquired the evening use of a commercial dark room containing a beautiful enlarger and learned the art of processing and enlarging our own films to such good effect that we were winning army photographic competitions. I eventually bought the enlarger for yet more cigarettes and shipped it home, using it for years after. We all gave up obeying army rules; I can remember spending my guard duties in the cabs of parked trucks when it was cold - even falling asleep; what was there to guard against now - the Germans had lost all spirit. But I still shiver to think what might have happened to me if I had been caught by a strict duty officer; a spell in the "glasshouse", I expect. We had already acquired unauthorised "walking out" battledresses with collars turned back and lapels faced with khaki to make us look like smart Americans. We wore very unofficial officers' paratroop style berets and we went out like this without any rebukes from MPs. After being told on parade by our sergeant that such unofficial gear was NOT allowed, we'd walk out of the gates under the eyes of the officers, or go on leave in it quite cheerfully.

There is very little to write about our army activities for the rest of the war. Our semi-official theatre productions continued for a while and provided an interest. Most of our time in the workshops - a real fug-hole of a place in the freezing Baltic cold, with lots of illicit electric warmth rigged up by ourselves - was devoted to repairing and even building civilian radios for the barrack rooms. Sometimes we presented these to the German helpers' families; they were superhet receivers Arnold and I built out of spare parts to a circuit I had devised, which was based on a laborious study of the extraordinarily powerful sets we had acquired for our canteens from wrecked American staff cars . They were a way of thanking local co-opted civilian staff for their activities in making our boring life more interesting. They arranged trips on the yachts now being put back into the use in the harbour - a sailing club was formed - and found suppliers for expensive goodies like Leica cameras and bottles of brandy in exchange for cigarettes and so on. This was all semi-official stuff; everyone knew what was going on. It must be said however that the German girls were not backward in coming forward towards advances by the British soldiers, and I had many requests for radios as "rewards" to them from grateful friends to which I did not respond, as this was going a bit too far. The Germans had mostly had to put up with a "People's Radio" of a very unsophisticated type, cleverly designed to be both able to pick up the German propaganda well enough but to limit any listening to broadcasts beyond their borders and also cheap to mass-produce without eating into the wartime electronic requirements of the nation too much. They were quite astonished at the powerful performance of the superhet sets we made out of surplus army spares and put into stripped out old "people's" sets. As an exercise in ingenuity I packed a complete six-valve superhet into a tiny Phillips bakelite case about eight inches by six by four. It was a wonder of power for its size, but when I took it home on leave and left it for my wife as a bedside set it got so warm with its closely packed valves that the sounds always slowly faded away as the coils expanded in the heat and it went out of tune! I somehow forgot to report this back to my friends who had been mightily impressed with it before I took it home!

I do regret now spending so much time in the NAAFI playing table tennis and eating buns when I could have been out absorbing all that wonderful architecture. I never went into a church or cathedral; nor an art gallery. Germany was full of such wonders, which all passed by me. We all lived in a fog of mild insurrection and exasperation waiting to be demobbed and get
home and ignored everything else.

I must say a word for a certain Miss.Brett, who used to arrange lectures and recitals of music in a hallowed "quiet room" in the NAAFI. It was here, as a fanatical fan (which I still am to this day) of traditional jazz and American Swing Bands to the exclusion of all other music, that I heard various people come and give us lectures on classical music; I can still remember the subtle ploy of one visiting orchestral conductor on such a duty tour round the troops leading us from Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo (much admired by classical musicians and composers for its clever harmonies - oh dear - what buttering up!) slowly towards hearing Handel's Water Music for the first time and then Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto on records and realising that there were other sorts of music than dance-music and jazz I heard string quartets and piano trios for the first time, live in
a small room (You've guessed it - playing for cigarettes, the universal local currency) and started to take simple piano lessons - for cigarettes - with the pianist of the string trio. This never came to anything, but it did all end up with running my own semi-professional early music group many years later - playing a whole range of different reproduction early wind and stringed instruments. I think a lot of people must be grateful for those teachers and lecturers who went round the units enlarging our artistic horizons and perceptions of the world before we all came home. I often think now of the humiliation the members of that Piano Quartet must have felt; proud and distinguished musicians playing to the conquerors of their nation for cigarettes! It never crossed my mind at the time of course. It was as a result of my new enthusiasm for classical music that I learned another important lesson in the army. I came in late one evening into our canteen to find a neatly moustached Anton Walbrook-like soldier I vaguely knew playing the Warsaw Concerto we all knew so well from the film "Dangerous Moonlight" - and playing it beautifully. When he had finished I crept out of the gloom and congratulated him. I then asked him if, in its way, he didn't think it was as "good" and "serious" a piece of music as any written by the great classical composers, even if not of the stature of the greatest of them. He banged the piano lid down and strode off saying "I never discuss music - I just play it; I can't stand intellectuals who talk about it!" In the words of a well known comedian "I only arsked !".Thus was I taught circumspection quite early in life. It was, alas, a lesson learnt but not always practised.

I also remember going on an architectural course run by the army which did a lot for my ego. It was attended mostly by qualified town-hall architects and professionals from architectural drawing offices, but I wangled my way in somehow and won the end-of-course competition to design a yacht club boathouse; "the only design with any imagination", they said, and left a lot of very satisfying egg on the faces of a few rather condescending professionals who had been giving me tips. Sadly I never was able to capitalize on all this, as there were no vacancies for architects in the early post-war years and like so many of us with a wife acquired during the war I had a choice
afterwards between dragging her with me to starve in the garret of my personal ambitions or supporting her properly. I chose to support her properly and became an Accountant - taking all those exams my Father had so wisely told me to take. It all turned out rather well as I did design a whole series of luxury houses for a period as a sideline later on in life and was able to supplement my income for a while and give up the activity without losing a career when the responsibilities of my main career became too much to combine the two.

And that's that. As far as I am concerned the army was the making of at least this semi-willing amateur soldier and I am sure I am in no way unique. How much luckier I was than those who were crippled or lost their lives.

ADDENDUM FOR WW2 EDITOR:.
(These pages of sketches and memorablia can be scanned and supplied on request if the editor of the 大象传媒 site is interested, with the following):

At the end of this book you will see a selection of sketches I made in a small ring-bound sketch book in which I kept a series of extraordinary notes, including jazz and classical records to buy after the war, silly army jokes, and ideas for surrealist paintings I wanted to do some day; needless to say I had no potential as a painter, surrealist or otherwise - I was more of a doodlearist if anything - but I still had a schoolboy preoccupation with pencils and notebooks; I just liked filling them up. It wiled away a few hours to do that, and as I still had left a little of that natural and uninhibited skill with a pencil a lot of us have before it is blasted out of existence by self-consciousness and instruction, I was able to capture a little of the atmosphere of our billets, cafes, hardware and weapons. Most of the things, like the battery charger Lt.Maynard tried to get the Home Service on and the Bren gun I had to look after above my bed are self explanatory from the text, but I wish I had drawn the 19-set we were all so involved with; you can see glimpses of it on in obe of the sketches - under and between the two pictures on the wall in the top sketch and in the far corner of our outhouse in the bottom picture. The piano in the left of the top sketch on page was the one being played by the Anton Walbrook lookalike pianist who taught me circumspection..

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