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Before his call up my Father was a foreman carpenter and joiner so the army soon had him earmarked as a future NCO. He was sent on a junior NCO’s course and was soon sporting a lance-corporal’s ‘tape’.
At that time the army had what it called ‘local leave’. This had to be spent within a certain distance from camp. My father invariably wangled himself onto a train to London where he spent his leave with my Mother and my elder brother, about five at the time. On returning from one of these leaves the train was delayed, a not infrequent occurrence at the time and my father was late getting into camp.
‘Sorry,’ he told the Guard Commander. ‘The train was held up’
‘Which train was that?’
‘The London train.’
‘Ah! But you weren’t supposed to be on that train.’
The CO was very understanding about it. He admitted that the Army did not usually bother to enforce the ‘local’ condition on private soldiers but as an NCO my father was a key member of the team who might be needed in a hurry if there was an emergency and anyway officers, even lowly lance-corporals were expected to set a good example.
My father said if his ‘tape’ meant seeing his wife and kiddy less often it was not worth having.
That’s why he remained a signalman throughout the War.

At a later stage in the War, when they were building up the infantry battalions for the Normandy landing an officer promised my father that if he transferred to the infantry he would be a sergeant within a month. My father replied that he did not want to be in the infantry and he did not want to be a sergeant so unless the officer could give him two good reasons for going he would stay where he was, thank you.

My father had not always been so against being in the infantry. He knew that as a time-served carpenter he could always get a billet in the pioneer squad attached to every infantry battalion. (As had my grand-father in the previous War.)When he was in trade training for the Signals the standard threat used by the instructors was ‘if you don’t get through the test it will be the infantry for you.’ One time one of the instructors was being particularly tiresome with this threat until my father piped up with ‘can you guarantee that, corp?’

One particular camp my father was stationed at was in a very remote location, no town nearby - not even a pub. He found the evenings spent in a crowded barrack hut tedious in the extreme. Then one day, for some minor misdemeanour he was put on a fizzer, got defaulters and marched to the cook-house to spend the evening peeling spuds, cutting cabbages, scraping carrots etc. My father loved it. He had a Victorian work ethic. He liked to be busy, enjoyed any sort of achievement and even just peeling spuds was better that sitting around doing nothing all evening.

Next evening he peered round the cook-house door. ‘Any jobs want doing, Sarg?’ You can bet that there were. The officers when they heard about it though it was bravado on my father’s part. Showing that their punishment didn’t bother him.

After a while there was a small group of likeminded volunteers who ensconced themselves in the cook-house of an evening doing jobs for the cook-sergeant in return for cups of tea and scrounged slices of bread and jam. So much so that there was nothing for the genuine defaulters to do.

The officers tried to stop the cook from giving work to the volunteers but he pointed out that they did a better job, needed no chivvying and that he was running a cookhouse not a prison.

Most of the servicemen in the War were not on the front line. They loaded stores, services equipment or, in my fathers case, set up telephone links. Their contribution to the War effort was unglamorous but none the less important. My father worked hard and whatever he did he always made ‘a proper job’ of. He could have wangled himself an exempt job in one of the many war factories in London but he chose to be, not so much a soldier more an artisan in uniform.

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