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This story is taken from an interview with Sam Wilson, and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was David Reid, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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We got a QRM.

Well, I joined when — War was declared on the day before my 21st Birthday. I lived in Rathcool then, and I applied to join the RAF on my 21st birthday, which was the 4th of September 1939. I was 21 then. And the RAF didn’t send for me until the following February or March. I went into the RAF about March 1940. So I was in right at the beginning.

[other locals joined the Services]
In other branches of the services. We had quite a number, actually. We had one famous fellow from the village, Stanley Torrel. I was at school with Stanley. He ended up actually as a Group Captain, oh yes. Very very nice fellow. Stanley died only a number of years ago. He’d lived up in Florencecourt in County Fermanagh. Far as I know his wife is still living there. There were quite a lot of village boys actually went into the RAF. I’d say there were about, to my own knowledge, about 7 or 8 of them. There were others actually went for the Navy, and others went for the Army as well, you know?
No conscription [in NI]. My family were very supportive, actually, of me, despite the fact that my father had died when I was 17 or 17 ½ and I was more or less the breadwinner in that family at that time. But no, the family were very supportive actually. I went to, after induction …
I’d been in radio servicing, actually, before joining up, and I had applied actually for — do you remember the ad that came out in our local papers? They were looking for Radar Micks. You could join the RAF and you became a Leading Aircraftman the second day after enlistment. So long as you passed the technical induction course.
Well, I didn’t actually get it as a Radar Mick. They sent me to Cranwell, which is a …
I didn’t get the exam. It was a very tough exam. There were BScs, academics actually, who had actually failed as well. They set the standard very high, in actual fact. The RSGB exam would be nothing compared to it. But that was a piece of duff.
They accepted me anyway, and after square-bashing at Padgate, I think it was. This was a basic training place where you were taught how to drill. You got RAF, what would you call it, basic training but you also got the history of the RAF, what was expected of you, and so on and so forth. It was quite rigid, and it was your introduction really into service life.

[no sense of urgency?]
Not in that sense. It was educational, though. You were mixed in with a host of other fellows, maybe 40, in a hut. And there would have been a corporal or member of permanent staff in charge of the hut, and you had to keep that hut absolutely spotless. In actual fact on one occasion I was in a hut, and this was no bull, mind you. So many of them were trying to get a weekend pass, which was the reward for the cleanest hut and the cleanest floor. And beds had to be made up in a specialist way, you put you kit on it, displayed every morning. The way you rolled up your 3 pairs of socks and displayed them all out. The orderly officer came round, he looked at all that, and he could tell if there was any item missing. And woe betide any airman who had a missing item. Sometimes you had to be clever, and you borrowed one from somewhere down the line, but the trick was in getting it back before he noticed, if he was inspected after you. However, that’s another story.

They inducted you actually into the RAF. This wee story that I was telling you, we were trying to get this award for the weekend passes. It wasn’t any use to the Irish fellows or the Scots blokes who couldn’t get home on a weekend pass, but it was all right to the others. So they build the floor up and polished it up with old, old blankets until it was shining like a shilling on the proverbial, you know? And we even took the coal out of the — we had a big big steel coal-bunker, actually, that sat beside the little stove, a pot-bellied stove. There were 2 of them, one at either end of the hut. And the one for inspection was the one that you saw first. It was cleaned up and polished and what-not, and they even took the coal out and washed it actually. Washed that coal, this is true, and we stacked it back in again. Of course, the great day came for the inspection of all the huts and we watched this actually, even at night-time because there was great competition between huts, and you could have lost that bunker of coal very very easily to your other place. So you more or less had to have a guard on it. But the RAF in its wisdom, this was part and parcel of your training. You’re seeing what RAF …
Anyway, our hut won the contest for the passes. But all I got out of it was a packet of cigarettes from the English bods who were able to take advantage of that. There were some came from London, some from practically all the counties in England. This was the RAF way of actually throwing you in, more-or-less at the deep end. You got to know the things that went on in the service. It wasn’t the stuff that you were taught officially in a classroom or anything like that, this was the raw bones of the … the bread and butter of it.
The old lino floors were kept clean. And I can remember pulling another fellow, another guy and myself, with an old blanket and a paliass on the top of it, we put wax on the floor, pulling him up and down that. And leaving a couple of old pieces of blanket at the door, so any of the inmates to the hut when it was clean, instead of walking on the floor with your boots on, especially if it was raining outside, you put these bits of blanket onto your feet and surfed. You skidded along.

[I remember seeing that in a film]
That’s perfectly true. That actually happened. I can vouch for that.

[basic training]
That was only a matter of months. 2 months, maybe 3 months at the most. Then the great day came, and the postings as they called it — you were posted to a station, and there was great anticipation about this, because you had the whole of England, all the stations that were there. So ...

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