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I have a way of getting lost.

This was to become apparent to a wider circle of people when the RAF, in all innocence, ordered me on October 13th, 1943, to join as a National Serviceman. I had just had my 18th birthday. I became lost in the dusty plains of Madhya Pradesh and on a road in the centre of thick forest in Bangladesh. Nowadays I enjoy the sensation in Bath, Somerset - Bath has a lot of alleyways.

Somehow, I managed to get through the compulsory eight weeks of Initial Training at Skegness, gasping over assault courses with full pack, rifle and fixed bayonet, firing Sten guns and Lee-Enfield 303 rifles and throwing hand grenades without killing myself or anyone else. I did, on the other hand, retain some of my cunning by making myself available to the Mess Sergeant as poster-designer for dances and ENSA visits. As I remember it, that did get me out of some of the more pointless and reckless throwing about of my peculiarly unfit body. I also wrote a march, 'Sicilian Victory', for the RAF Band and had the pleasure of hearing it played by the band and, later, by the town cinema organist. Interesting, that one.

Then I was astonished by being sent up to RAF Wilmslow to make chest X-Rays of WAAFs. A WAAF, for those too young to know, was a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. It rhymes with ‘taff’. Making chest X-rays of young women, I thought, had all the ingredients of a good party. But my heated imaginings on the train up to Cheshire were extinguished when I found that, in the first place, I was to be merely the darkroom boy, shut away from all chances of lascivious peering, and in the second place, that even on the odd occasion when I was lucky enough to see these young creatures come out of their changing cubicles they would be wearing high-necked white robes whose sack-like cut left absolutely everything to the imagination.

That posting filled in time before I surprised myself by being shunted into actually enjoying thirteen weeks of education. From April until June 1944, I learned the basic science and practice of photography at the RAF No 1 School of Photography in Farnborough, Hants, where in spare moments you could lie in the summer grasses above the Royal Aircraft Establishment airfield and look down at Frank Whittle’s experimental jet engine squirting the first jet aircraft, the Gloster E-2839, along the runway and into the air.

The photographic teaching staff were easy-going NCOs recruited from commercial photographic studios and laboratories. In the matter of NCOs, Farnborough was as different from Skegness as Fauré is from Acid House.

Complex mechanical systems within the huge grey four-foot tall F54 automatic aircraft cameras were learned surprisingly quickly by means of little memory aids. I remember the start of one of them, sung to the tune of ‘Phil the Fluter’s ball’:

When the solenoid is energised
The locking lever’s tripped. . .

So considerate were their teaching methods that I, even I, passed the final Trades Test Board examination and got the title of Photographer, Aircraftsman 2nd Class. I had yet to climb to AC1 and Leading Aircraftsman, but you have to start somewhere.
The last bit of August and September and the first bit of October were spent aboard the Orient Line Otranto, sailing in convoy to we knew not where. It turned out to be Bombay.

Surprises continued to occur: crossing the Indian Ocean, not many of the men could bear the stifling heat and close proximity of other humans below decks, sleeping in their almost-touching hammocks. As a result, the open decks at night were covered with sleeping bodies. I had found a good place at one end of B Deck, sheltered but in the open air. I got into the way of getting there early and settling down with a book, then sleeping whenever sleep came. I woke very early one morning, and something was different. For one thing, my head was sore, but the chief point was that I was not where I had gone to sleep. I was at the opposite end of the deck. Shaken, I stood up and walked, planting my feet carefully between sleepers, to the other end of the deck, reflecting that I must have done this during the night in my sleep. My space was still there, and my lifejacket pillow was lying against the bulkhead exactly as I had arranged it the previous night. That sort of thing can worry you.

(Two years later I was to find that ships’ rails are surprisingly wide and comfortable to sit on - even to lie on. On the Capetown Castle, the ship that took me back to England from this two-year spell abroad, you could lie along the rail and lean sideways against the thick steel fairing that came curving up at one point. There was also a vertical stanchion where your back came, so you had a back-rest as well. This made you feel safe, even though there was only about three inches of rail between your bottom and the 50-foot drop to the sea. So, with a lifejacket for a pillow and some careful body adjustments, it made a good quiet spot for an hour, watching the sunsets. I settled down one evening to do that before going to bed. Weary, I dozed off. The worrying thing was that, when I woke up, it was morning.)

The Indian railways system took me from Bombay to Bhopal in the middle of India via the Kama Sutra.

Day and night, the corridor was crowded with sweating khaki-shirted men, everyone trying to find the coolest spot, windows down as far as they would go, arms pushed out through horizontal bars to catch the rush of oven-hot, dusty air. About halfway to Bhopal, in what was then Central Provinces and is now Madhya Pradesh (Hindi for Middle Land), we made a stop in the middle of fields. We didn’t know why, and cared less. Someone said he thought we were taking on coal, or water, or something.
Across the fields was a group of huts. A few men, women and children came out and ran towards us. They stopped a short way off. As unconcerned as ‘The Mousetrap’ cast appearing on stage for the 10,000th performance, the man and woman stripped and began to entertain us, laughing towards us and gesticulating. This had a barely describable effect on me; dismay, and then, because of the combination of the utter foreign-ness of everything that had happened in the past weeks since boarding the ship in Liverpool, coupled with the unabashed gaiety on the faces of both the couple and the crowd standing round, I found myself accepting what I saw as being normal, accepting something which was so completely outside reality as to be beyond judgment.

But what happened next was, to me, worse. An older boy from the crowd came and stood below our compartment. A semicircle of knowing small children grouped themselves behind him, jumping up and down in gleeful anticipation of our reaction. He reached into the front of his loincloth, and, as if bestowing a rare honour, displayed a part of his body which was, because of its filthy condition, instantly covered by flies. The longer-serving of the servicemen around me shouted in servicemen’s Hindustani, ‘Sarf karo! Kharab hai! Clean it! Clean it! That’s bad!’ The boy tucked the exhibit away and, with the smaller children, stood staring up at us in silent disappointment, almost reproof.

I arrived in the vast, flat, dry, scrubby plains of Bhopal and RAF No 1 Air Gunnery Training School halfway through October 1944, and for eight months did photographic things with Liberator bombers and Mosquito fighter-bombers. Mosquito crews would take off and shoot each other down with guns loaded with 16mm movie film in place of ammunition. Liberator gunners would do the same. Apart from servicing the cameras, my job was to take loaded 16mm film magazines out to the aircraft when they landed, unlock and open the camera hatches in the wings and fuselage, remove the exposed magazines, load the new ones, go back to the Photo Section darkroom and process the film. In the evenings all the crews gathered in the projection room (which, after hours, became the camp cinema, operated by two or three of us in rotation) to watch the results as I projected the films. The duty gunnery instructor would comment on the gunners’ technique.

Whilst, thirty years later, the art-direction of the Kodak International Calendar from 1971 to1986 was to take me to places round the earth where I would never otherwise have gone - and occasionally drop me into nasty situations - for total immersion into the hugger-mugger of life it couldn’t touch National Service.

It is sudden and uncompromising. In Bhopal in 1944 I saw a dead man hanging by his neck from a high wooden post, slowly turning. He had only one leg. A rag was tied round his middle. His eyes were wide open, flies already round them, making them look as though they were moving. The small crowd was already dispersing.

The RAF living quarters were sparse but comfortable. They matched armed-services quarters anywhere in the world. About ten mosquito-netted beds stood along each side of the brick-built, cement-floored hut. We shared a servant to sweep and wash the hut each day and his small son to clean our shoes, wake us in the mornings and bring us charwallah’s sickly, heavenly, sweet tea.

So, in surroundings like these, it goes without saying that a boy coming from a sheltered life at home learns much and learns quickly. By the time I left Bhopal, few things shocked, depressed or surprised me. If the man in the next bed is a thug, murderer, sexual deviant, wife-beater or arsonist, you eat, sleep, wake, wash, shower, dress, pee and work with him. If your bed is between two mates you find yourself in the middle of their verbal and physical exchanges into the small hours until you get one of them to swap positions with you.

But I was enjoying myself. I suppose I was suddenly growing up. I was enjoying smoking for the first time. The free issue of a tin of 50 Players Navy Cut every week I found exciting. My first cigarette of each day was smoked as I walked in freshly-laundered khaki shirt and shorts to breakfast in the cool air and low sunlight of the early mornings. I still associate the feel of a newly-ironed shirt with the first inhalation of sweet smoke and the heady tingle of semi-intoxication.

I was nearly killed when I went out on a walk early one morning with a friend. We had 303 Lee Enfield rifles and a magazine of ammunition, and some water. With a devil-may-care attitude offsetting plain ignorance we set out across the hard, scrubby desert-like countryside. The sun did its morning trick of increasing its temperature from cool to unbearable in about fifteen minutes. For more than an hour we tried to keep going in a straight line - there were no vehicle tracks. We headed for the low hills, planning to rest there and have some water, then return. As we moved towards the hills, the hills moved away from us.

To all intents and purposes, we never got any closer. So we sat under a short, scrubby tangle of sticks which carried a leaf or two and which one could, with generosity, have called a tree, and sipped our water.

We started back to camp. For another hour we walked, and slowly began to wonder if we were heading in the wrong direction. No buildings appeared on the horizon and we both felt they should have done. Within minutes, we were sure. We were lost in the desert.

Then, to our immense gratification, we heard an aircraft engine. Or, rather, two engines. It was unmistakably one of our Liberators, but it was high above us, invisible in the dazzle of the sub-tropical sun.
It grew louder. Very quickly, it became even louder, and then it was on us, and firing live ammunition. We ran. There was nowhere to run to, but when you’ve got a Liberator bomber coming at you and spurts of dust flying up from the ground, indicating the presence of an automatic gun of some sort doing its stuff with uncompromising determination, you run. Anywhere.

By the time it was climbing away, we realised we were in the middle of the Air-to-Ground Firing Range. So it was good that we ran. And we kept running. The onslaught from above seemed to have corrected our sense of direction, for the airfield buildings appeared in the heat haze and we staggered in like a couple of wet rags and flopped on our beds. In our quarters that evening I heard one of the armourers describing how that very morning he’d been flying in E408 and they were bang on target and firing when two silly buggers went scarpering across the target. He couldn’t recognise them, but if ever he got his hands on them he would bloody well. . . My friend and I kept quiet. There are times when this is best.

I had to leave India because my father, blessed be his memory, wanted to keep an eye on me. I jest not. I was enjoying life more every day when in the middle of one morning as I came out of the darkroom with the latest batch of processed film, the Flight Sergeant in charge called me along the verandah to his office. He was a tall, clipped-moustached, easy-going, fatherly Lancashire man, liked by everyone.

‘Ay’, he began, clearly uncomfortable with whatever it was he had to say to me. ‘Ay, lad. Sit down.’

He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat.

‘Now. Thing is, er-hrrm, I’ve just been sent a letter by your father.’

The earth’s axis shifted slightly.

‘My father?’

‘Ay. And what he says is he’s afraid you might, you know -’ the poor man was almost more embarrassed than I was - ‘you might be a bit nervous of things in the services and especially being a long way from home - yes, he says here, ‘He’s a bit nervy’, and what he asks me is, would I keep an eye on you. Now, I wouldn’t have said anything, normally, but I thought you’d want to know he’s written.’

He was so right. I felt a red haze rising in front of my eyes. I think that was the moment I first realised my hatred for my father. A few months later, as I went into the darkroom to process the latest crate of 16mm gun magazines, he called me in again.

‘Er-hrrm, Sorry about this, lad. Air Ministry letter,’ he said, flapping the yellow sheet of headed paper. ‘Apparently your father has now applied for you to be repatriated on compassionate grounds. He’s had to be invalided out of his job and he says he wants you to be near home. You’ll be getting a posting down to a Transit Camp in Rangoon.’ He smiled. ‘So we’ll be losing you. Pity, that.’

I could not understand it. My letters to my parents told them that I was enjoying life, that I was really enjoying life for the first time ever. Doing turns in camp concerts, singing with a barbershop group, listening to records with friends, playing bit parts in Drama Club plays; I had described it all in my letters. It must have made him furious. And now he had worked out the one way of getting me back. The vitriolic letter I wrote to him probably ended up as a burnt offering. After calming down a little I realised that the Infantry man who had himself fought in the front line trenches for the whole four years of the first world war was simply anxious to be once again protective of his little boy. I cursed him then; now I know the intense feeling one can have for one's children, and I am grateful to him for his care.

So I had to leave happy, dangerous, Bhopal and begin the RAF-style repatriation to England. Quite why I had to fly down to Burma as the first leg of the journey I never quite understood, but it pleased me.

In a large country house along a tree-lined road outside Rangoon on June 14th, 1945, I dumped my kit in my room and looked round the huge garden. I was unaware of the great victory parade that was happening a mile or two away in the city. I found a black hole in among the shrubbery that led into a dugout. It had a roughly-painted notice in Japanese nailed to its shoring-up frame. I bent and went in. It was still aromatic from sweating Japanese soldiers who, until only weeks before, had hidden there with fixed bayonets and cocked rifles. It was then that I realised that I was close to the scene of sudden death and that I, too, would have been eligible.
But there were few excitements, apart from nearly stepping on a silver krait in the driveway (its bite, I was told, would have ended a short but increasingly interesting life) and hearing the ships in the Rangoon River blowing their sirens announcing VE Day. The house was a be-towered mansion belonging to Lim Tsing Chong, comfortable in a bare-floorboard way. There were twelve of us, and, apart from the strange, middle-aged, baby-faced man in the next room to ours who would open his bedroom door each morning and give us all a detailed running commentary as he resorted to a favourite and most personal pastime, the company was enjoyable. A table-tennis table was erected in the central courtyard and several of us played for hours at a time.

I did little else. Some of us paid a model from the town to pose for us one evening a week to practice our life drawing in the highest room of the tower, with the open windows admitting flying beetles of horror-film size. A wonderful girl whose manner was attractive but whose undraped body was infinitely more interesting to a lusting 20-year-old. I noticed that each night, as we drifted off to our rooms, there was always at least one man left with her. She did well out of us, what with this and that.

And across the lane from the house was a wide stretch of tree-fringed water - a lake, probably man-made. On my first day I found an old ragged canvas and bamboo canoe pulled up on to the mud. On the principle of acting first and asking later, I took it out on to the water, and for the few weeks of waiting for my next posting the lake was my playground, second only to the table-tennis table. I don’t think the possibility of the rotting canvas and sodden bamboo folding up underneath me ever occurred to me. Anyway, that lake wouldn’t have been a bad grave.

It was not until six months later that I was flown in a Dakota DC3 to Calcutta. For part of the journey I flew it myself. Things were like that in the1940s.

*
Calcutta!

I was lost, and this time the crux of the matter was that I didn’t know where I was supposed to be.

It was New Year’s Day, 1946. It was nearly midnight and I was alone, on foot, about a mile outside Calcutta on a silent forest road. That much I did know because I had just walked from the Excelsior Cinema, Chowringhee, in the centre of Calcutta.

How stupid can you get? said the voice of my father inside my head.

Rubbish, I said. It could have happened to anyone.

You mean, like the scissors?

I knew exactly what he meant. I was about six, then, and helping him cut the lawn. He asked me to get the scissors. Wondering about this I went to the kitchen and got the scissors. Then as I took them out of the drawer I understood. With these, you could trim the edge of grass that butted on to the fence because you could push the small point behind the tufts and snip them easily.

In the garden I knelt down by the fence and had a go. It was a good idea, but it was going to be a long job.

I jumped at his laugh behind and above me.

‘No-o! The scissors - you know, the clippers, the shears!’

Getting them from the shed I felt myself go hot with embarrassment but I told myself it could have happened to anyone.

This time I should have known better. That same afternoon, with two other RAF men, I had arrived in Calcutta. We had been picked up in a jeep from our Dakota aircraft at Dum Dum airfield north of the city.

My problems began at the moment of departure from the airfield. Had I kept my wits about me I would have noted that we crossed the River Hooghly via Howrah Bridge, turned on to the Barrackpore road and travelled about ten miles out to our unit in the wilds of a village called Bally.

But I did not keep my wits about me. My wits, as life was later to impress upon me, were not the sort you could keep on a lead.
As we were shown into the long hut we were told that a gharrie (in Service terms a covered Bedford 3-ton truck) would be doing a Liberty Run into Calcutta city in half an hour’s time. Would we like to see the sights? The gharrie would drop us and then, at ten o’clock in the evening, pick us up at the same spot to take us back to base.

We threw our bags on our beds, showered and changed and the three of us climbed up into the back of the gharrie. We wandered along Chowringhee and had an expensive meal at Firpo’s. I said I wanted to see the film at The Excelsior. They weren’t keen, so we split and arranged to meet a little before ten at the appointed spot.

The Excelsior was big, with red velvet seats and icy air-conditioning. After the film ended I went out into the blast of heat in Chowringhee and looked at my watch. It was five to ten.
At two minutes to ten I arrived at the meeting point. Neither the gharrie nor the other two men were to be seen. I waited for ten minutes. Then it became worrying. I called a taxi. The driver’s friendly Sikh face smiled broadly at me.

‘And you go to -?’

‘The RAF Station at,’ I said, and stopped. It was like walking into a glass door: I couldn’t tell him, and I didn’t immediately know why.
In the armed forces you get used to having your hand held whenever you move. Jeeps take you to railway stations, RAF Police Corporals point you to your train and more RAF Police wait for your arrival and get you to your transport which takes you to your new unit. So, instead of noting important things like names of places and serial numbers by which Air Ministry establishments tend to be known, you dwell dreamily on the scenery.

I had no notion of the name of the village to which I had been posted, the number of the RAF Unit, and certainly not the name of the road by which to reach it. And, beyond my twelve-fifty identity card, I had no papers on me to help. They were all lying on my bed somewhere in what is now Bangladesh.

The taxi driver’s eyes lit up.

‘Ah, you forget name?’ I nodded and he began listing military-sounding addresses, but I shook my head at each one. I knew I would have recognised it had he said it. Sikhs are not easily put off by western or any other oddities, but I could see that my taxi driver was beginning to sense that he was dealing with an oddity of quite another order. He left.

Then I had the solution. If there were as many military stations as he had revealed there would be military trucks speeding between them and the city. All I had to do was to choose one of the roads (I knew it had been a long, straight one) and walk along it, wave down anything that approached from behind me and give the driver any information I could think of. As I walked, I began to formulate sharp words of complaint to my so far unknown commanding officer about drivers who did not keep to their schedule.

I was half an hour along this road before anything hailable came. It was an American Air Force jeep, and it stopped.

‘Well, Hi, there, fella. Wanna lift?’

I explained. The enormous engine idly crackled away and they shook their heads and drew on their cigars. Then one of them snapped his fingers.

‘Climb in,’ he said.

He had an idea. They would take me to their own unit and get their files out and phone around. This they did. They found my unit, rang it, then gave me a meal and a comfortable bed.

In the morning they gave me a breakfast, huge, hot and aromatic.
‘English breakfast, huh?’ said the white-aproned GI, putting it in front of me and surrounding me with sauces.

An hour later I stood to attention in front of my own C.O. at what I now knew was No 329 Maintenance Unit in the village of Bally, on the Barrackpore Road. He started with a run-down of the unit’s search activities from 10.30 the previous night. This was brisk and to the point. Then he gave me his own private opinion of my behaviour. To this he devoted more time. I decided not to complain about drivers.

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