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‘Where are you going, you horrible little man?’
I recognised the voice of the Company Sergeant-Major and stopped short. After being in the army for a few months, mostly at this particular Infantry Training Centre, I knew well enough about standing to attention and shouting out answers and saying ’SIR!’
‘It’s the Jewish New Year and the chaplain is holding a service in X Lines, SIR’, I shouted.
‘ Oh. Jewish New Year, eh!’
I stood petrified. At this stage of my army career a CSM was a kind of sub-god with apparently unlimited powers over young recruits. CSM Johnson was a Regular in a county regiment and had spent his time in the pre-war army, gradually working his way up to his exalted rank. On the Reserve at the start of the war he had, with not very good grace it was said, returned in 1939. After Dunkirk he had gone on to training recruits.
We were all frightened of him. It was not a question of brutality. It was just the shouting, the drill, his
omnipresence. To have to approach him in the company office meant not only polishing and pressing and sweating over having some part of the uniform not exactly ‘proper’. There was the awful fear of having to go near him, and the things he might say.
He glared down at me, his pace-stick tucked tightly under his arm, his hands clasped behind his back, his whole body rocking slightly backwards and forwards on his heels and toes. He looked enormous.
In those few seconds nothing concrete came into my mind just a vague feeling that he might say something nasty about Jews. What did this Man of Kent (or was it Kentish Man?) know about Jews anyway. The anxiety in my mind was a product of who knows how many discussions, arguments and whispered conversations.
‘Do you have these things very often’, the CSM now grunted down at me.
Looking back I suppose I could have made some feeble joke about the two Jewish New Years at Pesach and Rosh Hashanah and perhaps thrown in the New Year for trees. But it did not occur to me then and I would not have had the courage to have been so flippant.
‘No SIR. Once a year.’
‘Who gave you permission to go?’
‘The Orderly Sergeant, SIR. I reported to him this morning.’
So far my army experiences had not been too disastrous. After trotting around the Kentish countryside in heavy equipment for some weeks in hot weather I was fairly fit. I had lost a lot of weight and the battledress I had been issued when I was at the Senior Training Corps at university was now too big for me but I had not yet got round to changing it for one more appropriate to my sylph-like figure.
I had finished my training and the spare platoon I was attached to did not readily fit into the routine of a training depot. At the time when the ‘spares’ had been able to change clothes at the stores I had been away, failing the test to become an officer. I had just returned from that and was living in a dark tent under some damp trees.
The seconds dragged by and I became increasingly depressed. I thought, don’t just stand there rocking, eyeing me up and down distastefully. Say something, whatever it is. Let’s get it over with.
‘Now look here’, came the voice.
‘Oh Lord’, I shuddered.
‘Now look here. I won’t have this in my company.’
I waited for whatever was to come.
‘Just look at yourself. Here you are, going to a religious service, on a Holy Day. And LOOKING LIKE THAT. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You ought to have more respect. Look at that battledress. There’s no crease in the trousers. There’s a STAIN there. Put your other suit on, it can’t be worse than this one. And if you’re late for the service make sure you apologise.’
He marched off.

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