大象传媒

UNDISTINGUISHED SERVICE PART 1 A signalman's sketch of what the army did for him during the second world war with some insights into a signalman's life.

By Patrick Taylor

PRELUDE

I suppose it would be difficult to find a subject with less significant content than my life in the army. However, it was typical, I suppose, of so many others that it may shed some light on the era simply because of that fact; no one else probably considered recording such dull stuff! But this is to look at it from the viewpoint of the world; from my own viewpoint the whole episode has a different significance. I would certainly not be the person I am today had I not spent four years in the army, and I would not like to have been the person I would have been without that experience.

Born in Calcutta in 1924 as a typical son of the Raj, my life from the start gave me the typically restricted view of my fellow dwellers on this planet that arises from the double privilege, if that is the word, of belonging not only to the upper middle classes but also to a conquering class which ruled a subject nation. My grandfather was a General - nothing very grand, probably an Admin man. This restriction of perspective was compounded by my being an only son, without a brother or a sister to brush up against and so learn the meaning of compromise or accommodation. Add to all this the fact that my upbringing up to the age of seven was in the hands of an Ayah who, though very thorough when it came to manners and diffident behaviour towards grown-ups, particularly in not disturbing them about their business and play, was in other respects indulgent in the extreme, letting me do whatever I wished, and you will see that I was not equipped very well to get on with the majority of people in this country who made up its conscripts in wartime.

I was not even equipped to get on with my fellows at the Preparatory boarding school to which I was sent at the accepted age of seven, when children are sent home from the colonies to continue their education; I was far too spoilt, and got up everyone's nose from the start. This was largely, though not entirely, ironed out over the next eight years until my Father ran out of money and came home in disgrace from a very prestigious job as Chief Accountant of Burn & Co., the largest steel company in India. He had borrowed - quite legitimately and with official blessing, but not explaining his motives - a large sum of money from the firm and gambled it disastrously on the Stock Exchange. Respectability still being all in those days, he resigned and sent my Mother home to haul me out of a school he could no longer afford. She promptly sent me to a Catholic Boarding School which was well disposed towards her as she was a recent convert to the Catholic Religion and well connected in high areas of the clergy at the time.
This school did nothing to fit me for life in the army, being packed with the unwanted sons of eccentrics, irresponsibles and of empire building parents who conveniently lost their children there while they cavorted and partied round the world in between ruling their bit of it and running their businesses. We ran riot under the lax discipline of the Brothers, who nevertheless managed to impart to us a very sound education, including the rudiments of Latin, for which I have always been grateful, but prepared us in no way for obeying orders or looking after ourselves - Matron did that, at the expense of her complete exhaustion as a result of our ungrateful and inconsiderate behaviour and endless demands.
Alas, the benificience of the Brothers was not inexhaustible, and since neither my Mother nor my Father when he finally came home to England could find any fees at all, nor any money to pay what they owed the school, I was unceremoniously removed and put into a job as an office boy with the world famous Eastern merchant bankers Jardine Skinner at the London offices of Matheson & Co. Limited without even a Junior Oxford School Certificate. This was to have some effect on my future, as I was not able to go straight into the Army as an officer as most young men of my upbringing and background did, who left school with at least a Senior Oxford (or Cambridge) Certificate of some sort and generally a Matriculation.
None of this rather acerbic summary of my up-bringing should be construed as a grumble. The excellent quality of my education enabled me to collect matriculation standard and professional qualifications later in life without much bother and my early training in merchant banking with such a prestigious firm as the Jardine group has enabled me to live comfortably all my life. But it did result in the most tremendous shock when I went into the army as a ranker and met the real world for the first time. Three years of civilian life in a merchant bank full of public schoolboys, my evenings spent in Bayswater among artists and intellectuals or friends of my own class, to say nothing of the perpetual students from Oxbridge who were exempted from war service and who regularly propped up the bar, were no help at all. Since my Father bought all my drinks - Cider was, I think, my chief tipple - I never even acquired the habit of standing my round. I was too young legally anyway.
The only thing that did save me from total disaster was, I suppose, the Hammersmith Palais de Danse in Tottenham Court Road. I could afford to go there once or twice a week - mostly on Saturday nights, and the presence of soldiers on leave in their uniforms at least made me aware there was a war on - I don't think it would have occurred to me otherwise, in spite of the intense interest I had in aeroplanes. I was a keen model aeroplane builder, and could have told you the performance figures and specifications of all the aircraft in the R.A.F., as well as those used by both sides in the first world war, but it was a technical interest that was more concerned with their comparative speed, manoeuvrability and fire-power in a dog-fight than with a war for freedom that had to be won. I looked on my own involvement in the war rather as a young man looks on death in old age; something that you know very well is going to come about, but is not worth wasting thought on now. I neither looked forward to my call-up nor dreaded it....it simply did not crop up significantly in my thoughts.
It was at at the Hammersmith Palais that I first met and conversed with people who didn't have "proper accents", and this helped me when the time came for me to join the army. There was no way to know when you asked a strange girl for a dance whether she came from the right background, held her knife and fork properly or spoke with the right accent. Even if she did not measure up in any of these respects, she very often did in other feminine respects and in the hope that something might be made of these I would often go back to their group with them and find it contained these strange people from the "working class" - another world I knew nothing about except as servants, waiters, barmen, train porters or office messengers....among them, of course, soldiers. This, I suppose, planted the first seeds in my mind about joining up. As I approached the age of eighteen, the quizzical looks and often direct questions as to when I was going to be called up, as well as some sarcastic remarks about "people in reserved occupations" caused me to think about my vague existing plans. It was the first time in my life I had come across direct questioning about my personal affairs, something "not done" in the world in which I had been brought up. It was also the first time I had been invited to consider what I was going to do with my life apart from pursuing my own pleasures and aims. The only thing upper middle class adolescents thought about in those days - and often still do - was their own pleasure, the lifestyle they aspired to and the "career" they were going to follow in order to provide the wherewithal for it; and they were not supposed to get too serious about the latter - not in company, anyhow. That was personal. Doubts about it were boring, and high aspirations were "side".
JOINING UP
But it was not this that induced me to volunteer for the army, although it may have paved the way. My "vague" plans so far for the future were to be a fighter pilot at what seemed to me at the time some remote future date, and to this end I had joined the Air Training Corps. It was here that I learned my first elementary electric theory when building and wiring up our home-made buzzers and oscillators in order to practice morse code at home. We also learned elementary navigation, and this tied in with the drawing and mathematics I was using fitfully in the evenings to design competition model aeroplanes. I was very lazy about this, and was always giving the difficult bits up in exasperation - rather like those annoyingly difficult bits in the middle of piano pieces one can otherwise play - and the discipline of having to see my work through and produce a result for the next lesson did me a lot of good. None of this was related in my mind to going to fight a war...it was just a rewarding intellectual activity no more or less absorbing than tracking down the latest Vocalion Fats Waller record which had somehow found its way across the Atlantic in the middle of a war in which convoys of ships were being torpedoed right left and centre, or the even rarer "race" records of coloured jazz musicians I and my friends were all so mad on.
It was the blitz that changed my thinking, and I quite clearly remember the exact moment when this came about. For many months the bombs had been raining down. I idly passed the people settling down for the night in the underground stations, wondering how they could be bothered or put up with being so uncomfortable. The fires that raged all over the place, the miles of intertwining hosepipes we had to step over on our way to the office each morning, the piles of rubble and such grizzly sights as bloodstained baths hanging on by their pipes to buildings sliced down the middle as if by some gigantic knife were things that happened to other people and were dealt with by other people. I was just an interested, if rather aghast, spectator. Even being thrown out of bed by the detonation of a bomb two doors away one night was a bore; a quick look to see that no fire was spreading to the building I was in near Paddington railway station and I was back in bed and off to sleep. It was all to do with grown-ups, this wretched war, and they could get on with it, as far as I was concerned; just let me sleep. The Pathe Pictorial films at the cinema of a war going on in some remote place were a lot more interesting, but seemed to have little to do with me. The relative performance and fire-power of the Spitfire and the Messerchmidt, or the Battleships Hood and Tirpitz - now that was an interesting subject, and we would argue about such things for hours. Maps pinned up on the wall with little flags to denote the current front line in North Africa were the closest we ever got to following the war seriously, since we were obviously going to win - weren't we? So meanwhile let's get on with our lives!
One particularly heavy raid saw me standing on the doorstep of the boarding house I lived in with two friends in a flat next to my Mother's, (Westbourne Park Villas) and watching with interest. The whole sky seemed to be alight much earlier on in the evening than usual. Incendiaries were dropping everywhere. Fire engines were roaring about and people dashing here and there, when suddenly a firebomb landed on the roof of a church practically next door. Pandemonium broke out. Shouting people started placing ladders against the wall of the church, and I watched excitedly while desperate measures were taken to confine the fire. It was a wonderful show, better than any film - so real. It was then that I noticed that some of the people involved were my age - some even younger than me. I should be doing something about all this - something to help. It was not just an exciting fireworks show put on to enliven the rather boring life I was living on my office boy's wages in a world of rationing and restrictions. This was serious; it was happening in my world and people were dying all round me. I called one of my friends and we rushed out into the night to see if there was anything we could do; the fire next door had by this time been put out, and everyone seemed to be pitching in. The firebombs were still raining down and a heady feeling of excitement took both of us over as we rushed about under a hail of spent shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns rattling down around us and searched for some way to help. We soon found it.
It is impossible to describe the next scene and the sort of thinking of many people, including myself at that time, without using words that are now offensive and emotions that are
probably difficult for this generation to understand. I can assure anyone that they were very, very common at the time, and probably still exist in a good many people, but are kept under covers in these days of political correctness. The attitudes concerned had a lot to do with my joining the army before being called up. We came to a large boarding house in Porchester Terrace from which a flickering glow through a basement window indicated that an incendiary bomb had landed somewhere inside. People were pouring out of the building screaming and yelling in some foreign tongue we could not place. "Oh my God" I said to my friend "Wogs! Let's get them organised." I am not going to gratuitously offend anyone reading this by indicating which country we subsequently found out they came from, but they were, indeed of, shall we say, Mediterranean origin: refugees. As far as we were concerned they were wogs. That is to say they were a disorganised, lazy, undisciplined lot of shirkers, over-emotional and given to gesticulation, crying woe at every setback, quite unable to organise themselves in a crisis, each one concerned only with his own or his own family's personal discomfort or danger, and, of course, foreigners. It was a very useful expression, whatever else may be said about it, as it summarised a lot of thinking into one word. The word wog is said to be derived from "wily oriental gentleman" and to have originated farther east, but as far as we were concerned any frizziness of hair, swarthiness of skin - even an Italian olive tinge - indicated untrustworthiness and lack of British discipline, phlegm and spunk. The irony of this, which I did not appreciate at the time, was that my friend of many years - from boarding school in fact - who had very frizzy hair, was partly of French Colon origin. But of course one's own friends were different!
What had a tremendous effect on me was the way our arrival - two inexperienced and callow youths - changed the whole situation. There were two or three air-raid wardens already there, trying to organise things but obviously being overwhelmed by the panic, who shouted at us to get the people sorted out into straight lines to pass buckets or get out of the way, which we
did. Within a very short time we had formed the remaining occupants in the house into two straight lines, one from upstairs and the various wash basins and bathrooms up there and another from the kitchens, calmly feeding every conceivable water container in a very disciplined and British manner down to the basement where presumably some intrepid people were throwing it on the fire that was starting to take hold. Even some of the people who had fled returned to help, bringing water from the next house presumably and feeding it into the lines. The fire was soon out and I have dined out on that story for years. I decided at once, though perhaps not in the conscious way I now describe, that my services were required by my country as I had now grown up and ought to be doing something. The RAF could not take me yet, for some reason I forget, so I applied to the Royal Signals to see if I could be of service. I could. What had not occurred to me was that even highly technical people like the trained civilians who went into the REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers), had to be made into soldiers first. I duly made my way to the bleak parade grounds of Catterick in Yorkshire. (Continued in Part 2)

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