大象传媒

UNDISTINGUISHED SERVICE
by Patrick Taylor PART 7

Christmass 1944 will always remain in my memory. I made a facetious record of this in my notebook - real schoolboy stuff - which I am going to quote verbatim. For all its inanity it does give a feeling of our pre-occupations at the time, and our zany sense of humour. The words in brackets are comments or additions to the original to make sense of obscure points. Square brackets are original.

"This Xmas will go down in the Taylor annals as the most glorious muck-up (muck is not quite the word my companions would have used) in the history of mucked-up Christmases. It all started with a tin of sweetened condensed milk - unfit for babies (a Wodehousian touch - I read him all the time) - taken in place of breakfast on the festive morn. (A whole tin eaten with a spoon) A stomach that has been sadly lacking in vitamins for weeks is no place for a sudden dose of same in concentrated and massive form. So Taylor has to leave a vast amount of an even vaster dinner of Turkey, Pork, wine, beer and Xmas pud. Only the wine all went down. Feeling an alcoholic melancholy creeping over him, Taylor goes into a sentimental stupor over the Belle Vue fire (our local pub/cafe) and consumes sherry. Bill and Arnold then drag him off to bed with them (fully clothed and with none of to-day's connotations and asumptions!) Warmth abounds as three stew in a bed for two. Bags of sherry follows the rest down in Belle Vue again until truck arrives and the Signals go to Antwerp. Our Sergeant deciding that signs, when pointing one way, have been turned from another (by retreating Germans?) we go darting around fields and cart-tracks until finally we reach a smashing modern building , the De Linden Cafe, and join the Signals Party. Lots of dancing with a girl who was good (unlike, presumably, those who just walked round the floor in the Belgian style). The first girl in Belgium I met who does a really superb fox-trot. But on the whole, Arnold and I a bit cheesed off.Bill happy. Pinches a girl off a friend and grants her straightforward wishes with pleasure. Makes girl miss passion waggon - brings her back from the wilderness and makes original boy-friend walk her home eight miles! Self's opinion of boy-friend censored! Strange then tells us the old Ford (Our 8cwt. Ford truck - the day's passion waggon) has broken down in in Antwerp. Burning smell in truck apparently cooking distributor lead! Taylor has vast aching of crumpet and borrows bed and blankets after icy sojourn in remains of a room. Rest of sigs stay in same room all night. Next day spent spent in De Linden Cafe! Truck repaired. Truck breaks down again in Turnhout. Sigs get slightly hysterical. Jim (our wise-cracking driver again!) gets a big cigar out and starts cracking wild jokes in situ. We mill around waiting for a tow.Canadian truck full of stewed souls gives us a tow. Said souls [stewed] pile out and fulfil nature's functions around a tram full of interested civilians. Bags of disorganisation in Turnhout until we finally leave truck and go home by Yank lorry. Go to Belle Vue and a Jerry plane starts straffing 557. Luckily only one bloke killed. Several injured. A little sobered by this piece of violence and wildly miserable, Taylor finishes his Xmas in bed waiting for a letter from his future wife and damning the Army Post Office very thoroughly indeed."

I can't remember much more about that Christmas except our much maligned officer - called Maynard I think - beaming through the back door of the passion waggon and handing us a bottle of Whisky - a great luxury in the ranks - and sitting on top of a Churchill tank at some stage driving round and round the central square waving wildly at all the bemused citizens of the town who had turned out to wish us well and watch our drunken antics.

SERIOUS STUFF

There were times when we behaved like serious human beings and not a lot of idiots, even in our spare time. Arnold was shipping bits of his dining room furniture home still. I was fitfully completing question papers for my INTER-RIBA exam, and learning how to draw architectural details when I could find a warm place with a table. We attended ABCA lectures and discussed politics and how to be good citizens and make the world a better place in that nebulous time "after the war"; here they attempted to teach us the rules of civilised debate instead of all shouting our political views at once in the way we did in barracks and in the cafes. Obviously very few of our present MPs attended these courses! Les Denyer was studying for some exams to further his Town Hall career. But it was all pretty disorganised. One opportunity did present itself, however, which allowed a little creative thought. As 30 Corps pressed forward to harry the Germans back into their own country, the communication lines became extended at an un-anticipated speed. The rather crude telephone cables with more steel than copper in them did not allow the signals from our rather simple telephones and telephone exchanges to travel over a long enough distance. Line amplifiers were scarce and sophisticated, requiring expert installation, so Brigade HQ held a competition to design a small and simple line amplifier that could be built from standard army spare parts and was light, portable and easy to install. We had a very short time to do this in, so I quickly designed an ingenious circuit requiring no complex line balancing circuits with only two ARP 12 battery valves, one Yaxley switch and two transformers that needed no adjusting to suit different lengths of line and without even a volume control to adjust. All this fitted straight on to the chassis and into the outer case of a standard 38-SET and was accompanied with a circuit diagram and a three-dimensional isometric drawing which enabled it to be built by people who could not even read a circuit diagram. Arnold and I built the prototype within a few days and sent it off. It won the Brigade competition jointly with the Chief Foreman Of Signals 30 Corps! Many were built to my design and they worked exceedingly well from what I heard. I never saw any of his built, and Arnold and I always told the story that he was only declared a joint winner in order to preserve his dignity. I am sure this was not true, but it made a good story.

How we loved good stories, and what kudos anyone got who could supply them! One day I had helped out the telephone linesmen by joining them to connect an army telephone exchange that was being put in on the opposite side of the road to a local telephone exchange we were cobbling our communications into. I spent some time helping them with the necessary tedious exploration of the multiple colour-coded wires in the commercial exchange, then realised my experience was no match for theirs in this meticulous job and suggested I put in our exchange over the road, connected by wires from through the top windows of the two buildings. They agreed, and I duly connected in all the wires they passed me to me in our new HQ. It was all tested and working my horror when I walked into the room next morning and saw no sign whatsoever of the small table exchange I had installed in a very large and empty hall. It had completely vanished! I rushed out in a panic to some linesmen to report the disaster and they came running back into the room with me. Suddenly one of them pointed to the top of a tall sash window. "There it is " he said. We all burst out laughing, knowing we had a story to tell that would cap quite a few army stories. The exchange was stuck at the top of a tall sash window and held there by the wires connected into it from across the road. Obviously an army Scammel or some such tall vehicle had caught the wires and hauled
the exchange up into its present position by the scruff of its wires, as it were!

Earlier on I mentioned that heroics were not in our line unless thrust into performing them by circumstances. The only chance I had to prove that my spirit was willing if required came during the German Ardennes break-through. (the Battle of the Bulge) We were stuck somewhere overnight on a delivery job when our officer declared that the Germans had broken through on a broad front between us and our base, but that he was urgently required with some maps or documents - probably telephone line dispositions, but I forget now. Anyhow he required a volunteer through the German occupied area to our HQ on the other side. One of our drivers - Jim or "Bish" (Harry Bishop) - and I volunteered for no more heroic reason I suppose than to acquire a bit of the "frisson" of battle experience; I am sure if we had actually had any battle experience we would have waited for someone else to volunteer. Anyhow we sailed through the lines frozen to death inside what was possibly the most uncomfortable vehicle ever produced for the army, proof against no more than a rifle bullet. One 88mm shell anywhere inside would have brewed us all up
nicely, and being aware of this no doubt provided a bit of the necessary "frisson", but I chiefly remember the cold, the discomfort, and being told when we arrived that the entire Scottish Highland division, drunk to a man, had passed through the town square on its way to "rescue" the Americans in the Battle of the Bulge. I am sure it was not the entire division, and that they were not all drunk. I am also sure that they did not on their own rescue the Americans, if indeed they were
"rescued" at all, but they did, I believe, play a useful part in driving the Germans back. But it was one of those good stories that spread around like wildfire and, of course, improved in the telling.

One point this last little tale illustrates is the intense loyalty engendered in the army for one's own little troop, for one's unit, corps, army and nationality at the expense of all others, and sometimes encouraged us to do something about enhancing its reputation. Our own group, from small signals troop up to the whole nation, had a vague idea of what we were about, but anyone else was useless. The Highlanders were all whisky swilling uneducated roughs from the Gorbals without a clue; the Guards Armoured a lot of privileged toffs oversold to the public and under-used because they were useless, and the Americans of course, over-sexed, over-paid and unfortunately over here (m)ucking up everything. This was emphasised by endless stories we told against ourselves, and implying that if we were that bad, you could imagine how bad the others were! I am sure my ridiculous little bit of minor heroics in the scout car was partly engendered by a feeling of "Oh God, I suppose we'd better do our bit to get those useless Americans out of their mess." I am also sure that when it actually came to the point at the sharp end a lot of real heroics came about through the desire to stick by one's unit - team spirit - and even more to support one's fellow conscripts as human beings in the same boat, rather than any feeling of saving the world from Hitler.

The only other memory I have from this period was attending a short refresher course in Radio Theory and sitting on March 5th 1945 an exam at Brigade HQ, theoretical and practical, to upgrade me to Instrument Mechanic A2. The Brigade Foreman had set some fiendish faults on a 19-SET for our "practical" and was rather bemused when I found them all half an hour short of our allotted time. I passed out top of the entry, marked "Passed - V.Good", but was far more pleased by the fact that my pay went up to seven shillings a day! (From 5/6d as far as I remember) My friend Signalman Arnold Ogden fared rather less well - marked "Fail - very weak on theory. Shows promise and should try again next time." But we remained friends and his ego was later to be boosted by his part in the line amplifier he helped me with that has been described earlier.

I had also been offered a place on an Officer's Training Course to trained as an officer, but was far too comfortable in my cosy rooms and backs of trucks, poking about finding interesting faults in radio sets to go gallivanting around on assault courses and parade grounds so I turned it down. Someone had obviously decided I was good officer material, and I am afraid that I proved by my attitude that they were wrong! Anyhow, the end of the war was in sight and it might have prolonged my time in the army.

I remember practically nothing about the short time we spent in Holland except that we were not nearly as welcome there as in Belgium. We found them a dour people whose motto seemed to be "lock up your daughters". There was no sign of the licentious night life of the Belgian cafes and I don't think even Bill Church managed to make any progress there - he had better luck with the German girls! Their strict Protestant ethic obviously did not allow any liberties just because "there was a war on."We found them a dull lot who, apart from a very brave group of underground Resistance fighters, had got used to the Germans and were not sure about how to cope with the seemingly remote possibility of their dislodgement when that came about. It was probably something to do with the ethnic and language connection.

WINDING DOWN

I wish I could remember more about the rest of the war up to its conclusion in Europe on VE day. Apart from the inevitable riding round on tanks in the town square, waving at everyone and trying desperately to prevent the girls and youths of the town getting their arms and legs caught in the tracks as they climbed on the tanks to join us in the celebrations, I remember nothing. We were all posted to a holding area in Hamburg for a while, and saw for ourselves the bombing devastation in the various towns, including the unbelievable sight of Hanover reduced almost totally to rubble. In Hamburg I remember that the Opera had miraculously survived, and I saw my first operatic performance there, arranged by my Mother who was ensconsed in a luxury suite of rooms in a very grand hotel as a member of the Control Commission. She and everyone else seemed to be involved in an endless round of parties and heavy drinking, with all sorts of bedroom hopping going on everywhere which I rather priggishly got terribly depressed about. I can still visualise one night just before my local leave ran out lying sulking in a small and very inferior room she had acquired for me. Appalled by all the goings on - which seemed to include my Mother - I stared doggedly at the ceiling while she sat on the end of the bed and tried to explain to me that I was a bit stuffy and I must not consider myself superior to other people who "had a bit of fun" in the extraordinary circumstances of the time and the exhilaration of winning the war. I only received two pieces of worthwhile advice from my good-time ex-colonial parents in my life, both in wartime. This one from my Mother I took to heart and tried to apply from then on, reinforced by the homily on tolerance and understanding received from her Father by Katherine Hepburn in "The Philadelphia Story" , a film which I thought contained all the wisdom of the world each time I saw it at the time - which was about eight times! The other was from my Father on leave once, when he said to me "Pat - take it from me: if you want to get on after the war, get yourself qualified. Get a profession. I know - I never got one and look where it has left me!" In fact he got quite far, then threw it all away, but I took this to heart too, starting with architecture in the army and ending up five years after the war with the Final of The Chartered Institute of Secretaries.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.