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CHAPTER 2

We were destined to stay in Cape Town for a week. Each day we found the quayside full of expensive limousines waiting to take us out to see the sights. It seemed that the wealthy residents of Cape Town were determined to give the soldiers from England as good a time as possible. They wined and dined us every day. They took us to the cinema and into their homes and generally treated us like heroes. They were very patriotic and thought that everything from England was the best. In 1940 they were probably right!

Cape Town is a very nice place, full of beautiful houses and beautiful girls. During the war they had a law forbidding anybody to buy a drink for anyone else in a Public House. This did not apply to them buying a drink for us though.

Our convoy was the first to arrive from England since the war began. They had seen only one previous convoy and that was from Australia and the Aussies had not behaved very well - getting
drunk and causing a lot of trouble. They said our troops were very well behaved and they could not do enough for us. One of the families that took us out told us that they knew we were going
on to Durban, so we could miss the ship at Cape Town and stay a further week with them, and they would drive us to Durban and we could rejoin the ship there. If we had taken their advice there is no doubt we would have been classed as deserters — not a happy thought.

The ship left Cape Town travelling round the Cape of Good Hope and then eastwards but not to Durban. We were now part of a very small convoy of only three ships and no protecting destroyer
so it was obvious that there was no danger from enemy submarines in the Indian Ocean. Our new destination was Bombay, between four and five thousand miles away and would take between two and three weeks.

We arrived in Bombay for our first sight of India. It was very humid and when we landed we had to wear our English made shorts with huge turn-ups which we were supposed to turn down over our
knees at dusk to deter the mosquitoes from giving us malaria. With our hose tops, puttees, shorts and African type toupees, we really did look ridiculous and felt it. It just proved that the officials and high up Army bods did not have a clue about how the soldiers were really dressed in India, or perhaps the real answer was that the AOD (Army Ordnance Dept.) had been conned by a smart supplier. Anyway it proved an enormous waste of money. As soon as we could , which was the next day, we got a local Indian tailor (durzi) to cut off the turn ups, so that we were no longer a laughing stock with the local population. Although, unfortunately, as we still had to wear our African style toupees, our confidence was down to zero. We were put into very large barracks in Bombay but as we were only there for two days, we had no opportunity for sightseeing. What little we saw of Bombay we did not like, but this was probably not a fair comment on that city.

Our next journey was by lorry to Mhow close to Indore and about three hundred miles or so from Bombay. We passed through Deolali which to soldiers serving in India was a place of interest because anyone bonkers or mad was said to be suffering from ‘Deolali tap’. Mhow was our final destination, and there I would stay for at least a few months. I had travelled almost continuously for more than nine weeks, covering more than twelve thousand miles. Mhow was a very large cantonment, which is a military area used for the housing and training of soldiers. It covered a very large area, including villages, and a soldier would rarely have the need to go outside the cantonment. The camp itself consisted of many wooden buildings of various shapes and sizes, and possibly two hundred or more tents. We all slept in the tents and we each had a wooden bed called a charpoy with a palliasse (a straw mattress) on top. We were quite comfortable and suffered no hardship. In fact, after the journey by sea, this was luxury.

When I say luxury, I was not referring to the food, which was not at all good. It was not cooked by the Army cooks but prepared and served by an outside Indian caterer called Salig Ram. From the quality of the food he delivered I would guess that Salig Ram was a multi millionaire many times over. I cannot remember the first courses very much but they were mostly of rice with some very tough meat, which we invariably described as coming from a wildebeest. There was always powdered curry on the table, which we could sprinkle on to our meals if we wished. I do remember that the sweet course was always a very thin custard with a few slices of banana in it. This we had day after day and month after month. To supplement our food, if we had the money, we could buy tea and cakes from the char wallahs, who were always around the camp with their charcoal heated tea urns. One had only to walk out of a tent and call out 'char wallah' and within seconds one would appear. Even if you had no money they still served you, but they never forgot that you owed them the money. Their memory for faces and how much was owed to them was proverbial. When one did buy cakes or any food from the char wallahs, it was advisable to watch out for the kite hawks, birds with a three foot wing span. They dived on to anything edible and whipped it away in a flash. Unless one hand was held over the cake, it was gone in a second. The other hazards were the flies which fought aerial battles over a cup of tea, and of course, the losers usually fell into the cup. You can see that in India, even the simple process of drinking a cup of tea and eating a cake, had its problems. In addition to the flies which were around all day, the evenings and nights belonged to the mosquitoes. They were forever buzzing in our ears, even though we slept under mosquito nets and had special cream to put on our arms and legs. To come all this way and then catch malaria was not in our plans, so we were as careful as we could be.

At this time I had not solved the problem of my African style toupee. It was made of cork and covered with linen. It was very tough and took ages to wear out. It was the same type of toupee
worn by Dr. Livingstone when he discovered the Victoria Falls and was very expensive. I used to rub it against every rough surface I cane across and also kick it and tread on it. I eventually made it look sufficiently worn out to enable me to go to the quartermaster stores and get a new Indian type.

There were four of us to each tent and we were quite comfortable until we discovered that there were white ants everywhere and that they had a great liking for the wooden legs of our charpoys. In no time at all, each leg they attacked was reduced to just a point of wood touching the ground, and a little pile of wood ash at the side. We then had to find something to prop up the leg.

One of the first lessons we learnt was that every morning, before you put your boots on, it was wise to bang them on the ground, upside down, just in case a scorpion had crawled into them overnight. There were hundreds of scorpions about as there were of almost every other kind of insect. In the latrines there were always hornets - hundreds of them, but they did not appear to do any harm, so we just ignored them.

Reveille at the camp was 0600 hours and at 0630 every morning we had a session of P.T (physical training). Our instructors were always successful athletes of one kind or another. Most of them were very good looking and had magnificent physiques and made us all feel rather inferior. We always had to change into our kit in thirty seconds and then after half an hour of energetic exercises, get dressed again also in thirty seconds. It was impossible to do but we tried our best. We then had to march to the mess hall, but some of the instructors, if they thought we had not tried hard enough that morning, marched us up to the entrance and then gave us orders to about-turn and then marched us away again. On several occasions this happened three or four times so that we were ten minutes late for breakfast. I suppose this was yet another Army idea to turn raw recruits
into disciplined and well trained soldiers.

Breakfast was from 0715 to 0800 hours and then we were on parade for some real training, including marching in formation and rifle training. We had previously been divided into squads, each under a corporal instructor. All of these instructors were regulars and had been in the Army for years. They did not think much of the new intake of recruits from England, and were out to
show their superiority. Unfortunately for them, most of us were better educated than they were, and when they finally realised this, we all got along quite well.

One thing I remember was that each one of us in turn had to take the squad in drill. It was a case of quick march, right turn, left turn and about turn. The problem was that if one became tongue tied or the words froze on ones lips, the squad could be rapidly marching away from you and soon out of hearing! On occasions like this, which were frequent, the instructor usually said, "go on, do something, even if it is only to wave them goodbye", and then in a stentorious voice, which could be heard a quarter of a mile away, ordered the squad to "about turn". This went on day after day, but interspersed with this was weapon training, gas mask training and long route marches in full gear. As we were destined to become signallers and wireless operators, more and more of the time was spent in this area. We practised on the heliograph, did flag signalling and, of course, learnt morse code for the wireless transmissions. Back at the barracks we were free after tea, when we could go down to the village, which was about half a mile away.

There were a number of bazaar- like shops there and places where one could eat cheaply. Mostly it was chicken and chips with tea to drink. There were also a lot of tailors, called by the soldiers the dersey wallahs where you could get a suit made to measure in twenty four hours. There were shoemakers who would draw a pattern round your foot and make you a pair of sandals,
also in one day.. Naturally all these things cost money and although they were relatively cheap, were mostly beyond a private's pay, unless his money was supplemented from home. The other things which were very cheap were cotton shorts and t-shirts and in fact anything in cotton. All a very good buy, if you had the money:

All our washing was done for us and cost almost nothing. Even us poor soldiers could afford it. As a result we always wore clean clothing. The chap who collected the dirty clothing and
delivered it back clean and ironed the following day was called the dhobi wallah. The Army in India must surely have been the cleanest army in the world.

It was always dark around six o'clock in the evening and there was the opportunity to play snooker, cards, chess, dominoes or to read a book, if one had a book to read. I can never remember having a book. In fact the whole time I was in the Army, which was a total of six years I can never remember reading a book.

Our barracks had several very good snooker tables and as snooker was almost my favourite game, and most of the other soldiers were not very good at it, I was on to a good thing. Although most of the others would not bet on the games, there were one or two who thought they were good, (particularly the regular soldiers) and inevitably challenged me. In the event I did win quite a few rupees from time to time. Because of this I was able to buy Eileen a table cloth from the bazaar in the village. It was one which I thought was typically Indian with a heavy intricate design. I duly posted it off , postage was very cheap for the troops. I was chagrined to find when I arrived home three years later, that the table cloth had the words 'made in Birmingham' stamped on the underneath.

You can imagine that this period in India was not exactly unpleasant and I was probably the healthiest I had ever been. Meanwhile, Eileen, back home had endured the Blitz at the time
of the Battle of Britain, strict rationing of food, and coupons for all clothing. In addition, in England, there was a complete blackout everywhere, even the traffic lights were hooded so
that they could not be detected from the air. It was not very pleasant in London at that time, although there was almost no crime at all. Nobody ever heard of rape and murder, and robbery
was almost non-existent.

I then found I had been posted to the 5th Indian Division which was due to go off to Burma in a few weeks time. The Fifth Division was being trained and brought up to strength at Meerut,
which was north of Delhi and a considerable distance from Mhow. There were four of us posted together and we went to Meerut by train. We had a carriage to ourselves, which was locked from
the outside to prevent any Indians getting in. The rest of the train, which was a very long one, was crammed full, with Indians even hanging outside the carriages. To see how the local Indian population travels on the trains is unbelievable. They are so crowded together that if they were animals it would be illegal. I was happy at the thought of going to Burma against the Japanese
because the alternative was to North Africa and the desert. I preferred the thought of a green jungle against a sandy desert. However, it was not to be - I was again transferred. This time it was to the 6th Indian Division, which was to be equipped for the desert as soon as the Fifth Division had left. I was not very happy about this, until I heard some weeks later, that the Signals section of the Fifth Division had been bombed by the Japanese and mostly killed, a few days after landing, in Burma.
I lost quite a few good army friends on that occasion. It could so easily have been me.

There was an opportunity to spend forty eight hours in Delhi. Four of us went and we stayed at a Salvation Army Hostel, and had a chance to see a bit of both old and new Delhi. As I saw it Old Delhi was rather dirty and full of beggars and New Delhi was very well laid out and full of magnificent Government buildings, and large areas of grass and flower beds similar to Hyde Park.
As usual we only saw a tiny part of what is a very large city, and I have no doubt my recollections of it do it no justice at all.

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