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UNDISTINGUISHED SERVICE 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".
1.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. There was nothing heroic about this. I certainly did not wish to go into the infantry or be burnt up in a tank and very quickly concocted for myself the likely story that a person of my intelligence would anyhow be of more use to the nation in its beleaguered state if I could bring my technical bent into play.

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.

2. TRAINING AND THE SHOCK OF THE REAL WORLD The bleakfullness of Catterick, in the words of Hurree Van Singh of the Greyfriars School Famous Four about whom I had not long finished reading in the Magnet, was terrific. In every way. The shocks came in quick succession very early on. Washing and shaving in cold water. Parading naked at the showers, sometimes cold and often lukewarm, when I had been used, in my Catholic boarding school, to dressing and undressing under the cover of my dressing gown and bathing by lying privately in piping hot baths behind locked doors. Eating porridge without sugar and meat full of fat and gristle. Sleeping with forty men in a freezing barrack room with no control over the lights and the noise, and having to take my turn getting up half an hour before everyone and fetching thick brown sweet stewed tea from the kitchen; or being duty fire lighter and attempting to light the stove with damp sticks and newspaper at some unearthly hour in the morning. The endless and to me pointless cleaning of equipment from brass cap badge down to shiny boots, boned with spit and shone to a mirror finish, and the almost daily stacking of them by or on the bed for inspection by vindictive NCOs who had to find defaulters for the endless chores to be done around the camp - many of them in our eyes equally unnecessary. Above all having to answer to others for my behaviour; not just to foul mouthed NCOs and supercilious officers - they were rather like bosses and could be endured, but answerable also twenty four hours of the day to my fellow men who seemed to have the most extraordinary codes of conduct to which one had to adhere in order to avoid dislike and approbium. I remember once being laughed to scorn and being accused of being dirty because I used one finger to get the soap into the corners of my eyes and ears. The whole barrack room seemed to mince around imitating me performing this delicately feminine action rather as if I were a Jane Austen lady holding her tea cup with one finger up in the air. What one had to do, of course, was splash torrents of water up over the face from the wash basin in a macho manner - not actually see that the soap got into every corner! On another occasion when I was excused parade for some reason until mid-morning, I did not get up until the last minute before breakfast - being dead tired from our previous day's exertions - and washed and shaved after my breakfast. Someone spotted this and I was the butt of various accusations of lazy uncleanliness for weeks after. It was no use pointing out that I had rinsed my hands quickly first. Jealousy over my lie-in soon dismissed that excuse!
Conformity was the name of the game. I soon found this out when I rebelled in any way, as I did in two cases, one trivial and one serious. To take the trivial one first, there was the morning tea. I could see we all ought to take turns at cleaning, lighting fires and any other chores contributing to our general welfare, but I hated both early rising and not just hot sweet tea but tea of any sort. I wanted my lie-in every morning I could get it, so I opted out. Those who want early morning tea can arrange it between themselves, but I don't, I said. Several others agreed, but the majority were howling mad. (This was not a standard arrangement in all the barrack rooms, which would have been different, but a special concession because someone in the draft had a friend in the cookhouse.) The others gave in but I stuck to my guns and became the butt of sarcastic remarks for months. The other matter was more serious. I had never heard any four letter words used before, and the continuous use in conversation of the both the 'f' word and the 'c' word, as well as other vulgarities I found truly shocking. Even worse were the obscene suggestions and gesticulations made out of the back of lorries when we passed any reasonably attractive females. I was in no way a prude, and would join in the most bawdy conversations in the barrack room; neither, I am afraid at that age did I have the respect for women I ought to have had in my private thoughts either, but to subject them to embarrassing behaviour in public was objectionable on two accounts. Firstly because it was bad manners and plain vulgar, as well as being cowardly - they could not answer back before the lorry was gone - and secondly because I could not understand why when a group of men got together en masse, they should behave in a manner they would not have dreamed of on their own in a public place. I let this be known quite clearly and was as a result highly unpopular and considered a self-righteous prig - and was told so!
But apart from these two things I adjusted. I never joined in the vulgar catcalls out of the back of trucks, and never used any obscene language in my whole time in the army, but I took the opportunity when we left Catterick after our basic training and were split up in our postings to Signals training schools to keep my views quieter and keep in the background so that any differences in my behaviour went unnoticed. It was my first great lesson in life and leads on to thenext two lessons I learned in the army.

Like all young men, the search for feminine company was one of the things at the front of my mind most of the time, and I joined the "passion waggon" into local towns whenever I could in the evenings to attend the frequent dances held in the area for the troops, and "get my feet under the table" of some nice family as soon as possible. Ripon was a great centre for these, and there I went quite often, coming back by a later train if the "hunt" was successful. I went quite dotty about a local girl and was invited to her home - very different to any homes I had known and full of her family, both visiting and resident, at all times. All meals except Sunday lunch were taken round the kitchen table - a strange thing in itself for me - invariably seating six, eight or ten people. This is no place for details of my romance, but an important effect on my life of being involved in a way I would never have been but for my army service was in meeting a typical northern family. I noticed a certain reserve in the attitude of the family and an unhappiness in my girl friend after meals which puzzled me. In one of the few opportunities this very strict family allowed me to be alone with her it all came out. Why didn't I offer to wash up after meals - or even help? I had never washed a dish up in my life. The army, of course, had asked me to peel potatoes, but not to wash up! (Apart from my own dixie, mug and cutlery). Even my Father - and of course my Mother or Grandmother with whom I had lived in various boarding houses since coming to London, and who provided my evening meals, never expected me to wash up. I had been spoilt rotten. It was women's work. I was finding out about life.

I was also finding out about ordinary families and the cosy environment they provided after being shunted about as a child and youth between boarding schools (or seaside boarding houses for the holidays - where I was never asked to wash up!) and seedy Bayswater or Paddington rooms. These were always being changed as my parents moved about, with all of us living on top of each other, and sometimes eating, sleeping and taking our recreation in one room. Oh the bliss when I stayed one weekend and had my own room, my own bedside radio, and Sunday lunch round a dining table with gravy boats and silver salt cellars....to say nothing of a roaring fire to sit round afterwards with cheery people and roast chestnuts! It was then I knew what I was after in life, and as we shall see - I found it! I also discovered to my intense surprise that in order to find people with whom I could get on, I did not have to restrict myself to those who talked with the same accent as I did - or have the same upper middle class background. Here ended the second and third lessons!

I shall not list the lessons I learnt any more - there were so many of them. Sadly, however, my budding romance was not to bloom. Our basic training course came to an end and I was posted to Prestatyn in north Wales for field training before my technical training. I can still vividly remember my last journey from Ripon to Catterick in a blacked-out train straining to see by the dim ceiling light the features of my girlfriend in the photograph she had given me ; I had climbed up on to the rack and was reclining there most of the journey to be near the light! There were the usual pledges to keep in touch, but circumstances and the presence of an Irish girl in Putney put paid to all that.

I can remember very little about Prestatyn except for the terrible fatigue of carrying a bren gun up and down the sand dunes above the town and endless marching with full equipment in between daily physical training schedules and weapon training sessions. Eventually the potential Wireless Operators were posted to Putney, in London.

My extremely limited acquaintance with the morse code and elementary electronics, acquired in the Air Training Corps, had induced me to plump for training as a radio operator, and I was duly posted to a training establishment in Putney. Our home was a large boarding school taken over by army - its previous occupants presumably evacuated to the country away from the bombs. Our relief at the release from PT, weapons training, drilling and marching new no bounds - at least for most of us. The bliss of getting up at a reasonable hour and sitting in a classroom taking notes in between bouts of morse code and learning to operate the radio and telephone equipment was not quite so apparent to outdoor types who had entered this part of the service without much thought or had been simply been drafted into it. Bricklayers, gardeners, miners and such people became very restless at the physical inactivity and did not take so kindly to note-taking and peering at blackboards. We very soon became divided into two distinct social camps. This was familiar ground of course from my public and boarding school experience, where the sportsmen and the swots soon separated out with mutual dislike of each other. However, I was lucky enough to have grabbed a room to sleep in with three similarly inclined companions and only two outdoor types, so we were in a majority.This was a very happy time of my life. As a person with an ear for music, the morse code came naturally to me, and slightly complicated the dividing lines between us, as of course many outdoor types are musical. To get up speed in the morse code you have to rid your mind of a dot - dash - dot approach, but think of it as a rhythmical di-dah-di; the words are separated by a short pause, with the letters flowing as a single stream. A double 'r' comes out as di-dah-di'di-dah-di, with the apostrophe in the example being not so much a pause between the letters as a minute delay of the first di or dah, caught up in time by the end of the next one, rather like rubato in music. You felt it rather than heard it or decoded it.

People soon fell by the wayside, either because they simply could not get the hang of it or because the operation of the equipment was beyond them. "Netting", or getting a group of transceivers all on to exactly the same frequency, and physically locking the radios on that frequency with small screw adjustments on the tuning knobs was a delicate matter, not for insensitive ears or bumbling fingers - or for that matter, people not technically interested or inclined. They went back to depot for infantry or Service Corps duties. Quite a few became lorry drivers.

Others fell by the way rather more dramatically. Our little group settled in a room which soon became a home of sorts as we added luxuries like radios, tables, mirrors and so on to it, purchased or scavenged; it had by some strange co-incidence two other Taylors in it besides myself. I had gained some fame by painting the three of us on a wall executing some cheery drill, and we always went out together to the town and local dances. After a while, however, I was eager to "get my feet
under the table" again, and met an Irish Girl named Mary who was introducing me for the first time in my life to various delights I had not yet experienced, unlike my rather more reticent Yorkshire lass - but "nothing below the belt"; Mary was a well-brought up Irish Catholic who had drawn up strict boundaries. This was all par for the course as far as I was concerned as young men in those days did not expect to get away with anything more than limited activities "above the belt", and I pursued her with a mild intensity. The first time we met away from the dance hall a bomb fell on it killing a very large number of our course including the two other Taylors in my room, with whom I usually went. This was my first experience of death, and very salutary it was; people I had known, talked to and become friendly with were suddenly no more! In spite of being soldiers none of us thought much about the dangers to come as we were too busy living and extracting as much irresponsible pleasure from our life as we could. There is a curious freedom about having all your decisions taken for you by people higher up and simply letting yourself go without a thought for the morrow in between carrying out the orders they give, and having bed and board available at all times without any effort! To have this heedlessness interrupted by death long before you got anywhere near the front was a bit much, and it sobered us all. I was certainly sobered by the thought that I would have been dead had I gone with them that night.But life went on, and I have often wondered what the next turn of events saved me from - the D-Day landings and death, perhaps? My pursuit of Mary had reached the stage of "night out"leave passes, so that we could lie side by side on the grass until late into the night making what now seems to be very innocent love; excursions "below the belt" were still strictly forbidden, but the cuddling, the kissing, the hugging and the limited excursions beneath her clothes above the forbidden territory were extremely pleasant; breasts, anyhow, were very exciting to us youngsters in those days of Betty Grable and the other cinema star "sweater girls." They were certainly heady stuff for me. The Vaga Girl double page spreads in furtively obtained copies of Esquire from America, with their long legs and diaphanously revealing clothes - I had never seen a nipple drawn before - were our "pornography" in those days. Even more pleasant, looking back, was the undivided attention for long periods of another human being who was interested in me; I had never known this before in my emotionally barren upbringing. She took me to Irish Celids - I have never forgotten the kicking up of the heels of the women, who seemed to me all to be fat, and therefore gave the rather comical and contradictory appearance of being inordinately light on their feet. Mary was no sylph herself, and I have always seen the Irish as fat people ever since - quite unfair, I am sure! She talked about her family and simple domestic things - as well as improving my manners and pointing out certain moral deficiencies I had acquired - with a simple certainty about the way decent ordinary people should live that was an education in itself after the empire builders, artists, bohemian friends of my mother and other brittle people precariously perched on the complexities of their sophisticated lives that I had known before joining the army.

I don't know what all this could have led to either, because I had a really soft spot for Mary, but it was not to be.Because, I am sure, of our long sojourns on the grass through some long chilly nights, I developed an acute pain in by back, together with a dry cough. After several sick parades at which disinterested doctors told me to stop making a fuss over nothing I fainted on parade and this time was given a proper check by an older doctor who announced that I had caught pneumonia. I had already had double pneumonia as a child of six, so this really worried me, but I was whisked off to hospital and given the new M & B tablets which put me on my feet just as I was beginning to
enjoy the comforts of hospital life and the gentle attention of the nurses; I've never forgotten how feminine, soft and sweet smelling they seemed after my hard-bitten, chain smoking heavily made up and sophisticated Mother. I'd never been fussed like this before! But better was to come. I was sent for three weeks to a convalescent home in the middle of the country where I was to built up after an illness which had certainly debilitated me. This was sheer heaven, with billiard rooms, table tennis rooms, a library and above all cod liver oil and malt. I loved the stuff. Mary's moral ministrations had not done me all that immediate good as I must confess to frequently going to the back of the queue after my first spoonful to get another if I thought I could get away with it. This was sometimes difficult, as the real war - apart from the very real one in Africa - had not started yet and the place was empty. The blue uniforms we wore got us a lot of sympathy and cosseting in the town and at dances; I cannot honestly remember saying to anyone that I was a pneumonia case and not recovering from war wounds! The army seemed very far away.

But of course it wasn't. I was soon posted to a transit camp in Godalming for re-posting to a unit or another signals course. Transit camps were one of the horrors of the war. They were always muddy, cold and cheerless. The staff were a bunch of useless officers, embittered NCOs and rankers entrenched in privileges they had stealthily built up over the years, unchecked by constant command changes as senior officers came and went. They saw to it that we did all the nasty work from potato peeling and lavatory cleaning to painting white lines and rows of stones with frozen hands in the bitter cold. We lit the fires, cleaned the windows, washed up the plates (I was an old hand at this by now) swept the floors and picked up the litter until we were posted out; no sitting about in the huts in front of the fire unless you were an old hand yourself who knew the right people in the place, or managed to latch on to one. The effect all this had on us soon disillusion anyone like me who had joined up in any spirit of patriotic fervour. We soon lost that fervour. I saw how the wind blew, and made up my mind when I was interviewed for my next posting to get away from all this sort of thing.

Although I had been happy enough training to be a radio operator, it had become apparent to me that the job, although preferable to that of an infantryman, was not all beer and skittles. You very often had to sit up all night on signals duty, to receive and send urgent messages. Hour after hour taking down or sending morse can become a bit samey, and was a tremendous strain. Mistakes were not treated lightly, and the operating procedures, code signs and calling drill were constantly
changing. Morse at 21 words per minute is not easy, even for the apt, and if you were apt enough to take it in your stride you were posted to the fewer and fewer stations using it - and did it all the time! More and more messages were sent RT (Radio Telephone) but you had to keep your morse up, without much field practice, in case it was needed. I made up my mind to do a switch to repairing and looking after radio equipment rather than operating it. This required a certain amount of bluffing

When my interview came, I went in with some trepidation.

"Well, Taylor, I suppose you want to get back to your training".

No sir, I was wondering if I could get into REME."(Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers)

Nice job back at base - eh". Do you have any electrical qualifications".

"Well - no sir. But I like messing about with electricity and we did a bit in the ATC."

"Hmmm. Not enough I'm afraid. Tell you what - the Signals are training up some Radio Mechanics to service the stuff closer to the front; sending the difficult stuff back to REME. I could
put you down for that."

It was as simple as that. Don't take this as gospel army history. I am sure there are some ex Royal Corps of Signals officers who would have apoplexy at the idea of their radio mechanics being there only as a new experiment to handle easy repairs and send the "difficult stuff" back to REME. Nor would some REME servicemen care for the implication that they were always "back at base". This officer, probably in the RASC and doing a temporary posting at the depot, explained it that way and who was I to argue? This sort of thing was always happening, as anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh's wonderful army trilogy will know. Anyone who went through the last war, while acknowledging the vast amount of individual sacrifice, bravery and conscientious application to winning the war, still wonders how we won it.

3. A SECOND START

I cannot for the life of me remember where I was sent for my training as a Radio Mechanic, but it was somewhere within reach of Darlington, where we used to go in the passion waggon for our after-hours entertainment. I can remember my Father's astonishing arrival on one weekend to visit me, an unheard of thing which was quite out of character. We had nothing to talk about and the whole thing was a frost which left me rather bemused but feeling very lonely. There was still a bit of the prig left in me, and I had no desire to get my feet under the table of anyone in that ghastly town. It appeared to me to be a place where the whole town was populated with people as common as dirt who got drunk every Saturday night and staggered round the streets arm in arm singing disgusting songs. I had got in with a hard drinking crowd of men much older than myself with whom I went around, and followed their lead in order not to be left out or thougt snooty. The drinking gave me no pleasure. I hated beer - it made me sick, literally, in any quantity, so that I felt disgusted with myself and even more on my own. I still had a feeling of mystery and sweetness about women, and this particular set I was with were intent on picking up women purely for brief
sexual adventures which excited me in a prurient way and at the same time disgusted me and caused me enormous embarrassment when they put their plans for picking them up into practice in my presence. The tables in the pubs were swimming with spilt beer, everybody was shouting or singing, they were always full of cigarette smoke and filthy ashtrays and the women my friends went off with were coarse in the extreme. At the same time I could not understand why they would have nothing to do with me and envied the physical liberties the others were taking with them around me quite blatantly. Of course I see now that everything was not so simple. None of the women were at all interested in me because I was an an innocent youngster to be left alone not corrupted. They were, of course, the sort of semi-professional and amateur camp followers that hang about army camp areas, going with men for free meals, drinks and a good time, a class of person I knew nothing about, and I am eternally glad now that they were uninterested in a baby like me. A" dose of clap" - and there was quite a bit of it about - would not have helped me at this stage, and it was from this type of activity that it came. Confused and unhappy by all these sudden complications in life, and my irrational state of mind, I found my adjustment to the world suddenly taking several steps backwards.

But this was all at the weekends. I was far happier during the week, where I came into my own. The barrack rooms were smaller and inevitably, because of the nature of the job we now had to learn, there were more intellectually inclined people around me. In addition to this, the others were not so quick at picking electronic theory up from books and a blackboard as I was, and many lectures would be followed by a gathering round my bed while I explained to them in slow detail what had just been fired at them in class at high speed. Soon, when the practical work started, I would be asked advice, particularly in fault-finding when equipment would deliberately be put out of order by the instructors in various ways so that we could put our theory to the test by attempting to find the induced fault. I acquired the nickname of "The Professor", and once you get a nickname in the army, provided it is not a perjorative one, it means you have been accepted. I was accepted by enough people to make my life much happier, but of course being popular with some often means being unpopular with others who are jealous of your popularity, especially if it is because you have something, or some talent, they have not got. It was soon very apparent that a few people hated this "clever clogs" around whose bed those who wanted to pass their end-of-course exams regularly gathered and who was always being consulted at the work-bench. So the next thing I learned about in the army was jealousy and envy.

This all arose from a very real problem which my history has already illustrated. Bored officers in temporary postings to administrative units - amateur soldiers as most of them were - had to decide who was suitable for what training. Inevitably there were misfits. At Putney, when it became apparent that morse code or the technical expertise with which to operate the equipment was beyond a trainee, there was nothing else they could do, so they were sent back for re-training in some other capacity, as I have described. As a Radio Mechanic, the situation was somewhat different. Each unit only required one or two people able to find faults in the complicated electronic
equipment and the rest could be used in a multitude of ways. Those who could not master radio theory were often very good at soldering and meticulously wiring up telephone exchanges; they became linesmen. Others were quite able to climb about tanks and find simple circuit breaks in the intercom. The turret of a tank had what were known as slip-rings - strips of copper running round the top of the opening of the gun turret against which contacts on the turret itself pressed so that the microphones and earphones of the turret crew could connect into the intercom. These got dirty, broken or bent; it required only patience to put that sort of thing right - no great knowledge. The same applied to the headsets,which were constantly being trodden on and otherwise mauled about; replacing them or doing a simple repair on the spot with a portable soldering iron and insulating tape required no great brains. Some hefty people found a place for themselves heaving batteries around for charging. And so on.

As a result, we "radio mechanics" were a very mixed lot and there was a lot of sarcastic banter from the linesemen, battery chargers and those who were out of their depth diagnosing faults inside complicated wireless sets; they were always sent out all day to mess about in wet or freezing weather in tanks and scout cars and directed this banter towards those of us who sat all day in a cosy room or truck prodding about with an Avometer inside a radio set with one hand and warming the other against an electric fire rigged up for from a spare battery. Visitors coming in from the cold with equipment for repair, or collecting spares, were not amused. We tried to placate them with unofficial coffee from the pots which always seemed to be on the boil, but it was uphill work. But this is to anticipate a little. It is sufficient at this stage to say that I saw how the land was going to lie and prepared myself studiously for the soft and, let us be fair, more interesting (and important?) type of work. That officer had a point about a "safe job at base" but he was not quite right. I was no brave hero, but what a lot of people do not realise about conscripts - perhaps regulars also for that matter - is that we did not think in those terms. There was a minority that did; they volunteered for the commandos or the paratroops and so on. Most of us thought in terms of comfort, privileges and soft options to make our life more agreeable. I never met anyone who actually made a deliberate attempt to get a "safe" position in the army - only a comfortable one. If we were asked to do dangerous things, or were sent to dangerous front lines, we'd go and that would be that - we'd do our duty and that sort of thing - but meanwhile our minds were preoccupied with warmth, comfort, good food and facilities for recreation - a town handy to walk into to meet girls and get our feet under the table or a good NAAFI canteen with lots of buns to supplement the army food, plenty of newspapers available and chairs to lounge in, with table tennis tables and so on available. That is all we thought about and, and of course, cushy jobs to do all day that preferably excused us from parade and guard duties. There were a surprising number of volunteers
for telephone exchange duty at night; it was better than wandering about outside in the cold carrying a heavy gun for two hours at a time in the middle of the night!

Weekday evenings would find us with time on our hands, and our meagre pay seldom allowed is enough spare cash to spend every evening buying beer and buns in the NAAFI. I had acquired a taste for study and had always been interested in architecture, so as a change from electronics all day, I somehow managed to get in touch with the Royal Institute of British Architects through a letter I wrote to my Father, and the first books and papers arrived for a correspondence course in architecture. I promptly set about studying for the Intermediate exams of the RIBA in the evenings. I had a facility for engineering drawing as a result of my earlier interest in aeronautical engineering when I had once copied out the entire working drawings of an American Curtis biblane fighter simply for the fun of it, and got on like a house on fire, getting excellent marks from the examiners I sent my weekly test papers back to. This boosted my confidence in myself a great deal and seemed to make the war worth getting through.

Sadly, this was to be interrupted. Another case of what might have been? I shall never know, as our course came to an end and we were posted once more into the wilderness; believe it or not that same dreadful camp in near Godalming. My stay this time was short, thank goodness, but I found time to visit my friend of the fire-bombing incident in London which had helped me make my mind up to "do my bit". It had had no such effect on him. Two years older than me, he had still managed to stay in a "reserved occupation" and was currently working in an evacuated Insurance Office somewhere near Haslemere and the famous Devil's Punch Bowl valley in the area. He managed this throughout the war, moving afterwards into machine tool designing, which I always thought rather odd; one could understand a machine tool designer having a reserved occupation - but an Insurance clerk? However, apart from a slight feeling of envy about his comfortable circumstances - they all lived in at a comfortable hotel - I felt no resentment and certainly no feeling that he ought to join the army. I often think of him when I read novels or accounts of the war which assume that there was a universal contempt for people who escaped military service. There was not. When I got back to the camp and spoke about him the universal reaction was "lucky sod"! No doubt wives and parents of people killed in the war and a few others thought differently, but not the rank and file. I am afraid most of the people who did think this way were civilians, from whom, of course, the white feather brigade came. We were far more philosophical.

It was at this camp that I learned another lesson - That life is not fair and it is childish to expect it to be or get angry when it is not. This is best expressed in part of a long poem on friendship published in 1992 in a book of poems of mine called "A View from Suburbia". I, as a temporary Lance Corporal, had been befriended by a full corporal and we got on like a house on fire; but let the poem tell the rest. It was a salutary lesson.

I turned to you,my next great friend.
Where all the rest around were strange and drab,
We shivered with the frost with each new jab
For typhus or for tetanus. We'd bend
And touch our toes in nothing but our socks
As doctors searched impassively for pox.
While winter battered at the Nissen door
We sat recalling old civilian ways,
And talked of tea-and-buttered-crumpet days.
Where huts were cold and food was scarce and poor
We opened wide the portals of our dreams
And giggled at a score of silly dreams.
Our names were posted on a board,
You to twist old Rommel's tail,
I to ride the channel gale.
Thirty strangers in our hut
You had your pick of - but
They asked for one to do that chore;
You looked straight down, down at the floor
And took the weak and easy way.
"You do it first" you said "today."
And thirty sullen men relaxed.
One blow, my friend, and you had axed
The slender line I threw to you;
One blow, and this time I withdrew.
I turned away from you, my friend.

4. POSTED TO A UNIT

After a mercifully short time at the transit camp - a damp and dismal place - during which I received a battery of inoculations against various ailments and bent over endlessly for various doctors checking for venereal disease, I was posted to 557 Assault Squadron A.T.R.E. to look after their radio and telephone equipment, together with several others in my hut. 557 were a special assault unit with variously adapted Churchill tanks. These had Petards - huge portable mortars for the demolition of concrete emplacements - flails with chains for beating the ground ahead and exploding mines and various "fascines" and other contraptions, including bridges, for getting troops quickly across deep trenches and depressions. They also acted as an experimental unit for other such complex devices fitted to tanks and as a training unit.

The apparatus we had to deal with was the same for the rest of my war. First there was the 19-Set fitted into the tanks. This was an extremely cleverly designed unit of enormous complexity containing three different sets on one chassis. The first was a transceiver which enabled the tank to communicate over quite long ranges with base over various frequencies which could be locked mechanically into place on the tuning knob and "clicked" into instantly without hunting about the dial - a fiddly job which defeated quite a few as I mentioned in my earlier account of Radio Operator training about "getting on net", but fairly reliable once the netting had been done. The
second set was an ultra high frequency transceiver using what was known as a super-regenerative principle - advanced for the time - with only a short range which was used for communication between the tanks when manoeuvring and in battle. The super-regenerative principle is extremelyhard to understand in theory, and extremely sensitive to the slightest physical movement of the , shielding and adjustment of the wiring in the high frequency areas. It used the new and very tiny all-glass "acorn" valves which clumsy people or people with very large hands did not like at all. The coils consisted of only one or two turns of thick wire which were wildly sensitive to physical contact or even the approach of a screwdriver, and this made fault finding extremely difficult. Often the whole set had to be sent back to REME for repair when only this part went wrong, a distinct drawback in this otherwise splendid piece of equipment. I soon determined to master the complexities and, as we shall see, eventually did. The third set within the set was a simple amplifier, with complex switching, for the internal communication of the tank crew, who all wore headphones. Apart from valve changing this caused very little trouble, but the headphones and their leads were another matter. I never understood how people could to be so clumsy, but there was a constant stream of these into the workshops for repair. People dropped them, often into the water that could collect in the bottom of a tank, trod on them, pulled the plugs off the end, lost the microphones out of the mouthpiece, cracked the plastic mouthpieces, crossed the threads of the screw-on microphone cover and generally misused them in every way.

Next there was the 38-SET, a small dry battery operated back packing mobile transceiver used by the ground crew and command staff for short range communications. This was an adequate but not particularly brilliant piece of equipment that was comparatively easy to service, with only one yaxley switch of any complexity to switch from "receive" to "send"; it was rather like a civilian portable radio, and an average employee from a wireless shop used to "fixing" small portable radios could manage to put them right without any extensive theoretical knowledge.

Finally, of course, there was the telephone equipment for the unit which we had to maintain. This included the telephone exchanges and the headsets used in all the tents and offices, to-gether with the various pieces of subsidiary equipment, including line amplifiers, required for communications in the Army. I particularly disliked this work, which was extremely tedious and repetitive; nor were we, sitting in our warm and "cushy" backs of lorries all day, particularly popular with the linesmen, who were out in all weathers laying or retrieving mile after mile of line along roads and across fields between the units and back to base.

All this, of course, was yet to come. I arrived as a complete rookie and was pitched into it with no preparation at all. Luckily for me, it soon became clear that no one else was prepared to dive into the depths of the 19-SET, particularly the super-regenerative transceiver in it, so this job was passed to me when I blithely volunteered. Apparently, in the Unit's short life so far, when a 19-SET went wrong it had been sent back to REME. Not being an outdoor type this suited me fine, and from then on I lived in the back of a truck apart from isolated and unusual circumstances! Some of my early unpopularity in the army returned to haunt me, even though I offered to let others "have a
go"; although they knew the task was beyond them, even my fellow Radio Mechanics resented the comfortable life I, and occasionally a fellow signalman with an electronic turn of mind, enjoyed in
our warm and comfortable truck. This was exacerbated by the fact that we were "excused parade" in the mornings. Lesser signalmen, as I rather arrogantly considered them but of course, having had
the army's crash course in human relationships, tried not to show, were sent all over the place each day in all weathers, to repair tank slip-rings, collect broken telephones and radios, lay and retrieve telephone lines and generally do the donkey work. They were given their daily task on early morning parade, whereas I was allowed to slope off each morning to my truck without standing about waiting for officers and NCO's to sort out the disposition of their men. Later on, as we slipped into our familiar fixed routines and finally became operational, this antagonism died out, but it left its mark for a long while on my popularity. Later, the whole signals troop as a body was to became unpopular with the rest of the unit as we all sloped off after breakfast to our specialised routines while they stood about on parade!

Life became very different as we settled down to training and being shaken into an operational unit. I was billeted in a suburban house in Worthing, opposite the local drill hall. I don't know who used to drill there - boy scouts, girl guides and territorial army I suppose - but the army found it very handy as a dining hall, drill hall on wet days, PT hall and even a canteen/dance hall during the evenings. We slept on the floor of the empty houses that had been commandeered along the Brighton Road - now the A27 - and I remember very little about this period except walking down the front path of our billet one day on the way to a dance and casually asking a soldier walking behind me if my belt was twisted behind to be told in a mincing voice - "Oh it looks lovely ducky!" Lesson number umpteen; I had never come across a homosexual in my life before and it must have been a considerable shock, as a vivid picture of it remains in my mind to this day. I mention such a silly little fact in case anyone should doubt the innocence of the ordinary youngsters of my era - apart, I suppose, from bohemians, artists, theatre people and intellectuals; most of us would not have come across overt homosexuality by the age of nineteen, and that includes the young and much maligned young men from public boarding schools. There was a lot of "messing about" at boarding school, some exploratory activity and mutual masturbation, often in groups, but any cuddling, kissing or climbing into bed would have been greeted with howls of "come on - none of that now!" I never came across or heard of any practising homosexuals among any of the people I knew at public boarding schools or in the army. I am not saying it did not go on - it probably did and always has - but it was by no means as rife in either institution as novelists like to suggest. On the other hand novelists are often unjustly accused of stretching the long arm of co-incidence in order to concoct a story. I remember soon after arriving at the unit seeing a head popping out of a tank and recognizing a senior boy named Semmence who had been a prefect at my preparatory school in Herne Bay and reminiscing for a while with him. It takes a wild novelist to create an unbelievable coincidence, for I can testify that meetings like this in an army of millions were quite common.

Having done a short period of close technical training with all the vehicles and equipment parked close together behind the drill hall, testing the equipment and learning to "net" the wireless sets, we were moved on for operational training in the open, and posted to Parham House near Storrington in Sussex. The tanks exercised on the downs while we set up comfortable billets in the grounds - huts for the men and the main house for the officers - with a pleasant NAAFI canteen hut also in the grounds. Here, in order to get my feet under the table as usual, I was soon walking out with one of the ladies of the house, I cannot remember which member of the family she was. She was highly sophisticated, very beautiful if rather plump, much older than me and obviously found my rather unsophisticated callowness highly amusing. Looking back I can now see that the rather limited sexual activities I indulged in with her could have been far more advanced, but I was put off by her very sophistication, believing at the time she "wouldn't have any of that" in the way a more "common" girl might have. Oh dear! I blush to think of my attitudes; after a year in the army I was still so snobbish and ignorant of life. But I was learning. Anyhow, it was just as well, since she could not get away very often from her voluntary canteen duties and a passion waggon started running into Worthing where on my first night I met my future wife at an Assembly Hall dance! Having bought a raffle ticket which was going to be drawn after the passion waggon left to take us back to Parham House, I arranged to call at her house next day to see if I had won. Strangely enough, I had won a bottle of port! The followingromance has no place in this story, but it does illustrate very vividly that high speed wartime romances as well as being a frequent occurrence, did not necessarily end up in divorce; we are still very happily married and approaching our golden
wedding! Anyhow, my feet were soon firmly under the table and once more the domestic comforts of stable family life were available to me for many evenings and weekends. D-Day came and passed without our being required and we soon began to wonder what all the training was for. For the next five months I took up my architectural studies again during the evenings we wereconfined to camp and the war seemed very far away. Then suddenly
the call came and we were off.

5. OPERATIONAL

The next thing I learned in the army was that I did not suffer from sea-sickness. The flat bottomed landing craft we went across in was a truly claustrophobic vessel. The centre was occupied by the tanks and vehicles, but the sides were a two or three storied corridor full of bunks receding into the distance with limited access through manholes on the deck. There was an intense smell of frying bacon, stale fat and oil the whole time and the sea was appallingly rough. It is probably untrue to say that everyone else was being sick all the time except for myself, but it certainly seemed like it at the time. I remember gleefully accepting other people's sausages and bacon, so there must have been a few people down there with me, but most had gone on deck. When I went there after my meal the whole deck was awash with sick and people hanging over the rail, so I came back down in the warm and sent a letter home to my wife in which I proposed to her! I may not have been seasick, but I was certainly homesick, and the thought of letting all her loveliness and all that proven homely domestic skill slip away concentrated my mind wonderfully.

So it was a tired and miserable unit containing one rather light-headed member awaiting a reply to his letter that set off on the other side of the channel for our first operational station on the banks of a canal. It was a small Belgian town called Gheel. You can imagine our reaction on finding out that it was a town celebrated for its Institutions for the mentally ill. "Coals to Newcastle" we all said as soon as we had arrived, and christened it "Loonyberg" at once with callous disregard. It was here that I formed my first close friendships in the army as we settled into our improvised billets. You will see from my sketches how improvised these were, generally in barns and outhouses, with a few proper rooms in houses which were the subject of great jealousy and connivance to take over when people left. And here cometh another lesson I learned - hide your light under a bushel in any new situation. You will notice a Bren Gun on the wall above my bed. In the haphazard way these things happened in the army our little group was sent off on a short weapons course, where I applied my natural affinity with things technical in the same manner as I
had in my electronic studies and passed out top at the speed with which I could assemble and test fire a Bren Gun from all the little bits laid out on a bench. It was a beautiful machine gun of the most simple and ingenious design - probably the best weapon we designed in the war; light, reliable in single shot or machine gun mode and with very little kick-back into the shoulder and it absolutely fascinated me. Anyhow the upshot of this demonstration of my skill was "Right, Taylor, you are in charge of this gun for your section. You will clean it regularly, maintain it in good firing condition and keep it close to you at all times, right?" "Yes Sergeant". "Right -sign here." "Yes Sergeant". My feelings about this responsibility were mixed. Of course, as soon as you become the butt of a funny story you gain the affection of your fellows in some mysterious way, especially if you frequently tell it against yourself, and I had by now learnt to do this sort of thing. On the other hand it was a beastly nuisance lugging the thing around and cleaning it regularly.

I was not too keen, either, on being the first target to be "taken out" by any Germans who might break through to us should I have to defend the section. As I have said before - the officer in the transit camp did have a point. Here were we, miles behind the lines servicing the equipment in the tanks which were regularly coming back for repair from the action in front of us while we suffered no more than occasional machine-gunning from stray Messerschmits using up ammunition on the way home. In fact I only just avoided "copping one" from one of these raids myself. One less lucky person was killed, but the danger was less than that I had experienced in the blitz at home. Our life could only be described as comparatively cushy. Cold was the main discomfort we suffered. The small fires we rigged up connected to batteries in draughty barns and outhouses had nothing like the effect they did in the back of a truck. Warm water for washing had to be "brewed up", and lying in late often meant shaving in cold water. Our beds were piled high with all our clothes at night as the blankets were insufficient; greatcoats came in especially handy for this. We even slept sometimes in our uniforms. No one who went through the winter of the Germans' Ardennes breakthrough will forget it. The only warmth we could find was in the cafes where we spent our evenings drinking and chatting up the local residents - especially the girls, which was great fun and caused great laughter when we tried out our French, as the Belgian version of French - used reluctantly in place of their own Walloon - was idiomatically very different and almost unrecognisable to us in its pronunciation. They seemed to get very angry at our very classical school French pronunciation.

The Belgians were very kind to us, and the girls even kinder to those soldiers able to take advantage this. I was not able to take part in any of this activity beyond a bit of innocent kissing and cuddling in the cafe, as I had soon received a letter from my future wife accepting my proposal and so the girls were out of bounds for me. However my education in life continued with the stories that came back to me of my friends' adventures. My conversations with some of the ladies were also quite broad and I saw my first pornographic photographs, which were often handed round for examination and ribald comment. I also managed quite a bit of enjoyable drinking for the first time
in my life, but strangely never acquired a taste for beer or cigarettes. We also had a local and quite hideous nymphomaniac who would come and lounge in the doorway until someone got up with a silly grin on his face and accompanied her through the curtains or back to her house to the accompaniment of great cheers from everyone else, to return after an incredibly short while with his detailed story to tell us all. This I can vouch for, but the tales which circulated of people who were walking with others up the street and caught sight of the lady in her doorway, popped in for a "quicky" and then caught their companions up before the end of the street may have been apocryphal; however, they pointed up her notoriety and illustrate the sort of story we all loved to circulate in the army.

6. COMPANIONS

What sort of people ended up as Signalmen in the Army?The very close group of friends I made during this extraordinary period were all so different from each other that they provide a very good cross section and at the same time showed that some at least of my gaucheness and snobbery must have worn off and emphasise the advantages of being thrown, when young, among peoplewith lifestyles other than those of one's own upbringing. There is nothing today like that conscript army to promote the sort of understanding and maturity it quickly produced in most people; particularly among impressionable young people and between the classes. Class simply ceased to matter, as far as I was concerned.

In the first place we were all either tradesmen of some sort - in the craft sense - or we were used to using our hands, our senses or our brains or a combination of them. Although a clerk, I had built a lot of flying model aeroplanes, had to some extent mastered the rudiments of mechanical and architectural drawing, enjoyed making things and even then had an encyclopedic knowledge of first world war aircraft, their flying characteristics, performance and armament which remains to this day. So what of the others?

Bill Church was an electrician who owned a wireless shop in a London suburb and also worked as a contract electrician, which was his real trade. A short and stocky man with an almost music hall cockney accent and married to a wife about whose sexual appetite he would go on and on about, regaling us with long and detailed adventures of their love life which were an education in themselves. This preoccupation he carried into his army life without regard to his marital status; he even hinted he had an arrangement with his wife and that she could not be expected to refrain from such activity while he was away. They nevertheless appeared to be devoted to each other if one were to believe him. In all our travels through the continent up to our demobilisation I neverknew him without his feet under the table and his spare slippers by the bed of some girl. An astonishing man, as he was certainly no good looker. I got on famously with him after an uneasy initial period. This is worth going into as it throws light on the precariousness of relationships in the
army when strangers are thrown together willynilly; your popularity could depend on the most extraordinary circumstances and judgements. Bill Church arrived in our workshop a little after the rest of us, and finding me ensconsed comfortably doing the complicated fault-finding and repairs on the 19-SETS all day while everyone else was sent out to do the chores outside on the tanks, resented this, as he was a wireless repairer by trade, and I was just an army trained office boy. He used to sit glowering a bit sometimes when I held forth in the cafe or canteen about some abstruse fault I had cured in a wireless set that day. I sensed the resentment building up. Then one day he was without a task and in the workshop with me when someone brought in a civilian wireless set he had been given by a Belgian for his billet which had never worked but which he could keep if he could get it working. I took it out of its case and started work on it while Bill rather sourly looked on with a lot of scepticism. Within a very short time I looked up. "Good heavens," I said, "this set
has never worked since it left the factory - there is absolutely no cathode bias resistor on the output pentode and never has been one." He looked even more sceptical. "Don't be silly," he said "You're just trying to be clever. No factory would let a set leave the premises without testing at least that it produces a sound!" "Perhaps this has been salvaged from a factory that was bombed" I replied......found at the end of a production bench." Anyhow I went to the repair box and found a 600 ohm resistor and soldered it in place. The set worked perfectly at once. (I should explain for those who understand these things that it was a simple RF/AF amplifier and not a superhetrodyne receiver, which would have required to work and have its intermediate frequency and local oscillator coils tuned for it to have received broadcasts instantly on being switched on for the first time. Such sets were still in use on the continent) Bill Church was visibly taken back. His whole manner changed as he patted me on the back. "Now I really believe you know your stuff as everyone says." he said to me. "A lot of people can be lucky and get easy faults in a set which can be put right by a knack for trial and error - but to work out that a complete part is missing in the circuit means you really understand what you're doing." From then on we never had a cross word; he even admitted to me couldn't draw up the circuit of a radio if he tried, and we remained friends until he left the unit a long time later. No doubt you are thinking this story has been included as piece of outsized self congratulation, but it is in fact just the opposite. The knowledge required to do what I did was more than contained in the very first lesson on the function of valves we had all received. It was elementary beyond belief! What it does point out was the extraordinary amount of repair work quite adequately carried out by signalmen who simply had no idea of what they were doing. Valves got changed, switches were cleaned, obvious broken joints were soldered, others found by poking about and producing a crackle when moved and so on. This covered most faults and people like me got the rest! If we were not available they went back to REME. What it also illustrates is the extraordinarily arbitrary way people become popular or unpopular in the most fickle and ill-informed manner when thrown together. An irritation no doubt first set in train by my "posh accent" grew and grew then suddenly the little contretemps that was brewing up between me and Bill Church was blown away on the completely false assumption by him that I was some sort of genius. On such slender foundations were built any respect felt for you by your fellow conscripts if they came from a different social background.

My two closest friends in our small group were as opposite as could be. First there was Andy Tawse. He came from a wealthy and very upper crust family of bankers who lived in a large Tudor house with extensive grounds. He was a terribly nice and completely useless type who had drifted through public school in a very unspectacular manner and had no idea what he wanted to with life. Being a far more amiable and un-pushy character than me he had avoided getting up anyone's nose in spite of his "posh" accent and background, simply smiling away insults and leg-pulling in a shy manner, but was only part of our little group through me; he never could quite understand my affinity and obvious liking for such "working class" types. Like me he found their continuous foul language objectionable and was simply unable to see beyond this. He was nothing if not practical however and seeing that I was happy in their company he joined in without any sign of condescension, and they took to him well enough after a bit of ribbing. Andy suffered from the most appalling migraines, and I have vivid memories of accompanying him often when he could not bear lying in bed with the pain and would go for long walks in the middle of the night, sometimes well into the small hours. There were no drugs available for people with migraine in those days - there are not many effective ones now for serious cases - and he suffered terribly with attacks that lasted for days. I lost a lot of sleep, often in freezing weather, accompanying him in these walks, but we became very close and unburdened ourselves of all our problems and worries apart from those involving our sex lives. We never discussed this subject as he considered it too personal and private. School, aircraft, photography (to which he introduced me), politics, architecture and family, yes, but no sex! He would sometimes take my turn at night-time guard duties when he knew he was not going to be able to sleep, or join me walking round on mine when we were on duty the same night. Our talks helped to take his mind off the pain and, I think, were a considerable help to him.

My other close friend was Arnold Ogden from somewhere like Bradford or Leeds - I forget exactly - and was a jobbing carpenter. Tall and lanky, he was recently married and somehow managed to find a room somewhere in most of our postings in which to continue making a dining room suite for which he managed to get the necessary timber carried around with us in army trucks
and shipped the completed parts bit by bit back home for assembly after the war. They were beautifully made and it was a joy to watch him planing the expensive seasoned timber with complete confidence and never a spoil a piece. The chiselled joints fitted to a hairsbreadth, which he would demonstrate to me before pulling them apart and packing them in sheets of corrugated cardboard for safe transport home. Arnold was an extraordinary character who, unlike Andy, was wholly unreticent about sex, and yet without a trace of schoolboy prurience - it was all a great laugh to him. The tales he told of "quickies" in lifts between floors with giggling groups of girls while he was working on their installation in a department store and similar adventures were quite enthralling, but all this changed when he married a diffident, quiet and very unpromiscuous girl who, as he explained to me, he had to "break in" very gently as because he both loved her very much and realised that he would continue to have strong sexual requirements he "did not want to put her off". As I was about to get married he went into great detail about the different requirements of men and women and even greater detail about what "put women off". This was probably the most important information ever given to me, and revolutionised my smutty attitude to the whole subject, as well as confirming very solidly in me the respect for women that had instinctively come to the surface when I had first heard the obscenities emerging from the back of trucks full of soldiers as they passed girls in the street. Needless to say I put all the advice to good use and never had any of the problems or frustrations that I still hear of in people's marriages to this day. Good old Arnold!

The fourth member of our little coterie was Les Denyer. He completed the group nicely, and was a local government clerk, somewhere on the social ladder, I suppose you could say, between myself and Arnold Ogden; well above Bill Church and all of us well below Andy Tawse! He was the only one of us apart from myself able to understand a bit of what actually went on inside a 19-SET and for a long time worked with me in the various back-of-a-truck workshops. Practical and useful with his hands, he would refer particularly abstruse theoretical problems to me and we made a good team. He was particularly good at "scrounging" luxuries and bits of extra equipment from stores like the more sophisticated Avometers and even an oscilloscope - the sort of thing usually dished out only to REME. He was a very moral and upright sort of person, but full of fun and laughter and by no means a prude. When he found out I was newly engaged he appointed himself my moral guardian and kept me on a tight leash in the pubs and cafes. He had a way of making it perfectly obvious that of course there was no way I could disappear with any of the girls the way so many of the others did, as I was engaged and that was that. I shall never know how I might have behaved had he not been there, and neither will my wife! Suffice to say he was a salutary influence on me and whether it was him who kept me from straying or my own faithfulness is now academic!
We would argue politics by the hour and enlightened each other about life in council offices and a merchant bank. The strict adherence in the civil service to grades and years of service, with everyone knowing the salary everyone else was paid in each grade and the horrendous difficulties of jumping the promotion queue, quite apart from the approbium it brought down on you if you did, astonished me after the secrecy among us in my firm about the salary we were paid and the independent personal and private negotiations with our employers by which, with the necessary exams, we could and did jump queues galore. He was equally horrified of course at the way the old boy network got me into a job in a prestigious merchant bank straight out of school without any trouble. I started to absorb his sense of what at the time I saw as fairness, and he was a great influence in making me one of the people who threw Churchill out of government at the end of the war. Although now a conservative of the truest blue I still believe the complacent conservative thinking of pre-war years needed the jolt it got, and don't regret what I did - just once! But I never voted Labour again!

So there we were, a very mixed bag whose companionship made life so much easier and was an incalculable help to me as a spoilt and snobbish only child in adjusting to the world.

7. RANDOM MEMORIES

I wish I could give a coherent and consecutive account of our travels through Belgium and Holland until the end of the war, but I kept no notes and find the task beyond me. I shall instead rifle through my memory of incidents and people and record them as they come to me, cataloguing the things that helped to form the person I am in the way that similar incidents and people must have helped form the characters of so many others dragged out of normal civilian life and made into temporary soldiers, sailors airmen.

One of the things the army certainly did not get right was the training of the Signals Officers, apart perhaps from some I never had any contact with - the technical experts in charge of the electronic activities in REME. Our officers seemed to have absolutely no technical training at all. They were never any use at all in solving any of our workshop problems, but because they simply refused to acknowledge this would meddle in our work and put on a front that exasperated us all. Our officer was typical of the rest and was the butt of much exasperated humour. I remember once being in the battery shop when the charger, looked after by Signalman Ford, broke down for some obscure reason we could not fathom. When the supply of charged batteries slowed down and was reported to him he came rushing down to see us, knowing he would be held responsible. Instead of gathering us together to contribute suggestions as to how to solve the problem he stormed in agitatedly and curtly asked us to "let him have a look at it." We all gathered round him with grins on our faces and watched him peering into it anxiously and twiddling the very few knobs it had on it with a look of expertise. Our driver was the troop wit, and suddenly he was heard clearly to announce in a loud whispered aside "We can't get the Home Service in this area, Sir." The whole room exploded into laughter. This was a most serious piece of disciplinary cheek which could have landed him in the clink and was a measure of our impatience. Luckily our officer's training in command had been better than his technical training and with the hint of a smile beginning to appear on his face he stormed out with a simple "get on with it then." I hope the army has got this right now, but it does smack of the attitude of a lot of senior management in this country - including chief accountants - who seem to think that anything to do with computers is beneath their dignity and leave it to "younger and more agile minds" or whatever other excuse they can think up when what they really mean is that management is for superior people who don't waste their time learning the trades of the rude mechanicals. I'm sure it was many incidents like this that made me as the Financial Director of my firm design and put in myself - hands on as they say now - one of the first tailor made (no pun intended) computer systems in the advertising industry with only the help of a professional programmer and not put the whole thing out to system analysts and consultants, as so many chief accountants do. You really cannot run technical or specialised people unless you yourself can do anything they can do or, when you get older, can at least make it obvious you have done and know the problems of their job. They will never respect you and you will botch the whole thing, as so many disastrous computer installations prove - put in by managements unwilling to familiarise themselves with the details of what a computer can and cannot do efficiently, and with every detail of the work the people who operate the system have to do.

It is only as I put this all down that I fully realise how the army formed me, if only sometimes by the experiences it faced me with that I would otherwise never have faced. Soon after we arrived in Gheel with the liberating army I was walking down the street one day and heard a lot of shouting and screaming. To my amazement a bed, followed by a shower of feathers from a burst pillow which followed it, came sailing out of a window in front of me, followed by sundry chairs and pieces of bedroom furniture. Almost immediately two or three men appeared dragging a screaming woman out of the front door of the house, strapped her to a chair and started shaving her hair off.Other soldiers appeared and soon the whole town seemed to explode with furniture and personal belongings pouring into the street everywhere while men and women were bundled about and held down in chairs and shaved. Apparently the collaborators and the women who went with the Germans were being dealt with. The Belgians were not very pleased with our reaction to all this, expecting us to applaud with glee. Most of us didn't - we thought the whole thing was bestial and hung around in acute embarrassment not quite knowing what to do. The whole process went on so long that I was able to go back to the workshop and get my camera to photograph it, while the town increasingly began to look like something in the blitz, almost every street littered with debris and many shops and cafes with all their windows broken. Looking as I write this at one of the photographs I took I feel the same disgust I felt at the time. One shows triumphant men, or rather opportunist hooligans, youths and even children, holding sticks and laughing triumphantly at the camera - the usual mindless mob looking for an excuse for pointless violence that we see on the inner city deprived area streets today. The feelings engendered then were amplified when I saw the pictures shown later on newsreels of Mussolini's mutilated body being dragged along the streets of Rome, and other smoked out Nazis being similarly treated by crowds in South America; in all these cases my instinct was to turn a machine gun on the mob. I had no thought that the victims were getting their comeuppance. My views on mobs of any sort, which were formed then, remain the same today, whether they are French Farmers, Trade Unionists, Miners, Greenham Common Protesters, hunt saboteurs or any other self-righteous and self-appointed dealers-out of what they see as justice. The seed sown when watching lynch parties in Wild West films flowered in Belgium.

Thank goodness most of our lives were lived at a very much more trivial level. Looking through a small notebook of sketches I kept during this period I find that our approach to life was essentially facetious. Everything was a joke, even the cold that was my most uncomfortable memory. Collecting equipment for repair from the the front line, the signals lorry was hit behind our driver — the wit mentioned earlier in the battery charger saga above - by shrapnel from an exploding shell with a colossal noise; with a great big grin on his face he shouted out "Rear gunner hit - bail out!" and everyone laughed their heads off. His remark was repeated round the whole unit for months afterwards. A silly little story, but it illustrates our generally blasé attitude. We were sometimes downright irresponsible - anything for a laugh. Our feelings towards the Belgian army - what there was of it - could not be described as respectful. Once on a chore because we had little repair work to do I helped the linemen by feeding a pair of telephones lines out of the back of a lorry along several miles of road for a new communications link. No sooner had we arrived at the other end when we were horrified to see a Belgian army truck draw up a few minutes later and proudly hand over to us the other end of the line we had just laboriously laid; both parties looked in horror at the two trucks connected by the two short lengths of cable, one winding out of a drum and the other winding into it. They had cheerfully been "salvaging" the line we had been playing out! This story went round the unit like wildfire, spread in the first place, I must admit, by me. Nothing made you more popular in the lower ranks of the army than a good story to tell against your officers or your allies, both total incompetents in our eyes. This shows how unfair we were to both,
but our lack of responsibility when no actual fighting had to done was monstrous. The Belgians soon got their comeuppance. During the riotous and drunken shenanigans at Christmas we were all drinking in the cafe when a signalman ran in and collapsed on the table laughing his head off. Between hysterical bursts of laughter he told us a convoy of Belgian trucks had drawn up at the top in the main square of the town and asked the way to Mol. We all knew that backwards, as did the teller of the story. He deliberately indicated the opposite direction and watched the whole convoy follow his instructions. "That will teach them to collect our wire when we lay it" he said, wiping the tears out of his eyes. Thank goodness the Belgians all around us did not quite get the drift of his story. This sort of irresponsible schoolboy humour was typical of our behaviour.

Also in my notebook I found the following note about the dispositions of out troop on a typical day. I quote them verbatim: 14/2/45:

TYPICAL DISPOSITION OF SIGNAL TROOP 557

Corporal Church In bed

Signalman Taylor ] Stage Lighting (see below)
Signalman Ford ]

Signalman Ogden Changing batteries for Church Army
Girls canteen.

Signalman Geall Toasting over fire (In our workshop)

Sergeant Sykes Stand-in for Bertha's sister's husband
in Germany. (Bertha was Bill Church's
very accommodating girl-friend who had
no objection to Bill servicing both
her and her sister!)

Signalman Ford was a dour Welshman who had finally learnt to get along with me after a long period of distaste on my part and what at the time seemed pure hatred on his. The stage lighting he and I were engaged on constituted an interesting phase in the Signal Troop's life - or at least for some of us. The officers in the unit had decided as a sideline to "keep the men amused" by putting on some stage shows with the assistance of the ladies in various organisations like the NAAFI, Church Army, Army Educational Corps and ABCA (Army Bureau of Current Affairs) who were floating about locally as the war drew to a close. This activity continued right up to our postings via Holland into Germany as part of the Army of Occupation and was highly professional in its work. Volunteer signalmen took turns at doing the stage lighting and operating the spotlights - all great fun. We would pile all the props into lorries and jump in beside them with our bottles of plonk and our beef or bacon and mustard sandwiches ready for an interesting and convivial journey to somewhere new and exciting while the pampered officers and the ladies swept along in style later in charabancs. Our venues included the Island of Sylt, where we all drove on to railway trucks to go across the causeway. I must say I went with some misgiving. I had been present at all the rehearsals and the plays they did were all the popular upper class amateur drawing room workhorses of the time like Noel Coward's "Ways and Means" and the even more upper class "Two Gentlemen from Soho". In England I had been driven to total despair at the stupidity of my fellow conscripts during that most beautiful of all films "Brief Encounter" - another Noel Coward story - which had produced howls of laughter, obscene suggestions and cat-calls from the audience. How on earth would the ribald lot we were in 30 Corps take to this sort of stuff? They loved it, and I have no explanation except perhaps that they wanted to be entertained after the discomforts, boredom, and in the case of those at the sharp end, the dangers of their life.

There were many bright moments like this in the general gloom of wanting to leave the army and go home - a day now tantalisingly near with VE day in the offing and in fact so long away, with the "occupation" ahead of us. 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.

8. 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.

10. 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.

I ended my war in the Baltic Town of Flensburg, with the rest of the unit, tanks and all, in the sort of cold I had never experienced before. This was a most beautifully preserved old town which I took great pleasure in photographing. Andy Tawse and Les Denyer were still with me. While Les kept an eye on my morals as far as the local girls were concerned - I was married now of course and even more beholden to restrict my activities - and Andy taught me all about photography, I made the best of things. Neither Andy or I smoked, and we piled up endless quantities of army issue cigarettes which we exchanged with the Germans without any qualms, and against all the rules, for splendid cameras: a Rolleiflex for Andy and a Robot (the latest German wonder with a Leica quality lens and shutter for me. This superb machine had a clockwork automatic wind-on mechanism and took 48 square pictures on 35 mm film. I could never have afforded one on the 5 a week I was to get when I was demobbed.) For more weekly cigarettes we acquired the evening use of a commercial dark room containing a beautiful enlarger and learned the art of processing and enlarging our own films to such good effect that we were winning army photographic competitions. I eventually bought the enlarger for yet more cigarettes and shipped it home, using it for years after. We all gave up obeying army rules; I can remember spending my guard duties in the cabs of parked trucks when it was cold - even falling asleep; what was there to guard against now - the Germans had lost all spirit. But I still shiver to think what might have happened to me if I had been caught by a strict duty officer; a spell in the "glasshouse", I expect. We had already acquired unauthorised "walking out" battledresses with collars turned back and lapels faced with khaki to make us look like smart Americans. We wore very unofficial officers' paratroop style berets and we went out like this without any rebukes from MPs. After being told on parade by our sergeant that such unofficial gear was NOT allowed, we'd walk out of the gates under the eyes of the officers, or go on leave in it quite cheerfully.

There is very little to write about our army activities for the rest of the war. Our semi-official theatre productions continued for a while and provided an interest. Most of our time in the workshops - a real fug-hole of a place in the freezing Baltic cold, with lots of illicit electric warmth rigged up by ourselves - was devoted to repairing and even building civilian radios for the barrack rooms. Sometimes we presented these to the German helpers' families; they were superhet receivers Arnold and I built out of spare parts to a circuit I had devised, which was based on a laborious study of the extraordinarily powerful sets we had acquired for our canteens from wrecked American staff cars . They were a way of thanking local co-opted civilian staff for their activities in making our boring life more interesting.They arranged trips on the yachts now being put back into the use in the harbour - a sailing club was formed - and found suppliers for expensive goodies like Leica cameras and bottles of brandy in exchange for cigarettes and so on. This was all semi-official
stuff; everyone knew what was going on. It must be said however that the German girls were not backward in coming forward towards advances by the British soldiers, and I had many requests for radios as "rewards" to them from grateful friends to which I did not respond, as this was going a bit too far. The Germans had mostly had to put up with a "People's Radio" of a very unsophisticated type, cleverly designed to be both able to pick up the German propaganda well enough but to limit any listening to broadcasts beyond their borders and also cheap to mass-produce without eating into the wartime electronic requirements of the nation too much. They were quite astonished at the powerful performance of the superhet sets we made out of surplus army spares and put into stripped out old "people's" sets. As an exercise in ingenuity I packed a complete six-valve superhet into a tiny Phillips bakelite case about eight inches by six by four. It was a wonder of power for its size, but when I took it home on leave and left it for my wife as a bedside set it got so warm with its closely packed valves that the sounds always slowly faded away as the coils expanded in the heat and it went out of tune! I somehow forgot to report this back to my friends who had been mightily impressed with it before I took it home!

I do regret now spending so much time in the NAAFI playing table tennis and eating buns when I could have been out absorbing all that wonderful architecture. I never went into a church or cathedral; nor an art gallery. Germany was full of such wonders, which all passed by me. We all lived in a fog of mild insurrection and exasperation waiting to be demobbed and get
home and ignored everything else.

I must say a word for a certain Miss.Brett, who used to arrange lectures and recitals of music in a hallowed "quiet room" in the NAAFI. It was here, as a fanatical fan (which I still am to this day) of traditional jazz and American Swing Bands to the exclusion of all other music, that I heard various people come and give us lectures on classical music; I can still remember the subtle ploy of one visiting orchestral conductor on such a duty tour round the troops leading us from Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo (much admired by classical musicians and composers for its clever harmonies - oh dear - what buttering up!) slowly towards hearing Handel's Water Music for the first time and then Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto on records and realising that there were other sorts of music than dance-music and jazz I heard string quartets and piano trios for the first time, live in
a small room (You've guessed it - playing for cigarettes, the universal local currency) and started to take simple piano lessons - for cigarettes - with the pianist of the string trio. This never came to anything, but it did all end up with running my own semi-professional early music group many years later - playing a whole range of different reproduction early wind and stringed instruments. I think a lot of people must be grateful for those teachers and lecturers who went round the units enlarging our artistic horizons and perceptions of the world before we all came home. I often think now of the humiliation the members of that Piano Quartet must have felt; proud and distinguished musicians playing to the conquerors of their nation for cigarettes! It never crossed my mind at the time of course.

I also remember going on an architectural course run by the army which did a lot for my ego. It was attended mostly by qualified town-hall architects and professionals from architectural drawing offices, but I wangled my way in somehow and won the end-of-course competition to design a yacht club boathouse; "the only design with any imagination", they said, and left a lot of very satisfying egg on the faces of a few rather condescending professionals who had been giving me tips. Sadly I never was able to capitalize on all this, as there were no vacancies for architects in the early post-war years and like so many of us with a wife acquired during the war I had a choice
afterwards between dragging her with me to starve in the garret of my personal ambitions or supporting her properly. I chose to support her properly and became an Accountant - taking all those exams my Father had so wisely told me to take. It all turned out rather well as I did design a whole series of luxury houses for a period as a sideline and was able to supplement my income for a while and give up the activity without losing a career when the responsibilities of my main career became too much to combine the
two.

And that's that. As far as I am concerned the army was the making of at least this semi-willing conscript and I am sure I am in no way unique. How much luckier I was than those who were crippled or lost their lives.

ADDENDUM (These pages can be scanned and supplied on request if the ´óÏó´«Ã½ site is interested.)

At the end of this book you will see a selection of sketches I made in a small ring-bound sketch book in which I kept a series of extraordinary notes, including jazz and classical records to buy after the war, silly army jokes, and ideas for surrealist paintings I wanted to do some day; needless to say I had no potential as a painter, surrealist or otherwise - I was more of a doodlearist if anything - but I still had a schoolboy preoccupation with pencils and notebooks; I just liked filling them up. It wiled away a few hours to do that, and as I still had left a little of that natural and uninhibited skill with a pencil a lot of us have before it is blasted out of existence by self-consciousness and instruction, I was able to capture a little of the atmosphere of our billets, cafes, hardware and weapons. Most of the things, like the battery charger Lt.Maynard tried to get the Home Service on (p.43) and the bren gun I had to look after above my bed (p.41) are self explanatory from the text, but I wish I had drawn the 19-set we were all so involved with; you can see glimpses of it on page 45 - under and between the two pictures on the wall in the top sketch and in the far corner of our outhouse in the bottom picture. The piano in the left of the top sketch on page 47 has a story I should have included in my lessons on life learned in the Army. I came in late one evening to find a neatly moustached Anton Walbrook-like soldier I vaguely knew playing the Warsaw Concerto we all knew so well from the film "Dangerous Moonlight" - and playing it beautifully. When he had finished I crept out of the gloom and congratulated him. I then asked him if, in its way, he didn't think it was as "good" and "serious" a piece of music as any written by the great classical composers, even if not of the stature of the greatest of them. He banged the piano lid down and strode off saying "I never discuss music - I just play it; I can't stand intellectuals who talk about it!" In the words of a well known comedian "I only arsked !". Thus was I taught circumspection quite early in life. It was, alas, a lesson learnt but not always practised.