Life Without Armour (11 page)

By the age of sixteen part of me was in every respect a fully integrated workman. If I wanted to come in late at night, or in early morning, when all others in the house were asleep, I had only to prise open the scullery window, find the key just inside, and let myself in by the back door, the only stipulation being that I lock up after me. So although by no means twenty-one, the key to the door was already in my pocket.

There would be new experiences, of course, the more the better (the more the merrier, also), and while there was a vast quantity to learn I seemed adult to myself, and imagined that other people thought so too. If a strong doubt lingered it was only because the officers of the cadet force led a life I knew little about.

I cared for no man, and cared not whether he cared not for me as I stood before the lathe with sleeves rolled up and, a thousand times a day – though the magic of turning out each separate object never left me – released the bar an inch towards my middle, spun back the turret, pushed in the chamfer tool, forced the drill, suitably cooled by a constant jet from the sud pipe, and worked the two cutting blades forward and back till the simple brass hexagonal nut fell into my right hand and was thrown into a tin, another item for the engine of a Lancaster bomber.

We worked hard in that factory, day in and day out, week after week, all through the war: youths like myself, women and girls, and the three men kept out of the Forces as toolsetters. One of the women, tall and thin, her hair entirely grey, had lost her sergeant husband in a bombing raid over Germany. Scanning other faces that breach the wall of memory, who was that tall fair woman with laughing eyes called Meg who came in every day from Edwinstowe? Then there was the slim dark-haired woman of impeccable but tragic aspect, or so it seemed to me, who sat on her high stool before a miniature lathe making I don't know what superfine object. I only ever viewed her from a distance, and never knew her name, for she always sat with the women, mostly listening to their talk. Someone remarked that she was Portuguese, but it occurs to me now that she may have been a Jewish refugee.

My ambition was to become a competent navigator in one of those aircraft whose engines we were helping to make, and join the flow of hundreds that set off night after night to pour forth the Wrath of God on Nazi Germany which, having sown the wind, was having the misfortune to reap the whirlwind with little or no sympathy for its ordeal. The irony of one day destroying those objects of art and architecture so meticulously detailed in the guidebooks which I frequently looked at, did not occur to me, and if it did I would not have worried much, knowing by now that war was war, that it was them or us, imbued as I was with the absolute confidence of being on the right side.

My only anxiety was that I might not be able to get into the air force, or any military service at all, because young men's names could be picked out of a hat, compelling them to work in the coalmines as ‘Bevin Boys'. Such a fate, if it came up for me, was the only one which could turn me into a deserter. We dreaded, but mostly loathed, the name of Ernest Bevin.

My lathe was converted to produce a different engine part, but the customary blueprint was missing. ‘Rolls-Royce haven't sent one,' Bert Firman said. ‘Or maybe they forgot, and it'll come next week. But as we know the measurements we can make do without.'

Taking the piece home, with a micrometer and depth gauge, I cleared the table in the kitchen, and went back in the morning with the drawing done to scale on fine graph paper. The job was simple, but perhaps as a result of this Bert said I ought not to join up but stay on for a few years at his factory and become a qualified mechanical engineer. It would mean going to school on a few evenings of the week for a year or so, but such a course would put me in a reserved occupation, thus keeping me out of the Forces. Though flattered by his plan, I had no difficulty in turning it down.

Looking up from the factory entrance in my dinner hour during June 1944, at khaki railway carriages on the embankment marked with large red crosses carrying wounded back from Normandy, it seemed that the war might still have years to run. In the next few months, however, the strength of the West Nottingham squadrons of the ATC fell by half, as if people thought the war was as good as over. I felt it could take an age to push through such a large country as France, as had been the case in the Great War, and then Japan would have to be defeated. Either I knew more history than most, or I had not yet realized the effect of the armoured column and the firepower of ground-attack aircraft in modern war. Perhaps my imagination refused to picture a less structured life after a war which was so much part of my existence that I did not want it to end.

The total time spent at camps and on training courses during my time with the ATC came to over three months' full-time service. I flew in many different types of aircraft, the smell of pear drops, rexine and high octane fuel combining to sicken when the circuits and bumps went on too long. As the number of cadets decreased there was less competition for the few flights available. Warrant Officer Rome, a Canadian, took me up in a Dakota from Syerston and let me work the controls. On another flight I did the navigation, mainly by pointing at relevant features on the ground and comparing them to the map. More exciting were the training flights, also in Dakotas, in which tightly packed bales of hay were pushed out of the wide side door on to marked dropping zones, either practising for action in the Balkans or for supplying food to the starving in areas liberated from the Germans.

Circuits and bumps in Hamilcar gliders hauled by a Halifax bomber gave better thrills than any apparent fairground peril. When I turned my head from a safety-belted stance behind the pilot we seemed to be inside a long wooden shed. Dropping its tow rope, the enormous contraption went gracefully like a bird to the start of the runway when, as if halted by an invisible hand, it plummeted 800 feet, and on reaching ground trundled almost silently along the grass until it stopped.

Crates of Short Lee Enfield rifles sent to the squadron were unpacked and de-greased, and used for the kind of arms drill which sent a different percussionist clatter through the wooden floor of the establishment. A two-two calibre rifle range was fitted out in an underground hall at the local gasworks, and other NCOs and myself spent an hour on Sunday morning improving our marksmanship, lying down and letting go on rapid fire, the walls echoing the noise tenfold, till we came back into daylight with ears ringing and eyes sore from the tang of cordite.

Because of my seniority I felt obliged to acquiesce when volunteers were called for, as when one of the officers decided that the squadron should form a concert party. We concocted short dramatic or funny sketches and, after entertaining the other cadets on a couple of Saturday nights, took our skills to a local prison serving temporarily as a borstal. Whether the brown-coated inmates thought much of the performance was hard to say, but they appreciated the packets of cigarettes our officer told us to have with us and surreptitiously give away.

While standing at the lathe my mind was lively with fantasies, re-enacting flights made under blue sky and above cumulus cloud-fields, and then being told on the radio telephone, after the pilot had mysteriously lost consciousness, to bring the kite in on my own. Or I would stow away in a Lancaster and, a gunner being wounded, take over his station and shoot down a German night-fighter. More often there was a lascivious reappraisal of sexual encounters from the recent past, and revelling in others yet to come with my present girl. To cool down I might tax my memory with facts that had been learned, or run through what had still to be mastered in the aviation syllabus.

Such maggoty and fevered musings, pegged within brackets of three years back and the future only as far in front as the next weekend or stint at camp, were fuelled by the mechanical and not unpleasing repetition of work, as if to keep me sufficiently content not to bear animus against the lathe itself.

My girlfriend worked in a netting factory and sat in line all day talking with other women. She had a firm and slender body, and a pale oval face with grey eyes that had a slight upward slant suggesting something oriental in her background, though she was absolutely English. I never wore uniform when meeting her, or talked about anything to do with the cadet force, because she thought I had succumbed to a life distasteful to her and unsuitable for me, that such interests could not really be part of me, and that I was in some way ‘putting it on'. She would have been more sympathetic had I donned a uniform of plain khaki, or a matelot's rig, but perhaps most of all she didn't like that part of my life from which she had chosen in any case to be excluded. It never became a real issue between us, since she saw how useless it would be to try and deflect me from it, due to my way of totally ignoring criticism or disapproval, while barely even noticing that I had done so.

What we talked about I'll never know, but we made love whenever we could, and once fucked five times in twenty-four hours. Silence seemed not to bother her, perhaps because it was a state in which she saw no possibility of conflict, and in any case it didn't worry me. At the cinema we were too absorbed to talk, and it wasn't possible to do so in pubs jumping with noise and too packed anyway to find a seat. Nevertheless, the nights we spent together were precious, and we loved on terms that were comfortably established, such regularity freeing me from wasting time going after other girls.

We went swimming in the Trent beneath Clifton Grove and, coming out of the Eastertime water trembling with cold, found warmth in each other's arms. Later there was an ample tea for ninepence at a cottage in the village. I took her rowing, or by bus to Hucknall for a walk up Misk Hill. Ordinary excursions pleased her, but she was uneasy when, as with my former girlfriend, I invited her to lunch in a restaurant, sensing a ruse to extend the limits of her social experience.

Earning as much as five pounds a week, and sometimes more, provided sufficient overflow for acquiring a secondhand bicycle. Arthur Shelton and I rode to Derby or Newark, and one Easter to the Lincolnshire coast, where we shivered all night in a concrete pillbox, before cycling back through seventy miles of rain.

Some of the past was already attractive to recall, or it provided a good enough reason for the destination of Worksop by bicycle, and cut out any uneasiness at knocking without notice on the back door of Mrs Cutts, who had looked after me so well as an evacuee five years before. There was hardly any traffic on the road, and in my solitary way through Mansfield with neither town plan nor signposts I went too far west through Pleasley and the Langwiths before regaining the Worksop road, consoling myself with the thought that even the best navigators get lost.

I must have disturbed her afternoon nap, and had to say my name before being invited in, motioned to step carefully by Mr Cutts who was dead asleep on the sofa. She apologized for the plate of stew being cold, but it was welcome after my long ride. The boy who had been evacuated with me had got into trouble for thieving, and they had sent him back to Nottingham. I sensed her horror at this experience, and a desire to change the subject. Asking about Laura, who had lived in a caravan on nearby wasteground, she said: ‘We used to have a little laugh at how sweet you were on her. She was your first love, we'd say. But they aren't here any more. A pony towed the family to a site near Chesterfield two years ago. Laura's a lovely young woman now.' She had guessed the reason for my visit, and so it was me who switched the topic, by saying I had to go. Mr Cutts did not wake, and she sent me back to Nottingham with an apple and a sandwich in my saddlebag, which I ate by the gateway to Newstead Abbey, unable to decide whether or not my journey had been wasted.

I was a fully integrated workman only insofar as there was little left to learn about the surrounding milieu, so it was time to get out by any means possible. In April 1945 I heard you could volunteer for aircrew with the Fleet Air Arm from the age of seventeen and a quarter, under something called the ‘Y' Scheme.

It may be worth quoting from the booklet put out at the time: ‘The Y scheme concerns candidates for the General Service branch, who come in as ordinary seamen in the first place, the pilot/observer candidates for the “A” branch (the Fleet Air Arm) who enter as naval airmen … Whichever the branch, the candidate has got to earn his commission in the same way as any other entrant, but to have been accepted by the Y scheme means that he is a marked man and that he will get every opportunity during his service training to prove himself worthy of a commission.'

Getting the morning off work, the first one ever, I went to the recruiting office to enlist, to the regret of my employer and the intense disapproval of my parents. To pass the medical was no problem and, after my preference for the branch of service had been noted, instructions came from the Royal Navy a fortnight later to present myself before an aircrew selection board at 13–15 Nantwich Road, Crewe, the letter containing a railway warrant for May 2nd.

A cadet friend, who had his School Certificate, and had passed all the tests which the ATC could devise, had come back from Crewe a few days before, having been considered the perfect candidate by Mr Pink and other officers. Cadets who succeeded in getting through an aircrew selection board, either for the Navy or the RAF, were entitled to wear the white flash of the Initial Training Wing in their caps, and in ATC squadrons those able to do so were a small and select band indeed.

Everyone expected to see the aforementioned cadet come on parade sporting his white flash, but he had failed, and was too dashed to say why. Since my schooling had stopped at fourteen this seemed ominous for my prospects, and my usual over-confidence was replaced at times by utter pessimism. Being fit and capable did little to abate the anxiety of thinking that failure would finish me off. I had trained obsessively for two and a half years, had diligently taken in what was put before me, and would go to the selection board with high recommendations from those officers who had been my instructors. Hoping there was nothing after all to fear I quelled inner disturbance by a determination to do my best.