On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (7 page)

We also rattled away on the range with .303 Brens – light machine guns on bipeds – which we learned to strip down and put back together swiftly and efficiently. These were all obsolete weapons from Second World War and went out of service shortly after I joined the grown man’s air force, but we Boy Entrants thought they were state of the art.

I made many friends at Cosford of course, including a big Scottish lad named Tam Keay, who used to take me to his parents’ farm in Perthshire while on summer leave. Tam was quickly promoted to Leading Boy, then Corporal Boy, and finally Sergeant Boy. He was a born leader, someone who I looked up to with great respect. Like all good leaders he was fair, just and tough as they come.

Then there was Alan Cake, who was not a leader in any sense. A tall willowy boy with a dark complexion, but along with Rod Williams he formed the intellectual lobby of the 29th Entry Telegraphists.

Mike Ormiston, the son of a colonial policeman, was very assured, elegant and confident. Mike knew all about etiquette, was knowledgeable and worldly, and if you wanted to impress your girlfriend’s parents, you went to Mike for lessons first.

John Chidlow, already mentioned, was a miner’s son whose wiry body whipped into action when a fight was necessary.

Johnny Ball was a London boy, full of a cockney’s sense of humour, with a square muscled body and a love of adventure. Johnny was not 29th but 27th Entry, but had been put in charge of us in ITS to teach us the ways of Cosford before we went up to the Fulton Block.

Finally, there was Bob ‘Titch’ Nottage who had been in my class at Rochford school. We had both been surprised to see each other at Cosford, not knowing that we were joining at the same time.

Many other good guys, too many to list.

Then there were the bad boys, of course.

Blake (not his real name, but close to it) who tried to strangle a boy with his bootlace, and thereafter became known as Bootlace Blake.

There was also a hard Glaswegian from the Gorballs, whose head-butt was greatly feared.

At the far end and far side of the Fulton Block, resided another tough boy in the Senior Entry who made everyone’s life a misery, but fortunately the telegraphists and those in other wings rarely mixed.

Finally, there was Boy Entrant Mallet, whose younger sister Rosemary had been my girlfriend at St Mary’s school. When Mallet went away to Cosford, I started going out with a girl named Valerie. She had once been Mallet’s girlfriend. Mallet was in the Senior Entry when I was in ITS and he was therefore quite a bit older than me. He took exception to the fact that I was dating his ex-girlfriend and sent one or two thugs down from the Fulton Block to beat me up. He never came down himself. The bully boys that came searching for Kilworth took one look at me (I was 5 feet-nothing in those days and weighed seven stones) raised their eyes to heaven and went back the way they had come. They would not get the reputation they desired by thumping the hell out of a squirt like me. If they had come back in two years’ time, they would have found a boy who had grown 8 inches and put on a few more pounds. By that time I was a flyweight boxer and probably worth punching.

I did see some nasty incidents. A ‘hard man’ came down to ITS one rainy day and demanded Alan Cake give him his cape. Alan said no and the result was that Alan went down like a felled tree, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. He was kicked and told to get up. Alan, wisely, stayed where he was. It wasn’t a terrible incident. Just a one-hit confrontation and no real damage done, but it did shake us new kids up somewhat. Was this what it was going to be like when we finally went to the Fulton Block? People stealing kit and striking out if denied? I began to wonder if I’d done the right thing by joining. At least in the grocery store you didn’t get your face smashed in for nothing.

On another occasion a senior entry youth arrived in our billet around midnight waving a .22 revolver. It had no trigger and the hammer had a thick elastic band around it. He got us out of bed and took us all onto the marching ground. Then using the elastic band he casually fired a round across the parade square. The sound of the shot cracked out over the frosted concrete and the richotets echoed through the night. The youth then strolled away into the darkness, towards the Fulton Block. We never found out who he was, or to which trade or wing he belonged. We simply stood there in the cold night air gaping at his departure, most of us wondering if this youth was typical of all the seniors.

Once they saw what kind of hell we were in, some of the boys tried to leave. Our parents had signed papers guaranteeing that we would remain to be trained at the school and then serve twelve years in the RAF. Several boys wrote home, begging to be released. One of these was a boy with a terrible stutter named McGarvey, who hated it all so much he began acting as if he were going mad, cleaning his boots with toothpaste and lacing his tea with polish. At inspection we stood by our beds and shouted number, rank and name when the officer walked past us. McGarvey’s stammer made it quite impossible for him to get this out before the officer had long since gone, so he was ordered to start the sequence the moment the inspection commenced.

However, the only way to get out was to buy one’s release from the Royal Air Force. In ITS it was relatively cheap. Twenty pounds would secure a boy’s freedom. When our weekly pay was five shillings, that amount of money was almost out of reach. One needed sympathetic parents. And it got much more expensive after initial training was over. Eventually McGarvey managed to raise enough money to buy his freedom and almost ran out of the camp gates to get away. One or two others left too. Some were thrown out for various offences. I don’t remember how many, probably only a very few.

Once we had completed initial training, we were allowed to go home on leave. Like many others, I was as proud as punch, parading before my parents in my new Best Blue uniform and peaked cap with its blood-and-custard band. I would have given a king’s ransom to tell them I was a Senior Boy, or Leading Boy, but I never got promoted. It wasn’t my size that held me back because an even smaller lad than me, an Irish boy called Louis Patterson, made it to Corporal Boy and Louis made a good Corporal Boy too. I was as smart and as sharp as any of them, both in mind and in appearance, but I’ve always been slightly introverted, and that’s a death knell in the services. You have to stand out, be the man who shows the others the way, and that I never have been. I make a good second-in-command, but I’m no leader.

~

Around this time my grandad, old Rhubub, shuffled off his mortal coil. The one-legged lengthsman, sexton and chimney sweep, a Rochford character known by everyone in that market town, died at seventy-two. I had expected a Dylan Thomas exit for Grandad, raging at the passing of the light, but he went in his sleep. In his will he left me his rack of pipes that had been smoked and chewed for over fifty years. I can’t remember what happened to them, but even now I can smell the odour coming from the bulge in his shapeless jacket pocket.

Nan followed him shortly afterwards, but was less lucky. She went out with lung cancer at a much younger fifty-six years, which didn’t surprise me, since she’d been cooking on a coal fire for most of her life. It wasn’t until they’d both gone that I started to think about them and their lives. Nan had slept on a sofa bed in the living room ever since I’d known her, so I very much doubt their relationship in their latter years was a sexual one. Every Sunday Nan would take the bus into Southend. She told us boys she was going to the pictures, but she never took any of us with her. I believe she had a boyfriend in those years, for which I don’t blame her, because Grandad was so self-absorbed and unwholesome I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting him in that way. I was sad for him, though I don’t think he cared that much. I was much sadder for my country-girl nan, whose life had been all childbearing and drudgery, and had ended in prolonged pain and distress.

I missed them both, for they meant a great deal to me. I never knew my maternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother seemed a very shrewish woman who didn’t seem to like children very much. I met her briefly, perhaps twice in my life, and I can’t even remember the date of her passing. My Rochford grandparents were people of the soil, close to the earth, and though they obviously did not get on together that much, they shared a wealth of country knowledge and managed to get by in the same house. I suppose practicalities must have dictated that they stay under the same roof, but it says a lot for them that we children did not sense any bad atmosphere. It is only now, in retrospect, that I see that all was not harmonious.

~

When the 29th returned to Cosford, we packed our kit bags, threw them over our shoulders, and marched to the Fulton Block. There we joined the 28th, 27th and 26th Entries. Here were the barracudas and sharks and we sprats were tossed into the same pond.

As with public schools at one time (who knows, maybe still?) the lowest form of life became ‘fags’ for the senior boys. At Cosford these slaves were termed ‘bull boys’ because they had to ‘bull’, or clean kit, for the entries above them. For a short while I became bull boy to a kid called Jock Mowatt, a piper in the band, but since he was the worst scruff alive and couldn’t punch his way out of a pair of bagpipes, it wasn’t long before I told him to clean his own kit. Fagging was totally illegal of course, but who was going to run to the authorities? Only some idiot who wanted to get his head used for a football. The idea that bullies are cowards is a wonderful sop, but it’s really not true. Some of them are and some of them are not. Those who are not will come looking for you after lights out, when the adult NCOs have all gone home, and tip you out of bed and proceed to kick the living daylights out of you.

So it went on. One or two of us rebelled, bigger lads, harder lads than me, and fought things out in the drying room. Some rebels were taken away and ‘spooned’, which was sort of like the Chinese water torture. A wet flannel was laid on their bare chest and a spoon would be tapped on the same spot for a prolonged period. It was very painful and left large blue bruises. One lad was dangled out of a third-storey window by some drum straps and threatened with sudden release. Many were too frightened to go against the tradition of bulling for the seniors and did as they were told, promising to look forward to the day when they too could become a despot and could command their own junior entry slave. It was one of those vicious cycles that are hard to break.

(Actually, towards the end of our time at Cosford a 31st Entry boy did go to the authorities and complain about ‘bulling’ for a senior boy. His name was John Storrs and his protest resulted in a 29th Entry, Jeff Limback, doing seven days in the guardhouse. Boy Entrants at that time were as strict as the Sicilian Mafia in observing the rule of
omertá
. This breach of the code of silence incensed groups of youths who went looking for the stool pigeon, intending to rough him up. Unfortunately, one of the 29th Entry had almost the same name and our John Storr kept being woken at midnight by vigilantes wanting his blood, John having to call on his mates in the billet to verify his total innocence.)

~

The Fulton Block was a huge building. It had over a thousand windows and with its sixteen paddle-shaped wings looked like two giant stone octopuses joined by dual halls that were the kitchens and dining rooms. Three storeys high and flat-roofed, all it needed to complete its gruesome appearance were machine gun posts and you would have a Russian prison. It housed more than a thousand boys. The Fulton Block was a monstrosity that must have been built to awe and subdue any thoughts of revolution among the boys. It is one of those legendary structures on a par with such buildings as the Gestapo HQ in Berlin, or the KGB’s Lubyanka block. It loomed over the rest of the camp like a brooding monster that devoured boys at night and vomited them out just after dawn the next morning.

Over the next year or so I laboured to become a telegraphist and for the first time in my life I took education seriously. I wanted to pass the exams and become a Senior Aircraftsman in my chosen trade. And I started to enjoy learning. I was taught to touch-type on a teleprinter. I learned to take and send Morse at twenty words per minute, which increased later to twenty-five wpm in plain language and 30 wpm in figures. (Now, in this day and age, it is about as useful a skill as making flint axe heads.) Other accomplishments were learning the Murray Code, how to use and service a Marconi 1475 radio receiver, how to use a petrol electric set engine, and all the theory and maths that went with becoming a telecommunications man, in the field or on a camp. In short, I was immersed in the romantic world of the Sparks, a man who knew the secret of sending and receiving coded messages through thin air or over copper wires.

Of all the skills I was taught at No 2 School of Technical Training, the Morse code remained the most fascinating. Those short patterns of dots and dashes need to become deeply embedded in the brain of any Morse code operator. You can’t access them directly while you are sending and more especially when you’re receiving a message. To do so would mean the loss of several characters. The letters and figures come so fast the brain needs to react instinctively and the pen hand write them down without conscious thought. By that I mean you can’t pause to recognise the sequence, ‘Dit-dah-dit-dit (.-..)’ as the letter L. A concentrated thought that long takes at least two or three seconds, by which time five or six other characters would have gone by. Most Morse is sent at twenty-five words a minute. The average word is five letters long. That means the operator is receiving a letter every 0.4 of a second. The action has to be an instinctive, from hearing straight to hand, almost bypassing the brain altogether. Personally, I found myself musing on mundane things – shopping lists, sport, last night’s party – and allowing the message in Morse to take care of itself. Only when the signals ceased in the earphones did I re-emerge and read what I had written.

In education classes I began to find my feet and discovered I was good at English, geography, history and science, but lousy at maths.