Royal Corps of Signals.
Dud's
Army
Chapter 1
Call-up
Some weeks after my twenty-first birthday an OHMS envelope landed on the door mat of our family’s house in Somerset. The contents of the letter declared that under the authority of the National Service Act, 1939, I was to report to Bristol for a medical. Included was a railway voucher, third class.
I knew the call would come. Being in the best of health and my five-year apprenticeship completed I had no further cause to claim deferment. There was now no barrier between myself and the dreaded two years of “natural service,” as my four-year old sister called it. If I had had the nerve I could have gone berserk at the medical centre, blasting everyone with the fire extinguisher and getting kicked out on the spot. I’d read in the newspaper about someone doing this. Or if I could rightly claim to be a Nationalist or a Quaker I could declare myself a conscientious objector and go work on a farm for two years. But I was of the type who toes the line, so I obeyed the call, attended the medical, coughed twice and was declared A1.
It was 1956. I measured six feet two, weighed ten stone and was about to be press-ganged into one of the three armed services for two years. My preference had been solicited, to which I had naively responded by choosing the Royal Engineers, imagining the building or exploding of bridges. I was seconded into the Royal Signals. A second OHMS envelope arrived containing instructions to report to a place called Catterick in Yorkshire. I looked it up on the map of England. I’d never been that far north, or that far from home. For the journey came another third class rail pass. I was to go in April.
At least, I told myself, I had been spared the embarrassment of being inducted into the RAF which had a local reputation of being pansy; or into the RN where the trouser bottoms and gaping collars measured sadly against the tenets of Carnaby Street. Even so, compared with most of my rugby-playing friends who had served in the Somerset Light Infantry, I was going soft.
I was in fact both woefully and wilfully green behind the ears. I had no hopes that two years in the army might do some good for me and I certainly made no plans to exert myself on behalf of the army. I had no family advisors. My dad, working at Hill Upton’s in Oxford, had joined the navy during the last war. He signed on at noon, during his dinner break, and was discharged by three-thirty of the same day. His boss called him into the office, gave him a stern talking to, told him he was in a preferred trade and consequently was needed more at home than away. He was to consider himself demobbed and go back to rewinding armatures. Dad did do a stint in the Chipping Norton Home Guard, his claim to fame in that mob being his skill at halfpenny pontoon. He’d return home after weekend manoeuvres with his pockets full of coin. I treasure a photo of him taken in company with his fellow defenders. Out of that bunch of scruffy lumpers, his cap set defiantly at the back of his head, he is clearly the most unsoldierly. Here was my only role model for the two years ahead.
In the factory where I apprenticed worked Jimmy Quinton. He’d been a lineman in the Signals, serving in Egypt and Ceylon. While a signalman he had become the captain of the regimental cricket team. Jim was an ace at telling enigmatic stories:
Commanding Officer: "Er, Quinton. I say, Quinton old chap".
Signalman Quinton: "Sir?"
Commanding Officer: "Quinton. I like to play slips, actually".
Signalman Quinton: "Right you are Sir. First or second?"
Once I’d received my calling up papers Jim offered his advice: choose a bed furthest from the barrack room door. Listening to Jimmy I got all fired up over the prospect of an overseas posting, one thing the army could provide me. South Wales and Southern England were the only British territories I’d ever visited. It was the Empire and beyond that beckoned to me.
But truth to tell, going abroad as a serviceman was poor compensation for two years robbed from one’s life. I so despised the enforcement aspect of National Service I ended up consigning myself into a profound and preferred ignorance. I cut my nose to spite my face. The idea of knowing your friends well and your enemies better had not occurred to me. So what the rough hand of the Army had to offer I would neither see nor blindly accept. I went into the service with the very worst kind of an attitude - the self-righteous, opinionated bias of an ignorant youth. I could not express my dissent so nicely as would John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter: “There aren’t any good, brave causes left,” but I could have stood, even at the age of twenty-one, as poster boy for the “Youth is wasted on the young” brigade.
Catterick was grim. When arriving at the railhead in the dark of night one was reminded of the films one had seen of a certain German concentration camp, the only properties missing being the dogs and helmets. The landscape about, surprisingly extensive, was dotted with the kinds of huddled buildings squatters favour, not houses but huts, their exteriors creosoted and property boundaries picked out with white-painted stones. For someone visiting from Bath the prospect was depressing.
We began with a month of Basic Training, four weeks to make soldiers out of us employing a manual one supposed initially written for the Iceni during Boudica’s uprising. The Army applied shock, a series of shocks, to the recruit’s sensibilities, already in shock from the impact of being so summarily drafted. We were to be brutalised into a condition from which we could cheerfully kill. In time-honoured fashion we were
first robbed of that which gave us our civilian dignity: name, hair and civvies. One’s neck and lower head were shaved to a tide line an inch above the ears. With the remaining hair cropped the net result resembled a thistle. Every stitch of one’s civilian clothes was replaced with Army stuff the colour of human s---. One was allocated an eight digit number, the last three of which were hyphened to one’s surname for ease of shouting out or typing into orders. Without ceremony I was re-christened “three-four-three-cox.“
So the shapes and forms that had hitherto contoured and coloured our separate identities were largely eliminated. We were next divided up into eminently conquerable squads, each group allotted a large open room in a barren stone building overlooking a gravelled, featureless square.
Our room contained two rows of iron beds and a corresponding number of tin lockers. For the next month it became our collective business to maintain this room at hospital cleanliness. In a smaller, filthier room alongside lived our assigned drill corporals who from the outset confided to us that at conception our best parts had run down our mothers’ legs. We were assured that at birth we should have been discarded in favour of the afterbirth. We were “nig-nogs.”
The dining hall was a shocker, for it was in this great, echoing cantonment one came in abrupt contact with the teeming mass of that month’s inductees. It seemed like a cast of thousands. One joined the queue for dinner and with still-wet plate in hand approached the surly Klan of cooks flanking their turgid pots like a bench of robed, apocalyptic judiciaries. One’s nose wrinkled, one’s eyes watered, one’s heart sank. “Whack” went the great spoon against the rim of the giant cauldron, releasing a potato bomb that flattened out onto one’s plate with a force to strain ones wrist. Something green was delivered from a second container and something wriggly came forked across from a tray of wrigglies. The mess was then swamped with gravy. A slab of pudding and two slices of bread rounded out the serving. Occasionally a plate was jettisoned from an unwary fellow’s hand by the potato bomber, crashing to the floor and smashing. A cheer would go up from the cooks while the unfortunate limp-wrister was thumbed to the back of the queue. The line of hungry men shuffled forward, walking through the mess on the floor..
There was also tea to which it was whispered the cooks added bromide. If this was the case it was wasted on me and with those consulted. One gleaned a sliver of comfort from the exposure of this myth. Second helpings were unavailable but occasionally more bread was offered. It arrived from the kitchen heaped onto a stainless steel hospital cart, pushed into the middle of the hall by one of the cooks, quickly released to travel wherever his last push might take it. The cook had to be nimble to avoid the resulting avalanche of thistle-heads as they rose like locusts from the tables and dove for the prize. In seconds the cart was breadless.
On admittance to the Army, what astonishes is the number of others: hundreds and hundreds in close proximity, thousands further out. What differentiates such a crowd from one’s experience hitherto is that all are of roughly the same age. And yet there is a diversity, not only in the long and the short and the tall but in the range of regional accents that clattered so vigorously about me. One could never have anticipated so many forms of pronunciation. Contact of this kind with so many of one’s own foreign- sounding countrymen challenged one’s senses. One’s hopelessly parochial concept of what it was to be British changed forever. What a cocoon I had been living in.
Our first day was given over to haircuts, allotment of quarters and collection of kit - a miserable three-letter word seconded by the Army to replace “personal military wardrobe.” Warned by the old hands in the factory to check each item issued for good fit before signing for it, I rapidly found the boys had been having their little joke. The quartermaster and his staff threw kit at us until it mounted to one’s ears, now exposed and flapping prominently below the plimsoll line provided by the camp hairdresser. At every stage we were harried forward by the gravel-voiced drill corporals who seemed to grow more menacing with each passing hour. Burdened like sherpas we were herded to our quarters and invited to select a bed. I did not get the furthest bed from the door but settled for he next one to it, indemnity against the “I want three volunteers, you, you and you,” routine. Over the next four weeks I had more than one reason to thank Jimmy Quinton for his cautionary advice on bed selection.
No sooner were we in than the drill corporal’s growled demonstrations began: how to fold Army kit and arrange it in one’s Army tin wardrobe, how to dress as if we were in the Army, how and who to salute in the Army and how to make an Army bed. We were introduced to the concept of orders. All Army orders were to be obeyed without any thought of consequence, the latter being the sole province of the Army. Response to an Army order was to be reflexive, not reflective. Thinking about an order was anathema and consequently banned. It was pointed out that our guts would be seconded to garters should we fail to comply with any directive issued to us, written, verbal or implied, by a serviceman of superior rank. We had no rank. We were a shortened number. We were nig-nogs. We were the lowest of the low. Worms had more rank than us. One month hence we might graduate to the lowest of ranks, that of Signalman, in the unlikely event we completed Basic Training.
Signalman did not sound like much of a rank to me. The only signalman I’d come up against worked for the railway yanking on one or other of a row of waist-high levers in an isolated, red-brick, multi-windowed, signal box on the Barry line as it cut through my Uncle Jack’s farmland. I remember that signaller as a miserable bugger, always shaking his fist at us boys for which he got a bevy of arse-about-face V-signs as we beat a retreat up the opposite embankment. Surely there were other more superior forms of signalman. Surely we were not going to learn to switch points. Semaphore might come into it, or Morse, or carrier pigeons. One might have asked one or other of the drill corporals for clarification on this point but one’s survival instincts rebelled at the idea; their eyes roved over us as menacingly as those of a Doberman.
Sadly we divested ourselves of civilian clothes. How these were disposed of I do not remember, probably parcelled home, there was certainly no place for them in the sentry-box wardrobe. As we sat on the lip of our stretched-blanket, envelope-thin beds fitting forehead-scarring badges into the berets, laces into heel-deforming boots, adjusting webbing belts and harnesses, folding all fabrics into eight-inch squares -
"NOT YER GREATCOAT YER IDJIT-BLOODY-NIG-NOG
- a pall of self-pity settled over the troop. Two years stretched incomprehensibly ahead. "Roll on death, demob’s too far away" took on the verity of a hymn.
With lights out we slid silently into our Army beds. We were in the damn Army. Not a sound could be heard. Whatever esprit-de-corps existed within us lay purely in our common bond of misery. We had not been abed more than ten minutes when a slight commotion came at the door, followed by a hoarse whisper:
"Anyone want a f---ing fight?"
I remembered another of Jimmy Quinton’s injunctions: never, ever volunteer. I slept.
.