Royal Corps of Signals
Dud's
Army.
Chapter
4
Passing out
With the third week behind us we began to look towards our passing out, a peculiar name for it as the last thing one looked for was to faint during the graduation ceremony. Evidence of our transition from civilian to military beings manifested on the morning we were at long last marched out onto that holy of holies, the square, an area so revered by our NCO’s it had acquired a taboo akin to the precinct of the burning bush. We had been declared unworthy of setting foot on the fringe of it let alone crossing it, by way of a shortcut, for example. Such a crime would incur unimaginable punishment. But out onto the square we now marched, imbued with much the same awe Columbus must have felt as the land’s horizon sank behind him.
The fine-grained gravel crunched pleasantly beneath our boots. From this munching sound we could more easily get it together. There was a snare-drum sonance to it, feeding information back to us, giving our squad a voice, a voice at our feet. We found ourselves wanting to get the drill right, cleanly right, to get it right together. Our drill corporal, instead of striding alongside like a herder of swine, took to holding his position while we were sent off into such distances as the parameters of the square allowed. We became a khaki-clad mechanical unit on booted legs obeying commands that came to us as air-slicing vibrations from the gravelled throat of far-off spotty-face. We were much happier to be trusted at such a distance from the ordering source. I was reminded of sheep dog trials I’d attended with Uncle Jack.
We found we could distinguish our own drill corporal’s commands from those of other corporals simultaneously drilling other squads on the same square. We covertly compared the smartness of our manoeuvring with that of others. Confusion changed to a pleasing complexity, a matrix of variables we had mastered. Hour after hour we were marched, wheeled, drilled, paraded and inspected. Occasionally might come a word of praise, or equally gratifying, less criticism. Even less occasionally we might finish the day an hour earlier. Our uniforms had by this time somewhat moulded to the form of our bodies, at least to the degree of providing one a sense of individual ownership. It was time to pass out.
In prospect, the passing-out parade was for me a frightening affair. From the moment we first mustered and marched out onto the mother of all parade grounds I was terrified of doing something silly. This was my first experience of stage fright, and like seasickness it is no small potatoes. I clearly remember standing in the accustomed right marker position of my squad with knees knocking. I had heard that the inspecting party was to be led by a Brigadier, a rank, in my imagination, of such impossible immensity it lay beyond infinity. Standing there in open order my knees did literally knock, and that shocked me. I had heard of the expression but had never believed it merited literal meaning. What saved me from further indignity was the music from our military band, striking up somewhere off to my right. I discovered that by fiercely concentrating on both melody and arrangement I could draw from it a measure of comfort. The more I listened the more I came to understand that certain numbers exerted a better soothing effect on me than others; the amplitude of knee-knocking was clearly a function of which number was played. A waltz, for example, exerted a huge damping effect on both the amplitude and the frequency of oscillation. I was getting interested in this theory, and had just moved on to a consideration of how close I might have come to resonance when the inspecting party arrived. They were stopped at my back.
The official party, Brigadier at their centre, had paused in their progress directly behind me. They were exchanging derogatory-toned, privileged-class noises. They were at my back and it slowly dawned on me that I was the cause of their conference. The follicles at the nape of my neck rose up in an epidemic of goose-pimples. The inspecting party, like a tight swarm of bees with their queen at the centre, then came wheeling around the right-hand side of me, eventually drawing up untidily dead ahead. I was enveloped in an eye-watering cloud of Eau Sauvage mixed with Carbolic. To a man they were surveying me. Something was up. Their body language hinted at disapproval.
It must be understood that when a soldier is brought to attention by an order from a senior officer he is required to fasten his attention on the sky that hangs above the distant horizon directly ahead of him. Should anything intrude into this line of vision, like the face of the drill corporal, for example, one is not allowed to adjust one’s focus. Looking the corporal in the eye, man to man, is tantamount to treason. Furthermore, standing to attention, an unnatural posture at the best of times, and staring out at a far-off nothingness actually decomposes the facial features into a sympathetic vacuity. So there I stood, a goggling nig-nog, alone and palely loitering, so to speak, with this out-of-focus nebula before me.
I received a composite image, a collage, oddly selective of detail in an arrangement reminiscent of a Salvador Dali painting: a flock of cap visors, a hanging of exquisitely-cut, pale-khaki, linen uniforms, a lattice of Sam Browns, a peppering of epaulettes, a kaleidoscope of pretty ribbons and a tepee’s worth of swagger sticks. I blinked.
The Brigadier, as ruddily complexioned as a Falklands sheep farmer, posed front and down-centre in typical, actor-manager style. He was tabbed and beribboned across his front as though shortly arrived from the prize ring of a county gymkhana. At the far extreme fringe of the party, ramrod straight and deathly still, stood the drill corporal, boils purple and eyes pale yellow slits of venom. There were at least a dozen others and all were beholding me as though I were some alien life-form. Time had stopped. My heart and my breathing had stopped. Even my knees were stilled. The music of the band had vapourised. I wanted my mother. Something about me was singularly wrong. I blinked again.
The Brigadier purposefully handed off his Malacca to an aide, stepped forward and laid his hands upon my person. His party, in a show of solidarity for their leader, momentarily shuffled, then settled into rapt attention. It became apparent the Brigadier was intent on rearranging my posture. He was going to put on a show. But my body was not of clay. Five and a half years labouring in a sweat shop factory, as many seasons of soccer and rugby, cycling, tennis, cricket, swimming up and down the Avon river and the past year’s Charles Atlas exercises at dawn had nurtured my body into a resiliency such as one finds in an assembly of wire ropes, essentially one for all and all for one.
The Brigadier found himself on a sticky wicket, for as he made a push here he created the need for a pull there, and addressing there he found himself back to needing a push here. Bending this way and that the Brigadier and I, like two skaters, became a living example of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, briefly stated as the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts. The inspecting party, sympathetic to their leader’s cause, perceptively strained in concert with him but wisely stayed in the offing.
The Brigadier changed tactics, initiating a dialogue, or more properly a monologue, since unless asked a question directly one was duty-bound to remain dumb as well as visually and mentally impaired. In this instance it was of small consequence anyway as by now lockjaw had set in. He wanted me to stand up straighter, he said. He wanted me to show everyone how proud I was of my Country, of my Regiment, of my six feet two. I wanted to tell him that my six feet two was a fraud, that two thirds of it was leg, and I was anything but proud of it and took every measure to conceal it, mainly because a good many of my friends, like the Brigadier himself, were short-arses. Not allowed to explain myself I duly stiffened myself heavenwards, presenting him my best imitation of a flagpole, a British flagpole of course, worthy of bearing a British flag even if the more distant suns were no longer setting on one’s country‘s colours.
With poor grace the Brigadier settled for straightening my tie, the lie of which had become disarranged from his earlier efforts at militarising my person. It was small compensation and I could tell he was miffed. His party stood their ground, stone-faced and silent. The Brigadier retreated a step and retrieved his cane. If we had been Roman he would have beaten me with it. I had been beaten with the cane, and with the open hand, by grammar school masters, in private and in public. The worst part of it was not the pain but the humiliation, especially when beaten in front of the girls of one‘s class as at Whitchurch. Shamed, I waited for my punishment.
With a significant look at the C.O. the Brigadier abandoned me, and his party moved on, scorn for me in every passing eye and parting gesture. It was clear to all I was an intractable, a lost cause, a uniformed disgrace that was becoming all too common these days. If ever there was a case for pulling the plug on the National Service Act, here it was. Bringing up the rear, the corporal found time to hiss malevolently into my ear:
"Cox! You're the worst f...ing soldier in the whole f...ing army, I could give you such a rabbit punch."
This latter comment, I supposed, came about as a result of my flagpole stretch exposing my drainpipe neck, a part of me I hated almost as much as my spaghetti legs.
The inspecting party moved on and I gradually unravelled. I suddenly became aware of the band playing. It had never stopped. And my knees had quit knocking, too. Apart from a light-headedness I felt better than I had all day. I realised that to all intents and purposes I had passed out.
With the pomp, ceremony and VIP’s off the field we were finally ordered to fall out. We then gathered in the drill shed for assignment to our training regiments. One stood in a particular spot and waited. I stood alone for a very long time, beginning to think some form of retribution for the Brigadier incident was being planned when I was joined by a young-looking, soft-spoken, Scotsman. The moment I looked into his face I experienced a sense of enormous relief: intelligence and good humour came beaming out of him like sun from between the clouds. The sight of him was a balm, a waltz. For the first time since I joined up I felt fully at ease with a fellow recruit.
"Are you for one-tearr?" he asked
"No bloody idea," I answered cheerfully, and we both laughed.
I was still high from my parade ground encounter and felt curiously invulnerable. Nothing worse could ever happen after that, I told myself. Somehow I had survived.
There were not many for 1 TR, a handful perhaps. I could tell right off we were the bright boys. The worst soldiers, perhaps, but the brightest. My heart sang. I had no idea where we were going or what we were to do when we got there. A small lorry showed up and we tossed in our kit and climbed aboard. So far as Basic Training was concerned, I was done with it and that was that.
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