Royal Corps of Signals
Dud's
Army
Chapter 7
Embarkation
We were a chastened group when we reassembled back at 4 TR. For all I know the class flunk-out was a ploy of Captain Macintyre to get out of us what he knew we were capable of. He was, after all, responsible for putting a first-time trade addition, at technician level, into the field. He would want his protégées to succeed, to trigger requests for more of the like to follow. There was a flap on over Suez. Maybe he figured the more preparation for us the better, as Montgomery had ably demonstrated. It was certain that career soldiers knew enough about national service types to have long figured various ways and means of motivating them. Some degree of subterfuge might be considered legitimate.
Our class, offended by failure, got stuck in for a further four weeks of study. We got a grip of ourselves. By the end of that month we were all declared to have passed the course, some of us with distinction said the captain smugly, looking straight at me. But Jack was the first to be asked if he’d care to be posted to Cyprus to which he gave breathless assent. I was asked next and gave the same answer. We had done it.
Did the captain know that Jack and I were the best of mates? Or had we passed first and second in the class? Or had the cards simply fallen that way? We’ll never know. The rest of the class, including Dennis, went to Germany, except for one posting to Bournemouth and one to Catterick as next intake's instructor. We’d been eight months in training.
Jack and I were over the moon. There was nothing for it but we must immediately stencil “CYPRUS” in big letters down the length of our kitbags, with William Blake lightning bolts darting out at acute angles from each end of the word. As we laboured at this task Jack confided to me that his mother would not take the news of his posting too happily; he‘d have to break it to her a wee bit gently.
Both military personnel and civilians were getting killed in Cyprus as the EOKA guerrilla movement led by Colonel Grivas aggressively pursued their objective of liberating the island from British control and forming a political union with Greece. In this they were jointly opposed by both the British occupiers and the Turkish civilian minority. The situation on the island was admittedly tense. I reminded Jack we were in a Signals regiment, not the infantry and he reminded me that civilians were being killed. Ladies were being killed, he‘d say, we should expect to at least get shot at. His logic flawless, this aspect of the posting dampened our spirits.
Preparations at 4 T.R. included kitting out with Khaki Drill: shorts, tunic, shade hat, undershirts, pyjamas and cotton socks, and, receiving the necessary, going-tropical, TAB injections. These needles were unpleasant not only for the jab one got, but for the after-effects. One became near-paralysed with pain. The last TAB I’d received had laid me low for the best part of the day. When this was mentioned to the orderly at the M.O. he assured us we need have no worries. We would be injected with one half of the serum’s total volume in the left arm and the remaining half in the right arm. This way, he declared, with the ill-effects halved and opposed, they would cancel each other out. One would feel nothing. We rolled up both sleeves and took the Army’s beastly jabs. Both arms. This treatment came on the day we left for seven days embarkation leave. By the time I reached the train for Bath I could scarcely move without hurting. Both arms were paralysed with pain.
It was the toting of my kitbag that caused most difficulty. I could move my body and legs about with my arms wrapped to my sides like a wimpy Uriah Heep character but it was coping with my kitbag that brought me closest to tears. To shift it I was obliged to approach the job cagily, like a tentative wrestler, working out my next move, using my knees to grip and nudge it around like some lanky pervert. I suffered the ignominy of having a lady lift it into the luggage rack. It hung there twisted, the insignia pathetically awry, feebly emitting crumpled signals. I sat beneath, equally corrugated and sick with pain.
I remember nothing particularly special about the week’s leave, and it surely passed quickly and without incident. I didn’t have a steady girlfriend to visit; after a stellar year of relationship we’d broken up, largely over the issue of impending National Service. Terry was now called up by the RAF, married three months already and planning a very different and superior career path from mine. I might have gone to a dance at The Glen in Bristol or maybe the Grosvenor Club in Bath. I think I hung out at the house a lot. I loved that house: four up and four down; sun and the river in our windows all day long - except when it rained. I enjoyed my mother’s upbeat company, and my Auntie Joyce’s, staying with us at the time.
Whatever misgivings my mother had over my going into active service she kept them from me. Stoicism was pretty much the way of it with both my mum and dad; the ’stiff upper-lip’ was a favoured tenet in our house. But years later I did learn from a cousin that my mother worried about me a great deal. He knew this for definite, he said, as he was with his mum, my Auntie Joyce, during my embarkation leave. I’d forgotten. Ten years old then, he drove with dad and me to the station in Bristol. Our mum would have been only too glad to unburden to her sister. My father was no good in this kind of a situation being an agnostic fatalist. My mother was a Welsh pagan so talk to her was like milk to a babe. Mum and dad went to church of course as did my three sisters, all of the latter having places in the choir. While home I must have worried a bit about Jack and wondered how his mum was coping. Jack was only eighteen.
We met up again in London, at Woolwich Barracks, there to mark time until a plane became available. Woolwich was a grimmer place than Catterick, reeking of Britain‘s military history. The place gave me the creeps. I'm sure our billet had been a stable -the floor was cobbled. As we were standing about in the courtyard one morning a squad of marine commandos went by. They were marching in the approved grouping of threes but their minimally-polished, rubber-soled boots made no noise above a whisper and neither did they adopt the tin-soldier stiffness or ridiculous shoulder-high arm swinging we had learned. They looked like real soldiers, hugely capable. I was then sporting full-corporal's stripes; some regulation or other required that one of our party-in-transit be an NCO. This was an embarrassment to me tantamount to masquerade. I wished I could have scissored those V signs in half and given one to Jack. We got out of the barracks as often as we could, idling the time away down by the Thames river. I asked Jack how it had gone with his mum.
It had been a disaster. Due to the debilitating effects of the double-barrelled TAB injections, the well-meaning, Edinburgh taxi driver had taken up Jack’s kitbag and preceded him to the front door. Answering the doorbell, his mother was confronted by a stranger mutely bearing Jack’s gear in his outstretched arms as one might a sacrificial offering. Thus displayed, the lightning-bolt-adorned "CYPRUS" leapt off the page, so to speak, telegraphing shock and fear into the very heart of Jack’s mum. By the time Jack made it to her side his mother was a basket case. His entire leave was ruined by that incident and by the week’s end he was mighty glad to come away from there.
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