ADOLESCENCE AND AFTER
Volume II of a memoir
By Alfred Baker
 
CHAPTER ONE
On 3rd September, 1939,  my sister Ruby and I were attending mass in the little Catholic church in Frinton on Sea, when the service was interrupted by the announcement of the declaration of war. I was twelve, Ruby was fifteen, and the previous day we had been evacuated to the village of Great Holland with her school, The Edmonton Girls’ Technical School.   Because our parents did not want us to be separated, I was forced to suffer the indignity of becoming a pupil at a girls’ school.
            Our hosts had lent us a bicycle for the journey to Frinton: just the one, which I could not use as I hadn’t learnt to cycle, so I had to walk beside it as Ruby rode.   That was O.K on the way there, but not on the way back because Ruby was so distressed that she cycled fairly quickly and was crying all the time: I had to run for most of the way in order to keep up, and I suspect that I was crying too.
            It was four miles to Veasy Farm but we got back in time for lunch, which, with my working class background, I thought of as dinner.  By then our hostess, a retired opera singer, Madam Wilmot, had returned with her daughter, Miss Dorothy, from their holiday on the Isle of Wight.
            The other adults living on the farm were her business partner, and part owner of the farm; Miss Young, Ruby’s favourite teacher, who was an upholstery instructor in the school; an ancient farm worker; and Madam’s husband, Commander Wilmot.  He was the first retired navel officer I was to meet, but even to my inexperienced eye there was nothing about him to suggest navel service.  He looked like a farm worker, which is what he was, for he was in charge of the ten cows, and milked them every morning at six. Which was why, sharing his room, I had to be in bed by seven so as not to disturb his sleep. 
            Apart from Ruby there were six other girl evacuees on the farm, including Ruby’s best friend; Phylis Bryan; Edna Hazel, who many years later was to become her sister-in-law; Peggy Mount, who seemed almost grown up to me; and Thelma Wolf, a German Jewish Refugee. I don’t remember the names of the other two.
            Madam and Miss Wilmot were both tall thin ladies and I was a little afraid of them. Almost the first thing that Madam Wilmot said to me was, “You had better have a bath.” 
            I didn’t think that I was particularly dirty, but as it was a week since my last bath, I didn’t attempt to argue.    A bath was run for me, and before I went to bed, I undressed, climbed in, and reached for the soap, but before I could take hold of it, Madam had entered the bathroom, taken the soap, and used it and a large flannel to wash my back.
            I was totally shocked.   At twelve I was used to bathing myself and Mum hadn’t seen me naked since I was a toddler.
            “I can bath myself,” I cried.
            “Can you?” Replied Madam Wilmot.  “Do you have a bath at home?”
            “Of course we do.”
            “Oh, in that case I’ll let you bath yourself, but make sure you do it thoroughly; particularly behind your ears.”  With that she left me to it.
            I suspect that she was genuinely surprised that we had baths and used them properly.   In those days many middle class people were convinced that any working class people who possessed baths used them to store coal.
            The farm was a mile or so from the centre of Great Holland, which despite its name was smaller than  Little Holland.   In our first few weeks we walked that distance each morning to attend school. 
            At weekends we remained on the farm, but as I was a growing lad it was decided that I should help with the poultry.   Nobody consulted me about this arrangement and I hated it.  Nevertheless, every Saturday morning, after breakfast, I had to report to the farm boy  who was to instruct me in  the mysteries of poultry keeping. Poultry was the main business of the farm, though additional income was provided by milk from the ten cows, and, in peace time, during the summer months, by paying guests.  There were about 1,900 chickens and an appropriate number of cockerels; 20 ducks, and about 15 turkeys.
            The birds lived in long, dark, sheds. One regular task that I disliked, was collecting eggs, which sometimes entailed  removing chickens who were seated on the eggs.  It was an unpleasant task, and not made any easier by the fact that the chickens would noisily protest as they were lifted from their brood.
            I was always pleased to get out of the sheds, which happened when we had to do something to the ducks or the turkeys; though writing this over seventy years later, I have no firm memories as to what we had to do to those birds.  I do remember that the turkeys, the largest fowl in the place, were also the most timid.   If a duck half their size came near them they would back off in terror.
            Occasionally we would be out on the meadow, bringing the cows in to the milking shed.   They were such huge beasts with such dangerous looking horns, that, at first, I was terrified by them: but it was soon apparent that they were extremely docile, and would make their way to the milking shed without protest.
            My Saturday morning poultry keeping did not last very long.   I suspect that by the fourth week the farm boy had already told Commander Wilmot that I was useless, and was doing more harm by being there than if I had been absent.  I think the  deciding incident was when he asked me to kill a chicken.   I had seen him execute birds several times, and it did not seem difficult.  He would pick the bird up by its legs, place its neck under a stick; stand on the stick, then pull the bird’s legs so that it choked.
            I thought that it was something that I could do without difficulty, but I was wrong.  He pointed to a particular chicken.  I grabbed it, and held its legs.  The stick was in place.  I got its neck under the stick in the approved manner; and pulled on its legs.   I pulled too hard.  The chicken’s head came off.
            The farm boy looked at me and shook his head.   He took the dead bloody chicken from me and threw it in the bushes.   “We won’t be able to sell that,” he said. “They’d think rats had got it.”
            We were urban children, and living in the country was a new, and not particularly enjoyable experience for us.  On one of our first mornings, we saw an elderly shepherd wearing a smock and herding a flock of sheep.  In the village itself, the village idiot was pointed out, an unfortunate individual of very low intelligence who gaped at us with open mouth as we walked to the church hall   which temporarily, and totally inadequately, housed the Girls’ Technical School.
            One, more pleasant, aspect of rural life was blackberry picking. Blackberries were growing in the hedgerows, and at weekends we sometimes went out with containers to pick them and bring them back to the farm.  Or we would pick and eat some on our way to the school. I was not as good at that activity as were the girls, and I always wondered if I would pick fruit containing grubs.  I don’t think that I ever did, but the thought that I might tended to put me off.
 
CHAPTER TWO
            The girls were being trained to be dressmakers, tailors, milliners or, as in Ruby’s case, upholsterers, and their technical studies required the use of numerous sewing machines, but there was no way that they could be housed in the church hall. 
            There was also the problem of the younger brothers and sisters of the girls.   There were perhaps nearly twenty of us, and we were supposed to continue our elementary education.  Most of the school staff were technical instructors with little or no formal teaching qualifications, so we younger children were an additional burden on the few academic teachers of English, History and Geography.
            I have no distinct memories of that first week of schooling, but very soon the school was to move into more suitable premises; a large hotel in Frinton on Sea, which was big enough to provide rooms for classes and sewing machines, and also to provide accommodation for some of the girls.  
            That was fine for the girls who shared that accommodation, but not for the rest of us, for Frinton was four miles from Veasy Farm and to get there we had to walk across the fields each morning, and walk back each evening.
            Frinton was an unfriendly little town.  Unlike Clacton, a few miles along the coast, it did not cater for the hoi polloi.  Its summer guests were entirely top drawer and resided in luxury hotels or in rented luxury houses.   It had a splendid beach, but little else so far as I could see.  There was no cinema, though I believe that there was a theatre.  The railway station was outside the town, as was the bus stop.   I was rather in awe of the place.
            Madam Wilmot received 4D a day for each evacuee which fairly quickly became 96D or 8S/-  for the number of evacuees on the farm increased to twenty four, including another boy, and the young sister of one of the older girls.  The extra numbers meant that each bedroom had several girls, and the other boy shared Commander Wilmot’s and my bedroom. Some girls had to be housed in sheds in the grounds.
            Each school day we would line up in the kitchen of Veasy Farm and collect our lunch sandwiches.  They were pretty basic.  I remember that on a couple of occasions they consisted of mustard pickles between two slices of bread. We would then set off on our four mile trek to the coast.   Once we reached the school building we had to take off our shoes and put on our plimsolls so that we did not damage the floor.   One morning I found that I had forgotten my plimsolls, so I turned round and walked back to Veasy Farm, picked up the plimsolls than walked back to the school.    I can’t remember what time I got there, but it must have been near the end of the morning, for in that lengthy walk I had covered twelve miles. 
            We would all be pretty tired by the time that we arrived back from Frinton each day, and after our evening meal, there was nothing much to do apart from listen to the radio or read, though I did not have much to read as I could not get my favourite boys’ magazines: Modern Boy and Modern Wonder.  I rather think that they had ceased publication now that the war had started. Sometimes some of the girls would play cards, usually rummy, a game that I quickly learned to play and would often join them; though very soon each evening I would have to leave the others and get to bed so that I did not disturb Commander Wilmot when he came up.
 
CHAPTER THREE
            Sundays were long boring torture times with almost nothing to do,  though for the first couple of weeks of the war Ruby and I  would cycle and walk to Frinton and go to mass, until on the second Sunday the priest asked us where we were from, and learning that we had come from Great Holland, took us into the sacristy, fed us, and told us that we should not try to get mass every Sunday as the journey would be too difficult for us, particularly when Winter set in. 
            However, as part of our cultural education; each Sunday after our evening meal, we would all go into the drawing room and listen as Miss Dorothy played the piano for us.   It was a kind gesture, as she was a fine pianist; but as she played classical pieces for us: chiefly Chopin, Schumann and Liszt,.  we young working class Londoners did not really appreciate her performances, which came to an abrupt end on the third Sunday when Ruby asked if she could play something modern.   Miss Dorothy stormed out, and Madam Wilmott gave us a lecture on how rude it was to ask Miss Dorothy, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music, to play such inferior compositions.
            Both Ruby and I were dreadfully homesick.   Our parents wrote to us regularly, but their letters did not compensate for our not being able to see them; however: after a month or so we did see them.  They visited us one Sunday, and we spent most of the time that they were there nagging them to take us home.   By the end of the visit they were as upset as we were: yet there was no question of us going home.  All the schools in Edmonton were closed; their pupils and staff having been evacuated.  Ruby was crying after Mum and Dad left.  I would have liked to cry, but boys don’t cry.
            The education of we younger brothers and sisters at the Girls’ Technical School was a little haphazard at first.    It was mainly English and arithmetic,  but we were hardly a balanced group as we were of several ages and different levels of ability.  The school did not really know what to do with us until the head mistress decided that a little technical study wouldn’t come amiss.    I don’t remember what the young girls were meant to do, but we boys were going to be taught tailoring.
            We were told that it would be a wonderful opportunity, as there were no other schools in Britain capable of teaching tailoring to boys. After lunch we were instructed daily by the tailoring mistress, who decided that the most sensible project for us would be to have us making trousers for ourselves.  That entailed some expense for our parents, for they had to pay for the trouser cloth.
            Mum and Dad paid up, though I think that they may have been sceptical about whether I would be able to make a pair of my own trousers. Such scepticism was justified, for fairly soon we were at the stage when the individual legs had to be joined.   When mine were joined it became apparent that they were not of equal size.  Either I had misread their measurements or, I had managed to mislay one leg and attached the other leg to another boy’s pair.  The tailoring mistress was extremely angry when she discovered the mistake.  The trousers were taken from me and I was left twiddling my thumbs whilst she attempted to correct the problem.  I don’t think I ever wore a pair of trousers that I had made, though, I suspect that the whole scheme was in time abandoned, for at no time to I remember seeing the other boys in their newly made trousers.
            However the problem of what to do with us was to some extent rectified, for it was decided that  for most lessons we were to be attached to another Edmonton school that had been evacuated to Frinton: The Edmonton Open Air School.
            The Open Air School was a special school that catered for delicate children who received the normal lessons of an elementary school,  but also had special rest periods.   In Edmonton, much of their lessons may have been out of doors, but that did not seem to be the case in Frinton.   Like the Girls’ Technical School, they were housed in a former hotel. We were with them for all the morning lessons, but at lunch time we would return to the Girls’ School where we would eat our sandwiches and engage in other activities
            The children of the Open Air School were not the four stone weaklings that I had imagined.   They seemed perfectly normal, and some looked rather tough.    However, they and we,  wore thick blankets on our shoulders, for the rooms were very cold, as the windows were kept open for health reasons.  I have no clear memory of the lessons at that school, but they did not seem to have been particularly difficult.   However, the other activities at the Girls’ school were now becoming rather more interesting.
 
 
CHAPTER FOUR
            The teaching staff there had decided that we young children were to perform in a costume play before Christmas.   It was to be a version of Cinderella with a script that we would write.  Our English lessons were rather taken up with that task, and in time a script was produced, though I suspect that most of it was written by the teacher.  The teacher also cast the play.   Prince Charming was to be played by the best looking boy in the group who was about my age; and Cinderella by his girl friend, a very pretty girl.  They were the only two in the group who had paired up in that way
            In the time honoured tradition of English pantomime, the Ugly Sisters were to be played by men, or rather boys, and I was one of them, and my best friend the other.
            The performance was to be part of a social event in the church hall in Great Holland to which the evacuees’ hosts were invited; though I don’t think Madam, Commander Wilmot, or Miss Dorothy came.   The play was to be the last event of the evening and before it began there was to be a fancy dress parade.
            In the fancy dress parade, Ruby was dressed as an Indian princess, and her friend, Pylis, as her husband, the rajah.  I walked behind them as a turbaned slave waving vegetation which was supposed to be palm leaves, over their heads, to protect them from the tropical sun.  It was a very successful group, and I rather think that we won a prize for it.    As soon as the parade had ended I moved back stage, donned a long dress and became an ugly sister.
            The play was well received.  I was quite excited when it ended, but I calmed down after I had changed into my own clothes, and around 8 p.m., we were walking back to Veasey Farm.
            That was my only acting experience at Veasey Farm, though Ruby took part in another.   One evening,  in the drawing room, the girls and I, and invited guests of the Wilmots, watched a dramatisation of The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot.   I have not read that novel, but I don’t imagine it could  have been a complete dramatisation of the book, but just one chapter, or part of a chapter.   I don’t know who directed it; perhaps Miss Dorothy, perhaps Miss Young, but, for me the star of the performance was Ruby, who played Maggie Tulliver with great aplomb.   I doubt if I understood clearly what was going on, but I was considerably impressed.
            This being Eastern England, Winter, when it arrived was quite severe.   At times there was snow, and ponds froze over. The other Veasey Farm boy ventured onto one frozen pond, but the ice cracked under his weight and he sank into the water.   Some of the girls pulled him out, but arrant coward that I was, I did not attempt to help.
            Most of the girls, who were aged between thirteen and sixteen, were becoming sexually aware, and must have found life on the farm frustrating, as there were few suitable men around.  The little golden haired sister of one of the girls, though only aged about nine took a fancy to me, but I tried to ignore her.    One of the older girls, a fourteen year old brunette, who, I now realise was rather attractive, also turned to me in the absence of any more suitable male, and kept begging me to kiss her.  
            A twelve year old today, would be delighted at such an opportunity; but I was not sexually mature at that age, and was horrified by the idea.   However, she kept at it, and one evening, I thought, ‘well why not’ and we kissed; only to be interrupted by Miss Dorothy who walked into the room as we were embracing.
            She was clearly disgusted.   We broke apart and felt the full force of Miss Dorothy’s invective: most of which was not directed towards my seducer, but to me.  She seemed to think that I was about to rape the girl. She threatened me with dire punishment, and promised to inform Miss Young.   I don’t know if she did, but no punishment followed.   The girl, Jean, never attempted to kiss me again. I was mildly sorry that she did not.
 
CHAPTER FIVE
            Suddenly it was nearly Christmas.   The term ended and joy upon joy, we were to go home for Christmas.   Someone, perhaps Madam Wilmot, drove us to Clacton coach station.
            As we climbed from the car a boy offered to carry our bags.    It was my cousin Gussy who had been evacuated with his school.  He was surprised to see us, and clearly disappointed that he could not expect a tip from us.   He did not carry our bags to the coach.
            I think it was dark when we reached Edmonton, where Mum was waiting to walk us home. It no longer seemed the Edmonton that I had known, for, because of the war time black out, the streets were very dark.  It was also very cold, and I was glad when we reached our house, which was pleasantly warm as Mum had lit a fire in the living room.
            It was wonderful to be home again.  War time rationing was in force, but Pop, as the manager of a food shop, was able to get us rather more than our rations and we didn’t suffer any shortages. There were differences though. Bananas were in very short supply, and, for the first time for me, cheese was not simply the yellow Cheddar that I was used to.  Pop brought home some blue cheese, which at first I was unwilling to taste, but when I overcame my reluctance I found that I enjoyed it much more than yellow Cheddar.  I think that it was Danish Blue, but if it was, the shop must have kept large stocks of it, for we were still able to get it after the invasion of Denmark prevented imports from that country.
            Sleeping in our own beds was refreshing.  The Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden was available, but we did not use it; for that first Christmas of the war there were no air raids on London. On Christmas Eve we walked through the darkened streets to the church for midnight mass, and afterwards walked home to eat ham sandwiches and drink tiny sips of port before we went to bed.
            We got up late, opened our presents and then sat around until Mum served up dinner; turkey with all the trimmings, and Christmas pudding to follow. But for the blackout, it was almost as if we were still at peace. I think next day we went to visit my grandparents in Tottenham, and called at the house next door to see my cousins Larry and Stan. The Tottenham Grammar School had also been evacuated, but like us, they had come home for Christmas.
            Of course, this idyllic time had to end.   All too soon we were back on the coach and on our way back to Veasy Farm; but with Ruby finishing her education at Easter and having to leave the school, I would also have to leave, for I was only there as the brother of Ruby.
            That term was hell for me, and, also I suspect for Ruby.   We both wanted to be home.
It was the period of the phoney war, and there were no air raids on England, and perhaps that was why, as the term ended, we were allowed to go home.
            We both left Veasy Farm for good: Ruby to begin paid work; and me to go back to St. Edmund’s School which had reopened to cater for the large number of children who had returned from evacuation.  From then on, until the end of the war, there were two St. Edmund’s Schools: the one in Edmonton, and the other in Wales with the children who had remained evacuated.
 
 
                                                            CHAPTER SIX
            We were not the only evacuees who had managed to return to London.  St Edmund’s school was still evacuated to Wales, but enough of us had returned for it to be reopened in Edmonton with a skeleton staff, so that we could receive some sort of education.
                        Now it was mid 1940, and the phoney war had ended.  France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark and Norway were occupied by the Germans, but much of the British Expeditionary Force had managed to get back to England, but without their artillery or tanks.  But for the British Navy and the Royal Air Force, we would soon have been invaded.
            At 13 I didn’t really understand what was facing us, but I could not believe that we would lose the war.   After all, we had an empire with over five hundred million inhabitants, and they would surely prevent the Germans from winning.   It did not occur to me that those subject peoples would have very little reason to prefer us to the Germans and that many of them might welcome a German victory.
            However, in that year we began to experience the war.  When the Battle of Britain began there were daylight air raids, and high in the sky vapour trails as German and British planes met in combat, though not as many in the skies over Edmonton as were seen further south. Happily, at no time did incendiary bombs hit the school so we were never called upon to demonstrate our fire fighting abilities.
                       
CHAPTER SEVEN
            I was now thirteen and in the top class as I would be leaving school when I was fourteen. One innovation that had been introduced was that the boys were being taught to knit.  They had been at it for some time when I joined the class, and I was given rather perfunctory instruction, handed knitting needles and course wool, and expected to get on with it.
            I did get on with it as far as the end of my first row of knitting, but at that point I had to stop as no one had shown me how to cast off.    Of course I could have asked the teacher, but I did not do so.   Instead I unpicked the whole row and began again, hoping that when I reached the end of the row somehow a process of osmosis would have shown me how to do it.  Of course it did not, but I was saved by the bell as the lesson ended, only to face the same problem at the next knitting lesson, and the next, and the next, and the next.
            As 1940 continued, daylight air raids began.   The school had no air raid shelter, but during a raid we would all collect in a downstairs cloakroom, which may have had specially strengthened walls, though I doubt it.
            If an air raid was still in progress during the lunch hour we were permitted to go home for lunch, but only if we were escorted by a teacher. Even at my age, I thought that the escort service was of little practical use, for in the event of a bomb falling close at hand, there wasn’t much that the escort could do to protect her charges.
            On one such occasion the escort for Jimmy Graulisch and myself was a new member of staff, a very attractive young female teacher.  I thought she was beautiful and I half fell in love with her.  I was bitterly disappointed when the all clear sounded after we had walked a short distance, and the lovely young teacher felt that she could safely leave us to walk home without her.
            It was felt by authority that if a high explosive bomb fell on or near the school nothing much could be done about it, but that if fire bombs fell they could be tackled.   To that end, schools were issued with stirrup pumps, which consisted of hoses, pumps and buckets.   The idea was that in the event of an incendiary falling, a team would approach the burning bomb, and one member of the team would lie on his stomach and direct the hose towards the fire.  A second member would stand by the bucket in which the pump had been placed, and pump away so that the water would stream out, and the third member would refill the bucket when necessary.   
            I was one of the six boys trained in those tasks, to form two teams.   It got us out of lessons to practice, usually in the playground, and was almost fun.   Usually we practised without water, but sometimes we had the bucket filled, and that really was fun. Whilst I was still a pupil, no bombs, incendiary or otherwise fell on the school, but had one done so, I rather doubted that a team of three boys could have effectively put it out.
            I knew that the pretty young female teacher was not for me; but there was a girl in my class who I also fancied, though as she was three months older than I was, I didn’t expect that she would even look at me.   Her name was Vera Denton, and I thought that she was gorgeous.   I never told her so, in fact I doubt if I ever spoke to her, for at thirteen I was extremely shy and terrified at the thought of being turned down if I approached her.
            Clearly I was not the only boy who fancied Vera, for when the time came to select the May Queen, all the males in the class voted for her, and despite few of the girls voting with them,  the male votes were enough to win her the title.
            She looked absolutely stunning in her May Queen dress and veil.  I envied her two page boys and would have loved to be in one of their places, but, of course that was out of the question.  I was far too old, even if the three months difference in my age and that of Vera meant that I was too young for her.  But at least I could dream.
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            Now the phoney war was over.  Most of Europe had been conquered by the Nazis, and after the Dunkirk retreat, we in Britain stood alone. Our army was back in Britain and only the strength of the Royal Navy prevented an immediate invasion.   Then, in that hot summer, what was to be called the Battle of Britain began. Most of it was to the South of us, over central and south London, and over Kent,  but a little of it we saw over the skies of Edmonton, yet not all that much as the planes were so high, so all that we could see tended to be just vapour trails, but we could hear the roar of engines, and the occasional rat-tat-tat of machine guns and cannons.
            One German plane was shot down, and crashed into the Edmonton Sewage Farm.  I don’t know if its crew were still on board, but if they were it became a very smelly grave for them.
            We became so used to the day time air raids and, if we were out, did not automatically seek shelter when the sirens sounded, but continued on our way.    The sirens were not always accurate.   One Sunday afternoon I was walking with my friend Tommy Perkins in Jubilee Park.    No siren had sounded, but suddenly we heard an aircraft overhead which sounded as if it was in a dive, and then came the rat-tat-tat of its guns.   We ran. It was not firing at us, but we did not know that.   Later we learnt that it had been firing at people in Silver Street.
            Tommy Perkins was my best friend at that time, though he was not a pupil at St. Edmund’s School, but having passed the scholarship which I had failed, attended the Edmonton County School.   He lived in St. Edmund’s Road in one of the ‘houses you buy’. He had my sort of imagination.   We didn’t play games together but rather would walk fair distances, and talk, putting the world to right.   Some Sunday afternoons we would walk so far that we reached the countryside beyond Enfield town.   Once we actually got lost but kind people in a car stopped, picked us up, and took us back to Edmonton.    
            Sometimes we trespassed on a siding of the railway line, near Enfield Town Station, climbing into stationary carriages, but not doing any damage.   Enfield town was one of our favourite destinations.    We would look in the windows of a toy shop and admire the toy cars, Sucho, made in Germany and now that the war was on, irreplaceable.   They were totally out of our financial reach.
            One hot Sunday afternoon we were in the Enfield park and people were queuing for ice cream and soft drinks.   Many were buying glasses of lemonade into which had been dunked balls of ice cream.   Tommy and I realised that the charge for the ice cream in the lemonade was actually a penny more than one would pay if one had simply bought an undunked ice and a separate lemonade; though to do so meant queuing twice for each item.   We did just that.   Tommy queued for two lemonades, and I queued for two ices, which we took out of the kiosk, and dunked.   We felt very proud of ourselves.  Particularly as we seemed to get more lemonade than those who bought it already ice dunked.
            Tommy agreed with me that one day the World should be united under one government, so that individual nations could not fight each other.   We discussed this at some length, but could not work out how this blissful situation was to come about.  I think Tommy thought that it would have to be a benign dictatorship, with either himself or me as the dictator.   I rather thought that the capital of the world could be on the Island of Malta or what was left of it after the bombing inflicted on it by the Germans and Italians that year had ended.
            We began writing a science fiction story, with Tommy completing one chapter and me completing the next.  Apart from our lack of writing talent, the main problem was that each of us had totally different notions about the direction that the story should go.
I think that our story ran to about ten pages before we both became tired of the effort. 
            Tom was not my only close friend.   I was also friendly with Peter Hartwell, who lived in a ‘house you buy’ in a street near the Edmonton County School. Sometimes of a Sunday evening I would be in his house playing rummy with Peter, his elder brother John, and their father.   We would be playing for money, and I often won; but at the end of the game Mr Hartwell would collect all the winnings, and using an elaborate mathematical calculation redistribute it more fairly:   which meant that instead of winning 4 shillings I received just one shilling.     I hated it, but it was his house and his cards, so I couldn’t do much about it.
            John Hartwell had just left St. Ignatious College and was working as a temporary civil servant in the Air Ministry.   I was tremendously impressed with what he told us about his job and decided that I would like to be a civil servant.   Later, when I was demobbed from the army, I actually became one.
            I still hated the woodwork class that I had to attend once a week at Eldon Road School. Frankly I was terrified by the teacher who used his cane frequently; though he never actually caned me, which was surprising as I was probably his worst Thursday afternoon pupil.
            I would moan about the class at home, and finally Mum suggested that if it was that bad, perhaps I should stay away, so I did.   Of course, I couldn’t get away with it.   My absence was noted after a few weeks and I was called to Miss Bell’s office one day and asked to explain why I was absent.
            I told her that my parents did not like my attending a class in a wooden building when there was such danger from air raids.  Incredibly, she seemed to believe that lie, and I did not have to attend it again.
            My lack of technical ability was probably why I failed in my next attempt to move up the educational ladder.   Having already failed to get into the Edmonton County School and the Edmonton Higher Grade School, I now failed to get into the Enfield Junior Technical School.   For this school there was no examination for candidates, but successful: ones were chosen on the basis of school reports and an interview.    I imagine that my school report included my lack of woodwork success: but I was granted an interview.  At it I was questioned about my interests, none of which were technical, and asked to hold a piece of equipment and demonstrate its use.  I think they gave me a soldering iron to hold.   I had never seen one before.
            A couple of years later, another cousin, Terry was admitted to the Junior Technical School, to the delight of my grandmother and to the considerable chagrin of my mother.
            After the fall of Belgium some Belgium refugees arrived in Britain.   Two became pupils of St Edmunds, Roland Eclair, the son of a Belgian naval officer, and Guy Ponsley.  Roland was too posh for our school and soon moved over to a private school.  Guy remained as he was certainly not too posh for our school.
            I hardly ever spoke to him, but at the start of one dinner hour I went to the cloakroom to collect my coat and found Guy attacking a smaller boy.  I told him to stop, which he did, and turned to me and made to strike me. 
            I grabbed his arm to prevent the blow, then started wrestling with him.   He  fought back, and other children in the cloakroom were urging him on, but that did not help him much, for I soon had him on the ground and was sitting on top of him.  By then he was in some distress, and the other children seeing that I was winning, were no longer crying for him to succeed, but urging me on.  However, quite suddenly they stopped shouting and fled from the cloakroom, for the one male teacher had suddenly appeared.
            I got up, as did Guy.   The teacher asked why we were fighting so I told him.  Guy could not contradict me, and as the boy he had been attacking had not left the cloakroom and he backed me up.
            I was not punished for my part in the affair, but I rather think that Guy was.
            By then I was nearing the end of my last term at school.  I had no idea what I was going to do about getting a job.  Pop thought that he would like me to become an engineer, which would have entailed technical training or perhaps an apprenticeship.   It was totally out of the question.  
            However, about two weeks before the end of the term, I was told that Father Wheeler wished to speak to me.   I left the classroom to find the young priest standing there.  “Have you found a job yet, Alfred?”
            “No, Father,” I replied.
            He handed me a piece of paper with an address in Fore Street.  “Go along, there,” he said, “and ask to speak to the works manager, Mr Collins.   He’s a good friend of mine and I‘ve told him about you.”
            The address was that of R.S.Lawrence, The Gilpin Works, Leather Factors and Sole Cutters.   I knew nothing about the work, but as Pop’s company was also named Lawrence, though not R.S., it seemed a good omen.
            I obtained permission to leave school and walked to the place, and there met Mr Collins, who was large and quite friendly.  He did not ask me to hold a soldering iron or any other tool, but told me that Father Wheeler had spoken well of me, and offered me a job to start as soon as the term ended.
            My parents were quite pleased that I’d got a job, though it wasn’t much of one.  In a couple of weeks my formal education ended and I said goodbye to St. Edmund‘s School. All the same, I was reasonably happy there, and had been glad to return to that school when I left Silver Street School, and also when I returned from evacuation with the Girls Junior Technical School. 
            Yet St. Edmunds did not provide much of an education.  It had vast gaps, I was taught no science, and no foreign languages, though the church had taught me to recite part of the mass, parrot fashion in Latin. There was lots and lots of religious instruction, I think in the junior part of the school it ran to two periods a day.  Much of that consisted in learning the Penny Catechism, which even then cost rather more than a penny.
            I did not want to leave.  I was very conscious that my education was inadequate and I also felt that fourteen was far too early an age at which to leave school.   But fourteen was the school leaving age for all elementary school pupils and for the past nine years I had been an elementary school pupil.
            Later that year the war began in earnest for the population of London.   The Blitz began.  Night after night there were air raids.   The docks, and the East End were particularly affected, but in North London we had our share of the raids.  Every night we would go to the shelter at the end of our garden.   It was a very unpleasant way to spend the night.   There were bunks for us all, but it was cold, and rather damp.   Mum would bring our supper there from the stove, and we would eat it sitting on the lower bunks.    Then the siren would sound, and some time after that Pop would arrive having returned from his shop in the East End.   Mum would go back to the house and bring his supper which he would eat whilst the air raid was in progress.  
            We would hear the anti aircraft guns, and the occasional bomb being dropped, and constantly during the raid the noise of the German planes over head.    We thought that we could distinguish them from the RAF fighter planes because their engines had an intermittent note, unlike the regular throbbing of our night fighters, but we didn’t really know whether that was true.
            We were in the shelters all though the winter and on into spring, though we had a welcome break at Christmas when the Germans suspended their air raids, and we slept downstairs in the living room.
 
CHAPTER EIGHT
On a dark and rather cold morning in 1940, just before 7.30, I stood with a group of strangers in Fore Street outside the premises of R.S. Lawrence.   I did not speak to the other people because I did not know them.   I felt dreadfully miserable.  I did not want to be there, and I did not want to be a factory worker.  There was so much that I had not learnt at school, and now there seemed no way that I could ever learn it.
            At 7.30 the factory gates were opened and we trooped in.  I had to report to Mr Collins, and he placed me under the charge of a man operating a strange machine.  My task was to stand behind it and collect the leather objects that emerged from it.   It was not a difficult task and so simple that even someone as cackhanded as me could cope with it.
            The factory was a noisy smelly place and the air within was thick with leather dust. About two-thirds of the space was taken up by the presses, they were very noisy, and for the operators, quite dangerous for I was later to find that a number of them were missing fingers or thumbs.   Then there were a group of insertion cutting machines operated by teen-aged boys, and the other machines, including the one that I was working on and which finished processing the soles and heels and took up most of the rest of the space; though against the back wall stood the factory office, a high construction, a little like a railway signal box, in which Mr Collins and the office boy worked.  
            The office boy was in a jacket and pressed trousers, the rest of us wore brown work coats, though Mr Collins had a white coat, as did the proprietor, Mr Lawrence when he came into the factory. Mr Lawrence also wore a bowler hat and was usually accompanied by his spotted  dog.
            Adjacent to Fore Street were the offices of the company, in a three story building which had probably been a family home when it was first constructed.  There were ten or so office staff, including one or two rather pretty girls, to whom I never talked.
            For my duties I was to receive 15s/- a week, most of which I would give to Mum for my food, board and clothing, though 2s/6d I could keep.
            Mum had given me enough money that first day for my bus fare, and for my lunch. I didn’t know what I could do to get some lunch, for the factory was too small to have a canteen, but two elderly workers took pity on me and said that I could come with them when the lunch hooter sounded.
            They took me round the corner into Angel Road and to a café which served the sort of food that I recognised.  It was certainly not haute cuisine, but I quite liked it; and for the next few weeks I ate there regularly with the two elderly men and became quite friendly with them.
            One of them was a wiry little chap, no bigger than me.   He had spent much of his working life as a bus conductor, beginning near the turn of the century on horse buses.   He told me how after the First World War there had been several rival bus companies operating the same routes, and sometimes a bus would dart past one of its rivals and pinch potential passengers from it.  That practice ended when London Transport was established.
            The other man seemed a little better educated than most of my fellow workers.  One lunch time he said to me, “You like reading, don’t you?”
            I told him that I did.
            “Well you’d better have this,” he said; and handed me a large book.
            I thanked him and opened it, and looked at the title page and did not understand a word.   For that matter I did not understand the script.  “It’s in Greek,” said the old gentleman, “It’s by someone called Dante, I can’t read it.”
            Neither could I, but I had heard of Dante.  He was an Italian who had written a long book about heaven and hell. Perhaps this book was that. I thanked him and took the book home at the end of the day.  
            I had a splendid idea, I would take the book to the reading room at the library, get out an English-Greek dictionary and use it to translate the book into English.   When I had done that, perhaps I could look at an English-Italian dictionary and using that translate the whole thing back into Italian, and, in the process learn that language.
            The following Saturday I went to the library with my Dante (In Greek) and looked at an English-Greek dictionary, but I soon realised that to translate into English was a rather daunting task.   I put the dictionary back and spent some time looking at one of my favourite reference books, “Jane’s Fighting Ships.”  Later, when I got back home I realised that I had left my Dante back in the library.   I didn’t bother to go back for it.
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            My sister Ruby had been at work for some weeks before I started.   Her first job was in Maples workrooms over their large store in Tottenham Court Road.   Mum and Dad had not been happy about her going in to Central London each day, but Maples was quite a famous store and she felt that she was lucky to get the job.
            She didn’t keep it long.   One day as she was working at her machine she noticed that a man cleaning a window, had suddenly looked up at the sky, stopped cleaning the window, opened it and climbed through into the workshop and crouched on the floor.   At the same time she heard the sound of an aircraft and then there was an explosion that shook the building. 
            No air raid siren had sounded, but Maples had been hit by a bomb, though some way away from Ruby’s workroom.  All the staff were rushed down to the shelter, and then the shop and workshop closed for the day and a shaken Ruby came home.
            Mum and Dad decided that she must not work in London any more.  Ruby agreed.  She gave in her notice and took a job in a small upholstery factory in Tottenham, an easy bus journey from our home and there she worked for the next few years until her marriage in 1947.
            The office boy in the factory office was suddenly sick.  He was a delicate lad, and on this occasion was away for several weeks.   Mr Collins decided that I should temporarily replace him, so for the time being I did not wear my brown work coat.
            I rather enjoyed working in that office, which was reached by a flight of steps, and had just enough room for myself and Mr Collins, though he did not spend all his time there.  It was pleasant to sit on a high stool and look down at the workers toiling away below. The office work was not difficult and mainly consisted of entering material in a large ledger, which I managed to do without making too many mistakes.  
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            I was never a happy factory worker.  I felt that there was something else that I should be doing, though I had no clear idea what that could be.  I knew that I was undereducated, but I didn’t know how I could improve my education. Further education facilities were almost non existent and because of nightly air raids, evening classes had all been suspended.
            However, there were Saturday afternoon classes still available, and having quite enjoyed my short period in the factory office, I decided to attend a shorthand and typing class held at the Charles Lamb Institute in Church Street Lower Edmonton.
            I quite enjoyed the typing part of the course, and I relatively quickly learned to touch-type; but I found the shorthand lessons difficult and never managed to work up any speed or accuracy when I attempted to use that skill.
            After a few months I abandoned the classes.
            However I didn’t immediately abandon my efforts to improve my education.  From somewhere I obtained the catalogue of the British Institute of Engineering Technology, and was quite thrilled to read of the various courses that they supplied; chiefly for technical qualifications, but also some academic ones.   I looked at the correspondence courses for the School Certificate, and wondered if I could cope with one of them.  Reluctantly I decided that I could not, particularly the foreign language elements which I would have had to start from scratch.  After a day at the factory, I doubted if I would be able to concentrate on learning French, mathematics or Latin. Sadly I put the catalogue aside for good.
            What I was doing regularly was reading.  I made great use of the fiction shelves of the public library, and completed an average of two or three novels a week.   Those I read for pleasure, yet in doing so I was improving my education without realising that I was doing so.
            I was also rather keen on the popular music of that time.   Many current songs were patriotic and referred to events of the war.  One in particular I remember was ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’, which came out after the fall of France:
            “The Last Time I saw Paris,
            Her heart was Young and Gay,
            I heard the laughter of her heart
            In every street café,
            I dodged the same old taxi cabs,
            That I had dodged for Years,
            The chorus of their squeaky horns,
            Was Music to My Ears.”
Another song, equally of its time was ‘My sister and I’ which was really about Dutch child  refugees:
            My sister and I remember still,
            The tulip garden by an old Dutch mill,
            And the home that was all our own, until,
            But we don’t talk about that.
            We’re trying to forget the fear,
            That came from the troubled sky.
            We’re almost happy over here
            But sometimes we wake at night and cry”
           
            My real sister and I at that time would pool our funds and every week buy a record for our wind up gramophone.  That was in the days before long playing records, and each disc would only play for a few minutes.  Our collection was usually of popular songs, and also sometimes comic records such as those by Spike Jones and His City Slickers which parodied more serious music including The Blue Danube waltz..
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            Once Mr Lawrence came up to the office, and noticing that I was writing with my left hand asked me if I could write with the other hand.   I had never tried that and told him that I did not think that I could.   He frowned, and I suspected that my time in the factory office would be limited.
            It was, the office boy recovered and returned to his job, and I had to descend to the factory floor, though not to my old job, but to become one of the insertion cutters.
            I became the youngest of the insertion cutters, but I got on fairly well with the others.  They were all under eighteen, and each worked at his own speed.  In my case, that was never particularly fast.
            Our task was to use the scraps of leather that remained after the adult presses had cut soles and heels from them, and cut them into insertions which would be placed in rubber heels.   I would pick up the leather scraps in my left hand, place them over the moulds which had cutting edges shaped like insertions, and using my right hand on a leaver I would press it down, causing a wooden block to act as a hammer and come down on the leather scrap hitting it into the mould so that an insertion would emerge. My machine had three moulds of differing sizes and I would select the mould that best used the available leather.
            It was not a particularly difficult task, though one had to be careful not to have one’s hand over the mould when the hammer block was descending.   After a month of so I did just that, and cut a sliver of flesh off the side of my thumb and had to go to first aid as I was bleeding badly.   
            It was very painful, but looked much worse than it was.   When the thumb was bandaged I was still able to cut insertions.
            Being an insertion cutter was not my only task, I also became one of the two tea boys. Half way through each morning, I would leave my machine, and with the other tea boy go round the factory taking orders for tea and food.   The food, mainly ham or cheese rolls, was obtained from a café in Fore Street.   The tea was made on the premises,  on the top floor of the building that contained the factory offices, where it was brewed in a large urn by one of the factory cleaners.
            When it was ready we would take it down to the factory floor for distribution to the workers along with the rolls to those who had ordered them  
            When that was done, I would return to my machine and get on with cutting insertions.
            I rather enjoyed being a tea boy.   It provided a welcome break from the machine, and also a small additional income, for we used to be given tips by the workers. I also enjoyed the company of the other tea boy, who was about a year older than me.   Whilst the tea was brewing, we would sit in that upstairs room and chat, and also chat to the tea making cleaner, a thin tall middle aged woman with a fund of stories about pre-war Edmonton.  I think she may have been in the theatre on the night that Marie Lloyd had died, she certainly spoke vividly about that final performance.
            The tea making room had two large sash windows from which we could look down on the factory.  The windows were often open in the summer, and we would look out of them and see that between them was a long drain pipe, and below them a narrow ledge that ran along the wall to the wall of the landing which was at right angles to it, and which also had a large sash window which was usually open.
            We would sometimes speculate as to whether it would be possible to climb out of a window, walk along the ledge, brace oneself with the drain pipe, then come in the second window.  It was a rather daft idea, for to fall would probably have been fatal, and if we didn’t fall but had been seen from a window low down in the right hand wall, we would probably be sacked.
            Yet one day, in a moment of complete madness, when the tea making lady was not in the room, I found myself out on the ledge, gingerly making my way past the drainpipe, only to find that the second window was closed so that I had to proceed along the wall and enter the building through the first window in the right angled wall.
            My companion was suitably impressed, but that night it took me a long while to get to sleep because I was conscious that I had been almost criminally stupid.
            I never tried that climbing trick again, and, although I taunted him for cowardice, neither did my companion.   Clearly he had more sense than me.           
            We both became quite friendly with the proprietor of the Fore Street café and his wife; and they suggested that we might like to eat lunch in a room at the back of their premises and we agreed.   I had enjoyed eating lunch in Angel Road with my philosophical old work mates, but Angel Road was a fair walk away, the Fore Street café was just in front of the factory, which meant that we could be there very quickly.   Also the choice of food was more extensive, and the prices, were if anything, rather lower than in Angel Road.
            After the meal there was usually time to do something else before the hooter sounded for the return to work.   That something else tended to be activities with the other young workers.   Once a dart board had been put up on an outside wall, and several of us played with it.    It wasn’t a proper game of darts, but just an activity in which one of us would throw three darts at the board, then someone else would take the darts and do the same thing.
            Unfortunately, demonstrating my habitual carelessness, one day I reached for the darts on the board, without realising that only two had been thrown.  The third was thrown and became embedded in my thumb.  More first aid ensued, but I recovered.
            In summer, that part of the lunch hour tended to be spent outside with the other youths.  One of them was a boy a little older than me from St. Edmund’s School named Keough.   I did not like him at school as he had been a bully, and I did not like him in the factory, for he had not changed.  
            One lunch time he objected to something that I had said to him, and challenged me to a fight.   Arrant coward that I was I did not want to fight anyone, but in the presence of  my friends I could not easily back down, so he went for me.    Fortunately, he did not choose to use his fists, but decided to wrestle me to the ground.   He grabbed me and pressed against me.   I used a trick that I had used at school against Guy Ponsley.   As he pressed against me, I stood aside, and he fell on his face.   At once I was on top of him, and he could not get up.   He struggled, but I had the upper hand, and though he shouted and screamed I was clearly the winner.    As I could not hold him down for the whole of the lunch hour, I stood up.    He rose to his feet, looked as if he could kill me, did not, but rushed out of the factory yard and out of the gates.
            He did not return that afternoon nor ever again.  I think the shame of being ousted by a wimp like me was too much for him.   I was questioned about what had happened by the foreman who was keen on Keough’s sister, a pretty girl who also worked in the factory, but as he had attacked me, there was no punishment for me.   My status amongst my fellows rose considerably because of that incident.
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            As we moved on to Autumn the day time air raids ended.   So many German planes had been shot down that Hitler decided that his plans to invade would have to be postponed.  Instead, the Luftwaffe turned to night bombing.   The Blitz had begun.
            At first we shared our next door neighbours, the Bonners, shelter.   But when it became obvious that the raids were going to be every night, we moved back to our own shelter which had four bunks.
            We quickly got into the pattern of having supper, then going to the shelter as soon as it got dark without waiting to hear the air raid siren.   I would be home from my factory at around six, Ruby a little later.  We would eat our supper which Mum had cooked, then, without waiting for the air raid siren  would go down to the shelter.   Soon after that the siren would sound, and a little later Pop would arrive.  He would not go into the house, but come straight down to the shelter.  Mum would go up to the house and take his supper from the stove where it had been kept hot and bring it back to the shelter, where he would eat it.  We would then climb into our bunks and wait for the raid.   We would hear aircraft overhead, and anti aircraft guns firing, but not the sound of very many bombs.   The nearest to us was a bomb that fell at the end of the street.    After a while the all clear would sound, but we would not leave the shelter as we knew that there would probably be another air raid before the night ended.  There usually was one.
            Soon after dawn we would return to the house, go up to our beds, undress and attempt to sleep for an hour or so until it was time to get up.
            That was our existence for much of the Blitz.   It was tiring and depressing, though not particularly frightening.
            Every home had a shelter.  Most of them like ours were Anderson shelters, metal constructs covered in earth and rocks at the end of gardens, but some were Morrison shelters, which looked like heavy tables and were surrounded with metal cages and placed inside houses indoors.  My friends the Hartwells had such a shelter, and during the raids they would lie inside it.   If their  house had been bombed, they would hope that the shelter would protect them from the falling walls and ceilings and would remain inside it until they could be pulled out by air raid wardens or other rescuers.
            Some people did not trust their personal shelters, but instead would go to the public shelters each evening.   These tended to be in public parks, there were several in Jubilee Park, each capable of sheltering a hundred or so people.   It could not have been the most pleasant of places.   If you walked past the shelter in the day time there would be a distinct scent of body odour emanating from them.
            After a few months of the Blitz many people had decided to abandon shelters, whether public or private and sleep instead on the ground floor of their houses.
            After several months I was fed up with sleeping in the shelter and begged Mum and Pop to let us sleep on the ground floor of our house.  
            Pop said no, but I kept nagging him to change his mind, because I really felt I had had enough of the shelter.  Finally one morning I went too far and accused him of cowardice for not letting us return to the house.   He was, quite correctly, furious, and hit me for the only time that I can remember.   For years after I felt guilty for my brashness.  Cowardice was not something that Pop was displaying: simply concern for the safety of his family. All the same, we did, in time, abandon the shelter and began sleeping on made up beds in the living room.
            That was certainly more comfortable than the shelter, though if a bomb had fallen on or near the house we could possibly have been killed; but that never happened, and it meant that we were less tired when we got up in the morning and went to work.
            We all four slept on mattresses in the living room which with the windows closed and the black out curtains fixed made that moderately sized room extremely stuffy.
            That unhealthy sleeping chamber became even more unhealthy at Christmas because my parents had invited, Aunty Ethel, Uncle George and their two sons to join us for the festivities.   They arrived on Christmas Day to eat with us, and that night to join us to sleep on the floor of the living room, increasing the number of people breathing the limited amount of air in the room. Though, come to think of it, I think Mum and Aunty Ethel slept on the floor of the kitchen that night.
            They also stayed for Boxing Day night, though during that day, Pop and I went with Uncle George to their house in Tottenham to pick up something or other.
            When we reached their road we had a nasty shock.  Before they left they had not closed the blackout curtains and had left lights on so any German bombers would have had an illuminated target in Tottenham.   Fortunately the Germans had operated a Christmas break and there were no air raids during the Christmas holiday.   All the same I was amazed that Uncle George and Aunty Ethel were not prosecuted for flouting the black out regulations so blatantly; but perhaps the air raid wardens had taken a Christmas break also and had not noticed their brightly lit house.
 
                                                CHAPTER NINE
The work at R.S. Lawrence’s was not particularly onerous and I found that whilst I was cutting insertions I could let my mind wander elsewhere, so that I could imagine myself as an air ace or a film star.  Perhaps that lack of attention was why I nicked my thumb soon after I became an insertion cutter; but I did not have any further accidents whilst I worked. However, I began to hear stories of the high wages that lads were getting in other factories; and 15s a week was certainly not a high wage, so soon after my 15th birthday I set goodbye to the leather factory and sought work elsewhere.
            The staff at the juvenile employment agency told me that I had been very foolish for Lawrence‘s had expressed a high regard for me, and had I stayed there I would have got on.
            Getting on at Lawrence‘s probably meant becoming a press worker on piece work with the possibility of loosing a finger or a thumb over the next few years, a prospect that did not appeal to me.
            I looked for better paid work elsewhere and found it at the Co-op Cabinet Factory, which was no longer producing wooden furniture but wings of Mosquito fighter-bombers and the fuselages of Horsa troop carrying gliders.
            The pay offered was not tremendous, but it was rather more than 15s a week, and the factory on the Great Cambridge Road was relatively close to my home, so I would be able to come home for lunch, if I chose not to use the factory canteen.
            Bearing an introductory letter from the juvenile employment agency I presented myself to the works manager of the Sundries plant which was where the Mosquito wings were made.  The Horsa fuselages were made in the main plant which was older and larger than the Sundries plant.
            I can’t remember what I said to the works manager, but I was offered a job as the assistant to the mechanic.  Looking back over the years, I can’t think of any occupation for which I was less suited, but I wasn’t aware of that at the time, and accepted the job.
            I was immediately introduced to the mechanic, Jock, a wiry little man in blue overalls who took me to my workplace, which was in an almost unbearably noisy room which contained a work bench, and the source of the almost unbearable noise: a huge machine which provided power for all the other machines in the plant.  That machine was kept noisily running for the whole day apart from the lunch hour when it was switched off, and then one could almost hear the blessed silence. At one end of the room was the power board which contained the switches to turn everything on and off.
            None of this was explained to me, but I was given an overall similar to Jock’s which I was to wear when at work.  I put it on immediately. I was then handed a broom and told that one of my daily tasks would be to sweep the room out completely, which I immediately set about doing.
            That simple task was to lead to the first indication to Jock and the factory management that I wasn’t particularly suited to be an assistant to the mechanic.
            One day I was busily sweeping the room whilst Jock was elsewhere in the factory doing whatever he had to do on that day, when I managed to knock the broom handle against the power switch.   Suddenly there was blessed silence as all the machines in the factory turned off,  and then the silence was broken by the sound of men on piece work swearing.
            About five minutes later the works manager entered,  “What the hell has happened?” He asked.  “I knocked the switch with my broom handle,” I explained.
            “Well turn the bloody thing on again,,” he demanded.
            “I don’t know how to,” I replied.
            The works manager swore, then barged past me to the power panel and switched it on again.   At that point Jock arrived and having learnt what had happened also swore at me.
            Another regular task that I managed without too much difficulty, was replacing any light bulbs necessary.   That entailed carrying a ladder to the point where the bulb needed replacing, climbing up the ladder, removing the faulty bulb, and replacing it with one that worked. I then had to dispose of the faulty bulb, which meant throwing it into a bin. 
            However, when Jock wasn’t around I would sometimes attempt to crush the bulb in the vice on his work bench.   That was almost impossible, and the bulbs would smash into numerous glass splinters which I would then sweep up.  However, on one occasion I did manage to operate the vice with such delicacy that it merely cracked, and apart from that remained intact.  After that success I didn’t bother with putting bulbs in the vice any more.
            Much of the time my job was to stand behind Jock when he was repairing a piece of machinery in the factory and hand him tools as necessary, but that did not happen all that often, as he could manage very well without my assistance on his own; but he did give me various tasks to perform on my own, if he thought that I could cope with them without too much difficulty.  He was often wrong about that.
            On once occasion he had welded a piece that had broken off from a machine, and then he had placed the whole item on to a trolley and told me to take it back to our workshop.
            I started to do just that, but as I was pushing the trolley I decided that the machine was in danger of falling off, so I tried to push it further on to the trolley.  I was lucky not to loose any skin from my hands, for the piece of machinery, having just been welded was still extremely hot and I screamed aloud when I touched it.  Jock emerged from our room, swore at me again, and pushed the trolley the rest of the way.
            The employees were almost all male, but there were a few women and girls, and one in particular, Cynthia, a gorgeous brunette of about my age, worked in one of the store rooms.  I had admired her from afar, but had made no move to become closely acquainted as she was the girl friend of another factory worker, a six foot young man, a couple of years older than me, who would not have taken kindly to me, or any one else for that matter, chatting up his girl friend.
            One day Jock sent me to that store to collect something or other. As I stood at the counter I couldn’t see Cynthia, but the young store man, who dealt with my request, said, as I was about to go,.  “You’re the bloke that Cynthia’s crazy about.”
            “What you talking about?” I replied, “She’s Joe’s girl friend.
            “That’s what I said, when she told me; but she said that she doesn’t really want Joe. She just wants you.”
            I didn’t know what to think.  I had never had a girl friend, but if this story was true I could have Cynthia.  But then again, I could also have been beaten up by burly Joe.   I decided that the story was probably not true and did nothing about it.
            In all the time that I had been in that factory I don’t think that I had ever spoken to her, though I certainly fancied her; but without belittling myself I could hardly believe that she would prefer me to tall strong good looking Joe.  In any case I was then extremely shy with girls, and I did not know how I could have approached her, and, if the story of her infatuation for me was not true, I would have made a right fool of myself.
            However, a week or so later I was high above the factory floor completing some work that Jock had started on an overhead fan, and I saw Cynthia standing down below, talking to two adult workers and looking up at me.
            Later that day when I was back on the floor and passing the two men one of them said, “Halloo. You’re the young bloke that Cynthia is mad about.”
            I gulped, but did not say anything and just walked on.  I know a real man would have gone to Cynthia and talked to her; but I was not a man, I was a timid, shy, fifteen year old boy, and, frankly, terrified of being beaten up by Joe.
            The work on the overhead fan was another demonstration of my total unsuitability to be Jock’s assistant. The fan, up near the roof of the factory was situated in a large metal box.   It had malfunctioned, and Jock set about repairing it, but when he had done his share of the task, he left it for me to complete it.   Now many years later, I have no clear recollection of what I was supposed to do, but presumably I had some idea at the time.   I remained in that high position after Jock had descended, and when I had done, whatever it was that I was supposed to do, I collected my tools, descended the ladder and told Jock that the job was completed.
            He immediately switched the fan on.  It ran for a few minutes without any problem, and then there was a loud bang, and a large file that I had neglected to remove, shot from the fan’s box; flew across the factory and buried itself in one of the mosquito wings under construction.
            I don’t know what was the cost of that damage, yet amazingly I was not immediately removed from my position as assistant to the mechanic, but that removal was only a matter of time.
            It came a few weeks later following the sprinkler incident.
            One of the sprinklers was malfunctioning, and Jock spent some time adjusting the outlet until it was only dripping a tiny amount.    He suspended a bucket under it to collect the drips, then told me to get up there and adjust it slightly if the dripping appeared to stop.
            I climbed up and stood, on top of a pile of wood sheets, looking at the drip point.   I suppose it was one of the most boring jobs that I had had, for there was nothing for me to do unless the rate of drip changed.
            After about half an hour I thought that it had changed, so I adjusted it slightly, but that did not appear to make much difference, so I adjusted it some more, and then again adjusted it even more.
            With that final adjustment the whole thing came apart, and instead of a small drip, a whole torrent of water shot out.   I tried to put the sprinkler back, but only succeeded in scalding my hand, as the water was by now very hot.
            Jock arrived and tried to correct it, but he scalded his hand also.  
            There was nothing we could do to stop the flow: and all the water in the entire system from all over the factory, shot out on to the pile of wood and the factory floor, until the whole system had emptied.
            The pile of wood on which we had been standing was totally soaked, and Jock claimed that it was ruined.   What was also ruined was my future as mechanic’s assistant.  Shortly after that disaster it was decided that Jock didn’t need an assistant.
            I was not sacked, but transferred to another job in the factory, where I could not do so much damage.
            I became the assistant to the man operating the four-cutter machine.   This was a sawing machine which cut wood into four planks.  My task was simple, but quite tiring.  I stood at one end of the machine whilst the operator inserted the wood for sawing.  As it came out sawed, I had to pick up the planks, and put them on a rack.
            It was tedious and boring, but what made it worse was that the operator was a bully.  If I did not move quickly enough or did anything incorrectly, he would hit me hard.  That was quite illegal, but there was nothing that I could do about it for the operator was a big man, and the foreman if he noticed this violence did nothing to stop it.
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            Because of the war there was no opportunity to go to the seaside or anywhere else for that matter.  Workers still had holiday weeks off, but as there was nowhere to go, they just stayed at home or went out and got drunk. 
            Authority attempted to improve the situation by the ‘Holidays at home movement.’ Under which local councils would organise activities, chiefly in parks, to release the tedium and to perhaps, to reduce drunkenness.
            I have no clear memory of making use of these activities, which included open air stage shoes, some by  professionals, but more often by, amateur entertainers.   I spent my week off at home, though I went to the cinema more often than I did on working weeks.
            I was a keen cinema goer, though the films I watched tended to be American.  One in particular that I enjoyed was called ‘Two Girls and a Sailor’ which featured a new attractive starlet, June Allyson.  I half fell in love with her and went to the Empire Cinema twice to see it in the week when it was showing.  I had a local rival for her love, for I found that my friend Denny Lock had also seen it twice for the same reason.
            Another popular British film at that time was ‘Dangerous Moonlight’ in which Anton Wallbrook played a Polish pilot.  That film featured a new peace of ‘classical’ music, The Warsaw Concerto by Richard Addinsell, which borrowed much of its theme from Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 in B Flat Minor.
            The latter genuine piece of classical music was featured in another film at that time; “Song of Russia” an American film about the suffering in Russia following the German attack.  In those days America was sympathetic to its Russian Ally.   The anti Soviet Cold War was still several years into the future.
            When I returned to work at the end of my ‘holiday at home’ I realised how much I hated my job, and, in particular that, scrub them as I did at home, I could never get my hands clear of the factory grime.  I decided that I had to work elsewhere, so I handed in my notice.
           
                                                CHAPTER TEN.
Getting another job was relatively easy, even for someone as incompetent as me. I didn’t have to go far for my next position; it was at Ferguson’s Radio Corporation which was just across the road from the Co-operative factory.
            As it was war time, very few radios were produced there, apart from a simple utility model; but other electrical goods of more use to the war effort were being manufactured.
            As soon as I arrived I was told that my job would be with Line Maintenance.  I had no clear idea what that meant, and to tell the truth, even after several months on the job I still had no very clear idea of its meaning.
            I was told to report to Polish George.  That was not his real name, and I don‘t know that I ever discovered what it really was, but everyone called him ‘Polish George’.  He was a small Polish Jewish refugee and was to be my boss whilst I worked in the factory.
            Line Maintenance occupied two or three work benches placed near the wall of the workshop and at right angles to the production lines.   These were occupied by hundreds of girls doing various things to electronic goods of various sorts.   The most numerous items were emergency transmitters which went into aircraft escape dinghies to be used by aircrews in the drink after their aircraft had been shot down.
            Sometimes something went wrong during manufacture, and the faulty item was placed on a line maintenance bench for us to correct.  That was usually done by Polish George, or perhaps by my other colleague, a tall ex County School boy of about my age.  His superior education had not enabled him to land a better job than mine.
            I did some of the corrections when I was able, but I did not spend the whole day at the workbench.   As soon as I got in each morning I had another task to perform.  I would fill a large container with a sticky brown liquid and take it round the assembly lines calling ‘Varnish’ at which women who had need for the stuff would call out and I would fill their pots with the varnish, which would be used to anoint screws and bolts, so that when they were in place they would set firmly and not come out.
            I was the varnish boy and I hated it.  I felt that it was not something a sixteen year old should have to do.
            I complained to the works foreman, but he said that there was no one else suitable to carry out that task so I was stuck with it.
            Apart from the indignity of being varnish boy, I quite enjoyed working with Polish George.   He was easy going, and did not give me any very difficult tasks to perform.  I also got on well enough with my ex-county school colleague, though we did have occasional disagreements.  
            On one occasion we were both using almost identical tools, drilling holes in similar items.   George had given me a new shiny drill to operate which annoyed my colleague as he thought that it was easier to use than his.   In fact despite its newness, it was rather stiffer than the other one, but I didn’t mention that.   However, after a while I deliberately left the work bench to go to the toilet, and when I returned I found that my colleague had taken my tool and left me with his.  I was delighted for now I found the work much easier.   Of course as soon as he realised his mistake he  tried to get me to take back the inferior new drill, but, I refused.
                                          
 
                                                  CHAPTER ELEVEN
            Although the nightly air raids had ended, we still were in danger from the air: not from manned bombers, but from Germany’s new ‘secret weapons’,  the first of which was the V1 the flying bomb, the doodle bug.
            These arrived in the air above us without prior warning, for there was usually no air raid siren sounded when they came.  When one approached we would hear its engine, and whilst that sounded, we were relatively safe.   It was when the engine stopped that trouble followed, for when it cut out, the flying bomb would drop to the ground and explode.
            On one occasion, at the end of my working day I was walking across Jubilee Park on my way to the branch library, when I heard the distinctive sound of a doodle bug‘s engine.
            I looked up and saw it.  It appeared to be flying towards me.  Then, over the park, the engine cut out, I fell down, and covered my head with the bag containing my library books, but it was far enough away from me, not to cause me any damage to me or to the books.  It fell to the ground some distance away and exploded.
            More instantaneous destruction was provided by the V2, a rocket shot into the stratosphere from France and aimed to crash into London and explode.  These and the doodle bugs tormented us until late 1944 when allied armies had captured their launching sites in Northern France.
            There were never any warnings when V2s descended.   The first we knew of a drop was when we heard the explosion.  None dropped very near us, though there were some that exploded in Bush Hill Park and Tottenham.   One of the latter destroyed the home of one of the office girls in Ruby’s factory whilst she was at work, killing both her parents instantaneously.
            The poor girl was left with just her brother who was serving in the RAF.   She had nowhere to live, so we put her up and she lived with us for several weeks.
            I don’t know where her brother stayed when he came home on leave.  I don’t think we had room for him. 
            We were desperately sorry for both of them, though, despite our sorrow we soon decided that we did not much like the brother, who made a pass at my pretty sister, who already had a soldier boy friend and was not interested in comforting the airman.
            Several times whilst I was at work V2s exploded in the area.   When that happened the women on the assembly lines would all duck under their benches.   I never did that but remained standing at my work bench.   I reasoned that ducking was ridiculous.  The fact that we had heard the explosion meant that we were in no further danger, as it had already happened.
            As I was a factory worker I had no real contact with the female office staff apart from the one who delivered the pay slips to us on Friday.   Suddenly that task was performed by an extraordinarily pretty girl, Patsy Smith. 
            I immediately fell in love with her, but being me, did nothing about it.   I was pretty sure that she couldn’t be interested in me. She was way above me.  I was an ex-elementary school factory worker and varnish boy: she was an ex-grammar school girl and on the staff. 
            I don’t know if she even noticed me, though I would see her dolled up in a good dress at the firm’s socials some evenings.  On such occasions I would sit with my mates and look across at her, sitting with her friends on the other side of the room.
            These socials were really dances, but I never attempted to dance with her, instead I would talk in a loud voice to my friends in the hope that she would notice me.  If she did, she probably thought that I was a complete idiot.
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            I was very conscious that in a few years I would be in the armed forces, and, if the war was still on, in some danger.  Though I had always thought that I was a coward, that fact did not worry me as much as it should.  In fact I decided that I should join the Air Training Corps, as that might make it easier for me to become air crew when I was old enough. Though as I had a cast in my right eye, and had worn glasses for most of my school years, that was as unlikely an ambition as was my father’s hope that I would become an engineer.
            As some of my friends were already members I joined 1288 ATC squadron, which was part of the Enfield Wing. It was situated in an elementary school near the main road and to the north of Potters Bar. Sessions were held two to three times a week in the evenings, and also, I think, on Sunday mornings.
            The school was rather more modern than had been St. Edmund’s School, though that did not make it particularly modern.   However, one feature of the school that impressed me enormously was that in the playground stood a biplane in RAF markings.   I think it was a pre-war training plane, and we were allowed to climb over it and even sit in the cockpit, though, as I think the engine had been removed, we could not take off.  Not that there would have been room to take off, even if there had been an engine.   I was thrilled to see it, and even to sit in the cockpit.   I had never been close to an aeroplane before.
            Apart from drills in the playground, and rifle practice with 22 rifles at a range off the Great Cambridge Road, classes were held in navigation, Morse code and other subjects of an aeronautical nature. I enjoyed them enormously and felt that they were improving my meagre education standard.
            I think I usually walked to the meetings, though I may have taken buses, but as three good friends, Denny Lock, Stan Cordell and Sam Hawkins were also cadets, I usually walked back with them. Denny and Stan soon became sergeants, but I remained a humble cadet, though I did manage to pass a certificate examination which enabled me to wear a badge sewn on my uniform jacket sleeve.
            There was an active social side to cadet life.   Socials were held frequently on Saturday evening at the George Spicer School in Enfield, and these would be attended by most cadets of the squadron and also be girls of the Girls’ Training Corps, a semi-military organisation whose purposes I never quite worked out, though it did provide a pretty uniform for the girls to wear.
            Sometimes I conquered my shyness enough to ask a girl to dance, and on one occasion even walked a girl to her home. The girl lived a long way from me, on the other side of Enfield, and our walk took us past the Enfield Crematorium.  I think as we reached it I had persuaded the girl to let me kiss her, and just as I was doing so, I heard a clock chime midnight.   I was conscious of the fact that thousands of dead people had been cremated there, and that thought frightened me so much that I stopped kissing at once.   I don’t think that I saw that particular girl again. 
            Sometimes cadets and girls provided entertainment.  That inspired my friends and I to try performing.  Dennis, Stan, Sam and I worked out a routine in which we imitated well known entertainers, including The Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, and the British entertainer, Hutch.   All of them were black, but we didn’t bother to black up for our performance, and neither did we wear costumes.  Dennis could sing in a high voice which he used effectively when we were pretending to be The Ink Spots. 
            I think we began with ‘Do I Worry when you’re stepping out?’ as The Ink Spots, and continued with, ‘Why do you Whisper, Green Grass?’  I rather think we ended with my impersonation of Hutch, though I can’t remember what I sang.
            We called ourselves The Gremlins, and despite our lack of talent, seemed to be a great success and were asked to perform again at another social, which we did.
            Another attractive feature of ATC life was that we were sent away to live on RAF stations for a week at a time.  They were a welcome break from the tedium of life in the factory.
            I had two such weeks whilst I was a cadet, to Sawbridgeworth station and at Wing.  At the latter we were given a short flight in a De Havilland four engined biplane air liner. I was thrilled, though we were only up for about half an hour.
            From Wing they flew Mustang fighters which carried cameras and were used for reconnaissance over France and Belgium.
            One day some of us were lying on the grass talking to a couple of off duty pilots when three Mustangs returning from a mission approached the airfield.  They were flying very low, and one of them suddenly rolled over, then crashed into the ground and caught fire.
            We were totally shocked, as were the two off duty pilots.  The pilot of the crashed plane was killed instantly.  He had a military funeral before we left the station. 
            We cadets were all very subdued when we returned home at the end of the week.  We had learned that war time flying was not just an exciting game.      
            The ATC squadron also had a band of sorts; just bugles, drums and cymbals. Of course that meant that it couldn’t play much, just marches that the bugles with their very limited range of notes could cope with.
            I was given a bugle and told to learn to play it.   I wasn’t very good and only managed to get about one note out of it.   All the same I turned up for the first public band outing, which was as part of a ‘Wings for Victory’ march.  
            There were many such functions during the war. They were designed to coax funds from the public towards the purchase of aircraft.   I rather think Enfield was hoping to raise £5,000 towards the purchase of a Spitfire fighter plane.
            Our bandmaster was a rather fierce post office worker when he wasn’t being a Band Warrant Officer.  He was a distant relative of mine in that he was the uncle of my O’Sullivan cousins.
            As soon as he saw me he told me to put my bugle down and handed me a pair of cymbals.  I had never played cymbals before, but it wasn’t a difficult task.  I had to clash them together in time to the big drum as we marched through the town.
            I understand that a good cymbal player can even get notes from them by holding them in a particular way as they clash together. But I was not a good cymbal player. 
            We set off at a steady pace towards the centre of Enfield Town with me clashing the cymbals together as instructed.   It was not unpleasant until I had an itch on my nose which I would have liked to scratch, but I could not do so because my hands were holding the cymbals.
            That irritation seemed to last an inordinate length of time, but I managed to grin and bear it, well not actually grin, when my discomfort was increased when the wind blew my cap off.   I could not stop to pick it up, even if my hands had been free, because we had to march on, with me now bare headed.
            Fortunately, when we did stop I discovered that another cadet had picked up my cap, and he placed it back on my head, which I certainly could not do myself holding the cymbals.
 
                                                             CHAPTER TWELVE  
Another ATC cadet began work at Ferguson Radio Corporation.  He was not someone I particularly liked, and I soon began to dislike him even more because he  took the Mickey out of me because I was the Varnish Boy.  I think that I had a fight with him in the factory yard because of that.   However, my dislike of him intensified when I learnt that he had a date with beautiful Pat Smith from the office.  Clearly he did not think that as a factory worker he was beneath her.
            I brooded about that for some time, then went to see the work’s foreman and complained once again about being Varnish Boy, and this time when he again told me that there was no one else to do the job, I suggested that my fellow cadet could do it perfectly well.  The foreman agreed, and two days later my rival was doing the round with varnish pail.
            It gave me a great deal of satisfaction, even though he was still dating Pat Smith.
            -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            When the war started we were worried that Pop might be called up, though his position as manager of a food shop and his age, he was the same age as the century, made that unlikely, so he was with us all through the war, though by the end of it he was no longer a shop manager, but had been promoted to be supervisor of the whole business of ten or so shops.
            However he did don a uniform in about 1941 when he joined the Home Guard which involved training on some evenings and at the weekends at Picket’s Lock on the marshes near the River Lee. Apart from his uniform, he also brought home his rifle, though not, so far as I knew, any ammunition.
            As a home guard he never saw any action, but we got used to seeing him in uniform as a Private setting off for training.  I think he was quite proud of his uniform, though he was rather hurt, one winter afternoon when Mum got rather worried that Ruby was late returning from work, so he set off in uniform across Jubilee Park to meet her and escort her home.
            When Ruby saw the khaki clad man walking towards her in the gloaming, she did not recognise him at first and was about to turn and run, when she did recognise him: ‘Oh Pop,’ she called, ‘You gave me such a fright.  I thought you were a real soldier.’
            Life for me then was not only factory work and the ATC.  I had friends, and having learnt to ride a bike when I was about fifteen I spent occasional weekends on my new, second hand, cycle with my friends.
            Sometimes we went on quite long cycle rides, out into the country and as far as Epping Forest in the summer, where we sometimes met girls who were friends of my friends. I was still very shy with girls, though my friends were not so shy.  I was told that one particular girl fancied me, but though I felt flattered, I did nothing about it.
            During a bank holiday in 1944, with ATC friends I spent a day in London, culminating with a visit to the theatre where we saw a new review: Strike a New Note.  The streets of London were full of troops; British, American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealanders, and also soldiers from various occupied territories who had managed to escape and were now in uniform:  uniforms that were identical to those of the British Army or the RAF, but which contained shoulder badges indicating their nationality.  Despite the war it was somehow exhilarating to be amongst them.
            No one in my family owned a car during the war, but even if we had we would not have been able to use it much because petrol was rationed.   However, there seemed to be many people riding mopeds, either purpose built, or normal cycles but with engines attached to the rear luggage rack.
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            I knew that I would be entering the services after my eighteenth birthday.  I did not want to be a soldier or a sailor, but I did want to become air crew so when I was seventeen and a half I applied to join the RAF.
            Mum was horrified, but nevertheless she was not able to prevent me going for an interview at Euston House in London.  There I was deemed suitable to be a wireless operator air gunner if I passed the medical, but, of course, I did not pass the eye test.  I believed that my sight was OK, but as I had a cast in my right eye I was turned down.  I had not worn my spectacles since before I left school, but the cast was the reason why I used to wear spectacles, and that was still there.
            Mind you, if they had accepted me I would still need to have got my parent’s written consent as I was under eighteen, and I doubt whether mum would have given it.  So sadly I went home to the ATC and Ferguson’s Radio Corporation to wait for my eighteenth birthday and my call up.
            My eighteenth birthday came and went, and I knew that at any day I would be receiving my call up papers, however before that happened Mum had to go to Cork as her father, my Irish grandfather, was seriously ill.
            We worried about her journey for it entailed crossing the Irish Sea, and already ferries had been sunk by German U Boats, but she completed the journey successfully and remained with my grandfather until he died.
            Whilst that was happening my call up papers came.   I was given a rail pass and was to report to barracks in Canterbury on February the first. Mum was due back following the funeral a couple of days later.
            Apart from sending a telegram, there was no way of telling her that I was going: a letter would have taken too long, and we were not on the telephone and neither was my grandmother in Cork.
            I said goodbye to my fellow workers at Ferguson’s and collected with my final wages, and the money that had been collected for me, as happened to all the young factory workers who had been called up.   I was surprised and delighted by the size of the collection, which was greater than I had expected.  Perhaps my time as varnish boy had made me popular with the women on the assembly lines.
            A day or so before I was due to leave, I went with my cousin Stan to see a London Show, staring, I think Tommy Trinder and the Dagenham Girl Pipers.  That sort of show was the only live stage entertainment that I knew.   I had never seen a play on the stage.
            Shortly after that, with considerable apprehension, I set off for Canterbury.
 
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                                                CHAPTER THIRTEEN
            When Pop and Ruby met Mum at the station, she asked where I was.  On learning that I had been called up she was furious, and told poor Pop off for not preventing my call up. Pop was a wonderful father, but he did not have the power to stop my call up.
            By then I was already in Canterbury, and a private in the General Service Corps, the military organisation charged with the task of turning civilians into soldiers..  I was in the barracks of The Buffs, the East Kent Regiment, and was issued with denims before I was given a proper uniform.
            We were housed in the first floor of a barracks building that was many years old.  Each platoon of nearly forty men had one barrack room in which the only furniture was single beds.
            My fellow soldiers were all eighteen year olds and fairly soon we were accepting army routine.   My platoon contained the first black man I had encountered, a Londoner, the son of a commercial traveller, who seemed rather better educated than most of my fellows.   He also had more gumption than some of us.   There was a fair degree of tomfoolery in the barrack room, and one evening he found that his bed had been messed up.  Discovering who the culprit was, he went to the culprit’s bed, picked up the bedding and threw it out of the barrack window. No one attempted to mess with his bedding after that.
            We were to spend six weeks in Canterbury.  It still had lots of bomb damage to be seen, but the cathedral was untouched, as were most of the other ancient buildings.  I became friendly with one member of my platoon, and, once we had changed our denims for proper battle dress uniforms, we were allowed out into the town, and with my new friend I looked at the cathedral, and also, one evening ate in what was to me, a posh restaurant, where we spent a large chunk of our meagre pay on a decent meal.
            We were not starving, for the food in the barracks was adequate, though not particularly enjoyable.   One dish that all to often was served to us as a dessert, was a concoction called biscuit pudding.  I could not find any biscuits in it, but it was brown and unpleasant stodge.  When it was served much of it remained uneaten.
            During those six weeks we had one weekend pass when I went home and was comforted by and comforted my family, including my mother who was quite tearful that her delicate young son had been taken against his will into the army.
            At the station, on my way back to Canterbury, I shared a compartment with my corporal, who looked almost as young as me, but had seen service in Italy.
            The compartment was empty when we got in, and the corporal and I tried to prevent anyone else entering so that we could have it to ourselves, but we were not successful, and several other soldiers pushed there way in.
            As the train began on its way, the other soldiers were very abusive to the corporal, making comments about young fellows who get corporals stripes and think they can lord it over others.
            For a while the corporal did nothing, but then he got up and removed his army greatcoat, revealing, along with his stripes, medal ribbons for his service in Italy and the middle east, and two wound stripes on his sleeve.
            The comments stopped at once, and before the other soldiers got off, they apologised to the corporal for their remarks.   In a way they should not have done so.  He and I were quite wrong in trying to stop them entering the compartment.          
            At Canterbury we were taught to march, had lots of PE And learnt to fire 303 rifles.  They had a greater kick than the 22 rifles I had fired in the ATC., but I rather enjoyed rifle firing, though I did not enjoy the rifle cleaning that always followed that activity.
            What we had were lots of mental and physical tests designed to discover which branch of the service we should be posted to. 
            I had a horror of finding myself in something like the Pioneer Corps, which, apart from some highly intelligent and cultured German Jewish refugees, contained many soldiers of low intelligence who were not thought capable of more difficult work.
            We were asked to indicate what branch of the army we wished to join.  I put my name forward for the Reconnaissance Corps, a newly created corps which operated lightly armed vehicles ahead of the lines.   It was a ridiculous ambition, about as sensible as my father’s hope that I would become an engineer.   In the mechanical adaptability tests that we had to undertake, I had not managed to finish the given tasks, whilst my comrades whipped through them at high speed.
            At the end of our six weeks when our posting were announced.  I did not join the Reconnaissance Corps, but instead became a private in an infantry regiment, the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, and was posted to Maidstone.
 
                                                CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My new home for the next couple of months was the Invictor Lines in Maidstone, the county town of Kent.   Maidstone in 1945 was absolutely packed with soldiers. The Royal West Kent shared the camp with various other units including the Parachute Regiment, and units of the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service.
            My platoon was made up of raw recruits like me. All of us with birthdays within a week of each other, and several exactly the same age as me.  
            I had always thought that the claims of Astrology were rubbish, and the close proximity of our birthdays confirmed me in that belief.   If astrological claims had been true, then surely those of us born under the same star should have shared characteristics: yet, we all, early January born soldiers, were totally different from each other, even the ones born on the same day as me.          
            Now we were to be trained to be infantry, foot soldiers, the P.B.I. (The Poor Bloody Infantry).   We already knew how to fire rifles, but now we learnt to fire Bren Guns (medium machine guns), Sten Guns (very light machine carbines), two inch mortars, and P.I.A.Ts. (Personal Infantry Anti Tank mortars), the use of the bayonet, and how to throw hand grenades.
            We also had lots of physical exercise and marched and marched and marched.  Inevitably, if all this activity did not kill us, it did make us very fit.
            I learnt how fit I had become when we were sent on lengthy cross country runs and I was amazed to discover that I was usually able to finish in the first ten, and once or twice in the first four.
            We saw rather a lot of the countryside in the vicinity of Maidstone, going on many route marches in which each section of a platoon would walk along in single file along one side of a country lane, with the next section behind or in front and on the other side of the road; a procedure that was supposed to mean that we were more able to deal with attack by enemy troops, not that there were any in Kent, or to be in relative safely from attack from the air.
            As we marched, we would often sing; usually the most scurrilous obscene songs, even if we were marching through a village.  One of the most popular of those songs was: ‘It was the Good Ship, Venus,’ which went:
           
            ‘It was the Good Ship Venus,
            By George you should have seen us.
            Our figure head was an whore in bed,
            And our mast an upright penis.'
           
            Almost as popular was ‘In Mobile.’
           
            ‘In Mobile, in Mobile,
            Oh the eagles they fly high in Mobile,
            Oh the eagles they fly high
            And they shit right in your eye,
            It’s a good thing cows don’t fly,
            In Mobile’.
 
            I used to wonder whether we were shocking the good villagers of Kent, but probably not.   I expect that many of them  knew even dirtier songs than that.
            I had more leave from Maidstone, I think once, for a whole week at home.  During that week I went to London at least once with my friend Tommy Perkins, who was also on leave, and, this time, now that I was a soldier in uniform, I was able to visit the Stage Door Canteen, an institution modelled on the original American one in which servicemen could enter free, dance, eat and drink, though that was not free; and watch the stage show, which was also free.
            There had been a film with that name about the original Hollywood Stage Door Canteen. In that film, one lucky American soldier on leave had visited the Canteen, and was overheard declaring his infatuation with a beautiful young film star; and it is arranged that he shall meet her and have a wonderful evening with his beloved.
            I think that I hoped that something like that would happen to me and that I could meet lovely young Sally Ann Howes who at that time was one of my favourite film stars.  Of course that did not happen, though later when I wrote to the young lady, she did send me a signed photograph.
            Just as I was never a very capable factory worker, I was also never a particularly efficient soldier. One aspect of my inefficiency lay in the difficulty I found in adequately cleaning my rifle. One morning on rifle inspection, the corporal decided that my rifle barrel was dirty and I was put on a charge.
            Next day I was marched in front of the company commander who sentenced me to be confined to barracks for several days. I was horrified.
            C.B., or Jankers as it was called, meant that I had to report with the other jankers offenders, to the company office several times a day, beginning before breakfast and continuing until late in the evening.   There we would be given various tasks to perform as punishment for our heinous crimes.  I think one of my tasks was to wash crockery in the kitchen of the officers’ mess.  Another task was to peel potatoes.  That was not particularly difficult, though it was annoying to discover when after about an hour at it, we were told to stop, and the remaining unpeeled potatoes, there seemed to be several thousands, were taken from us, placed into a machine, which was switched on, and those potatoes were quickly automatically peeled.
            The only time I was allowed into Maidstone was as a Roman Catholic on Sunday morning to go to mass.  I think if I had been an Anglican I would have had to remain in camp and be forced to attend the Sunday church parade.
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            Within the unit there were a number of Jewish soldiers, most of them refugees from Hitler,   None were in my platoon, but some of them were in the next platoon and housed in an adjacent hut.   One day, whilst we were queuing for our meal, one of the Jewish refugee soldiers was nearby, and he was subjected to the most severe verbal anti-Semitic abuse from my comrades.   He didn’t attempt to reply, though he looked angry.
            I was quite furious and that evening, when I saw him in the NAAFI, I apologised to him for the way that my platoon had behaved. What was particularly ironic was that we were only soldiers because we had been conscripted, whereas he and the other refugees were all volunteers.
            He told me not to be bothered.  He said that he was quite used to such behaviour, both in Germany, where he had been brought up, but also since his arrival in Britain. 
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            In time, our training became far more strenuous, but I survived; even on the exercise when we were marched out into the countryside where we camped in bivouacs for three nights engaging in various military activities which included shooting at ranges, and throwing grenades.
            That particularly activity was one that I dreaded, as I had never been able to successfully bowl a cricket ball overarm, and Mills grenades had to be thrown over arm.
            The grenades were nasty little lemon shaped objects with a pin at the top, and a lever along one side.  When they were primed they were relatively safe until the pin was removed, which caused the lever to fly away, if it had not been held, and then the grenade would explode four seconds later.
            On this particular exercise, we primed the grenades, by unscrewing the base and putting the detonators in, and then screwing the base on again.   Then we waited as a group whilst one by one we were taken to a sergeant, told what to do, threw the grenade and ducked down whilst waiting for it to explode.
            Apart from my apprehension about throwing the darned thing, it seemed easy enough.
            When my turn came I walked up to the sergeant who told me where to throw, and then retreated whilst I did so.
            I held the grenade in my  right hand.  I thought I could feel the lever in my palm, prepared to throw, and pulled out the pin.
            At once I heard a loud ping, the noise of the lever flying away. I had not been holding the lever but had been gripping the ridge on the other side of the grenade.
            I wasted no time, but made the best throw that I had ever made, in exactly the right direction, then ducked down and waited for the explosion, which came four seconds later.
            I stood up, and turned round to look for the sergeant.  He was nowhere in sight, but after about half a minute he emerged, looking rather distressed.
            “Why did you do that, lad?” He asked.
            “I thought I was holding the lever,” I replied.
            That night I had considerable difficulty getting to sleep as I thought of what would have happened if instead of throwing, I had simply dropped the grenade and tried to get out of the way before it exploded.
            On the third night of that three day exercise my platoon were ordered to lie in a field and wait to be attacked by another platoon which would attempt to pass us.
            We had been given a password so that in the dark we could identify each other.
            I think I had the furthest forward position: not through bravery on my part, but more through my stupidity in placing myself there.
            We lay in the dark for quite some time before the ‘enemy’ approached: then I could see sundry figures crouching down and crawling towards us.   One of them crouched down just a foot or so from where I lay.   I had the brilliant idea of obtaining the enemy password, so I called out ‘password,’ and the idiot facing me whispered their password to me.  Now that I knew what it was I realised that there was no way that I could pass it back to my officers, so I lay there brooding about it for a while, when suddenly the ‘enemy‘ soldier spoke.  “You been here long, mate?”
            “A bloody sight too long,” I replied.
            He muttered something in reply, but was quiet after that, as I was.
            Nothing much happened for the remainder of the exercise and I didn’t see anyone else fighting with the ‘enemy’, but after we were ordered to stand down our officer told us that we had been a complete shower: particularly the person he had seen having a conversation with the ‘enemy’.   I think my face must have gone bright red with embarrassment then, but as it was still dark, no one could see me.
            Next day we returned to barracks, but not by army truck, but on foot, carrying our rifles and full kit.
            This was to be the ‘Ten Mile Bash’ we had been warned about, in which we had to complete the ten miles to our barracks in two hours, walking and running all the way, and at the end go over the obstacles on an assault course.
            We had been told abut this torture when we first arrived in Maidstone, and I had been dreading it for weeks.   In fact, it wasn’t quite as bad as I had imagined. Each section under the command of a corporal, would walk for a few minutes, then run for a few minutes, then walk again and run again. We managed the ten miles well within two hours, and even the assault course which followed at the end of the ten miles, wasn’t too terribly difficult. All the same, I was glad that we had completed it, and would not have to do it again.
            Gas marks or respirators were part of our kit, though not the masks that we had as civilians, but more elaborate affairs, heavier, and of thicker material.
            Poison gas was not used by either side during the Second World War, though the Italians had used it against the Abyssinians when they conquered their country, but we had to be prepared for its use.   Sometimes on the rifle range we were told to wear our masks whilst firing.  When that happened almost no one hit a target as aiming was almost impossible through the eye holes of a mask.
            As part of our training we had lectures on the danger of poison gas, particularly of the danger of phosgene which had been used with devastating effect during the First World War and tore the lungs of men who had breathed it in, and was usually fatal.
            After one such lecture we were taken to a room, wearing our respirators and were told that a quantity of phosgene had been released in the room.   We were then told to remove our masks, breath in, and then put them back on again.
            I can’t remember what the gas laden air smelt like, but I was frankly terrified, and even with the respirator on again, wondered if I was going to die.
            Of course, there was no danger of that, the quantity of gas released was so minute as not to be any danger to us.
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            One military activity that I particularly hated was guard duty, for it entailed even more intensive boot cleaning and being sure that ones uniform was spotless for the close inspection that preceded the actual guard duty; but even worse than that was the loss of sleep for one was on guard for two hours followed by four hours sleep, then another two hours.  I used to try to get the first shift, for that meant that after the second shift there was still time for a little more sleep before the guard was dismissed.
            At the initial inspection, the smartest guard was made the stick orderly, which meant that he did not have to do any two hour shifts of duty, but was available to take messages when needed, and was also permitted to have a full night’s sleep.
            I thought that I would never be deemed the smartest on guard, but was amazed when on inspection before a guard, I was picked out as the smartest and made stick orderly.
            Even now, nearly seventy years later I am still puzzled by that piece of good luck.  I couldn’t believe that I was really the smartest guardsman, but the guard commander picked me out for that honour.   I can only assume that all members of that guard were equally smart, and that the commander, not finding one any smarter picked me out at random.  I was very grateful.  I was not called on to take any messages, and I did get a good night’s sleep.
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            Our training had been in preparation for our going to Europe and fighting the Germans; but the war didn’t wait for us to finish our training.  In May the Germans surrendered and the European War ended.   
            On VE Day (Victory in Europe Day), there was no training.   I would have liked to go home for the day, but there was no way that I could do that, but like most of my comrades I went into Maidstone instead.
            The town was full of people: soldiers, sailors, airman and civilians, absolutely joyful, singing, shouting, I think there was dancing in the streets. Many of the men, and some of the women appeared to be drunk, but that may have been because of their exuberance.  Yet with all that joy, I felt rather homesick.  I missed my family. 
            After that great day, we continued our training, but now there was a difference.  We realised that there was still an enemy to fight: the Japanese.  I thought that we would probably be sent to fight in Burma, and the idea frightened me enormously.  That fear increased when we were given a talk on what we should do if captured by the Japanese.
            We had been previously told that if captured by the Germans, we should refuse to give any information, apart from our names, rank and numbers.   Now we were told that if captured by the Japanese that would not do.   We should give them all sorts of information, for if we did not, we were liable to be tortured vilely.   That was not a very cheerful prospect.
            Since my call up I had been remarkably healthy, yet soon after VE Day, I became sick.  I felt extremely unwell, and the platoon sergeant took one look at me and told me to report to the medical officer next morning on sick parade.
            I suppose it was intended to discourage soldiers from reporting sick, but sick parade was very early in the morning, before breakfast.   The walking sick had to line up for inspection, and then were marched to the medical office.  That whole activity took over half an hour, and, by the time that I was standing at attention in front of the medical officer I was feeling particularly groggy. 
            I don’t remember what I said to him, but whatever it was, it was enough to make him take my temperature, and when he had done so and inspected the thermometer he said, “You have coryza. You’re not fit for duty at present.  Get your kit.  You’re going to have some time in bed. 
            I felt terrified.  I had no idea what coryza was, but it sounded dreadful.  Did it mean that I was going to die?  I have since discovered that it is a fancy medical term for a common cold.
            Once I had collected my kit I was sent, not to hospital, but to the Casualty Cleaning Station, which was a sort of miniature military hospital in the camp.
            I was in there for about a week, and soon after our basic training ended, we were moved from Maidstone to another training camp at Shorncliffe, just outside Folkestone
            
                                    CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Shornecliffe Camp was on the coast. It was quite different from the Invicta Lines in Maidstone, which had been near the centre of the town. This camp was on a cliff overlooking the sea, and on a clear day one could just make out the coast of France, which happily was no longer occupied by the Germans.
            Though our basic training had ended, we still had lots of training activities, but, I think, rather more leisure time than in Maidstone. Sometimes we would take a bus into Folkestone, and perhaps go to a dance in the Leas Cliff Hall, where top name bands performed, often including one with which the great blind pianist, George Shearing, played, and there were hundreds of attractive girls to pick up; but not by me, because I was usually too shy to make an approach, though I desperately wanted to.
            Now that the European War had ended and the Japanese War would probably end very soon, authority were concerned that the millions of service men should have some ideas about democracy and what we had been fighting for. To that end, officers of the Education Corps would lecture the troops on civic rights and duties, and booklets on the topics were available entitled British Way and Purpose.  I quite enjoyed those talks and reading the booklets.  I think they were probably an initiative by the new Labour government which had just been elected, to encourage us to think on social democratic lines; though that term was not currant at that time.
            One activity , which we had not experienced in Maidstone or Canterbury, was training in street fighting which would have been necessary if we were still fighting in Europe, but, I suspected was hardly so necessary if we found ourselves fighting the Japanese in the jungles of Burma or Malaya. 
            We were told that had we fought in a street, it was an extremely dangerous activity, as individual buildings would need to be cleared of the enemy who would be sure to defend them with deadly tenacity. The attacker’s technique would be to throw a grenade in through the door before trying to enter, and after that exploded, rush in and take control.  Unfortunately in a real case, the attackers might well have found that the defenders were still alive, having been saved from the explosion by a thick wall or sandbags, and the attackers would still have been met by a hail of bullets.
            There was an area of Folkestone on the sea front which was ideal for this activity because it was full of half destroyed buildings, which had suffered during the war from shelling from German long range guns in France, and this area was where we trained for street fighting.
            Though I would have been terrified if I had to engage in real street fighting, I found the training exercises quite enjoyable.  Sometimes we would be the attackers and sometimes the defenders.
            On one occasion I was one of the defenders. My sergeant placed me upstairs in one of the ruined houses, and told me to fire back with blanks in my rifle if I was attacked.
            I lay in the dirt on the floor facing the hole in the wall that provided the entrance to the room.  After a while I heard the noise of the attackers climbing the stairs.   I waited with some trepidation, for I didn’t think a grenade would appear, but I expected that one of the relatively harmless thunder flashes that we used as grenade substitutes in training, would be thrown through the hole, and though that would not be very dangerous to me, the bang of its explosion could make me temporarily deaf and the flash might damage my eyesight if I had been looking directly at it as it exploded. I had a vague idea that if I was quick enough I could grab the thunder flash as it landed, and throw it back through the hole.
            Nothing of the sort happened.  Instead, blank charges from the attackers’ rifles were discharged through the hole in the wall. 
            Outside I could hear the attackers descending the stairs, and then the voice of their sergeant. “Where do you think you shower are going?”
            “To take another building, Sarge.”
            “No you’re not. You’re dead.  Come out defender.”
            I emerged through the hole with my rifle.  The sergeant smiled at me, then turned to the four attackers.  “He shot you after you fired through that hole.  He was nowhere near your bullets, so you’re dead now.  But you’ll be alive tonight back at the camp when we’re having the four of you peeling potatoes this evening.”
            Soon after that all street fighting training ended because the good people of Folkestone had objected so strongly to the noise and disturbance caused by that activity, that authority had taken notice and forbad it.
            Training continued in other ways, particularly fitness training.  Sometimes we would be sent on cross-country runs, usually out of the camp and down the cliffs to the beach, where, on one occasion we ran straight from the beach and into the sea.  That was quite refreshing after the heat and sweat of running that distance, but it only happened the once, and I think our officers may have been reprimanded for it, as it had meant that our running shorts had been soaked, and, as we had not brought towels with us, there was no way that we could dry ourselves before we were back in the barracks.
            On another training exercise I once again demonstrated my total incompetence as a soldier.   On that exercise we had to dig trenches and then take up defensive positions in them.  That part of the exercise I managed without disgracing myself; but when we were in the trenches, resting after the exertion digging them had entailed, I was taken short, but as I didn’t feel that I should urinate or defecate within the trench that I had helped to dig, I climbed out of it and started to walk towards some bushes which I thought would provide lavatorial cover out of sight of my comrades. 
            As I walked towards the bushes I heard mild explosions coming from the ground around me.   I was puzzled and walked on, until an irate lieutenant shouted at me.
            “You stupid bastard,” he shouted. “You have set off the trip wires that were placed in front of the trench.  Get back in there, and look where you walk so you don’t dislocate any more of them,”
            Shamefaced I returned to my trench.  Suddenly I found that I no longer wanted to pee or shit.
            One of my mates said that I should complain to the company commander about having been called a stupid bastard.
            I did not complain.  I felt that the lieutenant had been totally justified by his remarks.
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            Although we were not yet in action against the Japanese, training itself could be dangerous, particularly when it was performed with stupidity, as had been the case with my grenade incident,  however, I was never actually injured by my own stupid behaviour, though I was in danger from the action of another idiot.
            One soldier in my unit seemed to be an accident waiting to happen. On one occasion when he was number two on a mortar, he had been about to put the mortar bomb in upside down, which, once the firing pin had been activated, would have resulted in the mortar, himself and the soldier firing the mortar being blown up as the bomb exploded.  Fortunately the sergeant in charge, spotted what was happening, and stopped him in time.
            However, on another occasion I was in danger from his stupidity.  This time he was in the firing position of a P.I.A.T mortar,, and I was number two, charged with putting the missile in position. 
            These missiles were projectiles with a spiked front which was intended to explode once it had penetrated the armour of a tank.  We had been warned that they were extremely sensitive, and that on no occasion should we bang them against anything as that could cause them to explode. I had already began to place the missile into its place at the front of the P.I.A.T., when idiot decided that he had not placed the mortar securely in position, and began to jerk it about to secure it to his satisfaction.  This caused it to knock against the missile several times, though fortunately not against the vulnerable spike.  I shouted at him as I realised the danger, and fortunately he stopped without killing either of us.
            Soon after that our training ended, and from then on we were used as enemy for soldiers less advanced as us.
            That was not particularly strenuous, as it did not entail much exercise on our part as we tended to be ordered to sit or lie still as the other troops attacked us.  On one occasion we were lying in a field waiting to be attacked, and in front of us were placed a number of sandbags which were meant to represent troops to be bayoneted by the attackers.
            As they came towards us with bayonets fixed they were led by an enthusiastic young officer who pointed out to them sandbags that they might otherwise have missed.  Unfortunately, one such sandbag was not a sandbag, but one of our unit, who had placed himself a little ahead of the rest of us.
            He got a bayonet in his bum, which led to a period in hospital.  I should have felt sorry for him, but I’m afraid I did not.  He was a bumptious individual and I felt that he had almost deserved it.
            It was now the time of the harvest, and the military authorities decided that the farmers and fruit growers needed help, so we soldiers were driven out to the fields and orchards to help.  We did various tasks.  I quite enjoyed picking fruit, though I did not like the backbreaking job of lifting potatoes.
            When we were driven back to our camp we usually had lots of fruit with us; and, on occasion, particularly when that was pears, fruit would be thrown at cyclists as we drove through the town. I am sure that was not appreciated by the recipients.
            On one occasion on our return, our officer who was sitting in the driver’s cab next to the driver, called us together and berated us for our behaviour.
            “Don’t think I don’t know what you were doing as you drove through the town,” he said. “You were behaving dreadfully.  I could hear quite clearly as you whistled to all the girls you passed.”
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            In our platoon, we now had one Jewish soldier.  I thought him very brave.  I still said my prayers each night, but I didn’t let my comrades see what I was doing.  I thought that had I done so I would have been ridiculed. The Jewish lad had no such fear.   He prayed regularly and publicly in the barrack room, donning a skull cap, a prayer shawl and a set of little boxes containing parts of the Torah.  I admired him for it; however, not everyone admired him.
            I was sitting on my bunk one afternoon reading, when I noticed a commotion at one end of the room.  A group of soldiers were laughing at something.
            I walked across and saw the cause of their mirth.  A tall Czech soldier, who I knew was a fellow Catholic because I had seen him at mass, had decided to mock our Jewish comrade.  He had obtained a shawl and a skull cap from somewhere, and put together what looked like the sacred boxes which he wore on his shoulders; and was speaking some sort of gibberish into a book. 
            I yelled at the Czech and told him that he was not being funny, but disgusting. 
            I think that I startled him, for he stopped spouting gibberish; and put the book down.
            I don’t know what the Jewish lad thought of the incident.  He was not in the barrack room at the time, and it may be that he was unaware that he had been mocked.  He still prayed publicly on the following day.
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            I had managed to make one particular friend in the unit, a lad named Bob, who had a rather better education than me.  He was an old boy of Sevenoaks School, a prestigious public school, and had lived in Italy where his father was manager of an asbestos factory.  He told me that the school had had Italian prisoners of war working in the grounds, and, when the headmaster wanted to speak to them, he had sent Bob.  The prisoners had been startled to find themselves addressed by a teen aged boy in perfect Italian but with a Piedmont accent. The other strange thing about Bob was that he was part gypsy.   His father, the factory manager, was a full blood gypsy. Bob did not look like or sound like a public school boy.  He was rather scruffy.
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            Now that our training had officially ended, we continued to act as enemy to less highly trained soldiers. One night the company were placed in a large field near the coast charged with the task of stopping the ‘enemy’ from passing.  My section was lying on the damp grass looking towards the road from which the enemy was expected to emerge.
            It was uncomfortable and rather boring, and, after about an hour I had difficulty keeping my eyes open; but suddenly I saw a vehicle coming along the road which then stopping at the nearest point to us. 
 
            Someone climbed out and walked into the field and came towards us.  We did not challenge him, he was not one of the enemy but our company commander. 
            He stood looking down at us.  “All right lads.” He said.  “You’ll be pleased to know the war’s ended.  A massive bomb has been dropped on Japan and it’s made them decide that they’ve had enough.  They have surrendered”.        
           
                                    CHAPTER SIXTEEN
            Now we were no longer at war.  It was wonderful.  We wouldn’t get shot at, we wouldn’t get killed.   But we would still be soldiers for quite some time.  The Government had no plans to dismiss us all at once. Nor did it intend to keep us in England. Very soon we were sent on embarkation leave.  Two weeks at home.
            I can’t much remember what I did in those two weeks: went to the pictures more than once I suppose; went up to London with Tommy Perkins who was also on leave; visited my grandparents and other relations, and then the two weeks ended, and I was back at Shorncliffe; waiting for the boat that was to take me somewhere, though I didn’t know where.
            When we knew when we would leave I sent a telegram home: “Off at last” I wrote. When they read it, it upset my mother enormously because it sounded as if I was looking forward to the journey.  In a way I was.
            The first part of our travel  was a lengthy train journey from South East to North West England.   I felt frustrated when we skirted London, so near my home, yet I couldn’t get to it. Finally, at the end of a long day, we arrived at our destination: Liverpool, where we embarked on our troopship, The Mooltan, a ship which I thought was of the British India line, though subsequently I learnt that it was owned by P & O.
            Now it was a troop ship taking us to God knows where, though its ultimate destination was New Zealand for apart from our draft, our fellow passengers were New Zealand soldiers, who having fought the war for years were going home to become civilians again.
            Soon after we were aboard, we set sail.
            We were housed in a large below decks compartment which we shared with some of the New Zealanders.  We were each issued with a hammock which we had to sling from hooks by the ceiling.   At lights out we climbed into the hammocks to sleep.  I had never slept in a hammock before and neither had most of my comrades.  I found climbing into it was quite difficult for the first time I tried to climb up to it, it spun on its side and I was in danger of being thrown down to the deck However, ultimately, I did manage to climb in; and, with a blanket over my body I set about falling asleep, which I did fairly quickly, for I found the hammock much more comfortable than an army bed.
            We were now in the Irish Sea sailing south.  Next day we reached the Bay of Biscay which was as rough as its reputation claimed.   Many of the troops were violently sea sick, but I was pleased that I was not.   However the rough seas affected my metabolism in another way, which was just as unpleasant.  For a couple of days I suffered with extreme diarrhoea, and spent an inordinately length of time in the toilets.
            During the voyage, when I wasn’t eating, sleeping or shitting, I played chess with one of my friends using a pocket chess set.   We played so many games, that after a few days I started to see chess moves in my head, even when I wasn’t playing.  One other activity I undertook was writing a long letter home to my mother, intending to post it when we reached a port.   By the time we did, it ran to about thirty pages, but it was never posted.   I had been writing in pencil and by the time I finished the letter most of the early pages were unreadable because the pressure of the pages above had smeared them so badly that they had become totally unintelligible.
            One of the New Zealanders had a Crown and Anchor board which was used constantly. Most of the players were other New Zealanders, but some of us became interested.  It was a relatively simple gambling game.  Contestants put their bets on one of the six squares of the board.  The banker then threw three dice, and any one with money to bet put it on one of the squares. If that square was shown on the dice when it was thrown, then the gambler’s money was doubled.
            Jim, one of my friends calculated that on each throw one had a fifty percent chance of winning, and that if one bet a small amount and lost, and betted double that amount on the next throw, one had a fair chance of winning.
            He discussed this with Bob and myself, and persuaded us to join together in an enterprise that might break the bank.  We pooled our existing cash; in my case that was about £1.10s , though the other two had rather more than me, and altogether we had about £10 to gamble, and we decided to begin, starting with 3d bets, rising to 6d on the second throw, 1s on the next and 2s  on the one after that.  We thought that we could go up to 16s though that would only be necessary if we had not won on seven throws, which we thought unlikely with the existing odds.  Of course if we had won at 16s our actual profit on those seven gambles would be only 3d,  
            We set to, and, surprisingly Jim’s calculations seemed accurate, and after about half an hour, both Jim and Bob, retired from the game, each having won over £5.  I was up to about £6 at that point and carried on; though the New Zealand banker and his friends were looking daggers at me.
            I increased my initial bet to 6d . However, perhaps it was sleight of hand by the banker, but my winning streak came to a sudden end.  I lot seven times in a row, which as I had started with 6d meant that my last bet was £1.12s. To recover my initial 6d my next bet had to be £3.4s, and if I didn’t win that time I would have to bet £6.8s. Needless to say, I didn’t win that time and ignominiously had to withdraw from the game, having lost all my winnings and also my original stake.
            I don’t think there was any sleight of hand by the banker; but the problem was that Jim’s theory didn’t allow for the fact that if more than one dice hit the same square on any one throw, then the odds ceased to be fifty percent, but considerably less. For the rest of the voyage I returned to playing chess and avoided Crown and Anchor.
            After a few days it we passed Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean Some time after that we passed an island that we were told was the Italian island of Lampadusa. Although it would be possible to continue through the Suez Canal and go on to India or Malaya, I thought that our destination would probably be Egypt, and that proved to be correct.  Our destination was Port Said, though after we disembarked the ship probably passed through the Suez Canal on its way on to New Zealand.
 
                                                CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
            Finally we arrived at Port Said, but didn’t disembark immediately.  Instead, from the decks we were entertained by hundreds of Egyptian traders, operating from small boats alongside, and attempting to sell us local bric-a-brac including handbags and purses containing linocuts of the pyramids, camels, and The Sphinx.  
            I didn’t buy anything, for I had seen such goods before, as many of them had been brought home by returning 8th Army soldiers.
            At last we disembarked and set foot in Africa.  We were packed on a railway line, onto what could have been cattle trucks.  There were no seats, and one had either to sit on the floor or stand.  I chose to stand, though chose is not the correct term, for by the time I boarded my compartment, most of the floor space was already occupied so I had to stand.
            By late afternoon, the train set off on our journey into Egypt.  It was soon dark and there was very little to see.  We rattled out of Port Said, and then across the desert towards the great city of Cairo.  It was a very uncomfortable journey and lasted all through the night.  I think that I did manage to get a little sleep standing up and resting against a wall.
            Just after dawn we arrived at our destination: a dusty train station on the outskirts of Cairo.  There we left the train and clambered on to Studibaker trucks which took us to our final destination, which proved to be a vast tented camp next to the Airport in the suburb of Heliopolis.
            The camp was called The General Base Depot, and was, I think, originally set up to house the artillery. It did contain some buildings, but I chiefly remember hundreds of tents. It was my first experience of living in a tented camp, but I was to repeat that experience in various other tented camps over the next three years. Because of its proximity to the airport, it was a rather noisy place with aircraft landing and taking off all through the day and into the night.  The air traffic was almost all military, I think the airlines had yet to organise flights into Cairo.
            I understand that Heliopolis was built as a garden suburb and catered chiefly to the rich who lived in luxury villas nearby.  That I have learnt since.  Whilst I was there I never saw any luxury villas, or their wealthy denizens.  What I did see when I left the camp was lots of aggressive shoe shine boys, or rather shoe shine men, who would rush up to soldiers and demand to polish their shoes; sometime splashing polish on the shoes before permission was given.  It was all rather frightening.
            I had been warned about such attacks and when I left the camp I took care to be with a crowd of other squadies, so that there was less likelihood of having my shoes blackened without permission..  Apart from the shoe shine vendors, there were other sellers who accosted us and attempted to sell similar items to the ones that I did not buy from the small boat merchants.  
            I was told that there were also people offering the sale of sexual favours by their sisters, but I never experienced that personally.
            The journey into Cairo was by tram, which we boarded at the stop a few hundred yards from the camp.
            We managed to find seats, mine facing the rear of the carriage which gave me a view of the many Egyptians who, in great danger of falling off the tram as it speeded up, hung on to the outside of the carriage by the entrance platform, which was already filled with other standing passengers.
            The tram set off, quickly gathering speed.  I was later told that this was the fastest tram line in the world, which I could easily believe. 
            I didn’t pay much attention to the scenery as we sped along, I was too fascinated by the sight of the people clinging to the sides.  One was a black soldier, dressed in what I thought was a French colonial army uniform.  He was so concerned to hold on tight, that he did not notice the man just behind him who was picking his pocket. That criminal suddenly saw that I was looking at him as he pilfered, and he at once, jumped down from the tram as it gathered speed.  I thought that he would break his leg when he hit the ground, but he did not seem to do so, for I saw him pick himself up and run away from the tram track
            I found the speed of the tram rather exhilarating, and before long we were at our destination in the centre of Cairo. I was very impressed by the look of the city.  I don’t know what I had imagined that I would see, but I had not expected it all to look so modern.  I don’t think that I was aware of the term ‘Third World’, indeed, in late 1945, I doubt if that term had been coined, but certainly Cairo did not appear to be a third world city.  To my untutored eye it seemed to be bustling and prosperous.
            I don’t remember what I did on that first visit, but I think that I ended up with my comrades sitting drinking tea in a forces canteen, which had a name containing the word ‘music’.  I think it may have been called ‘Music at Night’, though on that occasion there was no music: perhaps because it was not yet night.
            In the few weeks that I spent at the General Base Depot, I became quite shocked by the attitude of most of my comrades to the Egyptians.   To the average squaddie, Egyptians were inferior creatures, referred to usually as ‘Wogs.’  No one seemed to be concerned that this was their country, and to them we were unwelcome visitors.  In fact we were an occupying force, and our general behaviour was probably little better than that of German or Italian soldiers would have been if they had been occupying Egypt.
            This was exemplified by the belief that the correct procedure if an army vehicle knocked over an Egyptian pedestrian, would be to check if he or she was still alive, and if the victim was still breathing, reverse the vehicle over him to make sure that he was dead; for an injured Egyptian could make tiresome demands that a dead one could not.
            I think that we were in the General Base Depot for about a month, but I did not often go into Cairo during that time. For some days I was serving another period of Jankers.  One morning when we were on parade, the corporal decided that I had not shaved and put me on a charge.
            My excuse when I appeared before the sentencing officer was that I had shaved, but having mislaid my shaving brush and soap, I had not adequately been able to remove all the short hairs that adorned my chin.  That was perfectly true, but the officer did not believe me and gave me three days jankers.  It was not a particularly dreadful punishment, but it did mean that I had to report several times a day, and that I could not leave the camp.
 
                                    CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
            Finally we were to leave, but this being the British Army, no one told us where we were bound.  Studibaker trucks took us to the same dusty railway station where our train was already waiting for us.
            I dreaded another journey in cattle trucks, but happily authority had taken pity on us, and these were not cattle trucks but relatively comfortable passenger carriages. No one had to stand, and I managed to sit comfortably in a window seat.  We set off and were soon out of Cairo, and rumbling through the Egyptian countryside, so I said to my comrades, “Well, now we are leaving Africa.” 
            One of my comrades replied. “What are you talking about, you Wally?  We aint been in Africa.  We’ve been in Egypt.”
            I didn’t fancy a long argument, so I did not point out that Egypt is part of the continent of Africa.
            Fairly soon all signs of human occupation ceased and we were travelling through desert scenery.   It was fairly featureless and didn’t hold my interest for long and I was soon asleep.
            Next morning I awoke to a scene that looked rather like my beloved England.  The train was passing through scenery as green as the English countryside with fruit trees everywhere; but the fruit was not English apples but oranges.  We were in Palestine.
            Later that day, we arrived at our destination: the port city of Haifa We disembarked from the train and were taken to a transit camp, where we were to remain for a few days.
            I have no clear memories of our stay in that camp, apart from the fact that I found sleep very difficult as my bed had no mattress, but just a blanket placed over a base of several strips of a metallic material that seemed to cut into my back as I tried to sleep: but soon that nocturnal purgatory was to end when the fleet of large Indian Army Service Corp trucks arrived that were to take us on to our next destination.
            The trucks had no side benches for passengers, but instead the floors were covered by straw mattresses on which we were expected to lay for the transit. 
            For once we were not packed into each vehicle, and there were so few of us on each truck that we had room to settle ourselves relatively comfortably on the mattresses as the trucks set off, to leave Haifa and the camp and began the journey towards the border with Jordan, or as it was then called, Transjordan, and which, like Palestine, had the status of a mandated territory. 
            In those days the British Empire had colonies, protectorates and mandated territories: the latter being territories held under League of Nations mandate which had been previously German or, as in this case, Turkish possessions.
            The Palestine countryside through which we passed continued to be cultivated and green, but as we approached Transjordan there was less cultivation and the scenery became
rather barren. Then the trucks crossed a rather miserable looking stream.  It was the River Jordan.
            We now seemed to be climbing into hill country, and I was quite amazed to read a roadside sign that indicated that we were now at sea level. I could only assume that for the first part of our journey from Haifa, we must have descended at some point below sea level.
            Finally we arrived at our first destination, the large Transjordan transit camp, Mafraq. There we met for the first time members of the Transjordan Frontier Force.  Their distinguishing characteristic was their headgear, fur hats which to me, made them look rather like Cossacks.  We were to spend the night at Mafraq, and we learnt what our final destination was to be; Baghdad.
            Some of us played a football game against the Transjordan Frontier Force, though I don’t think that I was in the team.  We repaired to tents where we spent the night, and the next morning we were back on the trucks, and speeding towards our next destination.
            By now we were travelling through relatively featureless desert in which the only break in the monotony was the occasional herd of camels that we passed.
            I spent part of my time talking to my friend Bob, and planning the holiday that we would take after we were demobbed, a journey by moped round Britain.  I think that it was chiefly my idea, though I had never owned nor ridden a moped at that time.  Of course, that journey never happened.  By the time I was demobbed I had lost touch with Bob, and, in any case, before we lost touch, our friendship had waned considerably.
            At late afternoon we trundled into our stop for the night: the transit camp at H7, which was the site of a pumping station on the oil pipeline that carried oil from Iraq and Persia to the coast.
            We had another night stop, at another transit camp on another oil pumping station, though having left Transjordan, this one was in Iraq; then next day we drove unto the transit camp on the outskirts of Baghdad.
            There we learnt that we were no longer privates in the Royal West Kent Regiment, but had become Fusiliers as members of the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers which was stationed near the Persian border.
            I think that we spent a week or so in Baghdad, which didn’t  impress me much.  I much preferred Cairo which had been more open to us.  Large sections of Baghdad were out of bounds to British troops.
            However, I didn’t suffer any jankers sentences whilst I was there, despite the fact that we had to attend too many parades which were presided over by the transit camp regimental sergeant major,  a small fierce individual known unofficially to camp denizens as Twinkle Toes.
            Despite my habitual scruffiness, he never picked on me, unlike the poor corporal who he stood behind on one parade and said, “Am I hurting you corporal?”
            “No Sir.” replied the corporal.
            “Well, I bloody well should be.  I’m standing on your hair.  Get it cut.”
 
                        CHAPTER NINETEEN
            Then came the time to leave and join our battalion.  I think the journey to our camp outside Khanaqin near the border with Iran was by train, though the last part after we reached Khanaqin, must have been by truck.
            Khanaqin was a dusty little town in Southern Kurdistan, of mud coloured buildings lying on both sides of the Alwand River, with a population made up largely of Kurds. I don’t think it has changed much since then because I looked at some pictures of the place taken a couple of years ago on Wikipedia and it looked exactly the same.
             Pretty well the only time that I saw it in daylight was on Monday morning when we went to mass.  There was no Catholic chaplain at our camp, so the priest would say mass on Sunday in Baghdad then come to Khanaqin to say mass for us on the following day.
            During mass hymns, were accompanied by a harmonium, played, by a Greek Cypriot soldier.  The only time that we sang with any enthusiasm was at the Christmas mass, which was probably held on Boxing Day. 
            Apart from mass attendance in daylight, we tended to see the town at night after a visit to the NAAFI just outside the town, when we would look at the open shops selling local bric-a-brac, chiefly locally made jewellery.  I looked, but never bought any items there.
            Our camp, was beyond the NAAFI, but within easy walking distance of the town. Next to our battalion were the camps of two or three Indian battalions because we were part of the 4th Indian Infantry Division.  Perhaps as a relic of the Indian mutiny in which Indian soldiers attacked British soldiers and civilians, each Indian brigade had one British battalion to provide a sort of safety screen in the event of another mutiny.
            The 8th Battalion was the 1st City of London Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and had been part of the territorial army before the war.  During the war it had fought in Italy before being transferred to Iraq as part of what was called Piaforce (The Persian and Iraqi command),  though by the time that we got there, all our troops had left Persia, and we were part of Iraq Command, where to compensate us for our hardship in serving in such an out of the way theatre, we all received an extra 11p in our pay.
            When we first arrived at the camp we were allocated tents and told that we were now members of Z Company, and, as soon as we had stowed our gear we were ordered into PE kit and sent out for a session of PE. That lasted about an hour, and at the end of it, the PE Sergeant ordered us all to run once round the track.
            We ran and I managed to finish first and was told by the sergeant that I had to run  the 440 yard race in the company sport meeting that afternoon.   I had never run a quarter mile, but I had the idea that it was rather a punishing race, and that the half mile, though twice as long, was not quite so tiring, so I asked the sergeant if I could run in the 880 instead.   He agreed.
            Back in my tent I asked if anyone had any idea how one should run a half mile.  One chap said that the best way was to run in the middle of the pack for about three quarters of the distance and then sprint to the front and really belt for the finishing line.
            That afternoon the company sport meeting was held.  I was very nervous when I lined up at the start, but I need not have been.  The advice that I had been given was correct.  I had no difficulty running with the others for three quarters of the way, and when I made the final sprint, no one followed me and I won the race.
            “Well done lad,” said the Lieutenant Quarter Master, who was the officer in charge of the meeting. “If you do as well next week in the Battalion Sports you have a good chance of becoming the Battalion half mile champion.”
            I was horrified.  No one had told me that I would have to run again in the Battalion Sports.
            However, when that dreaded day arrived, I did run in the 880 again, and once again I won the race, with a time of 2 minutes 26 seconds, so I was now the battalion champion at that distance. 
            But, I was not allowed to rest on my laurels.  I was told that fairly soon would follow the brigade sports, and there at that distance there would be a relay race.   We would have a team of four 880 runners, with me, as the champion, running the last stage. Our opponents would be the teams from the Indian army battalions. 
            I prayed that my three colleagues would run so well that when I took the baton we would be so far ahead of the Indians that I would have no problem keeping the lead.  It was not to be.   I was horrified when I saw that our first runner managed to finish behind the Indians; our second runner could not do any better and neither could our third.  When I took the baton we were well behind all the Indian runners.  Clearly I could not hope to win by just keeping up with the pack for three quarters of the way and then sprinting to the finish.  I had to catch the pack first.  That I could not do.   By the time I had run half my race, I was still behind the others, and when I at last I got to the finish I was even further behind.
            That was not the end of my athletic activities.  We were to send a team to the command sports in Baghdad, and, of course I was in the 880 yard race,
            We went by road, a journey that took most of the day along very dusty roads and passing through dusty villages.   At one point the road seemed to end at a river, but we didn’t stop.  I was horrified to find that the trucks carried on and descended into the stream.   I thought that we would drown as there didn’t seem to be a bridge in sight, but I was wrong about that.   We proceeded across the river to the other side, up to our wheel hubs in water.  We had been using the famous Irish Bridge, constructed by the Royal Engineers below the water level.   This was a river that was prone to flooding, but by putting the bridge just under the water, in the event of a flood, the bridge would not be swept away in the raging current.  It was all rather clever.
            When we got to Baghdad and the sports meeting, I did not win my race.  Indeed I had difficulty completing the two laps that 880 yards entailed, as I was suffering from a bout of diarrhoea  as was a colleague who was completing a three mile race.  He actually managed to complete the twelve laps that that distance entailed, but the look of distress on his face as he ran on the last couple of laps made an agonising picture.  .
            We quickly settled down to being Fusiliers rather than privates, and found that despite being paid hardship money it wasn’t too bad a posting. There wasn’t much to do outside the camp but there was a large NAAFI just before Khanaqin, where British soldiers could drink and eat.   Indian soldiers could not, they had their own Indian NAAFI nearby, but the Gurkha, soldiers from Nepal, were not classed as Indians and could eat and drink with us.
            We had another smaller NAAFI next to the company mess tent, where the items on sale tended to be unfamiliar to me; particularly the bottled beer, which was Canadian.
            One regular activity was the Saturday morning Battalion parade, when we were all marched out to the parade ground after breakfast and inspected by the commanding officer, the adjutant and the regimental sergeant major, whose name we quickly learned, for the commanding officer would call out ‘Mr Belson’ and Regimental Sergeant Major Belson would march up to him.  Of course we lowly fusiliers could not call him Mr Belson. By us he was addressed as ‘Sir.’
            Apart from that parade, another week end activity was a cross country race run by the entire battalion of nearly one thousand men.   That entailed running from the camp through a wadi and then up a slope to a hill top ridge; running along the ridge for some distance, and then running down, crossing the wadi again and then running back to camp. I did not find the activity too strenuous, and finished the first time, I think around one hundred and fiftieth, which was not too disgraceful.
            This activity continued for several week ends until following a day in which we had to run through heavy rain, so many people reported sick next morning, that the commanding officer decided, that the weekly race was not a particularly good idea so the practice ceased.       
            We had been told that Iraq was a country that became almost unbearably hot in midsummer, but this was not midsummer, but the depth of winter when it could be quite cold at night.  As our tents could not keep out the cold, we were all issued with extra blankets, I have a vague memory of sleeping under five blankets, which certainly kept out the cold, though made the bedding so heavy that sleep was not all that easy.
            One task that I disliked even more than I had disliked it in Kent, was guard duty.   In Karnaqin those on guard did not stand at the camp entrance, but had to patrol the camp perimeter about two thirds of which was along open country, and the other third alongside the adjacent Indian battalion’s camp. 
            That section seemed to be mildly hazardous, for we and the Indian sentries had been ordered to challenge any one who approached us, and if we did not get a satisfactory answer, fire a round at the approacher.  On no occasion did anyone approach whilst I was on guard, but someone must have approached the Indian perimeter, for I suddenly heard the Indian accented, “Halt, who goes there?” 
            The intruder did not answer, but instead ran away.  That was not surprising because the Indian sentry had already fired his rifle though without hitting him.   However the rifle shot had come before the vocal challenge, not after it.
            I was very worried that seeing me patrolling the perimeter the hasty Indian sentry might have shot me, mistaking me for an intruder.
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            I never completely got over living thousands of miles from home, but in time life on the Persian border began to take on an air of normality.  Most of our time was spent in training and exercising.  In the evenings unless we were on guard, our time was very much our own. 
            I remember that one night I was forced to fight one of my comrades; a member of my platoon who in England had introduced me to his girl. He missed her dreadfully and conceived the idea that I thought that he was not worthy of her.  Nothing could be further from the truth because I thought she was not particularly attractive, and totally suited to him for he was a rather boring individual.
            His mistaken belief led to a shouting match and to his challenging me to a fight.  I did not want to fight him, or anyone else for that matter, but the challenge had been made publicly, and unless I accepted it, I would be considered a wimp. 
            We fought in the open, and were fairly evenly matched and I thought it would continue until one of us was really injured, which could quite well have been me, so when one of his blows landed on my shoulder   I took the opportunity of falling down and lay on the ground as if he had knocked me out. 
            That startled him, and he did not attack me again when, after a few seconds I climbed feebly to my feet,  staggering a little.  It was my first attempt at acting, and was successful for at that point the fight ended.
            Very soon Christmas was upon us: my first Christmas away from home since I had joined the army.
            It was not a spectacularly joyous occasion, though the cookhouse did manage to produce a semblance of a traditional Christmas dinner, including, I think turkey and Christmas pudding.
            Unless we were on guard we did not have any duties on that day, nor on Boxing Day. One feature was that according to hallowed army tradition, the other ranks were served at their meals by the officers which we other ranks enjoyed, though I suspect that the only officers doing the serving were the subalterns.  I don’t remember seeing the company commander amongst the servers, and certainly not the commanding officer.
            Some soldiers had too much to drink, but at eighteen I was still relatively abstemious and I don’t think I had more than one glass of beer.  Beer was all that other ranks could drink, as our NAAFI did not provide us with spirits.
            The large NAAFI outside the camp had an auditorium with a stage, where entertainment was sometimes provided.
            Shortly after Christmas a professional theatre company arrived and put on a free performance of the comedy thriller: Arsenic and Old Lace. I went to see it.   I rather think it was the first professional play that I had ever seen and I enjoyed it enormously. A few days before the performance we had been invited to submit photos of girl friends or female relations for a beauty competition.    I had submitted a photograph of my sister Ruby, and after the performance the winner was announced.  It was Ruby’s picture, and I had to go on the stage to collect my prize from one of the young actresses.   I can’t remember what the prize was, but I think the actress kissed me as she gave it to me.
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            Sometime after Christmas a notice appeared on the Z Company board inviting applicants for two weeks leave in Beirut.  I knew nothing of Beirut apart from the fact that it was on the Mediterranean coast, but I thought that two weeks there would be a lot more pleasant than two weeks in dusty isolated Khanaqin, so I applied.  I didn’t expect to get the leave as I had only been in Iraq a few months, but to my delight and surprise I was accepted; and shortly after that, with one other fusilier, I was on my way to Beirut by way of Baghdad.
            Our journey from Baghdad was again in Indian Army trucks, with no seats but straw mattresses in the back on which we lounged.
            Our first stop from Baghdad was at a transit camp on the oil pipe line.  We were the only people arriving in the camp, and the camp commander, a captain, was so pleased to see us that he let us eat in the officers’ mess. 
            On our journey through the desert towards Palestine, we stopped at times.   On one such stop, as I desperately needed to piss, I leapt from the truck, produced my penis and began to pee; but just as the flow started, the truck started to move again.  It had only stopped because some camels had been crossing the track. I managed to stop the flow, quickly put my penis back, and rushed to board the truck whilst it was still moving fairly slowly.  Fortunately a couple of my comrades put their arms out for me to grab, and helped me back on board, though they and others who had seen my plight were laughing so much, that it was a miracle that they did not pee themselves.
            After a couple more days travel, we reached the transit camp in Haifa. There we spent the night, were given Lebanese currency and set off next day for Lebanon and Beirut, where we were to be housed in a camp just outside Beirut and near the airport.
            I liked Beirut and the Lebanon.  It seemed a very civilised place.   The language in the shops tended to be French, for Lebanon had been a French mandated territory after the first world war, though the bulk of the population were native Arabic speakers.  Happily, though I knew neither French nor Arabic, I found that I could get by because English was widely spoken in the city.
            The city was packed with British troops, some of them, like me, on leave, but the bulk of them serving in units in the Lebanon. Each day, I and the other fusilier would get up, have breakfast, then using army transport go into Beirut for the day.   We usually made for the large NAAFI in one of the central squares, sat for a while at a large window looking out on the square, and then decided what to do for the rest of the day.
            I was content most of the time to simply take in the atmosphere of the place.  It was urbane, and very civilised, and though, I had never been to France it had the atmosphere that I thought I might find in a large provincial French town. However, I was patriotically delighted to find that our technology had found its way to this part of the former French empire, in that all the toilet fittings in the public lavatories were British made.
            My fusilier colleague, who was about my age, and, I suspect, as sexually inexperienced as I was, thought that we should visit a brothel.   I protested that I had no wish to have sex with a prostitute, but he said that neither had he, but, even without using their services, it would be an interesting experience, so one afternoon we entered a brothel on the sea front.
            It was not particularly interesting.  We bought drinks and sat and looked: but there didn’t seem much to look at.   The prostitutes and their customers must have been performing in closed rooms away from the bar.    We drank our drinks, and after a while got up and left.
            Hospitality was offered by local people to British troops.  I write ‘local people’ but I don’t know if any of the hosts were native Lebanese.  I and my fusilier friend were guests of the family of an academic at the American University. Years later when I began reading for a sociology degree, I discovered that my host had been a famous sociologist.   I don’t think I actually met him on my two visits, but I did meet his wife and daughter.   I also went twice to the home of an American Protestant missionary, a delightful man with a delightful wife and a charming young son, who, unlike his parents spoke fluent Arabic and sometimes helped them out when they had trouble communicating with their servants.
            When we arrived at the camp we had been warned that if we were found on the streets of Beirut at night after the last truck had returned to the camp, the military police would detain us and we would be charged and punished.
            One evening we did miss the last truck, and in trepidation set off to walk through the night, out of Beirut and back to the camp.
            We had walked about half of the way when suddenly a military police jeep pulled up beside us.   “Get in,” barked a fierce looking military police sergeant.  We climbed on board wondering what dreadful punishment we would suffer.
            We need not have worried.  The sergeant and the corporal driver, carried us back to our camp, wished us good night, and left us to go to bed.
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            One of the attractions of holiday in the Lebanon was the possibility of skiing in the mountains.   Indeed the British Army School of Skiing was there.  Unfortunately, when we arrived in Beirut,  intense snowfall had meant that the ski resorts were closed to new visitors. Happily the situation improved and the resorts were open again, so my companion and I managed to book a trip up to a resort hotel and a days skiing.
            The coach taking us there left from central Beirut quite early in the day, which meant that we would need to catch the first truck out of the camp that morning.   Alas! We both overslept, and by the time we left the camp, we were too late to catch the coach.
            We still had our tickets for the resort, but no coach to get us there.   In some desperation we boarded a bus to take us to Tripoli, the nearest coastal town to the mountain. In Tripoli, we made for the transit camp in the hope that from there we could cadge a lift up the mountain.   We were unsuccessful and were told that despite reports to the contrary, The Army School of Skiing could not be reached because of excessive snow.
            Sadly, we made our way back to the centre of the town, intending to find a bus that would take us back to Beirut. We did not see a bus, but a taxi driver asked where we wanted to go.  “Could you take us up to the ski hotel?” we asked.
            He could, and did, though just like Iraqi taxi drivers, he took on a couple of other passengers on the way up.
            The hotel was above the snow line, but the road to it was still passable. They seemed rather surprised to see us, but accepted our tour documents and had a room ready for us.  The other members of the skiing party, who were all officers, were out on the slopes, and we did not see them until supper.
            Next morning, after breakfast, we were provided with skis and sent out on the slopes without any instruction, where we did what we could until lunch time.  I managed to stay upright, though I learnt that despite what I had been told, it was possible to slide backwards on skis; though I did not slide all the way down the mountain.
            After lunch we all packed into the coach and set off down the mountain and then back to Beirut.  It had been an interesting excursion.
            That holiday in Lebanon had been a very welcome break, and I had quite happy memories of it when I returned to Khanaqin.
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            We continued our training, and in particular rifle practice.   We were told that a team was to be picked for a command rifle competition in Baghdad, and in order to select the team our prowess with rifles would be measured.  We had numerous rifle shoots at the butts, which were outside the camp, and I seemed to be doing rather well and thought that I might make the shooting team.  However, on the final shoot at the butts, I managed to slip on muddy ground, and got my uniform muddy, and also my rifle, which became so encased in sticky mud that I could not use it for the final shoot and had to clean it thoroughly.  That meant that my final score was not enough, though it was enough to get me to Baghdad as first reserve.
            I was quite pleased about that, as it meant that I would almost certainly not have to use my rifle and clean the barrel again.
            In Baghdad we did not go to the transit camp, but to another camp on the outskirts of the city, which was to be home of the battalion when it moved from Khanaqin.
            As first reserve to the team I had almost nothing to do, which did not bother me very much.   I think I went with the team to the shooting competition, though once there I was never called upon to shoot.  Instead I hung around with the others not in the team such as the drivers.  
            At that time I could not drive, and one of  the drivers decided to teach me, which, I suspect, was totally against army regulations.  He drove a 15 hundred weight truck, and sat me in it and explained the controls to me.   He then suggested that I try driving it forward, which I did for a few yards.  He then told me to put it in reverse and drive it backwards, which I also did.
            At that point he decided that teaching me was not a particularly good idea, as it was possible that I would drive into one of the other vehicles parked close by, and told me to get out of the truck which I did.  That was as far as my unofficial driving lesson went, and it was not repeated.  In fact I did not learn to drive for nearly twenty years, but as a civilian, and not sneaking a lesson unofficially on an army truck, but having paid for lessons to the British School of Motoring.
            I don’t remember how well our team did in the competition, which lasted, I think, for a week or so; but when it was over, we did not return to Khanaqin, but remained at the camp and helped get it ready for the arrival of our battalion.
 
                                    CHAPTER 20
When our battalion arrived at the camp I rejoined Z Company.
            In  this camp we would be rather more comfortable than we were in Khanaqin, for we were no longer housed in tents, but in huts.
            It was quite easy to get into Baghdad as it was within easy walking distance. Just outside the camp was a rather pleasant NAAFI establishment where we could obtain refreshments.  It was occupying a house, which may have been the home of a middle class Baghdadian before the forces took over the building. From there we were soon in the dusty outskirts of the city, and, having crossed a bridge over the Tigris one entered an area containing many stalls selling bric-a-brac to any soldier with more money than sense. More money than sense that is if one paid the price that the stall holder asked.   The correct procedure was to haggle and pay rather less.  I hated the practice.  I never wanted to haggle, so consequently I never bought anything at those stalls.
            Other soldiers seemed to enjoy haggling.  I was with my friend Bob, when a stall holder attempted to sell an allegedly silver piece of jewellery.   Bob talked him down to a price that was only about a quarter of what he had asked at the start: then when he seemed prepared to reduce the price even lower, Bob suggested that it could not be that good an item if the seller was willing to take almost nothing for it. At that point the man raised to price again to about half what he had originally asked.
            He seemed rather annoyed when we walked away without having bought it, or anything else from him.
            Other vendors sold picture postcards, none of which I bought, though I was tempted to by one of the photos of the extremely glamorous wife of the Shah of Persia, that were on sale at several stalls.     
            I soon decided that though Baghdad did not have the Westernised sophistication of Cairo, it was more attractive in various ways, in particular the haggling with the stall holders, but also the sight of the porters, walking the streets and carrying goods from here to there.  Some of the goods seemed almost too heavy for their slender frames.  On once occasion I saw a man carrying, what looked like a large wardrobe on his back. He was tottering along with it, bent forward, and going quite speedily.  I suspected that if he had stopped before he reached his destination, he would not have been able to continue.
            There were many cafés in the streets which soldiers did not patronise as they seemed to be for locals only.   The clientele were always male, some of them sitting at tables and playing backgammon, a game that I had yet to learn to play.
            There were several cinemas in the city that showed Western films, which we patronised when something good was available.  I think I saw Gaslight in one of them.   The films lasted longer than we expected, because at the end of the reel, there was a pause whilst the operator removed it and placed the next reel in position.   During the pause lights would go on in the auditorium, and vendors would noisily advertised their wares.   I remember the shouting of “American mastica,” which I think was chewing gum. And “Coffee Halem”.  
            During English language films, the only kind that we watched, a side screen would have the dialogue in Arabic projected on to it, so that the locals should understand what was going on.
            As it would be quite late when a film ended, sometimes we would take a taxi back to the camp, but that might entail extra stops on the way as the taxi driver took on more passengers to increase his profits.
            Most of the city was out of bounds to soldiers, but Catholics could enter the out of bounds area on Sundays to go to mass at the cathedral that was well into that area.  To get to it we had to walk along sinister looking narrow streets in which the passers by looked, to me, extremely unfriendly.  All the same I thought the experience was very interesting, and one afternoon I persuaded my friend Bob, to come with me to the cathedral.
            It was a rather foolish exercise, for apart from the danger of our being arrested by the military police, the area was out of bounds for the very good reason that the military authorities believed that soldiers were in danger from the local populace if they entered the area.  Happily nothing untoward happened to Bob or to me on that occasion.
            Sometimes duty took us away from Baghdad, in particular to the large military camp on the shores of Lake Habbaniyah, where I was sent on one occasion as part of an escort for a vehicle taking something, perhaps pay for the troops, to that camp.
            The sight of the Lake was very interesting, particularly as on its water close to the shore rested a large flying boat.  It was one of the Empire class flying boats of Imperial Airways which used the Lake as a place to refuel on its flight further south to Australia or South Africa.
            On that occasion I had my first taste of curry which was given me on a slice of Indian bread by a grinning Indian sergeant cook.  I think his grin could have been in anticipation of my response to the food.   It was so hot that I had difficulty not spitting it out. I never thought that as a civilian I would one day enjoy eating curry.
            Subsequently Z Company was sent on a training exercise to the Lake, but shortly after we arrived I felt very sick.  The doctor was still back in Baghdad, but a medical orderly took my temperature, found that it was extremely high, and arranged that I be sent back to Baghdad to see the doctor. 
            I was bundled on to the back of a 15 hundredweight truck, and the driver ordered to get me there as quickly as possible which made for a very uncomfortable ride so that by the time that we reached Baghdad I was feeling even more ill than when we had started.
            I was examined by the doctor, who wrote something on a piece of paper which he handed to me and said, “I am sending you straight into hospital.  Don’t let them operate.”
            I was frankly terrified.  I looked at the piece of paper but could not read the doctor’s writing.  What dreadful tropical disease had I succumbed to?
            I was driven tot the Indian Army Hospital, where I handed the piece of paper to an Indian doctor. He looked at it and said, “Ah, yes. Tonsillitis,” and sent me to bed.
            I spent about a week in that hospital, being awakened at the crack of dawn each day for medication; but they did not attempt to operate, though as a lowly fusilier, I don’t think I would have been able to stop them if they had wanted to do so. But I was desperate to get back to camp because there had been a rumour that the battalion was going to be sent back to England to take part in the victory parade, and I thought that if I was still in hospital I would miss that event.
            I need not have worried.  The battalion was still in Baghdad when I was discharged, but we did not return to Britain for the victory parade, though we were soon to move from Iraq.
 
                                    CHAPTER 21
The rumour that our destination was England was still spreading when few weeks later the Battalion moved out of Baghdad.  Perhaps the officers knew where we were going, but we lowly under ranks certainly did not. I think we may have been one of the last British units in Iraq until fifty-seven years later when, in 2003, British troops returned during the Second Gulf War.
            Our journey was along the oil pipe line to Haifa, though we did not travel on straw mattresses in Indian Army trucks, but in the battalion’s own vehicles which were nothing like as comfortable.
            I don’t think we used the same transit camps as they were probably not large enough to cope with a whole battalion of visitors.  Instead we slept uncomfortably in bivouacs, or under the back of our trucks. I think that we were three days on the road, and I, for one, was quite glad when we reached Haifa and set up camp outside the city close to the shore.
            I think that my mother was horrified when she learnt that we were in Palestine, which was still governed as a mandated territory by Britain.  Israeli activists sometimes attacked British troops, and in July of that year a bomb had wrecked the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine, and the British Military Headquarters. The following year British troops all left when the state of Israel was established and the Arab-Israeli war began.
            However none of that seemed to effect us, and we were only in Palestine for a relatively short period. For us, after dusty Baghdad, Haifa seemed to be the peak of superlative civilised comfort.  The largely Jewish city had clean streets with modern buildings and lots of decent cafés and restaurants where we dined inexpensively and well several times whilst we were there. Despite the dangers that my mother feared, we could go pretty well everywhere in the Jewish areas, though the Arab quarter was out of bounds to troops.           
            From Haifa I was able to go on a trip to Nazareth where we were taken to what was said to be the home of the holy family, which was beside a Catholic Church.  What we saw was little more than a cave, and the monk who showed us round was rather sceptical and said that it probably was not really the home. Probably he was right; and yet, as I stood there with my comrades I had an intense feeling that this really was a holy, special place.
            I think we were about two weeks in Haifa until we were moved again.
            This time we went to the docks and boarded a troopship.  It was a Canadian ship called, I think, The Princess Kathleen.  It may have been owned by Canadian Pacific, and, in pre war days had been used to ferry passengers from Vancouver to Vancouver Island.
 
                                                CHAPTER 22
            Because it was relatively small it was clear that the ship was not going to carry us back to England.  In fact it took us to Piraeus, the port for the Greek capital, Athens, which did not look very attractive when we arrived.  Perhaps because of the war that had recently ended, the port looked rather shabby and dilapidated as did the open railway trucks on which we were packed after we disembarked.
            We sat, getting very wet in the stationary train for some time, until finally it began to move. It took us out of Piraeus to a transit camp on the outskirts of Athens where we were to stay for a short while until a more permanent camp was ready for us.
            We clambered from the trucks, by now the rain had stopped.  As we stood and waited for orders, I glanced up and saw some distance away a hill top with a ruined temple.  I suddenly realised that I was looking at the Parthenon.
            All at once, the sun began to shine.
            After we had put our kit away we were sent to the dining hall for a meal. 
            The camp had previously been a German barracks, and the walls were decorated by cartoon paintings of buxom Fraulines on skis in an Alpine setting.
            There were no Fraulines in the dining room that day, but there were several attractive girls; for, unusually in a dining room serving lower ranks, food was provided by a waitress service.  We sat down, and our food was brought to us.
            After our meal we were given a talk by one of the officers who told us that the battalion would not be staying long at the transit camp as a new site was being got ready for us.   He also told us that we should try not to accept hospitality from local people, because following the war many Greeks were impoverished and short of food and could not afford to give some of it to English soldiers.
            He also said something about the political situation, that the Greek government was not in control of all of the country, and that Communist rebels in Northern and Central Greece were preventing government supporters and the general public from leading normal life. However, although the rebels had some support in the south it was not strong enough in the Athens area to prevent peace being maintained.
            I don’t know what effect that talk had on my comrades, but it left me feeling rather uncomfortable.
            Fairly quickly the battalion moved to its new home, which was a tented camp at Kovouri, some way along the coast but within easy reach of Athens. After Khanaqin and Baghdad, the camp at Kovouri seemed almost paradise. It was on an attractive wooded peninsula, and, but for the fact that it was by the Aegean Sea could almost have been the wood near Athens of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.
            Within the tented perimeter was at least one small building, a Greek Taverner that had existed prior to the camp and was not pulled down.  It was still in operation and from it I developed a taste for Greek wine, in particular a sweet wine called, I think Mavrodafne, which I would probably loath if I tried to drink it today. On the other hand I disliked Retsina, the resonated wine very popular with Greeks. Yet many years later, on holiday with my family in Greece, I found that I liked it very much.
            I doubt if that Taverner sold Ouzo, the powerful aniseed flavoured aperitif, but if it had there would have probably been few customers, because we understood that any soldier caught drinking Ouzo would be put on a a charge, for it was believed that drinkers could become almost madly drunk.
            Outside the camp were various temporary constructions used by Greeks who lived in them when they left Athens for occasional sea side holiday breaks.
            Near at hand were other units of our infantry brigade, in particular a battalion of the Highland Light Infantry, which seemed to consist chiefly of Glaswegians and Cockney Londoners united by the same love of whisky.
            Just as I had been in Egypt, I was horrified by the attitude of my fellow soldiers to the local population, the citizens of the country that was the cradle of European civilisation.  To the average semi-educated British squadie, the Greeks were clearly inferior.  We, whether, English, Scottish or Welsh were self-evidently members of the master race.
            As soon as we could we went in to Athens, which was then a lively troop filled city, with plenty of bars and other entertainment for soldiers.  There were lots of prostitutes on the streets, and I was occasionally propositioned by them, but as a puritanical young Catholic I was not tempted to lose my virginity.  That was not the case with many of my colleagues, and I was rather shocked by the extent to which so many of them used prostitutes.  That had not seemed to be the case in Baghdad.  Perhaps the Greek prostitutes were more attractive than the Iraqi ones.        
            At our camp our mornings were usually taken up with training which began to be concerned with working for efficiency qualifications.  Some one at the War Office had realised that though soldiers with technical skills could obtain extra pay for them, there was nothing similar for the foot soldier, the P.B.I., who in wars did the actual fighting, so a series of tests were devised to enable privates, or in our case fusiliers, to qualify for extra pay.
            These tests, which included shooting, marching and various physical activities were not terribly difficult, and the only one that I had a problem with was jumping across a trench in full kit.  The first time that I tried that I fell into the trench; however, on my second try I did manage to do it.
            After lunch we were usually free of duties, and most of us spent the afternoons on the beach and in the sea. Inevitably with a sea dip every day I did finally learn to swim. The breakthrough came after I had the courage to open my eyes under water, to discover that it was not painful and that I could see quite well. After that I soon learnt to swim, though I think that at first I swam under water.
            I never learnt to do the crawl, though I could manage a fairly competent breast stroke. I even had the courage to swim out of my depth to a raft that was moored some distance from the shore.  When I first did that, some of my more competent swimming friends were by my side to help me if I got into difficulty, but I did not get into any difficulty, and was soon sunning myself sitting on the raft.
            After about half an hour I realised that I would have to brave the waves again and swim to the shore, so I gingerly lowered myself from the raft, and set out to swim back, though this time without sheltering companions by my side. I made it without difficulty, though I don’t think that I ever again swam to the raft.
            Every Sunday morning, a truck took the Catholic troops to the cathedral in Athens for mass. We soldiers sat to the right of the nave facing a side alter where mass was celebrated for us by a military chaplain who, we later discovered, was a Benedictine monk.   Whilst that was going on the rest of the congregation of local Greeks were following a mass celebrated on the high alter by their own priests.
            I thought the whole arrangement of two masses being celebrated at the same time in the one church was somewhat bizarre, and must have been particularly confusing for any civilian attending mass for the first time in the cathedral. Perhaps it was a relic of a practice established during the occupation with German soldiers rather than British occupying a special section of the nave.
            When mass ended, we did not immediately return to Kovouri, instead we went into a canteen for troops adjacent to the cathedral which was run by British members of the Catholic Women‘s League.   There we would drink, tea, coffee or soft drinks and eat cake or buns for a nominal cost.  The attendants at the counter were not elderly British ladies but young local girls, including a very pretty girl who collected payments tokens saying as she did so, ‘Chits please’.  Her name was Jeanette and she was not Greek but Italian, and I was very attracted to her.
            Some Sundays, after mass, with Greek Catholic civilians, we would be driven to a beach along the coast in the Bay of Salamis, where we would sit or swim, and have a picnic lunch.  The Greek civilians included the delectable Jeanette, and I managed to conquer my shyness and get to know her quite well.  Though not particularly fluent, she knew rather more English than simply ‘chits please’.
            After the beach picnic we would return to Athens and sometimes remain there in the early evening to listen to a talk by one of the chaplains. One, the Benedictine monk, regaled us with an account of how he had become a monk before the war.
            He had tried to join the order, but had been turned down because it was thought that he did not have the stamina to live a monastic life.  To prove them wrong, he decided to walk to Rome by way of France and the Swiss Alps and present himself at the mother house of the order and apply again.  In this he was successful, though he found the Alpine section was rather difficult.
            When he told us this story dressed in his army uniform he looked extremely healthy.  I imagined, that with his build, in his monk habit he might have looked rather like Friar Tuck.
            I, and a Flemish soldier from our battalion named George, managed to persuade Jeanette and her sister to visit us on the beach at Kovouri one afternoon. I think George, who fancied the sister did much of the persuading.
            It was delightful to sit on the beach with two pretty girls, though after a time George went off with the sister on a float, leaving me alone with Jeanette.
            I was wondering if I could kiss Jeanette, but before I could even try such a daring act, I discovered that Jeanette was very worried that her sister was alone with lecherous George. She persuaded me to follow them and make sure that the girl was safe, so reluctantly I took another float and set off to find them.
            I had not gone very far when I met them returning.  There was a happy grin on George’s face, and also a smile on the face of the sister, so if the sexy Belgian had deflowered her she did not seem too upset by it.
            I did not get to kiss Jeanette that afternoon, nor any other time whilst I was in Greece.
            Later my company was sent on a training exercise to Loutraki, a resort on the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth.   I have no recollection of the actual training, but I do remember that in the afternoon some of us went swimming in the sea.
            I was a little later than my friends donning my swimming trunks, and when I was ready, they were in the sea some way away from a jetty.  I wondered why they had not used the jetty, but I ran along it to its end, then jumped in the sea.
            As soon as my feet touched the bottom, I discovered why they were not swimming in that area.  On the bottom were lots of sea urchins and the spines of some of them became embedded in the soles of my feet.
            In considerable pain, I was soon out of the sea, and on shore attempting to remove the painful spines, and with the assistance of some of my friends, managed to get them out fairly quickly; but I did not try swimming again that afternoon.
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            Education was provided in the battalion by a group of education sergeants who also ran the battalion library which was surprisingly extensive.
            I discovered that with study there was an educational qualification that I could obtain: the certificate of the Forces Preliminary Examination which was administered from London by the Civil Service Commissioners. I registered for the examination, and with the assistance of the education sergeants began studying for it.
            It was at the level of matriculation and was in two parts: Part I which were papers in English, Mathematics and General Studies; and Part II which consisted of two papers.  I chose to study History, and Social Science, concentrating on the Ethics paper.
            The time for taking the examination came all too soon, and I spend several days in Army accommodation in Athens whilst sitting the papers in the Command Education Centre.
As I had only been studying for a few months, I was afraid that, particularly in mathematics I was not going to pass.  I was right.  I passed all the other papers, but failed mathematics, which mean that I was awarded a certificate for Part II, but not for Part I. I would have to take that Part again in the following year including again the English and General Studies papers which I had passed.
            However despite my failure in mathematics I had impressed one of the battalion education sergeants who suggested that I should apply for a course to become an education sergeant.   The idea did appeal to me, but I decided that having only received an elementary education and having left school at fourteen I had best not apply.
            The brigadier decided that in the interests of efficiency there should be competition between the three infantry battalions in the brigade in various aspects of military work. I became involved in one such aspect.  The medical sections in each battalion were to compete and I was drafted in as a trainee stretcher-bearer.  I began a course on first aid, and in particular on stretcher bearing, though, oddly enough, I have no memory of actually having to carry a stretcher. It was all quite interesting, though I thought rather pointless. I think when it came to the competition, our team did not come first out of the three.
            At about this time Greece was preparing for its first general election since the war. The Communist Party was still legal, and its supporters were very vocal in the streets of Athens with their shouts of “Kappa, Kappa, Epsilon, Kooko, Kooko, Ai.”  The Communist Party of Greece had the initials KKE.
            However, despite those slogans, the Communists did very badly in the elections in Athens and the South, and right wing parties won the election and formed the government.
            After the election a plebiscite was held to determine whether the king would be allowed to be head of state.  During that period all British troops were confined to barracks, and, as it was thought that there could be violence our security was tightened, and medical personnel were made ready.
            I had to stand by as a stretcher bearer, though I don’t think any other bearers were told to stand by, so I don’t know what I was expected to do if I was called into action. Carry a stretcher with a casualty by myself? Stretchers were usually carried by four men.
            Happily there was no violence and medical personnel were allowed to stand down.
            At the Army Education Centre classes were held in Greek Language and I signed up for them. I learnt to read the Greek alphabet in capitals, though not in lower case; and thus I learnt that the soft drink advert that was displayed on hoardings,  did not read “ETAP” but “STAR”. I think that about this time I realised that I am not the world’s most gifted linguist. Almost all that I can remember from those lessons was “Ego emay o thisascalos”, which means “I am a teacher.”  Many years later I did become a teacher and hoped that I could surprise a Greek student with that phrase; but I never had any Greek students.
            Back in England my sister Ruby had become engaged to her boy friend, Archie, and now that he had been demobbed and was working in a plant nursery, the date of their wedding had been fixed for that year.
            I applied for leave on compassionate grounds so that I could attend the wedding; but I was not particularly surprised that my application was not granted so all I could do was wish them well and buy them a wedding present which I purchased from an Athenian shop.  I bought them a rather nice clock to place on a mantelpiece, if they had a mantelpiece when they had a home of their own. I sent it to them by sea mail; I don’t think air mail from Greece to England existed in those days, and they did manage to get it in time for the wedding.
            At about that time the battalion was moved from Kovouri, and transferred to a camp at Alliki, still on the coast, but much nearer to Athens.  The camp had been operating as a leave camp, really a sort of military holiday camp, and as it had buildings rather than tents, it was much more comfortable than Kovouri.  Most of us were quite pleased by the change of site.
                        ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            The powers that be had decided on a new way in which the battalion could be made useful and that was by providing guards for other, mainly technical units, that could not easily guard their own sites.
            When these guard assignments occurred, they were sometimes for seven days at a time. One such duty that I remember was at a REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) depot where tanks and other military vehicles were repaired; the repairs being carried out by German prisoners, who, despite the European War having ended over a year ago, were still being held as prisoners of war. The depot consisted of several large workshops, accommodation for the German prisoners, a large open tank parking space, and watch towers to prevent prisoners escaping.
            Despite my dislike of guard duty, I was not unduly concerned in finding myself on a guard detail, because our numbers were large enough for the detail to be split into two, with one half stood down each day, which meant that on those free days one could rest, or go into Athens and do anything one liked.
            One afternoon, when I was not on actual guard duty I saw a group of fusiliers standing talking to a German prisoner.   I joined the group and was disturbed to find that the German, speaking fairly good English, was explaining to them the virtues of Nazism.  The fusiliers seemed to be behaving as if they agreed with his rubbish.
             I cut in and pointed out what I had learnt of its faults.
            The German argued with me for some time, though none of my comrades supported me, but after a while he said.  “Well, you seem to be better informed than your friends.” He then, surprisingly, shook my hand before returning to his compound.
            Guard duty took us sometimes up into the watch towers.
            One early morning before sunrise, I was on duty alone with a bren gun up the tower that was placed in the German officer compound.
            Being on duty that early meant that I was extremely tired; and, against all military rules I fell asleep.
            Suddenly I was awakened by a loud banging from the base of the watch tower.
            I was horrified.  If I was charged with sleeping on guard duty I could be sentenced to a spell in military prison. Had the guard commander or an officer caught me asleep?
            I called down to the person banging below.
            It was a German prisoner who had some need to be out of the compound and wanted me to telephone the guard room and ask for the compound be unlocked so that he could get out.
            He did not report that I had been asleep so I was not charged with my crime.
            Before the seven days were up I had a visit to the beach as one of the escorts to prisoners who were allowed to go their and swim in the sea.
            My corporal told me to stand at one point on the beach whilst the prisoners were swimming in a designated area.
            The corporal told me that if any prisoner swam beyond the area, I was to shoot him.
            I was horrified.  I had no intention of doing anything of the sort, even though if any prisoner had swum beyond that point and I ignored it I might have been put on another charge.
            In fact some of the prisoners did swim that far, but, the corporal did not notice, and as they all returned no one was the wiser.
            ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            The brigadier was still keen on inter-battalion competitions, and the next one he organised was between the three battalion intelligence sections, and as ours was below strength, I was drafted into it to make up the numbers.
            I rather enjoyed the training that I received for that, which included working with codes, map reading and map copying and various other activities. It was a very small section with just a corporal and three fusiliers, including me.   There was an intelligence officer who also ran the battalion library.  He had his own office, but our office was at the rear of the library.
            Mum was delighted that I was in an intelligence section, and my brother-in-law later told me that she was so proud of it that she constantly boasted to people about her brilliant son.
            When the competition ended, which we did not win, I was able to remain a member of the section, which pleased me enormously as it got me excused from all tiresome company duties. In fact it was really a complete skive. We would sit in the library, chatting or reading books or magazines, but we kept maps and notebooks on our desks so that if anyone of authority came in, we could pretend to be doing something useful.
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Z Company was sent on a mission to the Peloponnese.  It was called, I think, a flag march, and was intended to demonstrate the presence of British forces in an area where there was many dissident Communist groups. The intelligence section was included in the mission, but not the intelligence officer.  Before we left the company commander told us that he was sure that intelligence wise we knew what we had to do.  I did not, and I’m fairly sure neither did our corporal.
            We set off and were fairly soon crossing the Corinth Canal, which had been inoperative since the War, and had still not been cleared of wrecked ships.
            We had our first stop at Corinth; not in the modern town, but at the classical ruins which we were shown around and given a talk about them by one of our knowledgeable officers. I don’t know where we spent that first night, but it was probably in bivouacs.
            We continued into the Peloponnese, and at one point we could certainly have done with better intelligence, though not of the military variety, but of the more useful variety that is usually thought of as common sense; for at one point we were ascending a mountain road, when it was discovered that the road petered out and the company would have to turn back and find some other route.  
            Unfortunately, the road, which was little more than a track on which we found ourselves was so narrow, that the vehicles could not turn found, so instead, all but the drivers were ordered to dismount, and when that was done we watched as the whole convey of vehicles carefully backed down the track until they reached a point at which it was wide enough for them to turn round. That was several hundred yards from the start of the reversal,  and it was a credit to the skill of the drivers that not a single vehicle came off the track during the manoeuvre; though it was no credit to the intelligence and the map reading skill of the officer responsible for the whole debacle.
            We continued on our way, and I found the whole trip extremely interesting. We did not always sleep in bivouacs.  One night we slept in the open on the flat roof of an ouzo distillery.  I think the odours emanating from the distilled ouzo got us to sleep fairly quickly, and made for some very interesting dreams.
            Near the end of our journey we arrived at Olympia, the site of the classical Olympic games.  There wasn’t a lot to see, though what there was to see was explained to us by the knowledgeable officer who had described to us Corinth.
            At hand was a shallow, swift flowing stream and there we bathed before setting off again, but this time to start the return journey to Athens.
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            Soon after we returned to the base, we received unexpected news.  We were told that the battalion was going to be disbanded, and that all personnel would be transferred to other units.
            I had mixed feelings about that.  I was not a natural soldier, and certainly not a natural infantry man, but I had enjoyed being a Royal Fusiliers, had made some friends, and had obtained a very comfortable position as a member of the battalion Intelligent Section. Wherever I was to be sent could be far worst.
            We were giving information of various possible units for transfer and told that we could indicate where we would like to go.  None of them seemed particularly attractive to me, though I did wonder whether the British Military Mission to Saudi Arabia might be interesting, but I didn’t apply for it, neither did I show interest in any other unit.
            When the postings were finally announced I discovered that I was to be transferred to the Claims Commission, whatever that was.
            Before the final break up of the battalion a farewell party was organised at which I drank far too much, and promised to keep in touch with various people, a promise that I never kept. Then the next day I was on my way to the Claims Commission Headquarters in Athens, where I learnt what the work of the Commission was.  It had to investigate claims made against the British Army, and where it found that the claims were valid, pay damages to the injured parties.  It was linked to another army bureau, Hirings, and I was to be sent as a clerk to the Claims and Hirings Office in Salonika.
 
                                    CHAPTER TWENTYTHREE
Because of the activities of the Communist guerillas, it was impossible to travel by road or train to Northern Greece, so my journey to Salonika was to be by sea. It was an overnight trip on a Liberty Ship, one of the mass produced ships produced in America during the war to replace ships lost by U-boat attacks.  They were eminently sea worthy, but very basic, and I remember that there were no port holes in the sleeping quarters which were permanently lit with artificial light.
            I think the trip took about a day and a half, but the sea was quite rough at times, and sitting below, I felt rather sick, so I went on deck to be sea sick.  However, as soon as I got on the open deck, and lent over the side to be sick, the sea breeze removed my sick feeling, so I went below again. As soon as I got below, I fell sick again so went back on deck, and once again the sea breeze did the same trick and the sick feeling went.  However I was sure that if I went below again the nausea would return, so I remained on deck but took shelter behind a wall so that I was no longer subject to the breeze.
            That subterfuge worked, and I was suddenly sick all over the nice clean deck.
            After that with a cleared stomach I was able to go below and sleep.  Next day we arrived in Salonika.
            I thought the city looked very interesting as the ship berthed.  Caiques, Greek trading vessels were moored along the extensive waterfront as far as the eye could see. It seemed to be a fairly narrow city, for beyond the tops of the buildings I could see the adjacent hill tops, which looked quite close.
            This was the second largest city in Greece, with a population running to several thousands.  For a time during the Byzantine Empire it had been the second capital after Constantinople; but for several centuries it had been part of the Ottoman Empire, and had been the birthplace of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic.
            My home for the next few months was to be the Lux Palace Hotel, which had been taken over by the military.  On the top floor were individual bedrooms, one for each soldier, even lowly fusiliers such as me.  On the floor below were the offices of Claims and Hirings, and the sergeants mess.  There was no eating area for other ranks, but we were allowed to eat in the sergeants mess.  There were two sergeants in the Hirings section, though none in Claims, but there was also a unit of the Intelligence Corp in the building with a sergeant major and several other sergeants.
            I arrived with one other fusilier, and learnt that he was to be an orderly and I was to be acting chief clerk, whilst the real chief clerk went on leave to England.
            He was to be away for a month on his LIAP leave.  LIAP stood for Leave in advance of Python, though I never knew what Python was.   I was apprehensive about becoming acting chief clerk, and I also resented the chief clerk’s sojourn in England, for I too was due to have a month’s LIAP,  but that wouldn’t happen until his return, which would be more than a month away, for the voyage to England took over a week, as did the voyage on return.
            My new position, which did not entail any promotion, was not untypical of Army practice in those days, in which totally unqualified individuals could find themselves occupying responsible positions.  The only time that I had previously done clerical work had been the short period when I substituted for the office boy in the leather factory when I had been fourteen.
            The chief clerk left on his leave a few days after I had arrived.  He explained my duties, but told me that Captain Milson, the chief Hirings officer, would explain in greater detail if I had any problems.
            As chief clerk I would supervise the one other fusilier, the orderly who had arrived with me, and a private who was a driver for the unit, and two male civilian Greek clerks, who obviously knew far more about the work that I did. One of the clerks, George, was a very competent young man, the other Basil, was not.
            At that point there was no Claims officer, but the Hirings office had Captain Milson and a lieutenant whose name I have forgotten, two sergeants and a couple of private clerks.  They had several civilian female clerks who were very friendly, though one of them, Mary, told me that although she got on very well with us; generally she did not like British troops who tended to be course and boorish.  Unlike the Indian troops who had been based in Salonika before we arrived. 
            “The Indians were polite and gentlemen,” said Mary.
            “British troops are very different.  They don’t know how to behave in this city.”
            As an example of the sort of thing that Mary disliked I will mention, the Sick Cow stove.
            The mess was heated by a primitive stove that I think had been constructed by REME. It was nicknamed ‘The Sick Cow’.  It stood on four legs and consisted of circular tube, and a funnel that emerged from one end of the tube, and which extended out of a hole in the window.  Above the tube and at the other end was a can containing oil with a tap that could be turned on or off, but when on caused drops of oil to enter the tube. When the oil was ignited the stove generated a reasonable degree of heat.
            However, it was found that if the tap was turned off suddenly whilst the stove was heating, and then turned on again quickly, that would cause a sudden cloud of soot to emerge from the window end of the funnel and fall on Greek pedestrians below who were leaving or about to enter the restaurant.
            It was a splendid trick, which we did far too often, yet we were never punished for such barbarity.
            The Lux Palace hotel was in the heart of the city.  Below it was a very popular restaurant, and along the road were tram lines and the trams seemed always crowded.  We often used the trams, and, perhaps confirming Mary’s view of the British, we never paid any fare.   Often troops would stand beside the driver on his platform, and have great fun, pressing the foot bell so that it would be ringing loudly to the annoyance of the driver as the tram moved along the track.
            Watching people boarding the trams I noticed that the orderly queue was not a feature of Greek urban life.  People waiting to board the trams would not be in a queue but instead would form an amorphous mass which would surge forward when a tram stopped, and then each person would fight the others to get on the tram.  It was not a process that was  good for women, children, or the aged.
            I used to go to a Catholic Church for mass on Sunday, and, although the congregation was chiefly Greek, I felt quite at home, for, in those days, everywhere the mass was in Latin, just as it had been in England.
            There was a NAAFI quite near the hotel, and there I tasted melon for the first time, and liked it very much.  For entertainment; I think that there was a Forces Theatre with occasional professional shows, but more often we would go to the cinema to see American or British Films.  I think it was in Salonika that I first saw Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet. 
            In one of the cinemas, when the lights were turned on one could see Arabic script on the walls.  In the Turkish period, that cinema must have been a mosque.
            One of my tasks before the chief clerk left was to go with the driver to collect tea and refreshments for both offices from another forces’ canteen along the water front.
            Payment was made to an extremely beautiful Greek girl, who took the money, and issued a docket so that I could claim the food and drink.  Her presence made that particular duty quite enjoyable.
            Years later I saw her photograph in a newspaper.  She had been found guilty by the Greek Government of being a Communist agent, supplying information to General Markos and his rebels.  She was sentenced to several years in prison.
            One of the girls in the Hirings office was a girl guide captain.   She set off with a party of guides to attend a rally in Athens, sailing on the regular ferry that sailed between the two ports.
            We had often seen that ship when it was entering Salonika port and when it left for Athens.  It did not look safe and it would often be listing to one side.  We had heard that it was sometimes overloaded when it sailed.  This seems to have been the case on this voyage. The ferry sank in a storm with considerable loss of life, as there had not been enough lifeboats for all the passengers, though the captain managed to get away in one. Our  girl guide captain and many girls in her troop lost their lives in that disaster.
            Understandingly both the civilian and the military staff were very unhappy at the loss.  She had been a very popular girl.
            After the chief clerk left I began my new duties with no clear idea of what I should do, and I waited for Captain Milson to explain them to me. That he did not, but a few days later he came into the office with an officer wearing a kilt.
            “This is Captain Ross, the new claims officer,” he said to me.
            Then he turned to the Scottish officer.  “This is Fusilier Baker, your chief clerk.” He said.  “He will explain everything to you.” He smiled at us both happily, then left for his own office.
            I explained to my new captain that I had only been at the job a few days, and that the real chief clerk was on leave in England.  Now doubt when he returns he can explain it all to us.
            Captain Ross looked rather shocked, but then George, the Greek clerk said that he would try to explain the workings of the office to both of us.
            There were various outstanding cases in the files, that George showed us, many of them concerned with alleged misbehaviour by British troops towards Greek civilians.   Captain Ross and I examined them, and he attempted to make decisions to satisfy the claimants.  Over the next week or so, he closed a few cases: but then we got a message from the head office in Athens asking why so few cases were completed which caused him to panic and within the space of a week he had closed almost all the outstanding cases on our books.
            That lead to another message from Athens.  It seemed that now we had closed far too many cases.  A major from Athens would shortly be in Salonika to sort things out.
            I felt rather sorry for Captain Ross.  He had been pushed into a job for which he had no experience.  He was an infantry officer, and, I imagine had been quite a good officer, but now he had only a few month’s service left to do, and had hoped that this posting would be a cushy number in which he could rest for his final months as a soldier.  Having me as a chief clerk had been no help to him.
            He had one other problem though.  He was a drinker, and sometimes imbibed too heavily during the day.  One day he came into the office after lunch, clearly inebriated.
He was pushing a large tire as he entered, which he bowled across the office onto the paraffin stove which was alight, and toppled over spilling flame onto the floor.
            But for the initiative of George, who swiftly pulled various files away from the flames we would have lost a lot of paper. Someone else put the stove back in position and stamped the flames out on the floor.  By the time that was done, Captain Ross had left the room.
            Some weeks later, one Sunday evening, when all the other soldiers in the unit were out,  I was sitting in an office typing a letter home, when I heard Captains Ross and Milson entering the building.  They had been on a shooting expedition outside the city trying to bag game.
            I heard them come upstairs, and shortly after that Ross shouted, “Baker”, but I did not respond, because from the tone of his voice I suspected that he was drunk. I then heard him making a telephone call, but in a voice so loud that it might have been heard all over the building.
            Quietly I crept past that room and up the stairs to the bedroom floor, where I saw that fire buckets on the landing had been kicked over, I thought by Captain Milson. In my room I undressed and climbed into bed, and lay there whilst reading a copy of The Saturday Evening Post.
            Suddenly I heard a shot, and then another, and another.  Guns were being fired on the floor below.  I did not get up to investigate.
            The shooting went on for several minutes, and then I heard the noise of a jeep drawing up outside the hotel, then the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs from the entrance. It was the military police.
            The shooting continued, and then I heard the footsteps retreating down again.
            There was considerably more shooting until a second military police vehicle arrived carrying an officer, the assistant provost marshal.   He clearly had more courage than the other police because he entered the sergeants’ mess where the shooting was going on and ordered the shooters to stop, which they did.
            Next morning I saw that the mess had been totally shot up by the two drunken captains.  There were holes made by shotgun pellets on all the walls, though not through the windows.  Only the picture of the king on one wall remained untouched.
            The cost of repair must have been considerable, but I never learnt whether the two captains had to pay for that.   Presumably they received some sort of ticking off, but as the Intelligence Corp sergeant-major, who was the senior member of the mess, did not make any complaint, they were not given any further punishment, and shortly after that Ross came to the end of his service and returned to Scotland. Milson, having sobered up, continued in charge of the Hirings office.
            We other ranks were angry at the mild treatment received by those officers.  Had we behaved in that fashion we would probably have spent a long time in a military prison, but of course we were just working-class oiks.  They were officers and gentlemen letting off steam.
            The repercussion of this incident was that shortly afterwards we were all moved out of the Lux Palace Hotel.  Our offices were relocated in the first floor of the building on the waterfront containing the offices of the British Consul-General.  His offices were on the second floor, and we squadies were housed above them in the penthouse on the roof.
            Whilst this all took place the real chief clerk was still on leave in England.  His month’s leave had extended for a rather longer period, for whilst he was there, England suffered the worst winter that it had had for years, and a blanket of snow covered the whole country and transport was almost at a standstill so that there was no way that troops could be moved.  Despite his longer stay on leave, this might have been depressing for him; but it was even more depressing for me, for I would not be able to go on leave until he returned.
            Finally, the snow having been cleared, he returned, was promoted to corporal and took over from me as chief clerk. Now at last I could go on leave.
            My journey began with the short sea voyage between Salonika and Piraeus, and then followed the much longer voyage to Southampton with one stop on the way at Malta.  I did not play crown and anchor or chess on this voyage, and, after about a week I was on the train from Southampton to London, and then on another train home.
            By then all the snow had cleared and the weather was quite good.  I half hoped that there would be another weather disaster which would enable me to spend longer than the statutory month in England, but of course that did not happen.
            I enjoyed being with my family, who made a tremendous fuss of me, and it was pleasant meeting Archie, my new brother-in-law for the first time. Until they obtained a home of their own he and Ruby were sleeping in Ruby’s old room in our house; but it was not an ideal arrangement, and they were busily looking for a cheap flat that they could rent.
            My month of leave seemed to end all too soon, and then I was back on a ship taking me back to Greece.
            When I returned to the office, there wasn’t a lot for me to do, now that the real chief clerk had taken over.   We had a new Claims officer. He was quite an affable individual, and as he did not seem to be a heavy drinker, was not likely to get us turned out of our new offices and quarters: but he soon hit on a solution to the problem of no work for Fusilier Baker.   He decided that I should be his batman.
            I was horrified by that idea, and protested to the captain that I would be dreadful in that job. A batman was an officer’s personal servant, and I had no wish to be anyone’s servant.  However, as I was still under Army discipline, there was nothing that I could do about it, so a batman I became.
            Every morning I had to report to his room in the officers’ residence,  a sea front hotel, and, make his bed, and tidy up his room.  I had no other duties.  I did not have to wash his clothes or press his trousers, but I felt it totally demeaning.  I would remain in the room until he returned before lunch, and he would then usually dismiss me, and I would be back in my quarters in the penthouse above the Consul-General’s office.  It was all very easy and cushy, but I deeply hated it.
            In fact, I now realise that the Captain was doing me a favour.  Had I not become his batmen, high authority, would have noticed that I was unemployed, and I would probably have been posted to an infantry battalion in the hills, which I would have hated even more.
            By now the Communist rebels under General Markos were very active outside the towns of Northern Greece, constantly attacking Greek Army units; though, so far, British troops were left alone as the Communist command did not want to draw us into the conflict, as our numbers added to Greek government forces, could have lead to their defeat. British vehicles travelling in areas where fighting was taking place, sometimes flew Union Jacks to prevent their being attacked by mistake by the rebels.
            The rebels were helped by Communist Yugoslavia and Albania, chiefly by the former which provided logistic assistance and safe havens to which rebel fighters could retreat and rest without fear of attack by Government forces.
            This all ended in 1949, when Tito, having fallen out with the Soviet Government, closed his border with Greece.  Quickly after that the Greek Civil War ended, and the Greek Government took control of all of the country.
            One repercussion of Captain Ross’s tenure as claims officer was the arrival of a senior officer from Athens to look into the organisation of the office.  He was a major and from Cyprus and a member of the Cyprus Regiment.  His native language was Greek, and the translator told us that he surprised some dishonest claimants who in his presence had offered to bribe the translator, when the major suddenly stopped speaking in English, and told them in fluent Greek that their attempt to bribe staff had been noticed.
            At about this time I was challenged to a game of chess by the unit’s Greek Liaison Officer.  Naturally he won, which was no real surprise to me as I had never won a game when playing against my cousin, Stan.  However, this officer took pity on me and spent some time explaining exactly where I had gone wrong, which, in particular concerned my opening moves in which, desperate to protect my king and queen, I always began by moving a rook pawn. He demonstrated the folly of that beginning, and I took his instruction to heart.
            In my first game of chess against Stan, after I left the Army I easily beat him.  He was very surprised.  I didn’t play him again for several years.
            My job as batman came to a welcome end when the time came to study again for Part I of the Forces Preliminary Examination which I had failed the previous year.  With other candidates I spent a month of intensive study at the Army Education Centre being tutored by a sergeant major of the Army Education Corps. He brought my mathematical knowledge up to Preliminary Examination standard.  I was taught algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.  I particularly enjoyed the latter, though when the exam was over I totally forgot all that he had taught me.
            In order to equip us for the general paper, he issued us each with copies of the airmail edition of The Times, which was printed on very light weight paper. This was a revelation to me.  I had always believed that The Times was a boring stuffy periodical not fit to be read by ‘normal’ people.   I found that I was completely wrong.  It was totally fascinating and I loved the depth with which individual news items were covered. 
            That, of course, was in the days before Murdoch took over that paper.  I doubt whether I  would find it quite so fascinating today.
            Happily, for me, that month of intensive study paid off.  I successfully passed Part I and was awarded the full certificate.
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            The two sergeants in the Hirings office had both obtained Greek girl friends, and one of them had become engaged.
            He was from the Isle of Wight, and before serving in the army had been a farm labourer.  His fiancée was a university graduate and the daughter of one of the richest men in Salonika. They intended to go back to the Isle of Wight when he left the army.
            I thought it was a most unsuitable match; after living as a wealthy girl in Salonika, would she be able to cope with being a farm labourer’s wife on the Island? It seemed to be a supreme demonstration of the truth of the saying ‘Love is Blind’.
            However, despite my misgivings which were shared by most of the other squadies in the unit, we were happy to attend the marriage celebration, at which Captain Milson acted as best man.
            The wedding was in two parts, the first the Greek Orthodox ceremony which took place in a small but very attractive church.  It was a very interesting ceremony in which crowns were held over the heads of bride and groom and there was much chanting from the priests and a large bible was kissed by both, and, also I think by the best man.
            After that colourful spectacle, the second ceremony conducted by an Anglican chaplain in the garrison church, was rather a let down, it was dull and uninteresting.
            After both ceremonies, back in the office we drank the health of the happy couple, though I don’t remember them being with us as we drank. Presumably they had other things to do now that they were man and wife.
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            As we moved into the Greek summer the idea of swimming became very attractive; however, as the city waterfront was part of the harbour and was crowded with caiques at anchor, there was no way that we could swim there.  However, one Sunday afternoon we took a truck and drove out of the city along the shore line until we arrived at an area , which was pitted with bomb crates and other debris left behind after the war; but which had a reasonable beach where we could swim.
            As we approached this swimming area our vehicle was suddenly almost knocked from the track by two army vehicles approaching us at high speed as if they were racing. We looked at them as they sped past until one of them toppled into a bomb crater.  We stopped, intending to help, but before we could do anything, a medical team arrived to take over and deal with the casualties, including the driver whose body had been crushed against the steering wheel.
            As there seemed nothing useful that we could do, we continued to the swimming area.
            In the sea we had great fun trying to teach one of our number to swim.  He had no wish to learn, and struggled valiantly as he was held under by two of his comrades.
            Suddenly he shouted. “You stupid bastards.  I’ve lost my teeth.”
            His dentures had fallen into the sea.
            We stopped trying to teach him to swim, and spent some time searching for the missing teeth, but without finding them.
            That incident and the traffic accident we had observed put something of a damper on our enjoyment of the afternoon’s frolic.
            Later the military police carried out an investigation of the traffic accident, and some of our number, not myself, were asked for witness statements.   What they did not say was that the truck had been racing another truck.  They felt that the driver and his passenger had suffered enough with their injuries; and had no wish to add to their distress by having then tried for dangerous driving, and perhaps imprisoned by a military court. 
            -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            We had now settled into our new quarters above the British Consul-General’s office, and, despite the fact that we had to climb four flights of stairs to get there as the lift had been out of use since the end of the war, we liked the penthouse very much.
            It had an open area in front from which we could look down on the harbour, and to the side from where we could see the screens of the three adjacent open air cinemas that operated through the Spring and Summer.  It gave us a fair idea as to whether it would be worth our while to pay for a cinema ticket to view the film close at hand. From the Penthouse we could see the action, though at that distance we couldn’t hear the dialogue properly.
            From our lofty perch we could also look down on the roof of another building in which girl NAAFI staff lived.  They would sometimes sun themselves on their open roof, not aware that they could be seen by lascivious soldiers from our roof.
            The only drawback to our enjoyment of the penthouse was the water supply.  This was intermittent, and sometimes when one turned on the taps nothing would emerge.  In order to be sure of having enough water to wash in the morning, some bright spark had the idea of putting the plug in the bath and turning on the dry taps at night, so that if the water came on again in the course of the night there would be enough in the bath in the morning to satisfy our needs.
            Alas, one night whilst we were all sleeping, the water did come on again, and remained running until the bath was full and the water was overflowing on to the floor.
            It did not simply remain there.  Next morning when the Consul-General entered his office he found that it and his desk was swimming in the excess water.
            He complained forcefully to our officers, and very soon we lost the joy of penthouse living and found ourselves sharing barrack rooms with another unit; the Royal Engineer Port Operating Company, which was made up in the main of former dock labourers.
            Being in a real barrack room meant that we were forced to do what real soldiers did do; like getting up along with all the dock labourers, making our own beds with all our gear neatly laid out for inspection each morning.
            We all hated it.  My only consolation was that I did not have all that long to serve in the Army.   Unlike the people called up after the war who were doing what was called National Service, we did not know how long we had to serve.  However, when we had entered the army in early 1945 we had each been given a demob group and when your groups number was reached, you were demobbed.
            My number was sixty six, and already the groups in the late fifties were being demobbed, so my turn could not be all that far off.
            As I was still virtually unemployed and in danger of being transferred to an infantry battalion; my officers again took pity on me and arranged for me to be transferred to another claims office, the one in Chania, Crete.
 
                                    CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I said goodbye to Salonika with no particular regrets.  In fact the idea of going to Crete quite excited me.
            My journey began with the short overnight sea journey between Salonika and Piraeus.
I then spent a few nights at the headquarters in Athens, before, carrying my kit and a packet of sandwiches, for no meals were to be provided on the voyage, boarded the ship that was to take me to Crete.
            It was the Volos, an aged tramp steamer that had been built in Hamburg in 1923.  It was packed with Greek deck passengers.  I was the only British soldier on board, though there were a number of Greek soldier passengers; Cretans, returning home at the end of their military service.  We really were deck passengers for there was no internal accommodation for us.  We packed the decks and at night slept, with luck, on a large cargo hatch with a tarpaulin stretched above it to keep out any rain.  It was November, but fortunately on that voyage there was no rain.
            I had an uncomfortable night, fitfully sleeping, and next morning I ate my sandwiches. That was a mistake for there was many more hours of the voyage to follow, and by the end of it I was feeling extremely hungry.
            We travelled on through a dull day, and another nearly sleepless night for me.  Next morning we could just see the outline of Crete in the distance. At once some of the Cretan soldiers, joyful at seeing their home island, started firing into the air and then joined hand to hand and began dancing a Cretan dance, which was possibly the Kastrinos.
            Despite not finding any English speaking passengers I somehow managed to learn that the ship was not going direct to Chanea, but was calling first at Heracklion, the Cretan capital, and after that it would sail on to Chanea.  I thought that by the time that it got there on the following day,  I would be almost dying from hunger.
            Then we were docking in Heracklion.  I was feeling rather depressed at the thought of greater hunger over the next day or so, when suddenly I heard someone calling in a Greek accent, “Fusilier Baker”. 
            A young Greek, only a few years older than me, was standing on the dock calling for me.   I went ashore and he introduced himself as Lefstafus,
a translator for my unit, though he told me that the other soldiers called him, Lefty.
            He quickly introduced me to my commanding officer, the major in charge of the unit in Chanea.  They had been in Heracklion on unit business, though I never discovered what that business was, and the major decided that they should pick me up.
            He asked if I was hungry, and, when I said that I was, he and Lefty took me to a restaurant.  There cooked food was displayed in open containers, and the major and Lefty pointed to dishes that we should eat.  I didn’t point to anything, being content to abide by their selections.
            The food was excellent.  To attract attention after we had eaten, Lefty clapped his hands and at once waiters scurried across.  I was impressed. I had only seen that sort of behaviour in films.
            After we had eaten we drove to a house where we were to spend the night. There sleeping accommodation was limited and I found myself sharing a bed with Lefty.
            Next morning we set off for Chanea.
            It was a lengthy journey, taking much of the day, though we stopped at times.  When we did, our truck was immediately surrounded by excited local people.  It became apparent that the cause of that excitement was neither the major nor myself, but Lefty. 
            I discovered that that young man had been a hero during the war and was recognised everywhere as one of the leading figures fighting in the hills in the resistance against the German invader.
            By the end of the day, we had arrived at the unit residence in Chanea.   It was a villa which had been a German dental centre during the occupation.   Its outside appearance was charming, but internally it had lots of faults.  In particular, some of the ceilings were in such bad condition that sometime the plaster from them fell to the floor.
            The Claims office was the only British unit remaining in Crete, and consisted of the major, two captains, two sergeants and me.
            Oddly enough, one of the sergeants was named Baker, and  one of the captains, Captain Fox, had been a cadet like me in the Enfield wing of the ATC, though not in 1288 Squadron.
            My position seemed similar to the one that I had held after the chief clerk in Salonika had returned from leave.  There was absolutely nothing for me to do.   I had no idea why I had been posted there, but I did not complain.
            The unit had recently sacked their civilian cook so I was asked if I could cook.   I could not.  The unit still needed a cook, but they did not need food poisoning, which might have transpired if I had been forced into that position.
            Instead, the other captain, who was from a farming family agreed to do the cooking until they could employ someone else.   He was helped by possession of an official army cookery book, though not helped all that much by the book as the recipes that it contained were for hundreds of men; not for just the six that he was required to cook.
            All the same, his efforts were certainly better than mine would have been, but his rank meant that if they had not been good, it would have been difficult to complain to him.
            On the ground floor, the building contained a room filled with wooden crosses which were in the process of being given names, ranks and military numbers by a Cretan worker.
            They were for the many graves of British and Commonwealth troops at the military cemetery in Suda Bay.
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            It was the most informal unit I had experienced since I became a soldier.  I shared a bedroom with the two sergeants and also ate meals with them. Often, after we had eaten, we would go into the officers’ mess and play cards with them.
            I liked it so much that I wondered whether I should become a regular soldier, but I realised that if I had done so, I would probably be sent to a less congenial unit. I just hoped that the remaining few months that I had to serve would be spent in Crete.
            The officers and the sergeants often wore civilian clothes, and it was suggested that I should do the same; so accompanied by Lefty I went to the market in Chania, and bought myself a civilian jacket, trousers, shirt and tie.  The clothes were actually made in Britain.
            Each day I would report to the office with the sergeants, and sit in front of Sergeant Baker’s desk, and try not to distract him, or distract the office girls.   There were three of those ladies: Iolanthe, who was very attractive,  half Scottish and the daughter of the Swedish Vice Consul, who was a Greek national; Esther, who was very pretty; and Mary, who was rather maternal.
            The reason why the unit was in Crete was to pay the Cretan workers who had been owed two weeks pay in 1941 when the British left following the German invasion.  There had been about four thousand workers employed by the British, but the only problem was that no one knew who they were. 
            So notices were placed in the Cretan newspapers, inviting the former workers to apply for their back pay.  Naturally, almost the entire population of Crete claimed to have been working for the British; and by the time that I arrived, the main task of the office was sifting through those vast numbers and trying to establish who was telling the truth and could be paid.
            Some sort of system was worked out.  If someone said that he had been in charge of a team of workers, he was asked to name them.  Of course, that lead to lots of problems, as the people named tended to be close relatives of the alleged charge hand.
            Also in Chania at that time were two officers of the British Police Mission who were training Greek police.  They were a Lieutenant-Colonel from Northern Ireland who had been an inspector in the Royal Ulster Constabulary; and a major from London who had been a station sergeant in the Metropolitan Police. The lieutenant-colonel had his wife with him, and the major, his wife and sixteen year old daughter.
            The major’s house almost became our second home.  This was partly because of the sergeants, who, when the two police officers were away on a course, had visited Mrs Panting and her doughtier several times, and when her husband returned he was very grateful to them for being company to his ladies, and rather annoyed that the officers had not done the same thing. When I got to Crete I was accepted as a friend along with the sergeants.
            I was also accepted as a friend by our unit’s dog, an Alsatian that seemed to take an immediate fancy to me.  On one of my first visits to Major Panting’s family, I was sitting at the table eating something that Mrs Panting had cooked, when scratching noises were heard from outside the door.
            It was opened, and the Alsatian bounded in, leaped on my lap and began licking my face.
            Josephine Panting who was still a pupil at a convent school nearby, was a georgeous blond.  If I had not already become infatuated with Iolanthe from the office, I think I would have joined the queue of her suitors, which, I think included several Greek officer cadets, and Captain Fox.
            Perhaps because I was the lowest in rank, Josephine gave me a military nickname.  She called me The Brigadier’, and sometimes the sergeants used that mocking title, though not, so far as I remember, did the officers.
            We had several parties, held usually in the officer’s mess at which wine would flow freely.  At one such party we had a visiting Lieutenant-Colonel with us, he had come to inspect the graves in Suda Bay on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission.
            Attired in my civilian clothes, I walked into the officer’s mess after the party had begun.
            Josephine saw me as I entered.
            “Ah, here’s the Brigadier,” she cried.
            I saw a swift movement to the left as a khaki clad officer stood to attention.
            “I’m Colonel Menzies” he said.
            “I’m Fusilier Baker,” I replied.
            The Colonel, took it quite well.  A couple of months later when I was in the Athen’s headquarters waiting to be demobbed, he walked into an office where I was sitting.
            He smiled, “Ah, it’s the Brigadier,” he said.
            I don’t think he was a very typical lieutenant-colonel.
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            At Christmas we had Christmas dinner at the Pantings, and after we had eaten, the sergeants and I were left to sit drinking in the living room whilst the officers went to a reception at the Greek Army Brigade Headquarters.
            We didn’t mind being left alone.  We had eaten well, and I was feeling very comfortable and dozed off for a while.
            The officers returned a few hours later.
            Our major said that they didn’t like having to leave us behind.  He said that next time they were invited, we should put on our civilian clothes and come with them.
            They were again invited to the New Year reception, and wearing civilian clothes we went with them.  The major introduced me as Lieutenant Baker.  I don’t know what officer rank he awarded the two sergeants, perhaps he made them captains. 
            It was a delightful evening; we ate and drank very well.
            As I have already mentioned, I had become very infatuated with Iolanthe Nagsaki from our office.  Despite possessing a gold tooth and a very faint moustache, both items not uncommon in Greek girls at that time; she was a delightfully pretty girl who spoke excellent English, though as she had a Scottish mother, that was not surprising.
            However, her Greek father, who was the Swedish Vice-consul in the town had very traditional views about the behaviour of young unmarried girls, and would not let her leave their home without a chaperone, so I was never able to take her out.  Nevertheless she did join the sergeants and me at some functions when Mrs Panting had agreed to be her chaperone.
            Coward that I am, as I knew that I would be demobilised very soon, I never declared my affection to her, and neither did Sergeant Baker, who later told me that he had fancied the girl too. The only token of my esteem that she ever received was a packet of chilblain ointment that she had requested that I sent to her from England after I had left the army.
            In January I had my twentieth birthday.  When I arrived at the office that morning, Mrs Panting was waiting for me, bearing a large birthday cake that she had made for me. The sergeants and I ate some of the cake that evening after supper, but alas, we could not eat the remains, for next morning we discovered that most of it had been eaten by the Alsatian who had got into the room after we had gone to bed.
            Not long after my birthday It was time for me to leave, as it was for Sergeant Baker who had the same demob group as me.
            We said our goodbyes and boarded the converted corvette which was to take us from Chanea to Piraeus.  It was smaller but more comfortable than the Volus.  It had been properly converted from its military role and had passenger bunks below desks and serving tables for food. Before we left the harbour, we tucked in to the excellent meal that had been provided, and then climbed into our bunks.
            I was mildly surprised to notice that none of the Greek passengers ate the meal.  I learnt the reason as soon as we were on the open sea; for the little ship rocked so violently that I had difficulty keeping the meal in my stomach, and several of the passengers who had not eaten, were violently sea sick.
            Despite the motion of the ship I did manage to get to sleep, but was awoken in the middle of the night by a loud crash.  I discovered that the noise was caused by Sergeant Baker who had fallen from his bunk.
            He was not injured, but we were both relieved when we reached Piraeus.
            I spent about another week in Athens whilst waiting for my final voyage home.
            During that time I actually went up to the Parthenon to look at it closely.  I am mildly ashamed that after living for over two years in Greece I had only visited that magnificent monument just that once.
            The voyage home took just over a week, though I neither played chess nor crown and anchor this time. As we passed the Isle of Wight we saw the Queen Elizabeth II with tugs around her trying to pull her off a sand bank where she had gone aground.
            Once ashore we were taken to Aldershot where we were given our civilian demob suits, though mine was not a suit but an unmatched jacket and trousers, and soon after that, no longer Fusilier Baker, I was home.