as our house was worth, so joining the merchant navy was out of the question, which was probably just as well because the war was imminent and, as I was to learn later, the German U-boat packs were no respecters of young British seamen and my chances of being seventeen would have considerably diminished.
However, here I was in an extraordinary, sunny Blackpool, marching, drilling, doing rifle practice and dozing through the lazy afternoons in the Winter Gardens, fitter than I’d ever been. I even enjoyed guard duties, standing as smartly turned out as the Grenadiers outside Buckingham Palace in tin hat and full blancoed webbing with bayoneted rifle, enduring endless box-Brownie camera snaps and trying not to blink when the shutter went.
The weeks rushed by too quickly for my liking. I was now conversing with my instructors at a speed too fast for ordinary erks. Physically I could have run to the top of the Matterhorn thanks to PT every day on the beach; I was suntanned to a deep walnut, clear eyed and bushy tailed; I even looked forward to guard duty, although we were only guarding Marks and Spencer’s. Marching to the corner, clattering my boots on the pavement as I effected a copybook turn before marching smartly back to my clattering halt, left turn, order arms and a last stamp of standing at ease—awesome; all the holiday makers sitting outside their digs enjoyed watching my every movement and when I stood easy they all relaxed and lifted their newspapers or continued their interrupted conversations, the show over until the next time I got itchy feet.
It was heady stuff. I was a bulwark of the Empire, so enveloped in a world of self hero worship that I didn’t hear the screaming child being dragged along by a harassed mother who stopped and pointed to my bayonet and snarled, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll tell that man to stick his knife in you.’ The lad wiped his snotty nose on his already overworked sleeve and then, taking a few steps up to me, he kicked me fiercely on the shin, wearing clogs. I was so startled that I let go of my rifle and it crashed to the pavement. The newspapers went down, all the talking stopped as if in a drill movement and all heads swivelled in my direction. I picked up my rifle just as the sergeant marched out to see what the commotion was all about, and again I was on a fizzer and an apple-sized bruise on my leg was no defence.
Apropos of nothing, I learned a very important wrinkle while on guard duty. At night, if you feel tiredness creeping into you, hold your rifle with the butt on the ground so that the point of the bayonet is under your chin. If tiredness seeps insidiously into your brain, your head begins to nod and ouch, you’re wide awake again.
Strangely enough, I never saw my room-mate during the day, so he obviously wasn’t a trainee wireless operator. No matter, we went out for a drink together some evenings to the Queen’s Hotel. We never drank more than a half pint of bitter each, but I couldn’t help noticing that whereas I took hefty swallows from my glass he sipped his daintily; and we never really conversed. His eyes furtively searched the customers as if he was looking for somebody and one evening as we made our way back to the digs he said, ‘We nearly got off tonight.’ I didn’t answer because I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, for as far as I could recollect there hadn’t been a woman in the room except the one behind the bar and he always ignored her.
It must be remembered that I had spent all my life up to a few weeks before in Oldham, which was hardly the sophisticated centre of the universe; and in those days homosexuality was a word we had never come across, let alone understood. I was still an innocent abroad and I suspected nothing. My room-mate was a very pleasant, likeable fellow and even if he did use face cream and wear pyjamas it only went to show that he came from a well-to-do background in which his gentle, superior ways were the norm. Conversely he must have thought of me as one of the peasantry, a bumbling village idiot who went to bed without washing, clad in my RAF-issue vest and underpants. For my own part I felt lucky to have found such a delightful room-mate.
On one occasion I received a cake from home. The last one had been a disaster, as the mice had had most of it, although I’d put it in my kit bag to guard against such a catastrophe. This time, however, I stood on my bed and hung the cake in my shirt from the chandelier. This way it would be out of reach of the little terrors. My room-mate was asleep, or I assumed he was. I turned off my bedside lamp and settled down on my back, hands behind my head, awaiting the sandman and wondering if I’d tied the cake bundle securely enough. My lids were getting heavy when suddenly I was wide awake. Inside my bed I sensed rather than felt something crawling towards my thigh. It could only be a mouse…Very gently and slowly, I withdrew my arm from the back of my head, and then crashed it down with all my strength—and my room-mate yelled, ‘Ouch!’ Quickly I put my lamp on and he was abject with apologies. I couldn’t grasp what he’d been up to, sliding his hand into my bed. He must have been dreaming. He kept saying sorry and that he wasn’t like other men: he had been a ballet dancer before he’d been called up, and he missed his friends. I didn’t know what he was babbling on about. When I switched my light off and settled down, he was still talking and the penny still hadn’t dropped about his motives; in fact I was only glad it hadn’t been a mouse. I was no wiser when a few days later he was demobbed. Apparently he had turned up on parade wearing lipstick and mascara. What’s so terrible about that? I’d known him for only a few weeks but I missed him when he’d gone and was glad that I’d not been born into the aristocracy and made to wear make-up.
However, on balance my training in Blackpool was idyllic, but nothing lasts for ever, and we marched and drilled to the band of the Royal Air Force in our passing-out parade on the forecourt of the Metropole Hotel. Filled with exultation, I considered signing on for a full twelve years—it wasn’t such a bad career. After sixteen weeks of high summer in Blackpool, I was bronzed, fit and well out of the chrysalis I’d brought with me to Padgate. I thought the war was a doddle and felt privileged to have been invited to take part. But I didn’t quite know it all: I still had a lot to learn and one of the hard rules of life is that when the birds are singing and the sun is shining and you are in a state of utter content, that’s the danger signal and in the middle of a happy smile, wallop! The sucker punch.
Eagerly scanning the noticeboard every morning for the where-abouts of my posting, I didn’t care where it was. Any operational airfield would suffice. At least I’d be sending and receiving messages that mattered, chatting up members of the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), with aeroplanes taking off one after another for Berlin or the Ruhr, whatever was the target for the night, counting the aircraft as they returned in the lightening sky of early dawn, and with the WAAFs. The mess hall would be mixed—good grief, would I ever get time to sleep? Sadly, like so many of my optimistic fantasies of things to come, it bore little relation to the actuality, but I lived in hope and my heart leapt when I saw my name on the noticeboard the following day. It straightened itself out when I read my posting to a place in Herefordshire called Madley and, underneath, ‘All personnel above report to guard room to collect travel warrants at fourteen hundred hours.’ So at two o’clock I stood before the corporal in the guard room, which in peacetime had been the children’s department in Marks and Spencer’s. As he was making out my movement order, I asked him if Madley was a fighter or a bomber station.
Without looking up he said, ‘If you see a fighter or a bomber at Madley, he’s lost.’ I didn’t get it, and as he handed me my documents he took pity on me. ‘All in good time, laddie. You’re still in training and if I were you I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to put my head on the bloc.’ I didn’t get that either. What it is to be ignorant!
Madley itself may be a delightful little town but the place where the three-ton lorries deposited us in the early darkness preceding the onset of winter, was barren and pockmarked by Nissen huts, corrugated iron and concrete floors—Blackpool had hardly prepared us for this. The first morning at Madley dawned cold and grey. It seemed like only yesterday we were in shirt sleeves, basking in the golden summer of Blackpool. How quickly the seasons change! Greatcoats now unpacked were the order of the day.
We were paraded and after a short address the commanding officer gave us a lot more information, which was mainly carried away on the brisk east wind; then he called four of us out and for some unknown reason I happened to be one of them, and we became class leaders. We were given black armbands with the letters ‘CL’ in white, and we had to wear them on our sleeve. Our duties were not too onerous. We had to line up our allotted section and then march them