very close indeed.
This time there were not only wrathful parents but a wrathful army to contend with. A couple of days later we were all taken before the Colonel. We had, he said, behaved in an extraordinarily irresponsible fashion. Yes, sir. We had put people’s lives and safety at risk. Yes, sir. Did we now realize the seriousness of what we had done? Oh yes, sir.
Having identified me as the ringleader, the Colonel glared more at me than at anyone else. How, he enquired, had I managed to come up with ammunition for the MP 43? Haltingly to begin with, but then more fluently as his attitude seemed to soften, I explained the research and development programme that had preceded the firing. Despite himself, he couldn’t quite hide his fascination. Finally he said: ‘And now I’ve something to tell you, young Mr Gurney.’
‘Yes, sir?’ My face must have been bright with anticipation – after all, I had made the weapon work. That had to be some kind of achievement.
‘We’ve examined your ammunition and we’ve rechecked the rifles. And d’you know what?’
‘What, sir?’
‘If you’d fired that thing just one more time it’s very likely it would’ve blown up in your face.’ The Colonel hunched forwards over his desk. His smile was humourless. ‘What d’you have to say to that?’
I swallowed hard. I had nothing to say.
As a lesson, it was well worth the learning; certainly, it was more readily absorbed than anything at school. My affinity with explosives should at least have stimulated an interest in chemistry, but unfortunately the subject was taught in such a way that it was about as fascinating as watching paint dry. Only on the playing field did I excel: after carrying off the Victor Ludorum, I was made School Captain of Athletics.
When Grandfather learned I was a promising sprinter he borrowed a stopwatch and off we went for a time trial in Greenwich Park. He paced out what he claimed to be a hundred yards and sent me on my way. When I’d finished he was staring at the stopwatch and shaking it. I skipped over to him. ‘How’d I do?’
‘Under nine seconds.’ Old Bill frowned. He shook the stopwatch again. ‘Nah. Can’t be. Bloody thing’s obviously wrong.’ But when he looked up, he was smiling.
The war that had dawned unrecognized was now ever-present, first in Greenwich and then in Netheravon. In June 1940 troops evacuated from Dunkirk arrived at the camp. Exhausted, disorientated, they crowded into tents. We watched and wondered at their sallow faces and shuffling movements, at the absence of smiles and the dullness of their eyes. They gave us handfuls of French coins. At first the NAAFI wouldn’t take them, but then relented, so we spent our francs and centimes on condensed milk and squares of jelly. I used to think the soldiers gave us the money because they didn’t need it any more, but as time passed I began to sense a different reason. Eventually I understood what had been meant by a soldier who handed me a souvenir – a leather belt to which had been carefully stitched a line of shining centimes, the thread sewn through the holes in the coins. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anything to remind me of France.’
We continued to live at Netheravon beyond war’s end. Finally, when I was seventeen, Father transferred to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and was posted to the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). The rest of the family went with him – my mother, my sister Maureen, and the two others whose arrival seemed to have come out of the blue: brother John, born in November 1939, and Diane, born in January 1943.
Because it was important for me to finish school at Bishop Wordsworth’s, I stayed behind in Netheravon Village, lodging with a couple whose son was at Sandhurst. Towards the end of that last term I was warned of my liability for National Service call-up and asked to state in which arm of the forces I would prefer to serve. After enquiring into the options available, I discovered that the army offered a trade as an ammunition examiner, it seemed a very interesting way of spending eighteen months. Luckily this was a Royal Army Ordnance Corps trade; I pointed out that my father was already in the RAOC, knowing full well that the selectors paid more attention to family ties than to anything else.
Eventually a brown envelope popped through the letterbox. Headed ‘On His Majesty’s Service’, it contained orders to report to Aldershot, a postal order for one day’s pay – four shillings – and a rail travel warrant. It was 25 May 1950. I was in the army now.
An ammunition examiner’s job calls for the exercise of specialist knowledge, an ability to act calmly and responsibly under pressure, and a facility for matters mechanical. Challenges are many and varied. Tasks are often of considerable complexity and require the display of initiative and ingenuity. So the selection board at Parsons Barracks, Aldershot, gave me a dismantled bicycle pump and asked me to put it back together again.
Each preceding test had shown the same sophistication of selection process: intelligence – a set of puzzles from 1949 Eleven-plus exam papers; psychological – a couple of pages of ink blots. And now, the bicycle pump.
It made me realize how lucky I was to have got this far, for the army’s idea of sensible selection had a logic all of its own: a friend who had been one of London’s best bricklayers was made a driver; another, a genius with car engines, wound up as a clerk. Yet none of this was surprising because, after my first two weeks of National Service, it was obvious that the army moved in curious ways.
Parsons Barracks comprised a series of wooden huts dotted around a grassed area and interspersed with the occasional tree. Each hut provided accommodation for thirty men in the main dormitory area; a small bedroom at one end was reserved for the permanent Staff Corporal. His job was to encourage us through our training. Accordingly, he bellowed everything at the top of his voice, rendering every command well-nigh incomprehensible.
The intake at Parsons was drawn from a wide social spectrum; it included a talkative Welshman, a taciturn Scot, an East End barrow-boy and a couple of chaps of ‘quaite refained’ upbringing. From Reveille to Lights Out every moment was taken up with training. After the evening meal at 1700 hours there was something called ‘Interior Economy’. This involved the cleaning and preparation of one’s kit for the following day: Blanco all webbing, clean all brass, press uniform, prepare bed space for inspection and ‘bull’ boots (bull being a verb for the act of polishing with one’s finger).
In those brief exhausted moments after Lights Out there was little time to ponder on the army’s strange terminology or tasks like whitewashing coal, grading pebbles – and shaving blankets. All bedding had to be folded and boxed for morning inspection. But this being the army, boxed did not mean boxed; it meant sandwiching one’s neatly folded sheets between one’s neatly folded blankets and then wrapping another blanket around the assembled fabric to make an aesthetically appealing pile. The exposed faces of the folded blankets were required to be free from fluff. To ensure that, these needed to be shaved.
Once you began to understand the thinking that informed this kind of duty, the task of arranging pebbles by shape and size or applying whitewash with a toothbrush to lumps of coal was of little consequence. The apparent aim was to mentally and physically exhaust every recruit to the point where every order, no matter how stupid, would be obeyed without question, which explained why the British army was the world’s best army and why those who ran it were very probably certifiable.
After two weeks’ inductions and trade aptitude selection, after seemingly endless days of saluting and marching and being treated as though one were deaf as well as retarded, we were sent to Badajos, a barracks a couple of miles away. No one had seen it but everyone had heard ominous rumours. On a warm bright morning we marched towards the place which, for the next six weeks, we would call home. Spirits were high: we’d done two weeks, we were veterans already. Things were looking up.
Unfortunately Badajos turned out to be exactly as advertised. It reared up stark and gaunt, a three-storey,