On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (8 page)

We marched to classes in the mornings behind the pipe band, with Mowatt shuffling along blaring his bagpipes. In the afternoons we had drill or gunnery practice, or sports. Tam Keay was brilliant at rugby and was Captain of Sports and Captain of Games for the whole entry, including all the other trades. John Chidlow (Chid) was extremely good at hockey. I could run a fair cross-country race, but a boy named Talbot was better, and Tony Burslem and Paul King were close behind him. There was no room for an
almost
in the team.

Sporting excellence has always eluded me, though I have been reasonably good at a number of sports and games. And I have tried many sports, from fencing to rock climbing. Those I was fairly good at – golf, tennis, swimming, running – I still do. Except running. I can’t run for toffee these days, not without falling over and sucking in breath by the laboured lungful. However, I am a septuagenarian.

I read no novels at Cosford. There was no time. Almost every waking moment was spent drilling, at weapons training, at sport, cleaning kit or in one classroom or another. Meals were taken in a huge dining room where we used to hammer with our spoons on the underside of tables to register our rebellion when a drill instructor came into the room. Once we’d eaten we washed our ‘mug-and-irons’ in a trough of greasy water that a thousand boys had used before us. You could have made farmhouse soup from it. Sunday, after Church Parade, was our only day of rest, when we would go into Albrighton or Shifnal villages looking for elusive, probably non-existent girls. There was a transport café just outside camp, known as the ‘tranny’ (this was before trannies were transvestites, which was not in our vocabulary in those days) where the senior entry would gather. If a junior entry went into the tranny he was likely to end up with a black eye and a few teeth missing.

Late Sunday night was my favourite time. The lights would be out and there would be twenty boys hidden in the darkness of the billet. The pot-bellied stove would still be glowing and Mike, who slept in the bed next to me, would have a radio on low volume. We listened to
Top Twenty
on Radio Luxembourg. I remember being bowled over by Neil Sedaka’s ‘Diana’ and I still know all the lyrics to that great song. Mike had recently started going out with a girl at home, but he told me it could not last because she made a terrible noise stirring her tea and clinking the cup. ‘And you know,’ he told me seriously, ‘if she does that, she probably farts in bed. Women do fart, just like us!’ After that warning, I have always steered clear of girls who clink their teacups.

It was at Cosford that I received my last letter from Rosemary Burns, who must have found her Scottish prince around that time.

Only once did I meet a girl while at Cosford, at a dance in Shifnal village. Out in the cold air of a winter evening she let me touch her breast through her overcoat. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me since birth. So excited was I, I ran full pelt for the bus along a street where the metal dustbins had been put out for collection the following morning, and hurtled straight into one. My knees were skinned and I had bruises all down one side, but still my heart raced with the knowledge that sex had reared its wonderful head, and that there were other things in life besides passing exams and being promoted.

I had learned to iron my serge trousers using dry soap along the inside seam to make a sharp crease. I had learned to fold my blankets into a box shape that a mathematician would have admired for its precision. I had learned to bull boots to a mirror gloss. I had learned how to take care of myself and do all those things that mum used to do for me, but now I had learned how to charm a girl into letting me touch a bump on her coat.

I was king for a night.

Recently, thinking back on those days, I remember befriending many boys from different nationalities, but with notable exceptions. We had Welsh, Irish, Scots and English, but no Asians or people from the Caribbean, or dark-skinned boys of any kind. I wonder now why the immigrants of the 1950s were not interested in joining the Boy Entrants. It was not that they were kept out by a racist induction board, because once I was in the RAF I met quite a few Asians and West Indians. After all it was not long after the war and the Indian army, and other nations had fought for their colonial rulers, and I’m sure Britain was glad to have them. I met one corporal, a man from St Vincent in the West Indies, while in Cyprus and he became one of my greatest pals. Trinny Sutherland and his wife, Lorraine, are two of our closest friends and will for always be I hope. The mix of various cultures enriches our country. Life is dynamic and change will come. You can’t keep the world of your childhood England intact until you leave this Earth. How totally dull it would be if we were all exactly like each other.

Talking of our close neighbours reminds me that one frosty dawn a Scottish Drill Instructor arranged the whole 29th Entry Telegraphists in one long line on the parade ground. We stood there with our breath coming out in clouds of steam, wondering what this new formation was for, and whether we were going to get a long talk or a photo. Then the DI screamed out, ‘All the Irishmen take three paces backwards.’ No sooner was this order executed than he cried, ‘Now all the Scots, two paces backwards.’ Once done, the final order, ‘Now the Welsh, one pace backwards.’ Then he strode along the long line of Englishmen in front, muttering in anger, ‘So this is the bloody master race, is it?’ Someone, a colleague in the Sergeants’ Mess probably, had obviously attacked his Celtic heritage and caused this incident.

As I explained earlier, Tam Keay invited me to join him on his parents’ farm in Perthshire for the holidays. I was delighted. I have always loved farms. It’s in the blood of my ancestors. Tam went on ahead of me and I had to catch the train from King’s Cross, London, to Logiealmond a little later. On boarding the train I found I was in a carriage with three uniformed Scots Guards who were in holiday mood. They were young men, full of high spirits, and were playing cards and drinking whisky. One of them turned and waved to me. ‘Come on, Jock,’ he said, ‘come an’ have a dram.’

I don’t know why, but I suddenly had a need to tell them I was not of their nation.

‘I’m not a jock,’ I replied. ‘I’m English.’

The young Scot winked at his friends and laughed, then said, ‘Oh, well, we know what we think of Englishmen, don’t we?’

Thereafter I was left alone.

When we drew into the station at the other end of the journey, this same young soldier stood up and grabbed his kitbag. I could see Tam and his parents standing patiently at the end of the platform, so I alighted too with battered brown suitcase in hand. The soldier and I began walking the length of the platform and about halfway there realised that both of us were heading for the same group of waiting people.

‘Who the hell are you?’ whispered the soldier, out of the side of his mouth.

‘Tam’s mate,’ I replied in a normal voice. ‘I’m spending the summer with him.’

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, clearly upset. ‘Tam’s my brother. Look, be a sport and don’t tell my ma I was drinking and gambling.’

He seemed genuinely worried, so I slapped him on the back as if we’d been pals for the whole journey and said, ‘I wouldn’t do that to a fellow countryman – after all, we’re both British, aren’t we?’

He laughed out loud and thereafter we became good friends, spending the next few weeks helping to bring in the harvest and shooting game birds, hares and rabbits with a 12-bore shotgun. It was a wonderful summer, hot and sultry, as that season should be. I even bought my own shotgun, a bolt action .410, that was good for small slow-moving game but not much else. I also purchased my first 78 record, ‘At the Hop’ by Danny and the Juniors. We played it endlessly on a wind-up His Master’s Voice gramophone, until Tam’s grim-faced dad came in holding his head and we knew enough was enough.

Logiealmond is in the heart of Scotland and the Celts there were hospitable and friendly, not at all scathing of Anglo-Saxons. There was the odd joke or two, of course, but nothing with any bite to it. It was not my only visit to the farm; I also went the following year and enjoyed it just as much. I felt extremely privileged to meet Tam’s family, good men and women of the land, just like my own father’s relations.

This is probably the poet speaking, certainly not someone who has worked the soil for most of his life like my grandad Rhubub, but there is something about a farm which reaches deep into the soul. It’s not just the sight of a honed plough, the scent of sickled hay, the chickens clucking and the geese cackling, but the whole package. Working dogs, obstinate bulls, a sea of corn on an undulating field, a fox gliding away from a coop with a mouthful of feathers, leather tack hanging in the stables, buckets clanking in the cowshed, early mornings, dark evenings, mud, straw, horse sweat, dung, milk churns, tractors, everything.

Yes, idyllic, a scene from a Burns poem, but real too. I’ve experienced several snap shots of farm life, and while it’s undoubtedly not a profession for an effete writer, there is the thought that if life had turned out differently it actually wouldn’t have been so terrible.

Near the end of our time at Cosford the 29th and other entries did a forced march to the Wrekin, a strange rounded hill in Shropshire said to be a the contents of a shovel wielded by a giant. We slept out in the open for a night and then marched back to camp again. This was, I believe, training for our camp in Southport when several entries went under canvas like boy scouts for a few days. The only thing I can remember about Southport is that some of the lads came back into camp late at night having been beaten up by civilian youths. The following evening the whole camp, several hundred boys, marched into town looking for the perpertrators of the previous night’s violence. There were battles, I am sure, but they have faded from my memory. Certainly my own bunch never met any of the enemy, who probably wisely stayed home that night and watched television in the safety of their living rooms.

~

The eighteen months I spent at RAF Cosford, No. 2 School of Technical Training, seemed to last forever. Yet they did come to an end on Tuesday 25 March 1958, when the 29th Entry had its Passing Out Review, its final military parade. My dad was there to see me doing my bit in the ranks. I was as smart as hell and knew all the moves, which as an ex-drill instructor must have pleased him a bit.

Dad had recently been demobbed after twenty-two years service and was struggling to make a living in civilian life as a ‘tally man’: a door-to-door salesman of women’s clothing. He had commuted most of his pension in order to buy a house and so had to work at something which, to my mind, went totally against his character. He was no more a salesman than I was a fish. When he got the cancer that killed him three years later (probably through the stress of the work) he lay dying on our living-room sofa and said to me, ‘You know, I would have liked to work in a hospital, as an orderly. That would have suited me very well.’ And indeed it would have done. He liked people, but not enough to push goods into their faces. And vulnerable people who appreciated his help would have left him feeling that he had done something useful.

I believe I passed out sixth in the telegraphists for Trade and Education, but I can’t be sure as I was lying sick with some fever or other in the camp hospital while the announcements were being made. I had to go on hearsay. I know Alan Cake came First in Education, with Rod Williams coming second. Tam Keay got a prize for General Service Efficiency. (Tam eventually got an MBE, of which he was justly proud, when he sorted out a mess for the RAF at one of their communications centres.) Anyway, I had found I was actually good at exams and had passed my Final Education Examination and Trade Examinations to qualify for the grand rank of Senior Aircraftsman (SAC). I would have to spend six months as a Leading Aircraftsman first, to gain experience, but in effect I had done the best one can do.

Fifty-eight boys out of the original ninety-six had qualified to Aircraftsman only, two ranks below SAC. (Thirty-four had failed to qualify in Education and twenty-four had failed in their Trade exams.) With drop-outs, buy-outs and those dismissed from the service for infractions, this appeared to leave around twenty-five of us who had made the required grade. I had avoided falling by that ‘wayside’ we had been warned about.

Military school had been the making of me, as they say.

6. RAF Coltishall and RAF Horsham St Faith

My first posting was to a fighter station. A
fighter station
. How cool was that? I thought it was awesome.

RAF Coltishall, not far from Norwich, was out in the wilds of Norfolk, where clear streams flowed between grassy banks and wooded countryside. As a rural boy it was ideal for me. There were South American feral coypu running wild in the streams, hares in the flat fields and falcons flying above the hedgerows. I was over the moon with excitement. The fighter ace Douglas Bader had served at Coltishall. In 1958 Wing Commander Laing was its Commanding Officer. This was the real Royal Air Force. I was to be one of four personnel in the Communications Centre (comcen), with special duties in the control tower (which actually meant nothing more than transmitting and receiving weather reports).

My experience of fighter stations to that point began and ended with the John Mills war films: Spitfires and Hurricanes. Now there were even faster and sleeker fighters, jets that flashed across the sky so fast you had to whip your head back and forth to follow their flight. These were the Hawker Hunters with swept back wings and a deadly looking fuselage flown by pilots of 74 Squadron. There were also the fighter-bombers of 23 Squadron Gloster Javelins, or ‘flat irons’ as they were known, because of their delta-shaped wings.

Another boy from my Rochford school days, Tom Hasler, was an instrument technician assigned to 23 Squadron. The Hunters were of course the aristocrats of the pair, but the Javelin pilots always taunted the Hunter pilots with the fact that the Javelins could fly at night and in bad weather, whereas the Hunters could not.

‘Get some windscreen wipers fitted,’ was the common jibe of the Javelin pilot, when the Dukes of the air were coming it too strong.

When I was posted back to Coltishall, at a later date, the Hunters had been replaced by sleek English Electric Lightnings. Lightning fighters looked like rifle barrels with wings, but I did miss the Hunters, which to me were beautiful if deadly weapons of the air.

Work in the comcen was not hard. We were given messages hand-written on message pads to send out by teleprinter, and received messages by the same medium. We had to be on the alert for FLASH messages, which were of the highest priority and caused a stir on the station, since their importance was denoted by their speed. Apart from having to watch for PRIORITY, TOP PRIORITY and FLASH messages, each message had a security tag, which might be SECRET or even TOP SECRET. EYES ONLY was well known to us even before the Bond books and films came into being. Some messages were encrypted and had to be decrypted by a sergeant with Red Seal Clearance, a job I was later to be given just before I left the RAF in 1974.

I enjoyed a brief spell at Coltishall before being posted to a neighbouring fighter station, RAF Horsham St Faith. The duties there were similar to those at Coltishall. Horsham was a much livelier station and I fell in love for the second time in my life with a WRAF named Silvia, who preferred the name ‘Trudy’. Trudy and I had a chaste relationship for around six months before she broke my heart. She left me for a ‘squadron boy’ who worked on the aircraft. There was an hierarchy among us airmen as well as among the officers. Telecommunications was Trade Group 11 – above cooks and clerks and suppliers and RAF Regiment ‘Rock Apes’ – but a long way below the aircraft engineers of Trade Groups 1 – 5, where the Brylcreem boys of the world of electronics and mechanics held sway.

Also, I was still a young boy of seventeen, had had no real sexual experience, and Trudy was nineteen. Trudy was small, round-faced, had brown curls, and was very pretty. I have always had a yen for ‘pretty’, rather than beautiful women. It’s probably for the best. Beautiful women do not go for shortish, nice-looking boys, which is what I was at the time. So I said goodbye to my first real romance and went out with the lads drinking and bombing around in Louis Patterson’s Austin 7 car, which broke down more times than a thin-skinned actress. We would go to the Samson and Hercules dance hall in Norwich to pick up girls, or to jazz venues like Studio 6, or simply down the local pub. Louis was only one of several of my ex-Boy Entrant class mates at Horsham.

Ironically I had my first sexual experience after I had been dumped by Trudy. It was a one-night (well, actually a two minute) stand with a girl I met at a bus stop going home after a dance at Southend’s Kursaal Ballroom, who after a short introductory chat to my delight and utter astonishment she proved equally keen to experiment with the dark but delightful side of nature. I can’t remember how the subject was broached, but somehow we came to an agreement to try it out there and then. I had on a white jacket peppered with black spots (not so garish as it sounds here, folks) which she told me I looked ‘smashing’ in. She had on a thin cotton dress and wore a cardigan back to front. Her coned bra made her breasts stand out like pointed volcanoes, but there was no lust in me, only an eagerness to have a go at something completely new which every other boy of my age seemed to have been doing forever.

The experiment didn’t go that well, because neither of us had any real idea of what we were doing. The act was performed on a soft-earthed grave in a little churchyard next to some shops in the centre of the town. I believe the only satisfaction either of us got was the knowledge that we had at last ‘done it’ with someone, even though a stranger, and I for one was left with a nice glow of achievement. I had worn what we called in those days a French Letter, so it was safe enough sex. There would be no babies or nasty surprises for either of us in the way of spots and rashes. I never learned her name, nor she mine, and the whole very, very brief encounter seems incredibly mystical to me now, but it did happen and it was a maturing experience. I hope that girl was not put off for life by my ignorance and ineptitude, and has since found that ‘doing it’ with someone you love is rather wonderful and enlightening.

I could rock ‘n’ roll in those days with the best of dancers, being light on my feet and quick to learn the moves. The NAAFI was the place where we spent most of our evenings, dancing to the juke box. Just outside the station was a speedway track where I used to watch Ove Fundin, a Swedish speedway rider of incredible skill. Ove was called ‘The Fox’ because before a race he would moan and complain that his motorbike was not up to scratch and that he felt unenthusiastic about the coming race, thus giving his opponents a false sense of security. Then he would go out on to the track and blow them away, spraying coke dust in their faces as he overtook them and roared to the lead. I don’t know where Ove is today, but he gave me a lot of spectator pleasure.

It was while at Coltishall and Horsham that I was approached several times by the authorities, as were all my colleagues, asking if I wanted to earn some extra pay by going to Porton Down, a government experimental station. We were told that they were trying to find a cure for the common cold and needed volunteers to ‘catch a cold’ then be given various treatments. There was something a little sinister about it at the time and I never went. Since then it has been mooted that experiments were taking place with nerve gas and that some servicemen had been experimented on in the mistaken belief they were assisting medical science. LAC Ronald Maddison died aged twenty after having serin nerve agent toxins dripped on to his sleeve. The authorities still claim these were not unethical human experiments, but somehow I’m glad I never took up their offer of extra pay.

During my night shifts, when there was little to do while at Coltishall and Horsham St Faith, I began writing stories in the vein of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
and
The Tell-tale Heart
. Those night scribblings continued throughout my RAF career until when I left I had written some fifty short stories and three novels. The novels are pretty bad and are still gathering dust in my attic. Some of the tall tales however have since been published. A selection of them won the Victor Gollancz/Sunday Times Competition. I’ve always felt more comfortable with the short story than I have with anything of great length. I try to break new ground with short fiction.

I was pretty miserable at Horsham after Trudy gave me the heave ho and was glad when a posting came through, though it was to RAF Uxbridge, where the majority of work was telecommunications for the meteorological boffs. Going there from a twenty-man-billet to a four-man-room, which was an unexpected upgrade. It was still only 1959 though half my life seemed to be over. How long those years seemed then and even now. Within three years I had been through one technical training school and three RAF stations. I had had my first love affair, my first shag, and many other experiences besides. Now I was on a station I disliked for its anonymity and blandness.