Dud’s Army (The personal memories of Dudley Cox)
Called up for National Service in the Royal signals in 1956
Chapter 1: Call-up.
A couple of weeks after my twenty-first birthday the somewhat sinister brown envelope headed O.H.M.S. landed on the door mat of our family's house in Somerset. The contents of the letter declared that under the authority of the National Service Act, 1939, I was to report to Bristol for a medical. Included was a railway voucher. One knew that the call would come. Being in the best of health there was now no barrier between oneself and the dreaded two years of 'natural service' as my four year old sister called it. If one had had the nerve one could have gone berserk and blasted everyone at the medical centre with the fire extinguisher and consequently get kicked out on the spot. If one were a Quaker, or a Scottish nationalist, one could declare oneself a conscientious objector and go work on a farm for two years. I obeyed the call, attended the medical and was declared A1.
It was 1956. I was twenty-one years old, measured six foot two, weighed barely ten stone and was about to be press-ganged into one of the three armed services for a period of two years. My preference had been solicited, to which I had naively responded with Royal Engineers, imagining the building and exploding of bridges. Instead they put me in the Royal Signals. A second brown envelope advised me to report to Catterick in April. For the journey to the north I was supplied a rail pass - a single. At least, I naively told myself, I had been spared the public embarrassment of being inducted into the airforce, which had a local reputation of being pansy; or into the navy, where the trouser bottoms and neck lines measured sadly against the tenets of Carnaby Street. Even so, compared with most of my rugby-playing friends who to a man had served in the Somerset Light Infantry, I was going soft.
I was in fact, both woefully and wilfully green behind the ears. I had no hopes that two years in the army might do some good for me, and I certainly made no plans to exert myself on behalf of the army. I had no family advisors. My dad had signed on with the navy during the last war. He signed at noon - during his dinner break, and was discharged by three thirty of the same day. His boss called him into the office, gave him a stern talking to, told him he was in a preferred trade and consequently was needed more at home than away. He was to consider himself demobbed and go back to rewinding armatures. He did do a stint in the Home Guard - his only claim to fame in that mob being his skill at halfpenny pontoon. I treasure a photograph of him taken with his fellow defenders: out of that bunch of scruffy lumpers he is clearly the most unsoldierly.
Left pretty much to my own stubborn devices I had absorbed enough knowledge to be dangerous. My education comprised two successful years of grammar school in England followed by two disastrous years in Wales. Unceremoniously hauled out of school at fifteen I tried the factory, which led to an armature winding apprenticeship and night school. After a repeated third year I passed O.N.C. I had never been abroad, I had visited London only once - a rugby club charabanc outing, and, darkest secret of all, at the age of twenty one I was yet a virgin. But I was a journeyman tradesman, working at an hourly rate of two and fourpence an hour. I had no car or even a driving licence but I could afford to buy Italian pedals for my racing bike. Aside from work and night school, life comprised of sports, dances and ranging the cloistered streets of Bath with my bosom friend Terry.
In the factory where I worked, Jimmy Quinton had been a lineman in the Signals, serving in Egypt and Ceylon. He got no promotions, but, more interestingly, was elected captain of the regimental cricket team. Jim was a story teller:
C.O.: Er, I say, Quinton, old chap.
Sig. Q.: Sir?
C.O.: Quinton; I like to play in the slips - actually.
Sig.Q.: Right you are, Sir. First or second?
Jim gave me one piece of advice: choose a bed furthest from the barrack room door. Listening to Jim I got all fired up over the prospect of an overseas posting - one thing the army could provide me. But I blindly despised the enforcement aspect of National Service to such a degree I despised myself into a profound and preferred ignorance. The idea of knowing your enemies better than your friends had not occurred to me. And what the rough hand of the army had to offer me I would neither see nor blindly accept. I went into the army with something of an attitude - the attitude of an ignorant youth. It was not an attitude so carefully scripted or so vehemently expressed as that of John Osborne's Jimmy Porter - "There aren't any good, brave causes left," but it was an attitude. I could have been the poster boy for the "Youth is wasted on the young," brigade.
Catterick was horrible. It reminded one of a certain German internment camp, especially when arriving at the dead-end rail terminus in the dark of early morning; all that was missing was the dogs. The Catterick landscape - extensive, was dotted with the kind of buildings that squatters favour, their exteriors creosoted and property boundaries picked out with rows of white-painted stones. For someone coming from Bath the prospect was decidedly a downer.
We began with Basic Training - four weeks to make soldiers out of us, employing a military manual one supposed initially written during Boudica's uprising. They applied shock, a series of shocks, to the recruits' sensibility, already in-shock in a general sense from the impact of being so summarily drafted. In time-honoured fashion we were first robbed of that which gave us our civilian dignity - our name, hair and clothes. One's upper neck and lower head was shaved to a tide-line above the ears, the net result resembling a thistle. Every stitch of one's clothes was replaced by uniform, most pieces of which were the colour of human s---. One received an eight digit number, ignominiously reduced to three and then hyphenated to one's surname for shouting out or ease-of-typing-into orders. Overnight, sans clerical sanction, I was re-christened Three-Four-Three. Both the shape and form of our separate identities were, in very short order, eliminated. We were divided into eminently conquerable squads, each squad allotted a large open room in a barren stone building overlooking a gravelled, featureless square.
Our room contained two rows of grey beds and a similar dispersement of green lockers. For the next month It became our collective business to maintain this room at hospital cleanliness. In a smaller, filthier room alongside lived our assigned drill corporals who from the outset confided to us that at conception our best parts had run down our mothers' legs. We were seriously assured that at birth we should have been discarded in favour of the afterbirth. We were "nig-nogs."
The dining hall was a shocker, for it was in this great echoing cantonment one came into abrupt contact with the full teeming mass of that month's inductees. It seemed like a cast of thousands. Plate in hand, approaching the surly row of cooks flanking their turgid pots one's heart sank, one's nose wrinkled, one's eyes watered. Whack went the great spoon against the rim of the cauldron, releasing a potato bomb flattening out onto one's plate with a force to strain one's wrist. Something green was delivered from a second container, and something wriggly forked from a tray of wrigglies. Before any kind of serious inspection was possible the whole was slopped over with gravy; one hoped it was gravy. There was a slab of pudding for the other hand along with two slices of bread. Occasionally a plate was jettisoned from an unwary fellow's hand by the potato bomber, crashing to the floor and smashing. A great cheer would go up from the cooks, while the unfortunate limp-wrister was derisively thumbed to the back of the queue which continued its shuffling progress through or around the mess on the floor. There was also tea, to which it was whispered the cooks added bromide. If this was the case, the drug was wasted on me, and with those I consulted - one gleaned a splinter of comfort from the exposure of this myth. Second helpings were out of the question but occasionally more bread was offered. It arrived in the form of a stainless steel four-wheeled hospital cart, heaped high to the edges with grey, curling slices of day-olds, pushed into the middle of the hall by one of the cooks - quickly released to travel wheresoever the last push might take it. The cook had to be nimble to avoid the responding avalanche of fellows as they rose like locusts from the tables and dove for the prize. In thirty seconds the cart was breadless.
An astonishing fact one notices on admittance to the army is the number of others to whom this is happening - hundreds and hundreds in close proximity, thousands further out. And such diversity - the long and the short and the tall, of course, but the range of regional accents that clattered so vigorously about me I could never have anticipated. Contact of this form with so many of one's countrymen was somehow hugely challenging. My hopelessly parochial sense of the shape and texture of what it was to be British changed overnight; what a cocoon I had been living in.
The first day was given over to haircuts, allotment of quarters and the collection of kit - a word depressingly employed to replace "personal military wardrobe." Warned by the old hands in the factory to check each item of issue carefully before signing for it, I rapidly came to realise that the boys had been having their little joke. The quartermaster and his leering staff threw kit at us until, above our outstretched arms, it mounted level with the ears - these latter now as evident as a plimsoll line, from the attentions of the camp hairdresser, while at every stage we were harried forward by the gravel-voiced corporals who seemed to grow more personally menacing with every passing hour. Laden like mules we were herded to our quarters and there invited to select a bed. I got the next but one to the far wall - indemnity against the "I want three volunteers: you, you and you" routine.
Then followed growled demonstrations on how to dress, how to fold and arrange kit in one's locker, how to make an army bed, how and who to salute. One soon discovered that all orders, great and small, demanded reflexive actions in straight lines - essentially inhuman responses. Thinking was banned. Throughout these domestic explications it was impressed upon us how our guts would be seconded to the function of garters should we fail to comply with any directive issued by a serviceman of superior rank. We had no rank. We were a shortened number. We were nig-nogs. We were the lowest of the low. Worms had more rank than us. Down the road we might graduate to the lowest rank - that of signalman, in the unlikely event we completed basic training.
Signalman did not sound like much of a rank to me. The only signalmen I knew worked for the railway, yanking on rows of waist-high levers in isolated, red brick, multi-windowed signal boxes. The signalman who inhabited the box on the Barry line, for example, was remembered for always shaking his fist at us kids - for which he got a bevy of arse-about-face "V" signs as we beat a scattered retreat up the embankment. He was held in low regard, unworthy of even a village boy's interest. Surely there were superior forms of signalmen? Surely we were not going to be trained to switch points? Perhaps semaphore might come into it, or Morse, or carrier pigeons? One might have asked the corporal a question or two at this stage, but one's survival instincts rebelled at the idea. Their eyes and ears roved over us as menacingly as those of a Doberman.
Sadly we divested ourselves of our civilian clothes. How these were disposed of I do not remember - probably parcelled and posted home - there was certainly no place for them in the sentry-box locker. As we each sat on the lip of our stretched-blanket, envelope -thin beds, fitting forehead-scarring badges into the beret, laces into the heel-deforming boots, adjusting webbing, folding fabric into eight inch squares -
"Not yer greatcoat you idjit-bloody nig-nog!"
- a pall of self-pity settled over the squad. Two years of this lot stretched incomprehensibly before us. "Roll on death, demob's too far away" took on the verity of a hymn. With lights out we slid into our sandwich beds as deftly as we had once slid our civilian hair combs into our civilian top pockets. We were in the army. Whatever esprit-de-corps existed within us lay purely in our common bond of misery. That first night we had not been in bed more than ten minutes before there came a slight commotion at the door, followed by a hoarse whisper:
"Anyone want a f---ing fight?"
I remembered another of the old hands' injunctions: never, ever volunteer. I slept.
Chapter 2: Drill.
Our barrack room provided sleeping quarters to perhaps eighteen of us, maybe less, I do not perfectly remember. It seems to have been that number for on the second day when we were shouted and harangued into a group outside in the roadway, self-consciously dressed in shapeless denim fatigues, I fancy we made up a unit of six men across and three deep - a squad. We clumped about awkardly in our new boots - ugly, ill-fitting and hated, my Italian slip-ons now a delicate memory. We must have resembled first-day farm boys. Up and down the roadways that bordered the square, numerous squads of thistle-headed recruits were about to begin drill training, separated from each other by sufficient distance as to prevent the screams of outrage of the drill corporals from overlapping.
The first time we assembled and arranged as a squad - heads up, eyes front and watering as we squinted into the sun, shoulders back, arms stiff at the sides, fists lightly balled, thumbs facing forward and pointing to the ground parallel to one's trouser seams, the whole busines struck me as so idiotic it was all I could do to prevent myself from falling to the ground in convulsive, manic laughter. But it was no laughing matter, and the moment soon passed. Like colts from the paddock we were there to be broken in to the ways of our new masters. Besides, any hint of a smirk from a recruit and the drill corporal was in his face, roaring obscenities in an eye-popping, saliva-scattering tirade that rapidly metamorphosed the smirk into fear. The first lessons were on how to come to ease, how to come to attention, and how to stand to attention - huge liberties with the English language not withstanding. One was taught how to transition from one state to the other by means of first flinging one's knee halfway to one's chin, and from this height stamping one's booted foot into the ground. Thus it was that on the coming-to- attention manouvre one invariably raked the inside ankle with the heel of the boot to the point where blood soon began to flow. It turned out that the army did want a loss of blood, but not from the ankle; the drill corporal expressed the objective thus:
"You are to smash yor feet so 'ard into the grahnd, I'll see the blood come spahtin aht o' the bleedin' lace 'oles. Nah. Let's get it tewgether. Squad! Huht-ten ... wait for it, wait for it, ...- SHAN!"
It took us several hours to get the hang of assuming these postures for our separate selves, but several weeks before we achieved a synchronisation with each other. In the meantime we were introduced to the approved method of turning the body either to the left or the right through an angle of ninety degrees. Such a turn, on pavement, required a fractional sort of backward hop of the leading leg once the angle had been turned followed by the usual ankle-smashing delivery of the follow-up knee, leg and boot stamp. From this we graduated to the about-turn, which was similar in all respects except for the angle being doubled to an hundred and eighty degrees. The ensuing leg-twisting while maintaining balance took some getting used to, with those of us having taken tango lessons finding a distinct advantage. On and on it went, hour after hour, the indefatigable, immaculately dressed drill corporals taking it in turns to hoarsly scream their orders, and reward our responses with inexhaustible streams of scurrilous obscenities.
All of this we endured, possibly for several days, before ever the business of marching was addressed, and no sooner had we mastered the idea of all stepping out with the same foot at the same time than we were required to learn to halt, again with the same unity of purpose and action. Then came the wheeling, trickier than one might suppose if one were positioned in either of the outside lines. They made me an outside marker - because I was the tallest I found out afterwards but at the time I thought it was a promotion. The most difficult manouvre of the march followed the carefully timed order to change step - with the squad barrelling full force forward. For those not versed in ballroom dancing this proved an almost insurmountable challenge. Eventually, the two worst offenders were plucked from the squad and while we stood at ease the miscreants were mercilessly drummed up and down before us, their efforts growing progressively more desperate, and tragically comical. Cruelly, we laughed at them.
Then came the rifles - bolt action 303's left over from the last war. We began learning how to fling these about our bodies without disturbing our squad formation or knocking each other senseless. With this mastered we were required to fasten a bayonet to the muzzle end and repeat the process. I remember being disgusted with the bayonet design - a sharpened length of five sixteenths round steel somewhat larger than that found on the back of a boy scout's knife which uncles told us were useful for digging stones out of horses' hooves. I had expected a sheath-knife type blade with grooves down each side for letting the air in and the blood out. But the danger of the rifle to me came each time I performed the order-arms directive, from skinning my left collar bone - embarrassingly prominent, and bruising my left breast muscle - most recently nurtured into vague existence by a series of Charles Atlas dynamic tension exercises, the expense of the course split fifty-fifty with my bosom friend Terry. I detested that rifle with a dark hatred, gloom settling over me each time the drill corporal unchained them from the corridor wall.
I actually fired my gun once, on the day we were marched to the practice butts, missing the target but hitting the wooden signal they were waving at me to indicate a miss. I was roundly cursed for this, even though I pointed out I preferred a moving target. Taking my turn in the butts, where one cowers below a concrete parapet above which the target sits, I learned at first hand what it is to come under fire. As the live rounds thrummed by not more than a couple of feet overhead, to my fevered imagination each bullet made as much commotion forcing itself through the air about me, it was as if a double-decker bus had bodily passed over. I was horrified at the potential violence, pain and disfigurement a single bullet offered to the human body. As a soldier I felt a complete failure.
Chapter 3: Excursions.
Days accumulated into weeks. There was no leave - not for nig-nogs; it was all work and no play. Somehow I got landed with an extra duty. Each morning I was admitted to the N.C.O.'s room next door where I was to make up one of their beds. It was not much of a duty, except for puffing up the pillows, on which stains of excreted blood and pus had nightly settled, oozing from a profusion of volcanic boils on the corporal's neck and face.
We were drilled in all weathers, morning and afternoons. When it rained we simply moved into one of the drill sheds; there was no let up. Between supper and lights out, when not cleaning and polishing, an occasional hour of no-work allowed a visit to the N.A.A.F.I. This particular locale was designed exclusively for the patronage of us nig-nogs and thus contained the barest of bones by way of resources. It was housed in a cavernous room bereft of comfort or stimulation. One might order there a pallid egg, beans and chips, or purchase such staples as toothpaste, chocolate, boot polish, yellow dusters, shoe brushes, toothbrushes, razor blades, soaps, Brasso and Blanco - this latter a pale green paste one diluted and then smeared or brushed onto webbing to make the article look clean. It was rumoured that the Blanco business was owned by a member of the aristocracy, which, true or false, made its application doubly offending. The staff there were a ghost-like, lurking, dispirited lot, haunting their depressing caravansary with neither zest nor zeal. The brightest sound that could ever be heard there was the jingle of the till - this last at our expense. We concluded the place was managed by a retired undertaker already taken up with a serious consideration of his own life's hereafter. His place was a good one to avoid.
Evenings were taken up with preparing our kit for the next day - to appear on morning's parade in less than perfect nick was certain to result in hours of cookhouse fatigues. Metals were brasso'd to a deep shine, webbing blanco'd to a pale apple green. Boots required an enormous amount of attention as the toes were expected to look like ebony billiard balls. It was literally spit and polish with the yellow duster on the ridiculously bulbous front ends, and vigorous application of brushes over the remainder. With this lot done, one usually hung about the room for either a game of cards or a plain old chin-wag.
Constituting a mosaic of sub-cultures, we were interested in each other. Being of the working class one's time had hitherto been primarily focussed on earning a living. This meant being at work Monday to Friday plus half a day Saturday - forty four hours a week, with two weeks off paid holiday a year. We got two days off at Christmas and one day at Easter. On New Year's Day one was allowed to clock in one hour later than usual. Such a regime keeps one close to home; we grew from boyhood to manhood scarcely going anywhere of note. Those who had seen something of the world had done so courtesy the merchant marine. It was from an ex-radio operator I learned what a good job for going foreign that was, while from a Liverpudlian ex-deckhand I was earnestly advised to never ship aboard a banana boat. Years later, unloading tarantula infested banana stems from a rust -bucket vessel in harbour at Hamburg, I was reminded of his kindly advice. For the sake of the evening talk that circulated our barrack room I was more than content to forego a trip to the N.A.A.F.I.
With the first couple of weeks' training behind us we were deemed safe enough to be ventured further afield. We were to go on a route march. From the movies I'd seen I supposed it was to be a full kit, weighted pack and rifle affair, with the weak ones falling by the wayside and getting jankers for letting the side down. In this I was mistaken. We were to assemble dressed in vest, shorts and boots. I was horrified. I had a very odd sort of physique about which I was neurotically ashamed. I was tall, but due exclusively to my legs being extraordinarily long. In the privacy of my head, my conscience nagged at me that my height was a fraud; by rights I was not tall at all - I was all leg. Further, to my undying shame, my legs were hopelessly thin. No matter that I could power a soccer or rugby ball, left or right footed, with force and accuracy, the shape and length of my legs was my secret despair. Both Terry and I, somewhere around the fifth year of our apprenticeship, had suddenly shot upwards in this manner, the alarming reality of these gangling extensions constantly coming into notice as a result of our cycling efforts. Being mates, and of a similar bent, so to speak, the distressing form taken by this adolescent spurt of growth inspired us to commission Charles Atlas, patron saint of all nine stone weaklings, to address the problem. Since we split the cost of the course fifty-fifty, we divided the instruction pamphlets in the same proportion. I drew the upper body, Terry the lower, pooling Charles' advice on nutrition. Terry's legs improved as did the size of my chest. But along came the army and I was stuck in a developmental limbo. Stripped off I did not look good. With my thistle hairdo, vest, shorts and bulbous-toed boots I looked bizarre.
We were marched off into the country side, arms and legs going like pink, knobbly pistons. Through villages, past post offices, corner shops, churches and pubs. Being the squad's corner marker gave me no place to hide. I suffered the mockery of small boys, giggling girls, dogs, old men and ladies in jaw-dropped mid-sentence at their front garden gates. I had read in books of characters who, in moments of palpable embarrassment, prayed for the ground to open and swallow them. I did just that, but lacking any true faith in the efficacy of prayer I also cursed the army with a malevolence that gave me pins and needles all over.
We made a second trip to the shooting range, this time for an exercise with the Sten gun. The Sten is a romantic sort of weapon; film stars have won wars with it - John Wayne and Alan Ladd, for example. That particular make of gun is an engineering marvel, and the fact that during the second world war it could be manufactured for less than ten shillings has always impressed me. The first lesson on its use is to learn the approved manner of holding it. The corporal demonstrated and then invited us to follow suit as he walked around us to see if we had it right. I did not; one of my fingers was curled into the ignition chamber. I was paraded about as a living example of typical nig-nog stupidity, demonstrating with chilling certainty how one's finger ends could be chopped off. We were advised that at the firing range we would be in the standing position, firing live rounds, and consequently, when approaching the target with the loaded gun, we would at all times have a second man at the back of us who was instructed to knock us down should we inadvertently turn about for any reason - to ask a typical nig-nog question, for example. By turning about, it was explained, we would be bringing all and sundry into the line of fire. We were not shown how to knock the man down, or given a Billy-knocker to do it with, as I had supposed, or even hoped, we might. Neither was this attack-from-the-rear procedure demonstrated. My imagination fastened onto solving the puzzle of exactly how to knock the man down, entirely forgetting the business of how to fire the gun. The main difficulty, I surmised, was that being the inexperienced knocker-man behind was small immunity from getting shot. A lot of blokes do not like getting knocked from behind, irrespective of the reason, and were likely to take umbrage.
As it turned out, others had been wrestling with the same problem, for in the midst of the excitement of liberating short bursts of live Sten gun bullets, one of our number did turn around, or half turn around - it was difficult to tell exactly as everything that followed happened very quickly. The man behind simply dove to the ground in the opposite quadrant to the arc described by the threatening gun muzzle, the rest of us following suit irrespective of quadrant, while one alert corporal roared "Eyes front you bloody nig-nog" at the offending man so fiercely his eyes and body had obeyed the order before the last of us had hit the ground. This moment illustrated for me the army's need to have orders obeyed on the instant, and worthy of inclusion in the training manual.
I got to fire the Sten alright, preserving my finger ends and actually hitting the target, but the firing did not feel like anything I had imagined from the movies. I did not enjoy the experience. At the end of the exercise we were involved in a curious ritual. Formed into a single line - front face, as the expression goes, the officer in charge strolled down the line, pausing before each of us and lifting an eyebrow - a singularly unmilitary form of address, I thought. In response to this condescending facial twitch each of us in turn was required to recite an approved litany:
" I have no live rounds or empty shells in my possession, Sir."
" I have no live rounds ..."
On and on, man after man it went. Down the line sauntered the officer, terribly bored, until reaching the end man - a beefy lad from Plymouth, who unknown to the officer had been detailed to pick up the casings:
"I have no live rounds but I do have a bloody gurt bag of empty shells, Zurr."
Zephyr-like, a faintly discernible sigh of contentment rippled with domino effect the length of the line. At the source, the officer's eyelids fluttered and he coughed stiffly behind white fingers as he shakily bid the corporal "Carry on."
The only other trip that took us out of our particular camp was of a very different nature. We were led to a distant hut, which on entering one was surprised to find rows of desks set out in typical examination room format. On each desk was placed a pale green booklet and one pencil. On the cover there was place for one to write one's name and number, which, as soon as we were all seated we were invited to do. Written beneath was printed "Sample Question," which turned out to be no question at all but an order: "Complete the following series." Following this order was printed three numbers followed by a space, as indicated by a short underlining of dots. The three numbers were "1,2,3,"
"Right," said the corporal, standing at the front not three feet from my desk. His shoulder insignias declared him to be of the Intelligence Corps.
"Pay attention. What you see before you is a test. It's designed to help place you in jobs that suit you, once you're clear of basic training. You are to attempt all questions and you have one hour to do them in. After that, pencils down."
Some groans went up from the back of the class.
"No need to panic," encouraged the Intelligent One, "Look at the first question printed on the cover. What could be easier?"
I'd already been looking at it and it looked like a tricky bugger to me; I'd concluded, in fact, that it was unanswerable. The three numbers were underscored by a dotted line which continued beyond the "3," thereby creating an empty space for continuation of the series. The problem for me was that the three numbers were underlined by a total of seven dots, followed by three dots above which lay the space in which one was to write in one's answer. I could not make any sense of it. To me the question read: "If three numbers in linear sequence are separated by three commas and underlined by seven dots, what number or numbers must follow in sequence if the underlining spans a further three dots?" There really should have been six dots beneath the three given numbers with the empty space underlined with two dots - eight dots in all, for the answer to be "4." But seven dots followed by three dots!? I started to get very hot. The Intelligent One looked at me strangely.
"So what is the answer?" he asked the class knowingly, addressing us as though we were five year olds.
"Four," roared the class (except for me) happily, crowing back on cue exactly like five year olds.
"Four," beamed I.O. at me with huge condescension tinged with pity. "Now that wasn't so bad, was it. Off you go."
Before I could write in a belated "4," I.O. had stepped into the aisle behind me making sure he read the name off my paper before I could turn the page. I was boiling with rage and mortification. In a dark flash of memory my mind went back to the day I sat the entrance exam to grammar school. Before going into the exam room I had engaged in a huge playground fight with a rival boy from a neighbouring village, arriving at my desk in a flushed and dishevelled state. Before me lay the mathematics paper. I started ripping into it, and was going along in fine style as one of the two teachers in attendance stopped at the back of me, looking over my shoulder at my answer sheet to see what I was making of it. I gritted my teeth but kept going, irritated to have him at the back of me. He then made a snort, proceeded to the front of the class, and leaned over to whisper conspiratorially in the ear of his colleague at the front. They both chortled and looked back at me as though my very sitting there was an impudence of false hopes. I cursed all teachers to blazes, including the Intelligent One. I turned the pages, checking out the test. It was a piece of cake, and I went through it like a hot knife through butter, still mad as hell but with a fierce sort of revenging delight. I had my pencil down in half an hour, spending the remainder of the time cursing the army.
Chapter 4: Passing out.
With the third week behind us we began to look towards our passing out - a peculiar name for it as the last thing one looked for was to faint during the graduation ceremony. Evidence of our metamorphosis from civilian to military beings manifested on the morning we were at long last marched out onto that holy of holies - the square, an area so revered by our N.C.O.'s it had assumed a taboo akin to the precinct of the burning bush. We had been flatly declared unworthy of setting foot on the fringe of it, let alone crossing it by way of a shortcut - a crime incurring unimaginable punishment. Out we marched, imbued with much the same sense of awe Columbus must have felt as the land's horizon sank behind him.
The fine-grained gravel crunched pleasantly beneath our boots. From the munching sound we could more easily get it together - there was a snare drum sonance to it, talking to us; as a squad we had found a voice, our voice, at our feet. We found ourselves wanting to get the drill cleanly right, to get it right together. Our drill corporal, instead of trotting alongside, took to holding his position while we were sent off into such far distances as the parameters of the square allowed - a khaki clad mechanical unit on legs, obeying commands that magically came to us as air-slicing vibrations from the gravelled throat of far-off spotty face. We were made much happier to be trusted at such a distance from the ordering source. I was reminded of sheepdog trials.
We learned to distinguish our own drill corporal's commands from those of other corporals simultaneously drilling other squads on the same square. We covertly compared the smartness of our manoeuvring with that of others. Confusion changed to a pleasing complexity - a matrix of variables we had mastered. Hour after hour we were marched, wheeled, drilled, paraded and inspected. Occasionally might come a word of praise, or, equally gratifying, less criticism. Even less occasionally we might finish the day an hour earlier. Our uniforms had by this time somewhat moulded to the form of our bodies - at least to the degree of providing one a sense of individual ownership. It was time to pass out.
The passing out parade was for me, in prospect, a frightening affair. From the moment we first mustered and marched out onto the mother of all parade grounds I was terrified of doing something silly. I clearly remember standing in the accustomed right marker position of my squad with knees knocking. The inspecting party, I had heard, was to be led by a brigadier. My knees did literally knock. I was shocked: I had heard the expression but had never believed it merited literal meaning. What saved me from further indignity was the music of the military band, playing somewhere off to my right. I discovered that by fiercely concentrating on both melody and arrangement I could draw from it a measure of comfort. The more I listened the more I came to understand that some of the numbers played had a better soothing effect on me than others; the knocking together of my knees was in direct relationship - a waltz, for example, exerted a huge damping effect on both the amplitude and frequency of the oscillations. I was getting really interested in this theory, wondering, for example, how close I had been to resonance when the inspecting party materialised - at my back. The roots of the hairs at the nape of my neck swarmed into a rash of goose bumps. Inexplicably, the official party had halted directly behind me, and paused there, exchanging derogatory, privileged class noises. Unified by an accompanying cloud of gents cologne they wheeled around the right-hand side of me, drawing to a halt dead ahead. Something was seriously wrong.
It must be understood that when a soldier is brought to attention by an order from a senior officer, he is required to fasten his attention on the sky that hangs above the distant horizon directly ahead. Should anything intrude into this line of vision, like the face of the drill corporal, for example, one is not allowed to alter one's focus. Looking the drill corporal in the eye, man to man, is tantamount to treason. Standing to attention - a ridiculous posture at the best of times, and staring out at a far away nothing forces the facial features into a sympathetic vacuity. So thus I stood, with the inspection party, somewhat out of focus, gathered before me. I received a composite image oddly selective of detail: a bevy of peaked caps, a gaggle of exquisitely cut pale, khaki, linen uniforms, a lattice of Sam Brownes, a peppering of pips and crowns and a tepee's worth of swagger sticks. The Brigadier, as ruddily complexioned as a sheep farmer, posed front and centre. He was kaleidoscopically be-ribboned and red -tabbed across his front as though shortly arrived from the prize ring of the county gymkhana. At the far extreme fringe of the party, ramrod straight, his boils purple and his eyes pale slits of venom, stood the drill corporal. All were beholding me as though I were an alien life form. I froze. My heart hammered. The music of the band vaporised. I started wondering about my knees but had lost all sense of feeling below the ears. Something about me was evidently wrong.
The Brigadier, after a prolonged and quizzical look handed off his Malacca to an aide, stepped forward and laid his hands upon my person, simultaneously harrumphing in an avuncular, walrus sort of manner. His party, in a show of solidarity for their leader, harrumphed approval. It became apparent he was intent on rearranging my posture. But my body was no lump of malleable clay. Years spent working on the floor of a sweat-shop factory, all four seasons on the playing fields and mornings in the bathroom at dawn with Charles Atlas had given my body the resilience of an assembly of wire ropes - one for all and all for one. The Brigadier was discovering that a push here instantly produced the need for a pull there, and as fast as he addressed one reaction he was faced with the need for a second action, and a third, and .... Bending obediently this way and that I was a living example of Newton's Third Law of Motion. His party, entirely sympathetic to their leader, perceptibly strained in concert with him, but very wisely stayed in the offing.
The Brigadier abruptly changed tactics, initiating a dialogue, or more properly a monologue, for unless one was asked a direct question one was duty bound to remain dumb as well as short-sighted. Anyway, for my part lockjaw had set in. He wanted me to stand up straighter, he said, he wanted me to be proud of my country, proud of my regiment, proud of my six feet two. At that I badly wanted to tell him - but didn't, that my six foot two was a fraud, that two thirds of it was leg, and I was anything but proud of it, and took every measure to conceal it, partly because a good many of my friends, like the Brigadier himself, were short-arses. But instead I duly stiffened myself heavenwards and gave him my best imitation of a flagpole - a British flagpole, of course, worthy of bearing British colours even if the suns of distant horizons continued setting in their absence.
The Brigadier reached up and straightened my tie, the lie of which had suffered during his attempted rearrangements of my person; it was small consolation for his efforts. He retreated a step and retrieved his cane. I suspect that had he been Roman he would have beaten me with it. With a significant look at the C.O. the Brigadier and party abandoned me and moved on. It was clear to all that I was an intractable, a lost cause, a uniformed disgrace that was becoming all too common these days. If ever there was a case for pulling the plug on the National Service Act, here it was. Bringing up the rear the drill corporal found time to malevolently hiss into my ear:
"Cox! You're the worst f---ing soldier in the whole f---ing army. I could give you such a rabbit punch."
This latter comment, I surmised, came about as a result of the flagpole stretch exposing my drainpipe neck, a part of me I hated almost as much as my drainpipe legs. I suddenly became aware of the band playing; it had never stopped. Curiously my knees had quit knocking, and apart from a sort of light headedness I felt better than I had all day. I realised that for all intents and purposes I had passed out.
With the pomp, ceremony and V.I.P's off the field, we gathered in the drill sheds for assignment to other training regiments. One's last three and name was called out and one stood in a particular place on the square and waited. I waited alone for a very long time, and was thinking that some form of retribution for the Brigadier incident was being planned when I was joined by a soft-spoken, diminutive Scotsman. The moment I looked into his face I experienced a sense of enormous relief: intelligence, good humour and plain common sense came beaming out of him. It was a balm. It was a waltz. For the first time since I had joined up I felt at ease with the world and those around me.
"Are you for one-teearrr?" he asked politely.
"No bloody idea," I answered cheerfully, and we both laughed.
I was still high from my parade ground encounter, and felt curiously invulnerable. Nothing worse could ever happen after that, I told myself, and I had survived.
There were not many for 1T.R., a handful perhaps. I could tell right off we were the bright boys - the worst soldiers, no doubt, but the brightest. What a thrill to find oneself in such company. My heart sang. I had no idea where we were going or what we were to do. We tossed our kit bags into the back of a small lorry, climbed in after them, and away we went.