I received my first underwear at the kitting out, and two uniforms which fitted neatly, plus a set of khaki and a pair of gaiters for rougher work. An overcoat was put into my arms, as well as woollen gloves, scarf and mittens, shirts and a tie, shoes, boots and socks. I had never been so well protected against the worst of the weather. Soon after arrival I was singled out to take a special hearing test, to make sure I had the highest aural standards necessary for wireless operating.
Alertness spanned every split-second when part of a swiftly moving block of men across the parade ground, or during drill in the great hangar when it rained, always relating to the slightest change of position in the man to your right. I wasn’t bored: the piously self-centred never can be. Part of my faculties relished the physical cohesion of belonging to an intelligent and responsive mass, while the other half enjoyed the over-view of such wheeling and about-turning from the cockpit of an imaginary autogyro suspended a hundred feet above.
The drill sergeants came from the RAF Regiment, some of them, as were the officers, redundant aircrew. Teasing took place in the billet, but no bullying, and the parade ground exhortations of the NCOs were now and again accompanied by earthy humour. Physical training alternated with rifle drill, runs over the assault course burdened with small arms and kit, bayonet fighting and grenade throwing turned us into soldiers though not hard infantry. Such an extension to ordinary life might some time be useful, I thought, especially the enhanced awareness of the body and an instinctive but careful use of firearms.
For all our marching and counter-marching as Aircraftsmen Second Class Recruits we were paid three shillings a day, one of which was allotted to my mother, who every two weeks took her allowance book to the post office, received fourteen shillings, then crossed the road to the Co-op and came out with almost more groceries than she could carry. The fortnightly pay parade left me with sufficient for tobacco, an occasional foray to the NAAFI, shoe polish, toothpaste and stamps. A pound or two was even put by for my first leave.
We were forbidden to go out during basic training, but Jack Mercer and I found a way through the back fence and went ten miles by tram to his home place of Atherton, where his mother welcomed us with a tin of sweet pears for tea. Few moaned about the food at camp, because the diet was good, and we were easy to satisfy after six years of rationing.
Mixing with people of all families and backgrounds was an interesting diversion. Docherty and a couple of cronies, hard men from Glasgow, kept together in mess and billet, distrusting everyone else for a while due to being in a strange element which they could not control and so felt threatened by. Perhaps because of my name they showed some interest in me, but I preferred arguing the Labour point of view with Ashley Bell, the solicitor’s son from Northumberland. As well as sharp lads who had grown up in London there was a tall, good-looking songster from Ireland, and he entertained us with militant or melancholy ditties out of an endless store of songs and verses. Because he could barely read and write we coached him with letters home, and helped to fasten on his complicated webbing equipment.
As the weeks went by one sensed the 120 of our flight becoming more and more cohesive as a unit on the drill ground. The idea was to make us as smart as the Guards and, eventually, marching twenty abreast, the line was so meticulously straight that whoever shouted the orders saw only one man go by at the point of the line passing, as if we were rehearsing for a military tattoo.
My immersion into the land of the all-fed and all-found was agreeable, no decisions to make as long as one did as one was told, which was never onerous or unreasonable. On the other hand, volunteer status was important to me, knowing that I had accepted the life of my own free will, and that call-up could have been avoided on taking Bert Firman’s offer of a reserved occupation by training to be a mechanic.
The final parade and march past in July was celebrated with a group photograph, and then a fortnight’s leave. In Nottingham most of my friends were also absent in the services, but my girlfriend and I, when not in the cinema, or holding hands in a pub over our beer, fucked the two weeks away with passion and abandon. She didn’t seem to enjoy being seen on the street with a smart airman as much as I had hoped, but my mother had either given my civilian clothes to the ragman, or put what fitted on to Brian. My bicycle had also gone, as had most of my books, but having cast myself loose in the big ship of the air force, possessions meant little beyond what could be stuffed into a kitbag.
At the beginning of August, candidates for wireless school were posted to Compton Bassett in Wiltshire to begin twenty-eight weeks’ training. Parades were few and, in order that the maximum time be given to learning, there was little or no bullshit, although billet floors had to be kept polished and kit displayed in regulation style at the bed-end.
School started at half past seven, and went on, with a meal break, until six. In a more relaxed pre-war era the length of the course would have been eighteen months, and instruction more thorough, but the times and the human material had changed. My Morse was already up to standard, while others could take at least some words per minute, so that with the initial barrier broken it was only a matter of practice to qualify.
Classes in wireless telegraphy procedure, and the technical aspects of radio, were later followed by the practical side of managing individual radio stations, our receivers and transmitters in Morse contact with each other. Touch-typing was also taught, and we were soon rattling out the loosening up exercise for morning fingers: ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’, a skill also used for operating teleprinters, as well as taking Morse more neatly than by handwriting.
The place resembled an adult technical college, many of the teachers being civilians or retired RAF signals types, one of the latter entertaining us with an account of plodding around the mountains of the Indian North West Frontier in the ’20s with a wireless installation on the back of a mule. To encourage us he sent the complete seduction scene from Forever Amber in Morse, adding at the end something not put in by the author: ‘He had shot his bolt!’ — then nervously telling us to rub that bit out in case an inspecting officer came in. Another tall, ruddy-faced old man had been a telegraphist for ten years at a place on the southern tip of New Zealand, which experience had left a glint of icy humour in his bright blue eyes.
Two trainee wireless operators of about twenty had seen war service as Marconi officers in the Merchant Navy from the age of sixteen, and came on the course with a row of medal ribbons longer than those on the tunics of most old sweats. Another young man, little older than myself, had spent the latter part of the war in the Far East as second officer on merchant ships, and he also had his decorations. I went on weekend pass with him, to a village near Weston-super-Mare, calling on his etiolated parents, who had been prisoners of the Japanese in China.
The wing-commander in charge of the camp ran the place fairly benignly, but would occasionally inveigh against us via the tannoy speakers in every hut, threatening to stop our ‘privilegees’, whatever they were, if we didn’t refrain from rowdy behaviour between classes. We imagined he just liked sitting in his office before a microphone and emphasizing his position as governor of the institution, but when someone defecated into one of the baths he assumed that a person in our hut was to blame. We were asked to reveal who it was, but only the culprit himself knew the answer to that, and none of us had much hope of him owning up, simply because we were totally unable to understand why he had done it, which made it certain that he could not have been in our group. Someone from County Durham wondered if a stray St Bernard called Dropper hadn’t been wandering around but, never able to say who had been responsible, we were confined to camp for a fortnight.