Boy Entrant; The Recollections of a Royal Air Force Brat (14 page)

“Very good Carlin. Carry on,” he finally said, and moved on to “Charlie” Chaplain, whose bed-space adjoined mine.

I felt great relief that the ordeal was over and I had come through inspection without any hitches.

Altogether, the kit inspection in our billet took about thirty minutes. When Flight Lieutenant Hubbard finished inspecting the final boy, he turned to face Corporal Blandford and said, “Carry on, corporal.”

“Okay lads, stand easy,” he said. “That wasn’t bad, but there’s a lot of room for improvement.” He then continued, “Some of you got picked up by the Squadron Commander,” then, looking at a piece of paper in his hand, he read out the names of the boys who had been picked up by Flight Lieutenant Hubbard. “Sergeant Clarke wants to see you in the Flight office at thirteen hundred hours. Be outside the office door by twelve fifty-five hours.”

It was getting on for 1100 hours by now. A little too early for lunch, so we quietly put our kit away in our lockers, took our berets off and unbuttoned our tunics carefully so as not to get fingerprints all over the buttons, then sat on our beds and relaxed for a while. At around 1130 hours, someone said, “Anybody coming to the cookhouse?”

A few people answered verbally, but most of us responded by just picking up our mugs and irons and heading for the door. It was a ten-minute walk to get there by the safe but roundabout route that avoided the dreaded Wings, and the queue started to build up for quite a while before the mess door was unlocked at midday, so it was good to get there early. We were all hungry, so the thinking was that if we left now we’d get a place near the head of the queue. A few others were already making their way to the mess along the road that ran parallel to the runway, everyone walking in little groups of three or four.

Our earliness paid off, because we found only four or five people waiting on the step leading up to the closed mess door. Even though it was obviously locked, I still walked up to the door and tried to open it, unaware that in the next few moments I would learn that not all English people speak in what we like to call the Queen’s English. Standing with his back to the door, as though guarding his place of first in line, was one of my fellow Boy Entrants by the name of Swaley.

“Wha’s tha think tha’s doin? Can’t tha see bluddy doh-ah’s shoot,” protested Swaley in a broad Yorkshire dialect, “ah were ‘ere fest.”

He might as well have been speaking Outer Mongolian for as much sense as it made to me. Although my ears heard sounds, my brain that had been tuned to a regional Northern Irish dialect since birth just couldn’t process them into intelligible words.

“Eh?” I responded, screwing my face into a questioning grimace.

A small ginger-haired lad standing nearby piped up, “He says ‘what do you think you’re doing, can’t you see the bloody door’s shut, and he was here first.’ He’s from Yorkshire and that’s how they talk.”

I looked at Swaley and said, “Am surry, ah wusn’t try-in’ tae go in frunt a yeh.”

But this time it was Swaley’s turn to look blank, as though I had spoken to him in something akin to Swahili. Richard Butterworth, the ginger haired kid, jumped in again to interpret for Swaley.

“He says he’s sorry, he wasn’t trying to push in front of you.” Then he added helpfully, “He’s from Ireland,” as though it explained everything, which it probably did.

That’s how I became friends with Butterworth. He was from Liverpool, which people jokingly called the capital of Ireland because of its large Irish population, so he was used to Irish accents and had little trouble understanding my broad brogue. And since Liverpool was in the neighbouring county to Yorkshire, he also understood Swaley’s thick dialect. This was a good guy to know, I thought, he could be of some help. As for Swaley, he and I spared each other any further attempts at conversation that day, but as time went on we all found an ear for regional accents and dialects, so understanding each other became a lot easier.

Finally, the mess door was unlocked from inside, and we made our way in line to the servery. The Wing boys were also making their way in there through another door, and queued up on the opposite side of the servery to ours. This was just as well because, as we had already started to discover, there was a definite pecking order amongst the entries, in which members of the newest entry came last—we were low men on the totem pole or at the bottom of the food chain, whatever you want to call it. Although we were protected by having a section of the mess specially set aside for us, the pecking order amongst the Wing boys didn’t escape our notice. Those with the most inverted stripes on their cuffs seemed to be able to push in front of those with fewer stripes. Some of the Wing boys had no stripes at all and it appeared that the one, two and three-stripers could all push in front of them. It appeared that by being down at the bottom of the food chain, it was going to take us a long time to swim to the top.

We were all back in the billet a little before 1300 hours, where we noticed that the boys who had been summoned to the Flight office were joined by several more from the other billets. Then, at a little after 1300 hours, they were ushered into the office, and given a bollocking—a stern lecture—for not meeting the standards of preparedness required for a kit inspection. A common problem was buttons that weren’t clean enough, which was something that dogged most of us at one time or another during our time at St. Athan. This was also one of Sergeant Clarke’s pet peeves. “You need to get the shit out from between the crowns,” he proclaimed. “Get an old toothbrush and really get in there.”

He was referring to the intricate little nooks and crannies on the embossed crown on our buttons, and the little gap between the crown and the eagle. It was difficult to clean these by just using a regular button brush or a cleaning cloth, and it could easily become a trap for metal polish residue, which had a tendency to turn green in reacting with the brass. Using a toothbrush was the best way to clean the tiny areas involved and all it took was a little more time and patience, but sometimes both of those commodities were in short supply.

Corporal Kaveney made an appearance soon after everyone had returned to the billet. The contrast between our drill instructors’ personalities was interesting. At one extreme we had Hillcrest the Snide and at the other there was Blandford who treated us like human beings for the most part, although he still maintained good discipline. Kaveney, tall, quiet, lean and straight as a ramrod, was somewhere in between the other two. He was what you might call a little tightly wrapped, but at the same time he was fair. Although he never picked on anyone, he didn’t joke with us either. The expression on his face never altered and it seemed that not even the hint of a smile ever crossed his face. For Corporal Kaveney, it was all just business. His entry into the billet initiated the alert, “NCO present!” We all jumped to attention, in what now seemed to be second nature to us. Corporal Kaveney carried a large roll of brown paper and a large ball of twine, both of which he dumped on the table. The paper appeared to be of the type used in shops of that era to wrap purchases, but it differed in that on one side it had a shiny green waterproof coating.

“Pay attention,” he announced in his calm, bland voice. “You will send your civilian clothing back home to your parents. From now on you must always be in uniform and must be properly dressed at all times, on or off duty, except when you are here in the billet after duty hours. Is that clear?” He looked around to emphasise the point that it should be clear, then continued, “That means tunic buttoned all the way up, belt buckled, hat properly placed on the head, unless you are indoors, in which case you may remove it.” He looked down at the paper and twine on the table in front of him and gestured, “Use this paper to parcel up your clothes. Tie it well and then label the parcel with your parents’ name and home address.” As he said this, he pulled a pad of gummed labels from his pocket, “Here are some address labels.” He then pointed to a corner of the billet, near the table. “When you’ve finished, pile your parcels in that corner. Okay? And don’t take all afternoon. I’ll be back in an hour and expect you to be finished.” With that, he turned on his heel and departed by the front entrance.

The act of parcelling up my civvies hit home as a moment of truth because of the symbolism it embodied. This, more than anything else I had been through in the past few days, brought a strong dose of reality to the situation. Those clothes had hung in my locker as a link with my old life. Up to now, a thought had persisted at the back of my mind that I could very easily take the uniform off and put my old clothes back on to end this adventure if things didn’t seem to be working out. Now, by sending the clothes home, that link with my former life was gone and it was a case of sink or swim from now on.

I parcelled the clothing up in the brown paper as neatly as a 15-year-old boy possibly could and wrapped enough string to moor the Queen Mary around the package. Then I filled out the address label and licked the gummed side, getting the foul taste of the glue in my mouth, and smoothed the label on the outside of the parcel before adding it to the growing pile. And that was the last I ever saw of those clothes.

That night I wrote my first real letters home—the form letter that we’d been forced to send a few days earlier didn’t count as far as I was concerned. Ironically, I was feeling homesick, brought on partly by the separation from my civvy clothes. It’s true that I was glad to be away from there, but home meant more than just being in my father’s house. It meant familiar surroundings, sisters, a brother, friends and uncles and aunts to whom I could turn when things got difficult. There was something else—in spite of the misery that I suffered at the hands of my stepmother Annie, I had learned lots of ways to get around her and snatch some small comforts in life. But here in ITS there were no friendly relatives to turn to, nor long-time friends. And the DIs had seen it all before, so there was no getting around
them
. They would often say things like, “You might have broken your mother’s heart, laddie, but you’re not going to break mine!” It really felt as though I’d traded one tough life for another—out of the frying pan into the fire! And although there seemed to be a far off light at the end of this dark tunnel holding out a promise that at least the journey’s end would be worthwhile, the feeling of loneliness at being stranded in an uncaring, hostile world made me miss the comfortable familiarity of my old life.

Before my departure from home, Annie had made sure I understood that I was expected to send some of my weekly earnings home, meagre as these would be. She had told me in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t be welcome to come back there on leave if I didn’t do this. A person needs somewhere to come back to, so there seemed to be little choice but comply. Therefore, one of the things I’d done during my induction a few days earlier was to assign a weekly allotment of ten shillings to Annie. The government would send her a coupon book that she would present every week at the Post Office to receive the allotment, much the same way as elderly people drew their pensions. My letter told her about this, which in a way I suppose was to secure my reservation when the time came to go on leave. The short letter, written in postcard fashion, told her of some of the happenings of the past few days and included my new address in the hope that I would receive a letter in return. As every serviceman will tell you, getting any kind of mail is a big morale booster when you’re far away from home. I also mentioned that my civvies should arrive in the very near future, so that she’d know to expect the parcel. Then I wrote to my great aunt Maggie. This second letter contained a lot more of myself, as I told her of all that had happened since the last time she’d seen me. Finally, I wrote a third brief letter to Aunt Alice, then sealed all three letters before walking over and posting them at the NAAFI. There seemed to be comfort in this, even if it was just one way contact with home. I felt much better on the way back to the billet.