Boy Entrant; The Recollections of a Royal Air Force Brat (32 page)

Following their passing-out parade, the 26th didn’t waste too much time in shaking the dust of St. Athan off their feet. That afternoon, groups of people attired in brand new battle dress, adorned with brand new LAC insignia, could be seen making their way around the station. They clutched blue clearance cards in their hands and wore broad smiles across their faces that would probably take several weeks to fade away. Gone were the colourful wheel badges and the coloured discs from behind their RAF beret hat badges. The chequered hatbands had also been removed from their SD hats and replaced by standard black RAF hatbands, which by their very mediocrity helped signify the wearer’s elevated status to the regular RAF service.

By late afternoon the now ex-26th had all cleared the station to enjoy a few weeks of well deserved leave before reporting to their new stations for real-life duty. Their passing left a power vacuum at St. Athan, but already the 27th were feeling the heady scent of long awaited Senior Entry status. That evening, they publicly claimed their inherited kingdom by noisily parading through the camp singing and shouting slogans in praise of their entry. Worse was to follow later, after lights out.

We were back to the dark times of nightly raids and bed tipping, but this time it was a little worse. When we had arrived into the Wings, the 26th had already enjoyed the first fruits of senior entry status, so although we had suffered through some billet raids after lights-out, the novelty had already started to wear off for them. Now, with the 27th, we were going to experience it from its infancy and that was much worse than our tribulations under the 26th. For one thing, we were no longer a bunch of anonymous sprogs whose faces were nothing more than a blur. Many of us, yours truly included, had managed to piss off more than a few of the 27th during our short time in the Wings, for reasons real or imagined. They knew who we were, they knew where we lived and they had bided their time until now.

On that first night of the 27th’s ascendancy to senior entry, a huge raid took place and this time prisoners were taken! I could hear their feet pounding on the floorboards of the corridor towards our billet, but not just feet and muffled voices. The raiders were calling out the names of specific individuals to be targeted. I clearly heard my own name called out, at first by one person but then taken up as a chorus by the others. They sounded like hounds baying when one of them has picked up the scent of an unfortunate fox. “Carlin, Carlin, let’s get Carlin!” I cringed and waited helplessly for whatever fate lay ahead of me. It was going to be a long, long night!

They came into the billet with torches flashing around and made straight for where I lay. My bed was thrown over and I found myself in the now familiar situation of picking myself out of an entanglement of blankets, sheets and mattress.

“Okay, Carlin,” said a voice that I vaguely recognized, “time we had you up on court martial.”

Two of them dragged me to my feet, pinioned my arms to my sides and then force-marched me out of the billet, into the corridor. A catcalling rabble followed behind as I was taken to the common room where a table, with three 27th entry members seated behind it, occupied centre-stage. Elsewhere in the room several of my fellow-29th entry members were being held under guard by the new senior entry, who were also jeering the ongoing proceedings. Evidently, I wasn’t the first to appear before the court that night.

When my turn came, the escort manoeuvred me into a position in front of the table to face the seated “judges”. The proceedings pantomimed a real appearance on a charge, but involved much more intimidation. Various people shouted at me to stand up straight at attention, while others accused me of looking disrespectfully at the judges. My name was read out from a “charge sheet” and then “evidence” for the prosecution was recited by one of the judges. It amounted to the fact that I had been disrespectful to several of the 27th entry members at various times during these past few weeks. This was probably true because I was a normal flippant teenager.

The third judge vigorously agreed, prompting the first judge to make pretence of thinking about it before agreeing to go along with the majority decision.

Addressing my escort, he commanded, “Take him outside and blindfold him well.”

I was force-marched back out to the corridor where a scarf was placed over my eyes and tied around my head. It came down my face almost to the end of my nose so that I couldn’t see out underneath the way children do when they’re playing blind man’s buff. When they were satisfied that I couldn’t possibly see anything and I can only imagine that they tested me well, I was taken back into the “court martial”. Then several pairs of hands hoisted me in the air and lowered me down onto the Formica tabletop.

Which would be worse, I wondered? At least with a cold bath there would be little risk of getting hurt. I continued to ponder my options, but a few seconds later some hands started nudging me away from my spot in the centre of the table. I resisted, but the hands were insistent. It began to look as though the cold bath option had been withdrawn and I was going to have to jump—or be pushed. My feet felt for the edge and at the same time the hands stopped nudging and held on to me instead.

Then another voice that I recognized as one of my own entry-mates piped up from somewhere in the room, “C’mon Carlin, you can do it. We had to do it too, so don’t let the 29th down!”

A chorus of “Yeah’s” followed this challenge, coming from the others that I’d noticed in the room earlier. That kind of did it for me. I bent my legs and crouched, trying to imagine how high I was off the ground so that I could consciously make the normally instinctive compensation needed to absorb the shock of landing. I tried to launch but my feet seemed glued to the table when the rest of my body tried to spring forward. I crouched again and failed again.

“Come on, or we’ll push you off,” the voice said, “We haven’t got all night!”

I got down in the crouch position again and this time leapt blindly into space. Shock! I was expecting a short time interval of maybe a second between launching and landing, but there was none at all: my feet met solid ground almost as soon as they lifted off the table and I fell forward heavily onto the linoleum floor. That was the first shock, but it was immediately followed by a second surprise when a huge burst of laughter suddenly filled the room. I tore the blindfold off and then saw why I’d landed sooner than expected and the reason for the laughter. The tabletop was sitting on the floor with its legs removed. I had never been more than three inches off the ground the whole time that I’d been agonizing about making the jump!

My tormentors laughingly ushered me to the side of the room to join the other erstwhile victims and by this time I was laughing myself, but more from relief than from amusement. Then the next prisoner was brought in and I was able to see how it had all been pulled off. As soon as he was out of the room, the “judges” got up from the table and brought the tabletop with them. The legs had simply been propped into place with the whole rickety structure craftily supported on the knees of the three people seated at it. Next they laid the tabletop on the floor and then called for the blindfolded prisoner to be brought into the room. Four of the 27th grabbed him, one on each leg and one on each arm and then they lifted him high, purposely moving him around so that he would be disoriented. Then, when they lowered him onto the table it seemed to the unsuspecting prisoner that he was standing on a table a few feet above the floor.

There were motioned signs for no one to laugh and the poor guy was then subjected to the same goading that I had undergone just a short time previously. Then, when everyone had been through the “punishment”, we were allowed to return to our billets and go to bed, but only after having to remake them as a result of the initial raid.

The next morning we awoke to find a white bed-sheet hanging from the very top of the 100 feet high water tower, with “27th Entry” crudely painted on it in large black characters. It flapped up there in the breeze for a whole week and no one ever found out who put it there, or even how the person or persons unknown managed to get to the top of the tower, because the door that gave entry to the internal stairway was always securely locked. We could only guess that one or more brave if foolhardy souls must have risked their necks for the glory of “The Entry” by scaling the outside of the brickwork structure under cover of darkness. Or maybe they had assistance from the St. Athan-based RAF Mountain Rescue team, which sometimes used the water tower to practise rope climbing. The banner was finally taken down, but in getting it up there in the first place, the 27th certainly scored a major propaganda point.

Mac, the 26th entry boy for whom I bulled, passed out with his entry, but that wasn’t the end of my servitude as a bull boy. On the evening following the night of the court-martial, Mick, one of the 27th approached my bed-space carrying his tunic, beret and boots.

“Hey Paddy, you’re going to bull for me, aren’t you?” He asked smilingly, using a name by which many people addressed me because of my Irish origins.

I happened to like Mick. He was a sort of role model for me, in a similar way that an older brother frequently is for a younger male sibling. I agreed, feeling that I didn’t have much choice in the matter anyway. Besides, it would only be for about four weeks, until the 30th entry moved up to the Wings. When that happened, the “duty” would be gladly handed over to one of their number.

* * *

In Workshops we moved from cockpit internal lighting to aircraft external lighting. There were the navigation lights, red for Port, green for Starboard and white for the tail. As with so many things, there’s a little more to simple aircraft navigation lights than a person might suspect. They aren’t just coloured lights stuck indiscriminately on the extremities of the aircraft. In fact, the lights serve a more important purpose during night-time navigation, especially in the years that preceded sophisticated aircraft anti-collision radar systems. Each light was masked in a way that made it visible only when viewed from a certain angle from a horizontal viewing position; 110 degrees for both Port and Starboard lights and 140 degrees for the tail light. The angles of all three lights add up to 360 degrees. This arrangement makes it possible for an observer in one aircraft to deduce the approximate heading of another aircraft at the same altitude in the night sky. If he can see a red and a green light at the same time, it means that the other craft is approaching on a collision course. One green and one white light, or one red and one white light, indicate that the aircraft is on a parallel course and directly on the observer’s left or right side. A single red or green signifies that the other aircraft is travelling on a parallel heading in the same direction as the observer’s aircraft, but behind his own position. A single white light indicates that the observer is viewing the other aircraft from the rear.

Then there was the retractable landing light, the type “J” I believe. This light was mounted in the underside of the wing and designed to be flush with the wing surface when retracted during normal flight. A small integral DC motor drove a mechanism that extended the light into two selectable positions: “Land” or “Taxi”. Because the light was only supposed to be extended at low airspeed, it incorporated a clutch device that caused it to disengage from the mechanism if the light was lowered into the slipstream whilst the airspeed was too high. When this occurred, as it frequently did, the disengaged light would be pushed back into the wing by the force of the air against it and could only be reset by operating the light to its “Retract” position before it could be extended again.

We also learned about Downward Identification Lights. This was a set of three separately coloured lights, each of which could be operated in Morse code fashion or simply left on “steady”. The purpose of the lights was to visually communicate with someone on the ground whilst maintaining radio silence, either by Morse code or by displaying a pre-arranged colour code as a means of identification.

After learning about these external lights, our task was to wire the components of the circuit together, using wiring diagrams and then find “snags” that had been deliberately set by the instructor. A favourite “fault” was to cause the high airspeed clutch to disengage on the landing light and then challenge us to determine why the light wasn’t lit in the down position. It was tempting to assume it was for the most obvious reason—that the bulb had burned out—but a more careful analysis of the situation would reveal that the mechanism was disengaged. Since the micro-switch that completed the circuit to the bulb was attached to this mechanism, it hadn’t moved to the position where it would close to light the bulb. Exercises such as this taught us to think before jumping to conclusions, which could waste a lot of time and resources in later operational situations.