These articles are about the Army when I did my National Service. They were written with the aid of a five-year diary and later between working hours during early morning shifts.
A SOLDIER'S TALE
"Drop your slacks", said the medical corporal. I stared at him in disbelief. "Drop your slacks" he snapped again, fixing me with an uncompromising eye. "Well, if you say so..." I muttered, undoing my belt.
"Now pass water into this", said the corporal, handing me what appeared to be something from the school laboratory which I seemed to have left so far behind. I retired, blushing, behind the thoughtfully-placed curtain and strained. I was successful and the corporal was obviously pleased as I handed it back. "Now go through that door...take your slacks with you." Already the next unfortunate was on the conveyor belt.
"Stand there...take all your clothes off ...said ALL your clothes...mm...yes." The white-coated doctor, prodded, then contorted my limbs. Told me to bend, stretch. Then he sat down.
"Cough", I did. He stared fixedly at my genitals...The symbolism of the moment was not lost. The Army was reaching to grab me. I flinched. "Cough" he said again...
Just 18, I had suffered my first indignity in the cause of King and Country. The place: Hither Green, South London. The time: Spring 1948. My medical was something not easily forgotten. I was passed fit for service.
Days later, an unpleasant buff form which dropped threatening through the front door gave me the curt instruction that I would report to No. 5 (Selection) Battalion, Royal Army Army Service Corps at Oudenarde Barracks, Farnborough, Hants on August 5. "Before 1300 hours" it added somewhat gratuitously.
(RASC was later changed to Royal Corps of Transport and again more recently to the Royal Logistic Corps.)
I experienced the full force of the Army's cold impersonal clutch. My guts turned over and I felt sick. Farewell the familiar and friendly: farewell family, farewell comfortable bed. Farewell freedom. I joined the resigned, unhappy crowd of conscripts on the dusty-bleak platform at Waterloo station. With our short hair, sports jackets and pathetic little suitcases we seemed already to be uniform.
Grimly, I thought that even if the RASC was known to my first-world-war father as "Ally Sloper's Cavalry", it could hardly be grateful for this little lot! But musing alone in the crowd I was underestimating the corps. I learned later that it took one in every five conscripts and made them into passable soldiers. It needed to. It provided the Army with most of it drivers, vehicle mechanics, typewriter mechanics, storemen, clerks, even, mule handlers, and other, more obscure personnel. It's saving grace - the kingfisher among the sparrows - were the waterborne units whose members dressed, and looked like guardsmen, and drove motor launches in harbours with great dash and verve. Quite what they did I never really found out, but you had to admire them...
At Farnborough station a sadistic sergeant herded us into the backs of three-ton Bedford wagons - never, never "trucks" or "lorries" to the RASC - which was spawned in the Boer War to handle wagon trains across the South African plains.
We were not to know then, as we scrambled aboard, that the Bedfords would become symbols of our uncertain futures. Every time one of us was posted to a new unit - there was the ubiquitous Bedford to take you to the nearest station. Occasionally it might be an Austin, and sometimes, if the numbers were large, an AEC Matador. But mostly Bedfords. Of course, if you had a weekend pass, or went on on leave, it was your business how you reached the station...
So we lurched along the straightest road I had ever seen between Aldershot and Farnborough. Along each side were rows of barracks, identical huts of wood or brick, and identical people. An occasional tree would break the monotony. Those of us near the back of the wagon were startled to see an everyday bus!
The Bedford hurtled round the corner into one of the barracks and pulled up outside a wooden office. There, another sadistic sergeant told us we were in the Army now and that Oudenard Barracks were named after a victory by the Duke of Marlborough in 1708. "So you are taking part in a bit of history", he leered. "Hope the ruddy buildings aren't that old" muttered a voice behind me...
"What's yer number then?", asked a bored storeman. His right arm featured a blue and red lady struggling with a snake wrapped round her ample bosom. His left depicted a heart with the inscription "Jim - Mary". "Just a minute, I'll look", and I fumbled with my stiff new paybook.
For "Gawd's sake, mate, 'urry up", said Jim. "I've got 'undereds like you to get through. 'Urry can't yer....socks, woollen two pair, drawers cellular two, vests two, 'ousewife...".
"A what?"
"Ousewife, spelt - haich -o-u-s-e-w-i-f-e mate, needles and wool for darning yer socks...got that number yet?"
And juggling the inch-high numbers on his outsize printing outfit he proceeded to stamp the number with machine-gun rapidity onto the tails of the shirts and vests, inside the beret, battledress blouses and trousers, and finally across the seat of the drawers cellular.
To be continued...
An audio recording of this chapter is available here: Chapter 1, "A Soldier's Tale" by John Hall. Read, recorded & edited by Michael Nendick.
This recording is released under the Creative Commons licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)