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 (3)

First impressions can often be misleading, but that was not the case with the odious cookhouse at Oudenarde, outside which we queued irritably three time daily. Trouble was that, like so many cookhouses at the larger barracks, it was too big, having to feed with some 800 to 1,000 people. The best were the smallest, where the occasional enthusiastic cook sergeant had a chance to do his best with the very basic rations of the time. After all, rationing was still in force for the whole nation.

The Oudenarde cook house was a great quarry-tile barn of a place, furnished with scrubbed wooden tables and the inevitable benches. It was the worst I ever ate in, but probably that was intentional. After all, when one was posted on, any slight improvement would be regarded as a luxury. Galvanised steel railings channelled you to the counter, where sweaty, pale-faced, harassed cooks dished out the indescribably dull, flaccid meals. The smell was of stale food, with overtones of disinfectant and wet dishcloths. As you left the cookhouse, you threw the often frequent remains of your meal into a ghastly stew alleged to be the "pig bin". We seldom passed it without a stab of sympathy for the pigs.

"Bull" it was alleged in the first fortnight, was the abbreviation for "bull****" which, in turn, was alleged to be derived from the name of General Sir Redvers Buller, Britain's commander-in-chief in 1891 in the Boer War, famed for discipline and enthusiasm for spit and polish. That was as good a story as any, and I heard nothing to disprove it.

Bull has been the subject of animated discussion in all three armed services down the years. The most incredible tasks were associated with bull, and it was the subject of a myriad of music hall jokes and pub stories. Bull permeated our very being. We bulled our uniforms and equipment, our boots and barrack rooms, our ablutions, the company office, buckets, brooms, coal, the stoves - and for good measure, whitewashed our souls. I am sure that most sergeant-majors of those days, if they ever envisaged it, would be a populated in Heaven with angels polishing their harps with Duraglit, led by St Peter wearing a well blancoed belt!

Of course, it was a hateful, monotonous, unimaginative exercise. Yet, in retrospect, it must have been the quickest, most efficient way of turning a civilian into a soldier. Without bull and drill, how else could an individual be turned into near-automation in 14 days, and complete automation, correctly programmed, in 10 weeks? True, if you were a thinking person it hurt and it jarred. It wasn't hard to beat the sheer insensitivity and waste of time involved in rubbing Vim on to broom heads and handles to make them sparkle whiter than white. Problem: how do you scrub the back of a scrubbing brush? Answer: with your toothbrush of course! If a man can be persuaded to accept that a broom handle needs Vimming, and carries it out, he will in other circumstances ride "into the valley of death with the 600" if ordered to do so.

But such questions of conscience and the concept of a valley of death were totally remote from the RASC of the late forties. More often the requirement was for uncomplaining form-fillers, fetchers and carriers. Anyway, bull was a fact and bull we did, along with the best. That first evening, Charlie and I sat scowling at four pairs of crinkly, unyielding boots on which we were expected to produce the regulation shine in a matter of hours. To the point of seeing our faces in the toecaps. "Blast it", he gloomed. "Let's go and find the NAAFI."

Later, after lights out, I lay in my scratchy blankets - no sheets - and wondered if this was to be my life for an interminable 18 months. With these strange people with their stranger dialects and habits. All around me were snores, whistles, belches and more, when those who were able to sleep, slept. Depressed, miserably uncomfortable and apprehensive about tomorrow, I slept fitfully.

Thwack, bang. "Wakey, wakey, rise and shine, the sun's burnin' yer eyes out". Too soon it was 6am and the orderly sergeant was rattling his stick around the bars at the foot of the beds. "Come on, yer in the army now, yer mum's miles away, and the only tea you'll get you'll get for yourself...that man...shake him someone...give him a blooming good shake. What's your name? Leadbetter? Right. See you get-out-of- bed-better tomorrow. I'll be watching for you." He looked around. " Move, move, move, the lot of yer." He clattered out of the door and a bemused, bleary silence fell over the members of 5A Squad. "Swine" muttered the Geordie in the next bed but one and lit a cigarette.

Corporal Fergie came out of his room at the end of the hut in his trousers and hiss braces with a towel over his shoulder. "Cm'on lads, the first morning's the worst. Crack on or you'll be late on parade." These more civilised comments came on receptive ears in the atmosphere of irritation and sheer bad temper. And about 20 minutes later we formed threes outside with out china plates and "eating irons" to march to the cookhouse. "They'd march you to toilet of they could", observed Charlie. "Cut the cackle", came the snapped command from Fergie, looking spruce and smart.

An hour later, after a good breakfast of porridge, sausage, pease pudding, fried bread and bread and marmalade, we were pounding the barrack square. Two acres. A hallowed patch across which sergeants and smaller fry bawled and where you walked on it at your peril, when not actually drilling on it, bulling it, or running round it as a punishment. That morning we gloomily watched the retreating back of Fergie, then switched our gaze to the drill corporal. We never remembered his name, but he was a vision. With his very highly polished boots, and belt brasses winking in the sun, to the tailored battledress and swagger cane, he was the incarnation of the Army's God of Drill. And he walked tall. But oh, he was nasty. He lashed us corporately and individually with his tongue, explaining that within days we must learn all the many gyrations on the heavenly asphalt. "I want bags of bull" he hissed ominously. "When you escape from me you will be a squad of soldiers, not the shower of pregnant ducks you are at the moment". And for varying periods of each day for the remaining 13 days he was as good as his word. He performed miracles and so did we - of endurance.

To be continued...