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 (11)
At the end of that first day's work I entered the lift, followed quickly by a dog and a be-tabbed general, who, I learned later, was the GOC (General Officer Commanding), Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Festing, known to wartime soldiers as "Front Line Francis" for his penchant for getting as close to the enemy as possible.
The lift conversation went something like this:
GOC (from a great height): "You are new here aren't you?"And he strode out of the lift into his large staff car and was whisked away, leaving me to ponder the significance of his last remark. But unable to make progress, I forgot it all, hailed Pete and Chas, and we went for swim before tea.
Hall (stiffly at attention and swallowing hard): "Y'yes, Sir"
GOC: "Mph. Like dogs?" (indicating it with his stout stick).
Hall "Y-yes, Sir".
GOC "Good. He's not keen on soldiers though".
Hall "Y-yes, Sir".
Routine rapidly set in again, revolving around my bed, the office, the cinema, the NAAFI, the Soldier's and Sailor's Club about 200 yards (200m.) from the barrack gate, where you could buy steak, eggs and chips for a very reasonable price. The tomato sauce was good too. The frequency with which we went to the pictures, according to my diary, was quite incredible - something like up to six times a month. In between the routine there were little snatches if action: "Frog in the NAAFI caused excitement", ran another quote from my diary. "Returned to camp with one dollar, 65 cents (15p)."
And there was the jargon: "dhobi" for laundry, remains since time immemorial; "amahs" cleaned the HQ offices (but not of course, the billets) and "chisamwich" in Chinese NAAFI attendant's pidgin English, meant the more familiar "chip butty". Most of us avoided the "eggsamwich" because a lightly fried egg between two slices of bread and butter could play havoc with the front of one's uniform. "Wouldn't touch them anyway" grumbled Pete, "With all those hundred-year-old eggs in these parts".
The reinforcement of the colony proceeded apace. Victoria Barracks received its share of extra bodies in the shape of a new group - HQ Royal Artillery. As a consequence, comparatively new beds were replaced by double bunks which offered only wooden boards on which to lay one's mattress, and the room's capacity was doubled from eight to 16. And, of course there were the usual recriminations attendant upon such overcrowding.
Former mates rowed too. I was a notoriously late sleeper, but the lad below me was an early bird and regularly woke me by using his legs to push upwards my bunk boards to the accompaniment of "Wakey, Wakey, Hall" and other notoriously derogatory comments. To my eternal surprise he stopped after a bleary-eyed confrontation in which I threatened violence.
Another similar confrontation was a drunken Ray when I was moved to an adjoining billet for some forgettable reason. To cut a long story short: he punched me, I punched him. Then we forgot all about it. We became firm friends again. But it didn't do much for my bruised image with Captain Crichton. "Been brawling Hall?" was the bland question the next morning. I never lived it down.
As the summer bore on and humidity climbed, the edginess in the billet was only matched by the degree of nudity exhibited there, and by the work in the office. A hefty top secret tome entitled "The Defence of Hong Kong" was written, revised, checked, duplicated and despatched. It was then called in and destroyed, in favour of a revised version. And who to destroy the old one? G Branch clerks of course! I became an expert with an incinerator, because security demanded that each hefty document had to be burned by page by a soldier, and not a Chinese civilian clerk - a group of people who were becoming scarcer in the HQ due to the tightening security precautions. This was a pity because it also meant the loss of a group of highly decorative and friendly girls. One could not say the same of most of the regular soldier's wives, who were brought into replace them.
Frequently, we typed, duplicated and collated far into the evening:
"What did you do in the Army. Daddy?", mimicked Chas in a baby sing-song voice.Sweating, we packed up for the evening, handed over to the duty clerk and rushed to the NAAFI for a beer before it closed. Later we were entertained by Johnny Gatcum who played Twelfth Street Rag on his new violin, standing stark naked in the middle of the billet wearing his tin hat. "He can't find his trousers" explained Pete.
"I drove a duplicator, my son."
"What all the way to Hong Hong Daddy?"
"No dear, just round the bend"
Every few weeks the job of duty clerk appeared on orders. This merely involved dragging one's bedding up to the office and camping out for the night with a duty driver and a duty officer. The latter mostly kept himself to himself in a separate office. Duty drivers seemed to be a garrulous lot. Especially Sam. A regular soldier sporting faded campaign medals, he cut a slight figure which he attempted to bolster with a moustache. He passed long evenings regaling me with stories about his murky army past. Like the day his Geordie mate who, stoned out of his mind, and anxious to find his way out of a certain northern city, followed the tramlines in his wagon and ended up fighting everyone in sight in the tram depot. Like his experience in Victoria Barracks, Sam and several others made a habit of sobering up by throwing off their clothes in gay abandon and jumping into the barracks swimming pool until one night it was nearly empty - drained for cleaning. They were in hospital for three weeks
Sam was also a man of little feeling . One evening on my return from supper I found what I took to be a praying mantis on my desk. The green grass-hopper-like creature, about three inches long stood with its front legs under its chin. I studied it for a few moments and told Sam to come and look. "Don't like the look of that, mate", he said, and before I could stop him he crushed it with a weapon training manual. I called him something like a rotten swine. But can still hear the crunch of the mantis - a sacrifice to ignorant fear.
To be continued...