My Life

 

-1I was born in 1933, in a military hospital in Aldershot. My father was at that time a Company Quartermaster Sergeant, Sergeant, and my first memories, helped no doubt by some photographs, are of living in Southport, where we went when I was one year old, in a small army house behind the Drill Hall near Holy Trinity Church, Church, where my father was in charge of stores. There were a number of trucks stationed there, and I can also just remember being told off for starting my father father’s ’s old Ford car (or it may have been Army  property) and inching it across the Hall by standing on the pedals. I was a great favourite with the lads, especially the sergeants who were my father’s friends, they often used to buy me ice cream cornets, and I used to enjoy cleaning under the trucks with a brush and some paraffin it must have messy butones I don’t remember trouble getting filthy. filthy . I hadeverywhere, a tiny tricycle, one been of those red work enamel with the pedalsgetting on theinto front wheelfor axle, I towed a trailer or my sister Charmaine’s dolls pram, and fretted if parted from it. We later moved into the flat inside the Drill Hall, this was on the top floor, and was reached via a staircase from the balcony overlooking the hall interior,, and there was a sergeant’ interior sergeant’ss mess with bar and snooker room leading onto the balcony. I rarely managed to sneak into the bar - there were a set of percussion maraccas on sticks which I delighted in  playing whenever the chance came up. There was an occasion when a friend of my father’s, Ernie Beer Beer,, held me over the balcony by my ankles, he meant well but it probably accounts for life-long vertigo! My first memory of the flat was myself m yself and Charmaine (encouraged by me) finding paint and brushes, and covering the staircase walls with some dark gloss paint - I had a very rare spank for that, and well deserved it. When the war started in 1939, my father was commissioned in the RASC as a (war substantive) Captain, he left fairly soon for active service overseas, making his way from a landing in North Africa, through the desert fighting, and eventually up through Italy via Monte Casino - he was away for over seven years, from my age six until 1946, when I was thirteen, which must have had an effect on m my y character, character, as our  household was female except for myself. My eldest sister, Madeleine, eight years older than I and born in Egypt, joined the ATS ATS at the beginning of the war and was stationed at remote acoustic aircraft detection (radio-location) sites along the South Coast, and my next eldest sister, Hazel, joined the Wrens as soon as she was old enough. These two older sisters both died at an early age, Madeleine from MS, probably  brought on by the stress of divorce, and Hazel from something very similar to MS which was never  definitely diagnosed, other than being something to do with nerve protein. Hazel also acquired a touch of  TB while serving, and subsequently had a small disability pension from the Navy Navy,, although this was an insignificant amount. I suppose this female household accounts for my lack of interest in especially masculine pursuits, and perhaps for my being a competent cook, but fortunately it didn’t put me off the female sex, who have been a great consolation to me, as well as a great trial at times! When my father was commissioned, we became rather better off financially financially,, and moved to Number Three Grange Road, a quiet residential tree-lined avenue, where we spent most of the war. I went to Holy Trinity  primary school from the Drill Hall, then from Grange Road to Churchtown primary school by bus, and on to King George V Grammar School at age eleven in 1944. Southport in wartime was a much safer place to live than nearby Liverpool, where the docks were regularly  bombed. We We had a few bombs, or land mines as the larger delayed action ones, designed to hinder or blow up the relief services, were called, one of these completely demolished a large house over the wall at the  bottom of our small garden. We spent the raids huddled under the stairs, recommended as the safest place in the house, there was a shelter about one hundred and fifty yards along the road in the garden of my friend  Norman Nutter, but we only used that once or twice for big raids. That nearest land mine rocked the house  badly and blew all the windows out at the rear, it also completely demolished our greenhouse, which was a fairly ancient wooden one so no great loss. I can just remember one occasion when an aircraft with big  black crosses on the wings flew over the garden one afternoon at zero feet, hotly pursued by a Spitfire or  Hurricane. I was mobile on my bicycle by this time, and spent a lot of spare time on the Southport sea front, which was a never-ending source of interest. There was the boating lake, the funfair, and the arcades of Neville Street with their pinball machines, and the pier. I didn't get much pocket money; there was a Jamaican family living just over the wall next to the house that was removed by the land mine, they had a son who missed Jamaica very badly and I used to go sailing with him on the boating lake, it must have been  pretty tame for him but was wonderful to me, and accounts for the fact that I don't feel really complete unless I own a little boat somewhere, although boating has become so organised now, with insurance and launching fees, that I feel that the nation has been deprived of part of its birthright. I have had several boats, mostly made by myself, never very elaborate, and have never been anywhere near being drowned, in spite of being out in the North Sea in fifty knots of off-shore wind in a Tornado dinghy dinghy,, and the onl only y one aboard

 

who knew anything whatsoever about boats. We just prayed and came safely home - but that's another  story! The large expanses of the Southport seashore between the sea front and the usually distant sea-line were heavily sewn with concrete posts to prevent invasion from the air, a few were removable to form an airstrip, from which DC3 aircraft, brought by Atlantic convoy in crates from the USA to Liverpool, were assembled in what later became Southport's bus garage. This had a steep ramp down to the foreshore, and the aircraft once assembled took off for destinations unknown - a great thrill for a small boy on a bike as the monsters roared down the ramp, along the cleared strip, and off into the wild blue yonder - I saw many aircraft take off, but never land, and a most situation. W e roamed thesaw golfone courses theunusual salt marshes, the pier and amusement park, and the very good public  parks which Southport was and is blessed with. Hesketh Park was the nearest to Grange Road, I knew every inch of it, and there were a couple of climbing trees in the grass field next to the swings which were always our favourite headquarters - I was amazed at how small and insignificant they were when I went  back in later years. A couple of odd climbing trees are still recognisable in my old age! The Botanic Gardens at Churchtown were also favourite, when I was at the primary school there the boat-keeper used to let me have half an hour in a rowing boat in the lunch hour, it must have been cheap but I can’t remember  the price. Both Hesketh Park and the Botanic Gardens had large buildings, conservatories or museums, which were used for billeting American troops newly arrived in the country while they were indoctrinated for overseas service among the ‘Limeys’, the grass areas where they lolled around in their off duty hours  became a dark brown colour from all the chewing baccy which they lavishly spat into the grass. I remember  one lunchtime when one of them got into my rowing boat, I jumped onto the bank, and a series of soldiers in big boots jumped into the boat until it was full of standing soldiers and keeled over in three feet of  muddy water. water. The boatman came sculling up like mad and gave me a good telling off, and refused to refund my money, money, although I hadn’t had my m y full half hour! The hospital on the sea front, and the Hydro building which is now a tax office, were both used as convalescent homes for servicemen of all services, they wore blue uniforms and red ties and spent their  time sitting in deck chairs in the sun, recovering quietly quietly.. The Marine Lake was dredged out towards the end of the war, this was done by two steam traction engines which dragged a large bucket backwards and forwards scraping all the mud to one side, where it was lifted  by track-line dredgers into narrow gauge railway trucks and taken off to fill in land elsewhere, in the golf  course areas and further along the front. This was terrific fun, the machines hooted to each other, other, once to stop and two to go, and we hung around a lot. I remember the inch thick steel cable broke and wrapped itself around the iron railing along the sea wall, and ended up with about a hundred feet of railing sticking straight up in the air with the cable wrapped around it, very impressive! The dredging cable cut grooves in the stone which are still to be seen here and there. One Sunday afternoon I was wearing a brand new blue hairy tweed suit which I disliked intensely, and after spending an afternoon sliding down the concrete sea wall on my bottom, I ended up in deep trouble in mud from the dredging, and was barely saved by passers by who my friends called in to rescue me. The suit was a write-off, and I fully deserved the mild hiding that resulted. When the war came to an end, and my m y father returned with the rank of Major, Major, after seven years away, naturally my parents had both changed a great deal, and my mother had become fixated on their retiring to a bungalow in Dorset, where she had childhood friends, while my father, having taken a resettlement course in agriculture, intended to become a farmer. farmer. His family had been farm workers, and as a boy bo y he had worked as boot-boy at Acton Burnell Hall, in Shropshire, but left to join the Army for World War I. He  became a prisoner of war by his seventeenth birthday, birthday, and returned in 1918 at the age of nineteen, a shadow of his former self, after two years of dysentery and living on sauerkraut (pickled cabbage). His mother told him ‘There isn’t any work round here, George, the Army got you like that so you’d better stay in the Army’. He did, for thirty-three years altogether, altogether, but never forgot or forgave his mother’s words. I am sure that part of his determination to be a farmer stemmed from a desire to show his family that he could go one  better. As my parents found they could not live together, my mother decided to go down south to Weymouth, Dorset, and we lived first of all in a private hotel, and then in digs, my mother, younger sister Charmaine, and myself. The digs were always fairly uncomfortable, and we couldn’t afford anything better better.. I went to Weymouth Grammar School for a year, and enjoyed the seaside aspect of living there very much. Again canoes or rowing boats in the school lunch hour were a possibility, possibility, my best friend was called Dally Dally,, he was the school reprobate and we made up a foursome with two girls. Thelma Harvey was his girl, she was the

 

glamour girl of the school and the daughter of the family which ran boats on the sea front, my girl was the daughter of a publican in Osmington Mills, but I don’t recall ever going there, and I honestly cannot remember her name. My moments of deepest pride came when the Channel Islands ferry came in, and the harbourmaster had to use the Tannoy, Tannoy, to say ‘would the canoe at the harbour mouth please clear the entrance for the incoming ferry’. I think this gave me a taste for becoming an irritant to authority! W Wee had  bicycles and explored much of the countryside, there were radiolocation masts at Ringstead Bay, Bay, and wild raspberries and strawberries in plenty in the woods between Preston and Broadway Broadway.. There was also the whole of Portland and Portland Harbour to explore, and the Chesil Beach, twenty miles of pebbles carefully graded in size by was not until aboutgraded 1990 that onstretch television at lastwhich explained to me the mechanism bynature. which It the pebbles become overa aprogramme twenty mile of beach, briefly is that the pebbles become mobile as a result of becoming anchor points for seaweed which incorporates  bladders of gas, when the bladders grow big enough for the pebbles to be moved by the current, the bigger   pebbles naturally take taller plants to move them, and the current takes a slightly different direction the further away from the friction of the sea bed... Well, I understand it - it must be the way I tell ‘em! To see the pebbles bouncing gently along the seabed buoyed up by the seaweed bladder plants was a revelation. At age fourteen, in 1948, I was asked whether I wished to go farming with my father in Carmarthenshire, Carmarthenshire, or  stay with my mother. After agonising over the decision, which more or less gave me a nervous breakdown, I opted for farming, which with the benefit of hindsight was probably the right decision. At the time I rationalised that life would be easier for my m y mother with only one child to worry about - but I feel that deep down she was deeply hurt at my leaving her, and only in later life did she almost forgive me. The break from Weymouth Weymouth to being a farmers son in Carmarthenshire was a very abrupt one. For a term I went to Whitland Grammar School, but it was a long haul on the bus and no-one spoke English much, except occasionally when someone took pity on me. Some English lessons consisted of me reading to the class, which may have modified their pronunciation, but did nothing for me. It was a heck of a strain taking the long bus journey in such unsympathetic surroundings, and my father eventually decided that, since ‘there would always be the farm’, I would leave school without any O levels. In retrospect he was right for  the wrong reasons. I took to farming like a duck to water. W Wee had 104 acres, at Pencraig Uchaf, above the Afon Cynin near Llandrinio Common, equidistant from Whitland Whitland and St Clears, and a long way from both! About a third of this was very steep semi-scrub hillside leading down to the river, we kept about 22 Friesian milking cows and some breeding Saddleback sows, and a few hundred hens in field houses. W Wee had a Fordson Standard tractor, an ex-WD jeep converted to a station wagon, and a Welsh pony, 12 hands, called Daphne, who pulled a small pneumatic tyred trailer which took the milk churns up to the milk stand. The farm lane was about a mile and a half to the road, with huge pot-holes and five gates to open and shut, cattle grids had hardly been invented then. We had one of the first milking machines in the area, a two  bucket Fullwood & Bland made in Ellesmere, and a chest steriliser fired with coke, which took hours to fire up and reach the boil, whereupon the valves were opened and the steam rushed into the chest with a roar. After a while we changed to chemical sterilisation sterilisation which was a lot easier. We also grew some Arable crops, although this was before myxomatosis, and the whole place was alive with rabbits. There was a string of small fields leading up to Llandrinio Common at the other end of the farm, and I well remember planting it with wheat, seeing the fields being stripped by the rabbits, and looking with my father at the final pathetic ear of wheat standing all alone waiting for the rabbits to finish it off. The rabbit industry was the major source of income for the subsistence farmer in those days, the local  pub, Pant y Blaidd, sent them off by b y the lorry-load to Haymarket Inn in London, the prices I remember ran from about ten old pence in time of glut to two shillings when supplies were short. Rabbits were also the most usual main dish on the table in those parts. Kay, my stepmother, stepmother, was adept at doing them jointed in  breadcrumbs and indistinguishable from the very best chicken. The Butlers, our neighbours, were very dependent on their rabbit money, as they only had 2 or 3 cows milking, they were always most hospitable with the little they had, and their meals were usually boiled potatoes stabbed from a bowl on the table, Daddys sauce, and perhaps a little fat bacon from the flitch on the hook, and sometimes an egg shared  between them. I didn’t have any pocket money, just a highly theoretical two and a half percent of the profits, and wages of  two pounds a week, also theoretical, but my father supplied me with five dozen gin traps, of the kind now  banned, and I kept half the rabbit money. The normal procedure was to stagger into Pant y Blaidd with a  belt hung with many rabbits, blood all down the trousers, and sling them over the bar, where they were counted into the heap under the bar and chalked up on the slate. On leaving the account was totted up and settled one way or the other other.. It is hard to realise, in these post myxomatosis days, what a major industry the

 

rabbits were. Many people who would now be on the dole made some sort of a living as itinerant rabbit trappers, and there was a good deal of skill in setting an effective trap. I had a long term rivalry with Gareth Butler, the son of our neighbour, neighbour, who had been brought up to set a g good ood trap. He used to steal out of my traps, and I out of his, and several times I took a pot shot at him in the dark of night when I heard a gate rattle. That was with a .22 rifle with long rifle cartridge, it would have been death if I’d hit him, but it is hard enough to hit anything with a rattly old .22 even in daylight when you are trying, so it was just a game of Russian Roulette. I used to go into the pub and see his father sitting by the fireside, and say “all shot, Butler!’ even when we both knew I’d probably thieved more than half of them from Gareth’ Gareth’ss traps the  previous night. We We also used to let the dogs loose after rabbits when driving up the road at night, and also took the dogs out with a car battery and spotlight. The Butlers had a greyhound cross who could catch three rabbits per field, and instantly break their necks with a quick shake. We We also had great sport spearing salmon in the river, usually with a Tilley lamp. The spear was a blacksmith made one with about twelve  barbed prongs, and the fish would be very slow to move from the light. We used to call out so that the sound echoed down the valley valley,, as if the bailiffs were coming - but we never ever saw a bailiff. There were some disused mine shafts and adits in the valley, and I believe the mines ran under our farm, we owned the freehold but that only applied to the first ten feet of topsoil as far as I remember from the deeds. Our farm overlooked the valley which was about 250 feet deep, and amazingly quiet on a still day, when conditions were right we could hear conversations in the farmyard of Cwm Farm, a good half mile across the valley as the crow flew, and sometimes even hear them in their kitchen. We often heard the railway shunting at Llanfyrnach, three and a half miles away away,, and I was bemused to be told that they sometimes heard me singing to the cows as I fetched them for milking. You You had to sing really loud to hear your own voice above the racket of a Fordson Standard tractor, this gave me vocal chords which have served me well in later life. My mechanical experience had been put on hold while my m y father was away, away, he was proud but a  bit bemused when I asked if I could give the Fordson a top overhaul, I de-coked it and ground in the valves with a bit of advice from him. W Wee had a Petter engine for the vacuum pump for milking, and an Onan exservice generator for lighting. We We used to start this on petrol and then run it on TVO once it was hot. The idea was to feed it a tin and a half or so of TVO depending on the time of year year.. As it began to run short of  fuel it would speed up a little, the lights would brighten briefly briefly,, and there would be a mad rush to be in bed  before it stopped and darkness descended. The electric wiring in the buildings was very crude, many of the switches hung by their wires and lacked covers, so the odd shock was taken as routine! The water supply for the farm came from a spring-fed well in the field above the house, there was a semi-rotary pump which needed about 300 strokes for a bath, 150 was the usual morning chore, I used to drink literally gallons of  water, mostly straight straight out of cow house buckets. When I complained of a musty taste, we pulled off the big concrete lid off the well with the tractor, tractor, there were a large number of phosphorescent bodies floating in it, either rats or moles, they were too decomposed to identify - but never did me any harm! Pencraig is now something of a hippy colony colony,, with several buses parked about the place, and even horse caravans. The cow house end of the long house is a recording studio, and a stone Buddha looks out over the dingle I knew so well. The bulk of the land is sold off to a barley grower, grower, and daffodils grow where our  muck-heap was - and of course mains water and electricity make life more convenient, but not necessarily more interesting. The river is tidier tidier now and the fishing belongs of course to a Midlands club - I dare say the bailiffs are more active now. I should explain that once at the farm I had a stepmother in my father’s partner, Kay Kay.. At fourteen, I was not easily won over, and sometimes I felt a bit isolated. My M y social life was vastly improved when we acquired new neighbours at Plas Parke, this was a 200 acre farm beyond Butlers, who were Pencraig Isaf (Lower  Pencraig). Plas Parke was about five fields away by footpath over stiles. They were a young newly married couple, Scholly and Joanna Neisius, and they were the second marriage between an English girl and a German POW at the wars end, such marriages were forbidden during hostilitie hostilities. s. They were both 21, Scholly had been a boy bo y soldier on the eastern front and through the Stalingrad campaign, so was lucky to  be alive. Joanna was a very well brought up middle class lady, her father owned a national pencil company and set them up with the farm as a wedding present. They had one child, Richard, and I met them by walking across to Plas Parke to meet the library truck, and soon became baby-sitter, and we became a trio of bosom pals - at least that is how I remember it! TV was just getting on its feet then, we used to drive ten miles to see 20 Questions on a black and white set, the first in the area. The household at Plas Parke was augmented later by Herbert, a large ex POW who married Freda, a buxom German au pair who came to work there. There were a whole bunch of Germans working for Thyssens, sinking shafts for a new Cynheidre colliery. colliery. They used to work 16 hours shifts shovelling muck into giant buckets for three weeks at

 

a stretch, then come to Plas Parke and raise absolute hell. I used to go to the pub as their mascot, Scholly’s Alsations, known as the Killer Dogs, lay across the pub floor dividing us from the locals. I spoke fluent German by then, I never learnt it as such, simply began to speak it colloquially one day, in fact my first words in German were to one Icke Schultz, a Berliner Cockney. Cockney. He was in the loft looking for an airlock, and said ‘Alles in ordnung hier’. ‘Ja, Icke’ said I, ‘aber hast du in die tank gekookt?’ ‘Wer sagt das!’ ‘ilex77!’ ‘Aber ‘Aber ilex77 kann kein Deutsch’. ‘Das ist wahr, Icke, aber jetzt kann Ich!’. and I never looked  back after that, although my German was always sloppy and very colloquial. When we went to the pub, I went as one of them, and drank alongside them, they always threw me into the back of the pickup and sat on me all the way home. At Herbert and Freda’ Freda’ss wedding party, Icke Schultz, a great joker, dropped a heavy hint to Herbert that my library books might account for Freda’s pregnancy, pregnancy, and I still remember vividly the feeling of flying backwards into the shrubbery after I laughed at Herbert’s accusation, accusation, and he fetched up a haymaker from his knees and lifted me clear off my feet. I still have the front tooth missing, and a scar  from his deaths-head ring. My sense of humour survived though - I was still laughing when I came round several minutes later. It all seemed a lot less amusing the next morning, my father and Kay didn’t think much of the state I was in, and as I finished the morning milking, there was a stir at the far end of the shed. I found that Mary Ann, a heavy Friesian cross with some Hereford in her, had swung her head and knocked off a horn. We had  been dehorning the cows by placing a strip of milking machine liner around the base of the horn, which cut off the blood supply - a method widely in use then. Mary Ann’s had been nearly ready to drop off, but the artery was open, and the stone floor was two inches deep in congealed blood. I spent the next one and a half  hours trying to stem the flow of blood, stripped off and covered in gore as I slipped in it, the worst experience of my life - so far! The vet soon cut around the vein and tied it off, and the cow was soon none the worse. There wasa another gory occasion a cowde calved butcalf remained very uncomfortable, cameTilley and we spent long time cutting up a when two month dead ad twin inside the cow by the light ofthe thevet trusty Tilley lantern. When the bits were all out, the cow had a prolapsed womb, and we both lay on the ground trying to get a purchase to stuff the slippery mass back in, a little at a time all round, until at last we reached a point of balance, and the vet gave it one mighty punch. Golloop it went, and Bertha leapt to her feet and galloped off with tail held high, as if it were Spring instead of a cold winters night. When we had a chance to look  around, there was a circle of faces in the lamplight - we had gathered quite an audience, the whole Butler  family and various other children were all there, called by b y the jungle telegraph. People had to find ther own amusement then! My father and I both enjoyed Pencraig very much, although he went a bit wild in the early days, going to cattle auctions while still being weaned from wartime Benzedrine stimulants, which made him a bit optimistic in his cattle judging. Unfortunately his war experiences had taken their toll, and after a fter a year at Pencraig he was found to have high blood pressure and forbidden to lift as much as a bucket of water. My father’s younger brother, brother, Jack, had joined us for about six months, but it soon became clear that the farm wouldn’t support us all. My father’s background in Army stores had accustomed him to fill in a form for  any necessary equipment as and when required, so we became, if anything, slightly over-equipped with expensive machinery, machinery, which one or two neighbours were only too glad to borrow, and since we were all inter-dependent one could hardly refuse. One very fine machine was a hammer mill, powered from the tractor pulley. pulley. This kibbled barley for the cattle, and we could grind wheat to make our own flour for   baking on our Aga cooker, although the flour only lasted about three days before going sour, as it needs a  preservative to keep. According to the literature, the mill was capable of grinding up bricks for tennis courts, although we hadn’t much demand for this at the time! Our hay crop was cut with a Bamford wheeldriven reciprocating grass cutter, the rotary cutter hadn’t quite been invented then. We had a modern Lister  hay tedder, raked hay with a converted horse-rake behind the tractor, tractor, and lifted it with an ancient elevator/pickup of Butlers. The hay was taken to the barn on a four wheel trailer which had to be reversed through a dogleg bend into the barn, a skill which stands me in good stead with caravans now. An ancient hay-grab sliding on a rail was designed to be pulled by horse, but Daphne wasn’t heavy enough, so we had to unhitch the tractor and use that, it took about eight or ten pulls to unload a four wheel trailer. We We had spring tine harrows, spike harrows, a Cambridge roller, disc harrows (fairly newly introduced). Grain was cut by a horse binder converted for tractor pulling, a real Heath Robinson affair those were. My uncle Jack  was the only one who understood the deep mysteries of the knotter on the binder. The corn came off the  binder in sheaves, was stooked for days or weeks according to the weather, then thrown up on the trailer by hand, and built into a stack, which was finished in such a way as to shed rainwater, rainwater, without the luxury of a

 

sheet on top. Building these stacks to be waterproof was a matter of some skill, Jack was a master and soon had me shaping up. Like many farming jobs, it took patience and care, but there was a tremendous surge of  satisfaction on standing back to survey a job well done. The most social occasion occurred when the threshing box came on its travels around the district. A Although lthough combines were beginning to become commonplace elsewhere, our small farms with narrow lanes and gateways were still threshing. threshing. The box spent 2 or 3 days on each farm, and needed about 8 or 10 men to run, so we sent someone, usually me, to several other places to help out, in return for their labour on our  days. There was usually a big mid-day meal, we also had a pipkin of cider but this was considered to be showing off a bit! I remember being on top of the box, Jack and myself on each side of the drum throat, cutting bonds with a penknife and feeding in the sheaves. I leaned across the drum to shout above the noise ‘I’ve dropped my knife in the drum!’ Jack flung himself flat, and the remains of my knife whizzed past his ear. I was bagging tailings for the rest of the day. Ploughing was done with a two furrow wheeled plough behind the Fordson, which made a fiendish racket ear-muffs weren’t weren’t thought of then! Yo You u had to sing really loud to hear yourself enough to stay in tune. The Fordson started on petrol and was switched to vaporising oil (TVO) when hot, and had a nasty habit of  oiling up the plugs. It took a strong arm to swing the starting handle, and forgetting to retard the ignition first could break an arm! Ignition was by magneto - no battery needed - and the spark was a real killer. Butler was much admired for his ability to hold a spark plug lead and give an opinion on its strength, he could do the same with any electric fence. He was also a water diviner, so perhaps that had something to do with it! Daphne, our 14 year old ex point-to-point W Welsh elsh pony, pony, 12 hands, was very versatile, I have mentioned the small rubber tyred trailer, which had bolt-on pipe-work shafts. This took the milk up to the milk-stand on the hard road, and she came in useful to ride to Pantyblaidd for petrol when we ran out completely completely,, petrol was still rationed so bought in that small alsogalloped rode outhome a couple times broody to sit on eggs, but we usually found byquantities. the time I Ihad withofthe hen to in fetch a bag,a she had hen usually forgotten about being broody. broody. I have to admit with deep shame that there were a couple of times when Daphne brought me home from Pantyblaidd distinctly the worse for wear - fortunately falling from a galloping horse in a relaxed condition rarely results in serious injury injury,, and for some mysterious reason you are always still holding the reins when the earth stops revolving. Daphne could be very cantankerous, and this wasn’t helped by my attempts to shoot rabbits from horseback - the only way I could get near Daphne with a .22 rifle was to hide it next to a gateway and pick it up as I rode through. The sight of me trying to shoot from a bucking pony pon y must have had the entire rabbit population in stitches. On one memorable occasion my father went into Daphne’s stable to fetch her, and failed to emerge. Hearing faint cries for  help, I found that Daphne had taken a firm hold with her teeth on my father’s hair through his cap, and I had to twist her tail to get him free! Father occasionally rode Daphne himself, and earned the local nickname of ‘the Galloping Major’. We tried Daphne with the ridge plough for planting potatoes, but really a light scuffle hoe was the most she could pull, and it took a great deal of care and attention to do that, as the reins were long and the hoe or   plough easily overturned on corners. We We grew mangolds, swedes, and cow cabbage, and the horse hoe was the easiest way of keeping weeds down - we used no chemical sprays, thistles were taken out with a hand hoe, and grass seed spread with a hand fiddle, which had a canvas bag on a wooden frame, and a metal spinner driven by a bowstring which broadcast the seed about 6 feet on either side of the fiddling walker. walker. Later, on Plas Parke, I sowed some 35 acres with a fiddle, better than aerobics for fitness! We also had a new 12 foot corn drill, this had wheels which were moved to one end for transport through gates, and was much borrowed by neighbours. There was also a small hand barrow for sowing root crops or brassica seeds - this had small cups which dropped two or three seeds every few inches. The plants were then singled out  by hand hoe when small. Rape seed was broadcast with the fiddle. The worst job was pulling mangolds or  swedes by hand, and topping and tailing with a hand hook - a miserable job if the tops were wet. Potatoes were grown for cattle feed, and lifting them was the only job I remember where we used the Womens Womens Land Army.. - I was too young to appreciate the opportunity for horseplay! The potatoes were stored in a ‘clamp’, Army laid in a row 3 or 4 feet high, covered in loose straw, and then a layer of topsoil, with tufts of straw through the ridge for ventilation. Rats had a field day day,, and enough potatoes were damaged by the spinner in lifting that parts of the clamp became rotten - there is nothing smells worse than rotting potatoes. W Wee made some of the first silage in the area, but not very successfully, successfully, it was in a very crude pit and not consolidated enough. It become obvious that something had to be done regarding my fathers health, and the farm was put up for 

 

sale at a small profit, but it took more than a year to find a buyer buyer.. My father and Kay decided to move to a smaller place near St Dogmaels and concentrate on breeding pigs. Aft After er much thought I decided not to go with them, and when they left I move to Plas Parke to work for Scholly and Joanna for a few weeks. The  buyers of Pencraig were an Irish family who had been keeping a pub in St Clears. they had never farmed, so I promised to show them the elements of milking et cetera. The day they moved in, I did the evening milking without any of the ten of them bothering to come out to see, and when I stuck my head and Tilley Tilley Lamp through the living-room curtain and said ‘Right, I’ve washed up and bedded the cows down, I’ll be  back in the morning’, the old lady took her fag out to say ‘Why don’t you stay - you can sleep with me darter’ I stammered ‘some other time perhaps’, as I still had a fear of strange women, which has taken years of striving to overcome. One of the reasons they left the pub, I learnt afterwards, was because the daughters were a bit over-familiar with the customers. Butler told me a few years later that it wasn’t long before they were coming over to borrow two bob for the pools coupon, that the tractor was the first thing they sold, and they sold the cows off one by one without finding out how to milk them, he went over out of sheer pity and milked them a few times. When the old uncle died in the armchair where he spent all his days and nights, they had no vehicle, the undertaker refused to come down the farm road, and Butler and his lad Gareth had to take their tractor and trailer to fetch the body up. They had to ask for help to throw the body onto the trailer (he was a very large man), and not one of them came to help get him into the hearse. After a few weeks at Plas Parke, I began to feel that my life needed a change of emphasis, and I went down to my mother, who was living in a rented cottage just outside Shaftesbury. She was very glad to have me,  but there wasn’t much work to be had. After a few weeks I found a job as a learner woodsman at the Longford estate of the Earl of Radnor, south of Salisbury. Two of us started the same day and shared digs with the estate tree nurseryman, his wife and daughter  Evelyn. The other chap was an ex Barnado’ Barnado’ss boy twice my size, and I had a hard time doing my fair share of work, the three ofyears us lined up with spades to dig garden.atLife simple. My drawn father  sent me aespecially cheque forwhen my wages, two at £2.00 a week, plus 2% the of profits nil, was less £4.00 I had to buy my very second hand .22 rifle. This bought me a very basic new motorcycle, a James 98cc twostroke, which didn’t have a pillion (disappointing Evelyn) but enabled me to visit my mother at weekends. Evelyn came a couple of times, we must have gone by bus, but after she came during a plague of daddylong-legs which she had a phobia for, she didn’t come again. She worked in Marks and Sparks in Salisbury, Salisbury, works outings by bus remain in memory, but where we went I don’t remember. I was a great swell, with a snap brim fedora and a white silk scarf. Lonnie Donnegan and skiffle on a washboard was the latest pop thing then! Work was straight hard labour, we worked a lot of our time alongside Ukrainian DPs (displaced persons) who lived in a hostel at Wil Wilton. ton. They were a hard lot who spoke little English, but great jokers. The only Ukrainian I remember is ‘Dobre dosch’ - good rain, which meant we could sit in our little shelters and toast ourselves on the oil-drum fire. Our work was mostly clearing undergrowth with sickle and brummock. We We also each had a 7lb Elwell tree feeling axe but rarely got to use them, as there were two pairs of  experienced tree-felling specialists. specialists. A good edge was a matter of pride, and many hours of wet days were spent on the hand-turned whetstone, water cooled, thinning out the edge and sharpening the sickle, but any edge tool was rubbed with a small pocket stone if the edge hit anything hard. Sometimes we spent several days planting in the tree nursery, the seedling trees were laid on long boards, clamped with another, and the whole length dropped into a trench. The trees, mainly conifers, were transplanted every year to encourage root growth. We We also planted out on the rough ground, a quick T cut and a lift with the spade, in with the tree, and a stamp of the boot. Our clearing work also involved ‘brashing’, trimming the lowest branches of  firs as far as a hook on a long handle would reach. Once there was a misunderstanding of something I said to one of the Ukrainians, later as I was straightening my back for a minute a razor sharp hook on a whippy twelve foot handle nicked the top of my ear just enough to draw a mere trace of blood - no small feat of  skill! Major felling on the home estate was still done with 2-man hand saws and axes, chain-saws were about but  banned as vulgar and noisy noisy.. Longford Castle was still fairly grand (all flats now!) but only onl y had seven domestic staff, where in its heyday there were 22 gardeners alone. Fencing on the estate was very precise, and if bark on a new post became chipped it had to be replaced with a fresh one. Old-time manners  prevailed, in that hats were tipped to the passage of the Earl, and the knuckling of forelocks by the hatless was only just becoming to seem a bit silly and over the top. When I started there had been some talk of my training in forestry and being deferred from National Service, but the management must have decided that I wasn’t up to it, or they couldn’t afford it, as there was no more such talk. My last few weeks were spent

 

running a Canadian 1922 model De Witte Witte reciprocating saw. This consisted of two parallel beams with metal strips across like ladder rungs, with a draw-bar at one end, and a heavy old oil engine and wheels at the other. The engine had an open evaporative cooling tank and open crankshaft with grease-cups, and a large flywheel and crude clutch. A blade blade up to 12 feet long (I mostly used 10ft as being more manageable for a lightweight!) hung on parallel arms and was reciprocated by a connecting rod to an eccentric shaft. There were several glass oilers to keep filled, one was on a tube which passed through the cooling jacket to lubricate the single cylinder, and this tube had a habit of coming unscrewed about twice a day and filling the hot cylinder with water, resulting in a minor explosion which always came when least expected. The modus operandi was that this contraption was towed by the estate Ford Model T into the woods, and left by some half rotten fallen giant, known as ‘the stick’. The wheels were removed and fitted across the end of the chassis, the draw-bar was laid across the stick and spiked to it. The blade then reciprocated  painfully across the stick, the engine banged away until it exploded, and a slice was slowly cut from the end of the stick. This slice was then split for burning logs while the next slice was being cut. I had axe, sledgehammer, wedges of various sizes, 8 foot crowbar, and heavy timber jacks which would lift anything, although my short stature meant that I had to climb on the stick, walk along the jack handles, and jump up and down to move anything. the whole contraption was on its last ramshackle legs, the blade wouldn’t stop unless I threw myself on it, and everything was falling to bits. What the management had in mind in putting a seventeen year old youth to run this death trap I have no idea, it makes my blood run cold to think of it now, they must have been devoid of imagination or common humanity! What made it worse is that I was alone for days with this highly dangerous machine, there were weeks when the first person I saw was the head forester on a Friday with my wage packet, which was the agricultural minimum of £3.15s per week, of  which 35/- went for my digs. Themothers machinery finally it needed stronger muscles than wouldonever have. One I went to my cottage andbeat myme, sister Madeleine’s husband Roy wasI there a visit. He wasweekend a chartered accountant working for Cash, Stone of London, and was acting as Receiver for a bankrupt country club at Elcot Park, Kintbury, near Newbury, and offered me a job there, which I immediately accepted. This proved to be far more up my street than De Witte’ Witte’ss masterpiece. Roy ruled supreme over a very run down business, an inadequate staff was fully stretched but conformed to a strong hierarchy. As Roy’s protégée due for  military service in a few months, I was free to do pretty well as I liked and no threat to anyone. I ran errands on my little James, felled a couple of old trees in the grounds for fuel, overhauled the mechanism of  the tower clock (probably to its ruin!) and acted as barman/chamber-person/boilerman/ barman/chamber-person/boilerman/dance dance music operator, and went on the pillion of Roy’s BSA Gold Star to Finchley where they had a flat. Roy and I used to block up one side of the horse racing machines in the bar very slightly, and play the other side until we won all the money. When the penny dropped the owner came and took the machines away, away, but we had done fairly well out of them. I also did a great deal of cheap and cheerful decorating with Roy’ Roy’ss paint sprayer, spraying most of the dilapidated rooms and toilets. I was very fast but shudder to think what standard the work was done to. The high point of the club was when the Bentley Owners Club met there, the car park  filled with magnificent gleaming green machines, and the bar with their ‘wizard prang’ owners. Life was total bliss, with plenty of variety, and little responsibility, and the female staff couldn’t do enough for me. Roy increased my wages more often than was decent, and insisted on paying me for any extra hours I worked, and I did work long hours. It was far too good to last, my only complaint was that the pheasant was often too well hung for my taste! All too soon my orders came through the post to my mother’s cottage; report to the Recruiting Office in Salisbury,, where I was sworn in and received the Queens shilling - yes I really had the shilling! Given a Salisbury choice between two years National Service or something longer, I opted for three years Regular Service with the Colours, and four years Class A Reserve, and asked for the Royal Army Service Corps, on the grounds of my father’s connections with the RASC. I was to be in the army for three years and five months altogether.. My wish was duly granted and I reported within a few days, on February 25th, 1952, to altogether Oudenarde Barracks, Aldershot, Aldershot, for initial training. After issue of my first scratchy battledress, and I remember because of neck size I was the only one given two WW1 battledress blouses, which had a  peculiar lined collar and were always picked out for remark on inspections. It took weeks to get them changed for something the same as everyone else - the Stores bloke must have taken an instant dislike to me. The first twelve weeks were spent on initial square-bashing at Oudenarde, in the heart of army country, not far from where I was born. Early morning PT was followed by endless drilling on the parade ground,

 

‘by the left..quick.. left..quick.... wait for it... March! About... Turn! Double... March! Slope Arms, Shoulder Arms, Port Arms, Stand at... Ease! Atten........ Atten........ shun! endlessly endlessly,, all da day y, with occasional weapon training on .303 Lee Enfield rifle, Sten gun, Bren light machine gun - the RASC repertoire of weaponry didn’t run to anything very sophisticated. Actual Actual firing on the range was a very rare event, never in all my service did I get enough firing practice to feel at home with a weapon, and the Sten in particular is far more dangerous to the firer’s fingers than anyone the gun is pointed at, unless you get enough practice to know what to expect, which is a wild sweep off to the right and up. The general idea of parade ground drill is to bring about automatic and quick obedience to any given order.  New intakes arrived at the barracks fortnightly, fortnightly, and on the command Parade ..... Shun, there was a ripple of  feet crashing down, the longest serving first, the latest intake doing a Corporal Jones of Dad’s Army, Army, thus illustrating that the training did what it was supposed to. There was a great deal of shouting very loudly into faces of recruits by the drill staff, who spent their days being licensed bullies, and consequently must have  been more damaged by the system than we poor cannon fodder were. The whole dreadful experience was made bearable only by the fact that we were all in it together, and suffered equally. A mid course break was spent at my sister Madeleine’s flat in Finchley. My only success in initial training was on some field training, we had to hide, then the officer directed a corporal to where each soldier was hidden, the nearest to be considered champion. I was flattened in a very slight dip, and scared the hell out of him when he called the finish, by rising out of the dead ground about four yards from him. ‘Where did you learn that?’ he asked. ‘Salmon poaching, Sir’ said I smartly! Passing Out Parade was made as difficult as possible, highly bulled boots shone from hours and days of  tiny circles with a finger tip and polish duster, imma immaculate culate polished brasses and blancoed webbing, knife edge creases in trousers, & etc... A brief leave, and the next assignment was driver training, at Blandford Camp, Dorset, about fifteen miles from my mothers but I wasn’t allowed to bring my motorbike on camp, so didn’t there often. We lived ‘san-blocks’ like the IRA do now, 30 to each hut,short withoffour huts  joined by get common facilities. Thereinwas a Naafi and a camp cinema, butabout we were kept very cash.  National Servicemen had ten shillings a fortnight, regulars ten shillings a week. Training consisted of an instructor and two trainee drivers to each Bedford QL 3ton truck. Y You ou climbed into a truck parked eight inches from the kerb, noted where the line of the kerb cut the windscreen edge, and kept it there for the next few weeks! The instructor carried a short stick to rap knuckles if the wagon strayed by a few inches. My sergeant instructor, instructor, was an extremely overbearing, unpleasan unpleasant, t, and loud voiced bloke whose name I won’t mention, he might still be around somewhere! Late in the course, I was a witness at his court martial for  extortion from trainees. Various Various items had been found in his possession, in a suitcase with m my y name on, which he had borrowed from me and ‘forgotten’ tto o return. I managed not to mention the five shillings he had out of me. He lost his sergeants stripes and was posted elsewhere - I was to meet him again in adverse circumstances, when he thanked me for not mentioning the cash! Our course was put back three weeks due to a smallpox scare, our whole block was put in quarantine and we went out marching, running, and drilling with a hand bell rung to keep the rest of humanity at bay, and our food was deposited on the block steps. Fortunately the whole thing was a washout, nobody died or  came out in spots, nothing to laugh at, at all! Driving tests were carried out by normal civilian testers, mine was in Southampton and I passed, after about thirteen hours of driving. This was very slightly marred by a conviction for driving through Blandford on my James motorcycle without L plates. I fell off in front of a policeman, so deserved it! The bike was left at the cafe in Shaftesbury where my mother worked part-time, and I used it on a few weekends when I could get to mothers at Cherry Orchard, at the bottom of Shaftesbury hill, to the west. After a short leave, Borden Camp, in Hampshire, which was the RASC transit unit for postings. I was now T/22793936 Driver ilex77, and posted to No 5 General Transport Company, Company, RASC, based at Kaprivi Kaserne, Osnabruck, in Lower Saxony. We travelled via the Hook of Holland on the Blue Train. The  barracks were massively built of stone, a former German cavalry barracks, triple glazed, with gravel squares, now used as parade ground and lorry parks. We were a general transport company attached to noone in particular. The trucks, four platoons of about thirty each, were employed in moving rations, ammunition, and potatoes mostly, mostly, but spent a lot of time on the vehicle parks being polished, as there was insufficient petrol available for frivolous use, and there was much competition for the work available. When I arrived the company was about to leave on an exercise, Operation Spearhead 2, and I was allotted a 3ton Bedford QL and picked up a load of ten or eleven collapsible boats, and departed on detachment to an Infantry battalion, who I followed about the North German Plain, staying under camouflage during the day and being led by MP jeeps at night, until the night of the big push, when my truck and others met at the

 

River Leine for the river assault which was a major part of the exercise. Some of the infantry were Canadian, I was attached to the 3inch mortar platoon and was interested in the mortar gun-laying techniques, which used ordnance survey maps and compass bearings. The most exciting happening was waking up one morning after sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag, to find that the hedge about a foot from my head had been demolished by passing tanks in the night - I hadn’t heard a thing. There was another occasion when I was driving back to the company on manoeuvres after collecting rations from the  barracks, it was just getting dark along a narrow and heavily cambered cobbled country road lined with trees, and I dropped my last inch of cigarette on the floor. While While groping around for it, the front hubcap clipped a tree and the steering sheered, the truck turned over and became a write-off, I swore blind that I had been run off the road in a ‘revenge attack’ by a heavy civilian truck, as used to happen to our chaps occasionally, and I got clean away with it. After six weeks with the company, I was in the guardroom on guard one night and out of sheer boredom filled in the Guard Commanders Report with number rank and name of the twelve on guard duty. duty. This was considered a matter of great literacy and initiative, much to my m y beguilement, and as a direct consequence I was promoted to Lance Corporal the following morning, and posted to the Company office, as a clerk  doing Part II and III Orders. This involved the publishing of regular papers informing central army records of education, promotion, pay alterations, punishments, illness - everything that the army wanted to have  placed on a soldier’s permanent record. A series of orders were sent out, also placed on the notice board, and these had to be meticulously correct, a misplaced comma meant that an amendment would come back  from records, and then the ‘occurrence’ had to be re-published. My attitude towards paperwork has always  been somewhat cavalier, so I ended up spending most of my time correcting my own mistakes. Another six weeks and a second stripe came, now I was Corporal Clerk in the Company office, and a fairly key figure. Still Part II and III Orders though, and the worst thing was that when the company went on manoeuvres, I was left behind totrips openby the mail answer the telephone, generally act as dogsbody dogsbody.., The only fun Ithe hadone was occasional train toand collect weapons from the and Military Hospital at Hannover, Hannover which occasional freedom I enjoyed, using the simple German I acquired at Plas Parke. On one trip I went out for  a few beers in local bars, and ended up back at RMH Hannover without having arranged arranged any accommodation. Creeping into an empty ward, I got into bed and slept like a log. Someone shook me in the morning, and I raised my head to find that it was 11.00 am, and I was the centre of attraction of the Commanding Officer’s Officer’s morning rounds, together with his entourage of about twenty assorted ranks. Fortunately I wasn’t his man to punish, but the Matron gave me a memorable tearing off in her office later! Life in 5 Coy became a bit boring as we became affected by a general cutback in expenditure, which meant fewer stores to move, and very little petrol for the trucks, which sat on the parks being endlessly bulled up and painted. There were small excitements, like when one Paddy Gaynor, who seemed to follow me around in the army, while on sentry go, fired closely over the head of the Duty Garrison Major, pretending he thought he was an intruder intruder,, that was one of Paddy‘s milder japes, but did not amuse the major! He spent many long days of solo pack-drill (that is where you carry a pack full of bricks) on the square with a  provost sergeant named Morris who had been at the Drill Hall at Southport at some time when I was there as a child. He was determined to break Paddy’s Paddy’s spirit, but even months in prison didn’t affect him, except to make him wiry and hard, I met Paddy later in Korea where he had just come out of the stockade there, I think that was a really hard Amer American ican run prison, he would only have been sent there as incorrigible, but Paddy hadn’t changed an iota. In the past he had deserted and come back in under different names a couple of times, which made his documents a bit complicated! He wasn’t barmy barmy,, he just had an unusual attitude to authority,, and didn‘t give a damn! Despite his prison sentences, he was the nearest to being his own man authority that I have ever known! At Christmas the local infantry ( I think the 1st Battalion Scots Greys - very hard lads!) got really plastered and broke up the Osnabruck garrison Naafi, throwing a very dignified WVS woman into the goldfish pond,  but apart from that, there wasn’t much to laugh at. The actual barracks, Kaprivi Kaserne, made a strong impression on me, they were ancient German cavalry barracks, there were strange secret back stairs meant for the staff, and many attic rooms with odd strange dossers of both sexes here and there. For many years afterwards I used to dream of being lost in the dilapidated parts of those buildings. I applied to join the war in Korea, the CO refused to consider it, but a circular came round (and I opened the envelope!) calling for volunteers and stressing that COs should do all they could to find them, so he didn’t have a leg to stand on, and couldn’t prevent me going. My motive was simply that I had trained as a soldier, that Korea was where the serious soldiering was being done at the time, and that is where I ought to  be.

 

At Borden transit camp I became Draft Corporal, a fate worse than death, as it meant continually harassing 33 reluctant men, most of whom were National Servicemen and didn’t want to go to Korea, with nothing to lose. They had to be bawled out of bed in the morning, marched endlessly round the camp for jabs, kit collection, medical inspection, and ordering people about all day was not my favourite thing. Eventually we went through the Draft Warning Warning procedure. This has several effects, one of which is to turn the mild offence of Absent Without Leave (AWOL) into the more serious crime of Desertion. We were issued our official Draft Warning on a Thursday for departure the following Tuesday, and my draft were then put on cookhouse duties, spud-bashing and washing up, for the weekend. I protested to our staff sergeant, on the grounds that the men should not spend possibly their last weekend in the UK on such duties. He refused to do anything, so I went over his head to the Regimental Sergeant Major Major,, who saw my point and let us off the duties. We We all promptly lit out for our nearest relatives, except one bloke from Aberdeen who couldn’t have made it in the time. Unfortunately Unfortunately,, the RSM spotted me getting on the bus outside camp, on my way to Finchley, and I was up before the Colonel at 9.30 Monday morning, with my corporals tapes pre-cut by the RSM personally with a razor blade, and after a very well presented rocketing by the CO ‘since you are now on active service I could have you shot...’, the RSM ripped off my tapes with huge relish, and hep hyte h yte hep hyted me all the way back to my billet, where I threw myself on m my y bed with a surge of relief, and gratefully waited for some other poor blighter to shout at me to move! Most of us were National Servicemen, the general attitude was that you lay around until someone shouted, then only moved as long as they kept shouting. What a relief it was to sink back into the mob again! We sailed on the Tuesday Tuesday,, all present and correct, and had the good fortune to be on the Asturias, Asturias, the first trip after she was converted from a cruise liner. Most of the large public rooms had been fitted with rows of  standees, or metal racks of beds four deep hung from steel pillars, but the infantry infantry,, I think it was 1st Battalion Royal Essex Regiment, had those, the RASC and other odds and ends had four berth cabins whichcombined, were quitebut luxurious. the decks finest the than foodarmy was excellent crew cooks andproper  catering corps the kitchens werewere muchofmore upteak, to date cooks were used to, and  potato peelers, no spud-bashing or dish-washing! Shipboard life was a soldiers paradise, lounging around all day da y, a little genteel bingo in the evenings, run b by y the civilian stewards. The troops were paid ten shillings a week, and played penny ante games of banker on the decks. This rapidly relieved them of their few bob, which ended up with a number of small-time penny  banker kings. The real gambling then began, as they played brag and thinned out to a very few, who then had the wherewithal for entry to the real game, which was cut-throat poker in the crew’s crew’s quarters. There, the bosun, his minders, and the odd really hard soldier (they were very few, maybe one or two in an entire shipload!), ended up gambling with the entire pay-roll, and all within a few days of each pay-out, a real lesson in economics in society for those who cared to take it in. Of course in the general nature of things, the bosun usually ended up top of the heap! The journey to Pusan took 42 days, with stops at Gibraltar, Valletta, Port Said, Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong. Ten bob was the most we ever had for shore leave, and they were mostly brief stops for  refuelling and victualling. We We had no civilian clothes but the tropical kit was fairly smart. Gibraltar seemed very British, red telephone boxes and British bobbies. We saw the apes traversing the rooftops looking for  trouble, and climbed the 300 steep steps to the Peak, where there is a fantastic panoramic view across the  bay to Algeciras and a hazy smudge of Africa to the south across the Straits, and one is very aware of the importance of this gateway to the Mediterranean, so narrow and full of a sense of historical significance as the dividing line between civilisations. That night we were on our way with full tanks, another two and a half days along the coast of Algeria to Malta, with a marvellous early morning view of Pantelleria, a heaving fortified island in the Sicilian Channel, belong to Italy, looking like a huge aircraft carrier bristling with gun emplacements. Valletta Harbour was very beautiful, the town very much a Royal Navy preserve, the narrow and notorious Gut was an alleyway lined with low bars advertising W Watneys atneys Red Barrel and  Newcastle Brown Ale, Ale, mostly run by raddled old harridans who terrified us - the Navy must be made of  stronger stuff! We We had an oily tough steak at a cheap cafe, and visited the Union Jack Club, a serviceman’s waterhole run by the Naafi, which smelt a bit strong due to the perennial water shortage. The ship was moored in mid-harbour, and refuelled from barges, we were brought on and off by taxi-boats. A Ass soon as we were back on board after a few hours leg-stretch, we were off again with full bunkers, another two and a half days run to Port Said. Here we remained aboard, but trading boats ranged alongside offering leather  goods, and the famous professional conjurers, known as gulley-gulley men, after their main cry. The  performance was unbelievable, standing on a raised Carley Float, the conjurer singled out soldiers in the crowd, who then found their shirts full of cheeping newly hatched chicks, and no chance of collaboration,

 

the victims were our mates! ‘Nothin’ in my hand, nothin’ up my sleeve - gulley gulley gulley.’ Group hypnotism or what? We joined the twice weekly convoy for the passage of the Suez Canal, two days of thumping gently along with only a couple of yards to spare on each side, except for a short stop at Ismailia, half way, way, where the canal becomes a lake and north and southbound convoys pass. All under the command of a canal pilot. There was little to see along the banks, for most of the way the view was confined to the banks which were raised above the surrounding desert, just an occasional fellahin saluting us with the apparently traditional insult of dropping his trousers and ‘mooning’ at the ship. Our passage down the Red Sea had a really exotic feel to it, with flying fish, dolphins gaily gambolling alongside the bow wave for hours at a time, and the air becoming warmer daily as we drew south, to Aden as the next refuelling stop. Again, we had a brief shore leave, just a distant memory of walking through the Crater district, hot, dusty, noisy, noisy, and smelling of paraffin and cooking. From Aden, across the Indian Ocean to Colombo, Ceylon making its presence known many hours out to sea by its exotic aroma a roma of hot cinnamon and other spices. Then on to Singapore, and Hong Kong, each stop allowing a brief shore leave. It is impossible now to give the sort of travelogue account which we are now so used to through the medium of TV. We always went ashore as hard up servicemen, with four hours and ten shillings to spend, so a cup of tea in the handiest British forces canteen, or one glass of beer in a low bar, was the most to be hoped for, with a foot-aching march into town rather than bus or taxi, though maybe the authorities did this deliberately to keep our feet in order for marching! The shipping was always interesting to me, especially in Hong Kong, where the variety of boats of every kind, from Kowloon ferries to sampans and sea-going  junks were an endless source of entertainment. During the last leg of the journey journey,, from Hong Kong to Pusan, we passed through a full typhoon in the South China Sea, and I had the great good fortune to be night duty fire piquet on the open deck, otherwise out of   bounds, a great thrill and as the bows dipped anditthrew spray hard backwork the length of the I had my sea legs by then, enjoyed the roll into and huge pitch,waves although was really bending theship. ankles and legs to stay upright - rather like slalom skiing I should think. At last, Korea began to loom over the horizon, and a very daunting sight it was - dark mysterious islands rising sheer from the sea, with dark mountains stretching into the distant horizon. Pusan was a short sharp introduction to the doubtful delights of Korea at wars end. The truce ending the fighting had been signed the week before we arrived, so we were spared the experience of full scale warfare. The war had swept up and down the country several times, setting off new waves of refugees fleeing from the battle front. Being mountainous, and very underdeveloped, the major long distant routes were historically confined to a few valleys, where all the flat land was taken up by rice paddy fields with complex irrigation systems systems,, and a dirt road usually only slightly above the water table. Pusan was a city of 600,000 souls, but they were almost all displaced persons living in total squalor in huts made of whatever they could steal, and clothed in grey rags of anything which would help even slightly to keep out the cold. We arrived at the beginning of the first winter at the end of the war, and the temperature was to gradually fall away to fifty degrees of frost, and that first winter the population was decimated by frostbite gangrene which was a common sight, as all the available fuel of any kind had long been gathered and burnt. The traditional Korean house was made of  mud with a thatched roof, and had a hearth at one end outside the building, which fed a flue running under  the floor and out the other end via a chimney of mud, or by then usually an ammunition container. This This was an extremely efficient form of heating, fuelled by either rice straw or animal droppings, and either fuel  burnt with an extremely strong smell which always hung in the air over settlements. On the few occasions I entered traditional Korean dwellings they were always warm and comfortable, but refugees lived as best they could - very poorly and prone to frost gangrene. After three nights in the British transit camp at Pusan railhead, we climbed aboard the KComZ (Korean Communications Zone) Komet, a wide-gauge American run railroad which rolled slowly north for two days, via ??. We were dressed in our heaviest clothing, which was one set of UK battledress, but since we had become tropically acclimatised during our voyage we felt the cold badly. We We tended to sleep in heaps on the train, as the carriages in which we travelled had hard wooden seating and all the windows blown out. Our discomfort was aggravated by the sight of American troops, lower down the train in comfortable warm well lit coaches, enjoying heat which was piped under our coaches to get to them! The train travelled  painfully slowly, slowly, with long stops at times, and each time we were besieged by crowds of shadowy children of all ages, mostly maimed, dressed in shreds of clothing, many suffering from frostbite gangrene and suppurating limbs. We We were to be haunted throughout our stay by the suffering which surrounded us - it was hard to be unable to help, as a scrap of food or a coin thrown to them resulted in a full scale battle with

 

the winnings going to the strongest and the weakest left even worse off. To To be decently dressed, well nourished, and passably housed, while surrounded by suffering which couldn’t be eased by your own actions, induced a guilt which many were unable to handle, and troopships returning to UK had the poop deck closed in with rope netting to contain those psychologically disturbed by the suffering of the people and the hostile alien culture and brooding countryside. I was affected myself, and unable to look at a healthy baby for several years afterwards without bringing it all back to mind. Korea, in the native language Chosen, or Land of the Morning Calm, had been reduced to a very low state  by the war. The capital city, Seoul, lay in ruins, hardly a building had anything left of a second storey, and the Parliament building was gutted and ruinous. Sanitation and clean water were non-existent. Hundreds of  children led a feral existence - hardly a life - in caves dug in the ancient rubbish dumps on the Han River  flats outside the city, living by their wits. A favourite trick was for one child to tap or bang on the front of a vehicle, and while attention was drawn to this, others would be looting anything removable. Even a spare wheel would be detached from a lorry - civilian transport was by ancient ramshackle buses, kept running with stolen spares and petrol from the thriving Black Market in Amrican Amrican supplies. The main feature of the  buses was their crab-like approach - for some reason the rear axles, usually stolen from Mack trucks, were hardly ever in line with the bodywork, so it wasn’t always easy to work out where they were heading, very alarming if you were driving in the opposite direction!! After two days and nights on the train, we arrived at the railhead at Tokchon, Tokchon, and were almost on Commonwealth Division territory. territory. The 38th Parallel had been taken as the dividing line, and Commonwealth Div was responsible for a central part of the North and South Korea border, along the DMZ or Demilitarisation Zone. This was an empty area along the border, patrolled only by small patrols agreed by both sides, and illuminated at night along its entire length by parachute flares, which were fired  by mortar, hung in the air for several minutes as the flare buoyed up the parachute, then as one expired another would belarge firedfortune. to replace it, all this taking alongthe several miles border, which must have cost a very Commonweal Commonwealth th Divplace included Imjimhundred River and the of famous Gloucester  valley where the Gloucesters fought a notable action with the Chinese, and a Private Steadman won the VC, although I heard that he was a bit tipsy at the time! After staggering from the filthy train, about thirty scruffy and dirty RASC personnel fell in beside the tracks with backpacks and kitbags. We were asked if anyone had experience of driving a jeep, as a driver  was needed for a unit which hadn’t had much luck with its RASC drivers. The officer asking looked a  pretty decent sort of chap, so against all the old soldiers advice about never volunteering for anything in the army,, I stuck my hand up, and in two minutes I was driving an open Jeep up the dirt road with my new army  boss, with whom I was to serve a year and a half, or two winters and a summer, as we tended to think of  time there. He was Geoffrey Hibbert, a civilian attached to the army and wearing a major’s uniform, commanding officer of No 1, Army Kinema Detachment, 1 AKD for short. This was an active service unit of the Army Kinema Corporation, a large organisation based in Croydon, responsible for providing the British army everywhere with film entertainment. We drove to a REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) heavy vehicle recovery unit, based in a compound at a road junction about half an hour from Tokchon, where No 1 AKD had a small compound of  its own inside the REME perimeter. There was the CO, an elderly Scot, Lieutenant Jock Ward, as second in command, two projection equipment technicians who were ranked as warrant officers, and a pool of about ten operators classed as sergeants, all of whom were ‘civvy-attached’, ‘civvy-attached’, meaning that they wore uniform in case of capture by the enemy, enemy, but were employed at civilian rates. The military personnel consis consisted ted of a corporal and three infantrymen who ran the film library, checking, splicing, and re-winding the 250 American and 150 British 16mm films in the library. library. I was one of three RASC drivers, and was officially the CO’s driver. driver. My duties were very light, as he often drove himself. The system was that a film library truck went out every day on a regular schedule of good meeting places in Commonwealth Div area, where representatives of the various units met to exchange films. They usually had a set of cinema equipment on loan from the AKD, either one or two GBL516 or Bell and Howell 620, 16mm cinema projectors, and when a battalion arrived they sent a body to be trained on a course run by b y the AKD. Smaller Smaller units were visited on a regular schedule by one of two or three mobile cinema outfits. I soon began to sit in on the  projectionists course, helped to run the next one, and after that I was mostly on the No 1 Mobile round, which included the Divisional General’s Mess, A Mess which contained all the staff officers and Brigade commanders, and several interesting smaller units like the Canadian Field Hospital (just like M.A.S.H.!) the Field Security Section (Intelligence) and Ammunition Examining Unit (death wish absolutely vital).

 

Since I sported the silk neckerchief popular with civvy-attached personnel on my unit, it was usually assumed that I too was a civilian, and I got away with murder nearly all the time. There was one occasion when I took with me an alcoholic civvy-attached Staff Sergeant Sergeant waiting for a berth back to the UK - a warrant officer in the Divisional Senior Warrant Warrant Officers Mess spiked his drinks and I told him off in no uncertain terms, as I had the job of getting the sodden wreck back to base. Unfortunately the SWO (Divisional) saw me the following day bringing a signal to Div HQ for transmission to the UK, and cottoned on to the fact that I was a mere RASC driver with no right to be socialising in his mess at all, let alone dressing down a member. He gave me a really masterly dressing down, but allowed that it had been a stupid trick for his WO to play. He would have been well within his rights to slap me in jail, but settled for  making me a quivering wreck. I could tell he respected me for getting away with a good racket, but seeing one of his own WOs told off in his own mess by a private soldier was too much to bear. Life generally was pretty good - I spent the morning in bed, afternoons overhauling generators, and evenings into the small hours doing film shows with the mobile. W Wee used to get requests for extra shows for  special occasions, and would fit these in after the normal evenings show where possible. There were some really memorable evenings in all sorts of places, I remember a Maori farewell party with Hawaiian guitars and even Korean Hula-Hula dancers specially trained for the occasion, and everybody crying most convincingly! The General’s General’s Mess was the prestige outing, of course one was not allowed to eat or drink in the bar, but there was generally something pretty good to eat in the kitchens. The Padre was always late for meals, which annoyed the chef greatly, I remember him slapping several handfuls straight out of the dustbin on to a plate, telling the waiter ‘Give the Padre this with my compliments”. The Mess was well dug in, with a number of pet rabbits living in the mound, it was a great challenge to try for one for the pot but I never  succeeded. I talked to the General’ General’ss parrot a lot, he would only speak if you were wearing the General’ General’ss hat, whichbeen washorrendous, usually hanging on parrot a special peg.squealed Had I been caught wearing the hat, the consequences would have but the never on me! We had two varieties of mobile cinema, either an open jeep with screen rack and boxes bolted to the floor  and a generator on a trailer, or an old-fashioned Morris one tonner of WW2 vintage, 4wheel drive but noisy and cumbersome, I preferred the jeep as much more sporting, although as we drove them open most of the time, in winter you had to drive with an extremely small slot in the wired front of the parka hood, and there was an issue of protective nose-warmer nose-warmers. s. The America Americans ns had petrol heaters in their hooded jeeps but we scorned such luxuries, I suppose we could have bought them on the Black Market but never thought of  doing so - we looked upon windscreens as being rather non-macho! We were sent a shipment of generators which had Norman flat twin motorcycle engines, these were simply not strong enough for the job, and almost coughed to a stop whenever a projector was switched on. We We replaced these through the Black Market by buying 7Kw jeep-engined generators from the Ameri Americans, cans, the  price - one bottle of whisky each! American forces were dry, dry, and the demand for hard liquor was insatiable, as any hitcher picked up on the road would offer ten or even twenty dollars a bottle. Our private soldiers were not allowed spirits but NCOs had a ration and there was always some to be had. Everybody did it. Geoff Hibbert bought an American Hydramatic command vehicle, centrally heated with all mod cons, for  two bottles, and a stores truck with racking for the same price. Incidentally Incidentally,, a bottle of whisky was also the  price of a Colt automatic 9mm pistol, which an American American storeman would simply cross off his list as issued, and no more questions asked. Many of our people collected Chinese ‘burp’ guns and other  hardware, but I never had the urge. We We did prop open our tent door with an old live shell though! Our quarters were in ten-man tents, very threadbare - you could see the stars shining through the canvas, We each had a camp bed and two heavy sleeping bags - one inside the other in winter. Heavy condensation from the breath made them sopping wet, and they would freeze solid during the day, day, so you had to actually  break the bag up before getting in. We We had Japanese ‘hand-warmers’, like a cigarette case, with a platinum element. They were fuelled with lead-free petrol and helped to get a warmth going, though why nobody was asphyxiated I just don’t know. Some people had favourite rocks which they warmed on the stove for  use as hot water bottles. There were two barrel stoves in each tent, burning diesel oil from a jerrycan outside, although petrol often was put in them in really cold weather. These made the tent quite comfortable to a well dressed person, when turned up full and red hot, but in cold weather everyone coming in would give the valve a half turn extra, and if overfed they would get white hot and begin jumping up and down with a loud roaring noise. At that stage everyone bailed out and waited for the danger to subside. The stoves were about twenty inches high, and habitually used as seating during the summer. One autumn evening we were all just in bed when the last man arrived from the canteen after a skinful, and the stove had been lit for 

 

the first time and was just about red hot. He sat down heavily upon it, and we were all too paralysed with horror to make a move. It took what seemed a very long time for him to realise his mistake, and he was in hospital for some weeks with some very nasty burns down to the bone. The REME officers mess was in a Quonset hut - like a Nissen only much bigger - and an orderly filled a diesel stove with petrol from a  jerrycan while the stove was lit - there was a strong breeze at the time and the whole hut became red hot, with a giant spout of flame from one end. The members had just had a set of furniture brought from Japan at their own expense. Save the furniture! they cried - but no-one lifted a finger, and it was all a burnt out shell in a couple of minutes. We also had mosquito nets, more to keep the rats at bay, as we took paludrine anti-malaria tablets daily. daily. The rats lived in holes under the floorboards, although a truck exhaust was regularly piped down the holes the rats seemed to thrive on it, and used to enjoy running up the seams inside the tent roof, probably seeking waste body heat, as it was strictly forbidden to sleep with stoves lit. When the rats fell off they landed with a thump on someone’s mozzy net, which could be startling. They were a real menace as they carried hemorrhagic fever fever,, which when passed to humans via a scratch resulted in a loss of blood and death in a matter of days. There was no known cure, and the fever was the only way of getting back to the UK by Comet jet, because the Tropical Medicine Institute in London were very interested in it, but couldn’t keep their patients alive for long enough to get a decent look at them. The state of the roads in winter was abominable, there was a system of green, amber, and red road states. When amber was declared, authority at Brigadier level was needed to be on the road, and when red, there was almost no-one on the roads, as the graders battled night and day to keep the mud which constituted the road, swept into some kind of line. Since most of the roads were lined with rice paddy on both sides, as soon as water piled up and crossed the road, there was usually a narrow crack which rapidly widened below the surface, so that the first vehicle which broke through often disappeared entirely. entirely. Since we were considered to be essential morale-boosters, we had carte blanche to be on the roads in any state, and it was not unusual to drive aheavy jeep and trailervehicles. crab-wise round a giant pot-hole containing several trucks andto a couple of Scammell recovery The Americans Ameri cans at these times resorted almost entirely helicopter transport. Our valley was on a main north-south route and there would be a continuous stream of  small two man helicopters with cargo stretchers on the skids, in each direction. There was a stores depot across the valley, valley, about a mile away, away, which was constantly raided at night by gangs of armed bandits, who set off trip flares along the perimeter and were warned off with machine gun fire. The first time I went out at night with one of the civvy sergeants in a Morris truck, I was amazed to see a red dotted line come out of the hills, cross the road just in front of our truck, and disappear into the hills across the valley. ‘Was that what I think it was?’ I asked about ten minutes later. ‘Oh, yes’ he said, ‘we often get that, it’s either bandits or some sentry getting bored’. Later, I was several times fired on by by Korean police, who all carried carbines, when refusing to stop at night when waved down. Although we were not supposed to travel alone, in practice I was alone more often than not. We carried Sten guns, but I can’t remember having any ammunition. The black market value of the equipment we carried, in a desperate country where porno films from Japan were becoming a hot commodity, commodity, was such that we couldn’t let the police see the projection equipment, or a muddy grave in the nearest rice paddy would have  been the result. The police usually wanted to commandeer transport to take prisoners away from their  villages. there were two villages near our camp, Tsin-Zah-Nee and Ka-Pa-Wee, but it was always dangerous to stop anywhere near a settlement. Prostitution Prostitution and black marketeering were rife everywhere, and authority lay with whoever ran the rackets. American troops had money to burn, so the main rackets centred near large American camps. The main legitimate industry was the returning of empty beer bottles to Japan, although importing was done by the military military,, they left the returns to private enterprise. The best organised distribution system was Coca-Cola, who got endless supplies through to wherever Americ Americans ans might be found. Our camp had its own canteen, I was mostly out in the evenings, but there was a certain hostility between our lads and the REME, as we didn’t do guard duties, which they resented. There were one or two of  doubtful masculinity among the civvy-attached - no more than that - but REME tended to tar us all with the same brush. Pete Stocking, from the 1st Battalion Essex Regiment, was an ex-Haileybury lad who spoke with an upper-class drawl and was very good looking. He also played the piano expertly, classical and jazz. This led the REME to pick on him a lot, which was a mistake, as he was an accomplished boxer, and always won any fight. We We of course had to back him up, and there were some full scale brawls with a lot of   black eyes as a result. Asahi Asahi and Nippon Pils were quite strong lagers, about the same as Carlsberg full strength. The usual thing was to hit the cap off the bottle, drink it down, and smash the empty on the floor, so that eventually you were walking in inches of broken glass. It seems ridiculous now, but I suppose it

 

relieved our hooligan tendencies. On the subject of masculinity, masculinity, the transport company I would have joined if I hadn’t volunteered was hugely overworked for a period of many months, and they had as a result of the strain, a very unusual outbreak of homosexuality in the unit, amounting to a majority affected, which I am glad I didn’t have to live through - which of us knows who will be the last to be seasick on a sinking ship? This was severely dealt with at the time, and kept pretty quiet, I’ve never heard of such a thing in the army, army, apart from this instance. The favourite films at that time, often requested for extra shows, were ‘Genevieve’, ‘A Hill Hill in Korea’, and my own all-time favourite, ‘African Queen’, with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, and I still watch it any time it crops up. Many of our shows were in the open air, as we could put the screen up on the  back of any truck. Summer insects were irresistibly draw drawn n from miles around by the glare of the screen, and them flew up the beam of the projector. We used to set off a row of DDT bombs upwind of the audience, so that the gas drifted across in a cloud killing off all the wildlife. A major part of the Korean diet was ‘kimchee’, a very potent mix of sun-dried squid and garlic, which was so powerful on the breath that if  one garlicky Korean crept into an audience of a couple of hundred, an instant roar of protest resulted. Another major aroma source was the ‘honey-carts’ which carried excrement from the villages out to the crops When passing these in a jeep, the standard procedure was to take the deepest breath possible, hold it until bursting, then hope the air was again breathable. The buffalo which pulled the carts also let off a  powerful aroma of their own, and the ‘morning calm’ around every settlement was always pretty potent,  being full of smoke of strawy dung. My position as CO’s driver meant that I sometimes drove to Seoul City by jeep, usually to collect films from aircraft arriving at Kimpo airport, a wide expanse of slotted steel decking, with constant traffic of  aircraft, mostly American C130, and also the faithful DC3 Dakota. There were all sorts of sights in Seoul, I was trapped in riots several times in an open jeep, not a happy experience, being screamed at by  bloodthirsty schoolgirls for Chon round-eye blood, insisted while police lookedwith on approvingly. approvingly . The police were not to be trifled with, ourhowling houseboy, Kee Yung, on coming us into the DMZone without a pass. He was dragged away screaming and returned ten days later much chastened, claiming he had been fed twice in ten days, which I fully believed. Security forces often had wire cages full of prostitutes and young children, it just didn’t do to take any interest. There was a small valley just behind our camp, and we often saw trucks full of bound prisoners drive into the valley, heard the sound of distant gunfire, and saw the trucks coming back empty - it just wasn’t any of our business, and no-one ever went up there to see what was what, curiosity as to the doings of Korean police being not a good idea! On one of my trips to Seoul, I visited the FMA (Forward (Forward Marshalling Area) Area) near the railway station, and was astonished to hear my name called from nowhere. It turned out to be my old friend the sergeant instructor Horrocks from Blandford, whose court martial I gave evidence at. Now a corporal, he was in an underground dungeon with a grating in the roof, under the FMA HQ building, awaiting another court martial for desertion. Before I could get the full story, story, the RSM came out and bawled ‘Get away from that  prisoner, that man!’, and that was the last I ever heard of him. I also at some stage met a chap called Morris who had been a corporal with my father at Southport, then a sergeant at 5 Coy in Osnabruck, I think he was some kind of Provost (Police) Sergeant in Korea. We mostly stayed very fit, due to lots of fresh air, and even in winter a strong wind tanned our complexions to a leathery brown. A peculiarity was a periodic wind, which blew very regularly, something like three days from Mongolia, and four days from the opposite direction. Korea also was a very active earthquake zone, and small quakes happened almost daily, daily, bigger ones less often. To To feel the earth under foot actually moving about is a fundamentally frightening frightening experience. We We were in no danger living under canvas, but to see Kamak-San, the dominant peak, actually shifting in relation to everything else defied one’s belief in the laws of physics. Korean country burials were done with the body sitting upright in a small mound, and rice dolls and funeral paraphernalia were set about the grave. Dire were the consequences for any round-eye tampering with the same... December 1954 saw me back again at Pusan transit camp, waiting to get a troopship home. W Wee were running behind time, since National Servicemen were paid compensation for late demob, and regulars weren’t, and a particularly nasty mood hung over the camp as Christmas drew near. The routine was to hold roll-calls four times a day, and sadistic staff called out names for various ‘lists’ which seemed to be designed just to keep us guessing. Many soldiers were unstable from overwork and climate, or just from general gloom engendered by the country, and went ‘over the wire’ even at that late stage, to vanish into the stews of Pusan - a hell on earth if ever there was one. I squatted on a bank at the edge of the square in the moonlight on Christmas Eve, watching the canteen go up in flames, while several hundred men fought in

 

one huge mass of kicking swearing completely cheesed-off cheesed-off squaddies. At last a place became available, on the Empire Fowey, Fowey, whose sister ship, ther Empire Orwell, had just sunk in the Med after a fire. The return journey took 43 days. It was wonderful to kiss the ground at the foot of the gangplank, who would have thought Liverpool docks would inspire such appreciation! A cheer  went up in the Customs shed as a bunch of RMPs who had been trying to maintain discipline aboard ship were taken off by the Customs to be searched, as some Liverpudlian ex-inhabitant of the military stockade in Korea had sent a tip-off on ahead that there was a fair amount of Japanese photographic equipment among their kit! It was hard to settle after such an active time, the rigours of climate and seeing such suffering had affected all of us. My M y father and stepmother were now living in Southport, where he was back in uniform as adjutant to the Home Guard, wearing his substantive rank uniform of captain. I eventually went back down to Carmarthenshire where Scholly and Joanna were kind enough to give me a job of sorts, and healthy open air and peace and quiet slowly put me right. Feeling much better after a few weeks, I returned to Southport, and managed to get a job based at the Ordnance Depot, Burscough, near Ormskirk. My little James motorcycle had been sold when I went to Germany Germany,, but I had saved enough in Korea to pay for a 200cc Zundapp Bella scooter. I was clerk to a travelling team of a Clerical Officer Officer,, myself as clerical assistant, a foreman and about six labourers, and our job was to take stock of Unit War Equipments, Equipments, which were agglomerations of army stores flung together during the war, which had been lying l ying at various ordnance depots ever since. My boss travelled mostly on my pillion, and the men followed by train. We had the master copies of the War Office Office G1098 inventories, and our task was to identify everything, and alter the inventories to match what we found - an unusual form of stock-taking! Some of the items, like ‘gauges  bicycle’, and obscure lumps of artillery howitzers, defied all except the most inspired guess-work, but we tried. After much about to sixthe months mostly at Holmes Chapel and Pembroke depots, non-combatants I was made redundant, regretof ofthis, the management, as the permanent staff wereDock all war-time with good excuses for not travelling away from home, but the union rules were first in, first out, so out I and my boss went. They were still unable to put a team together a year later, God only knows what happened to the stores, they are probably still mouldering in their packing cases. I went on the dole in Southport, and was glad of a few weeks work as deck chair attendant on Southport  beach. When it rained we swept up around the fairground at Pleasureland, and sometimes had free goes on the rifle ranges. It was a pleasant enough open air life. I enjoyed telling a lady reporting a ‘flasher’ under  the pier, ‘I’m sorry madam, that’s the publicity and attractions department”. At the end of that season I managed to get a job as milk rounds man, and I can’t think of anything good to say about that. I started at 5.30 every morning, worked fourteen days with the fifteenth off, but almost always there was a telephone call to say that someone had gone sick, and could I turn in. If you didn’t answer the phone someone came hammering on the door. The firm added a whole street of bad debts to my round, then badgered me because the money didn’t come in. The only good thing was that in the evenings I was attending night classes at Southport Technical Technical College, for O Level classes in English, Maths, Physics, and French, and I sat my O Levels that summer. The papers were full of the crisis over the Suez Canal, and it was almost a relief when, just as I was about to have an August Bank Holiday off, a telegram came to report the next day to Aldershot, for a recall to Colour service from my Class A reserve category. I went to the office and told them. ‘This isn’t very convenient’, they said. I exploded and told them it wasn’t all that much of a thrill to me, either. Luckily I sat my O level exams just before the call-up came through. Back in uniform again, we drove three ton lorries all over the country, country, carrying ammunition and stores to various ports, mostly Cardiff and Southampton, for the great expeditionary force. It was quite a lot of fun, we several times drove convoys through the heart of London at night completely ignoring traffic traffic lights, and when we were held up, housewives would come out with tea and bikkies for us. Most of the time I was  based at Maindy Barracks, Cardiff, and Smoky Joes Cyprus Cafe in Bute Street was the favourite wateringhole. I remember a few good nights out at the seamen’s seamen’s mission, where a motley assortment of all colours of people had a whale of a time dancing to jazz records. We were very short of cash, but scrumpy rough cider was only 4d a glass. After covering most of the country collecting stores of all kinds, we ended up at the REME barracks at Stansted, where our own trucks were sprayed with a sandy colour ready for the desert. Eventually we loaded up our own ship in Barry Docks, the SS Marshall, I think she was Red Funnel Line out of Liverpool, and a really desperate old rust bucket she was. She carried three ton trucks loaded

 

with tank ammunition and a deck cargo of the same plus crated jerrycans of petrol. W Wee sailed on Guy Fawkes night from Barry, so had a pyrotechnic sendoff. There were about a eighty drivers aboard, mostly reservists but also some National Servicemen. Generally speaking none of us had anything to lose, so we were a pretty bolshie lot. A Major Nightingale was our  commanding officer, officer, and we were half of an ‘Independent Tra Transport nsport Column’ belonging to the Suez effort. The other half of the Column was on a much faster ship, an LCT (Landing Craft T Tank) ank) and left a few days after us, passed us in the Mediterranean Sea, got to Suez, did the job, and passed us again in the Med on their way back while we were still ploughing slowly towards Egypt. In fact, we were running into a storm for several days in the Bay of Biscay. Biscay. While the ship was being loaded there had been a strike by all the riggers, trying to make a few quid from the national emergency, emergency, so the loaded trucks in the holds were not  properly fastened down. When we started rolling badly badly,, over forty degrees in fact, the trucks started  breaking loose. Every time the ship rolled there was a shuddering crash as everything in the holds went from one side to the other, and on deck the ammunition was jumping out through the truck canvases and rolling around the decks, where the petrol in the jerrycans was leaking out steadily. After the worst rolls there was a long wait before the ship righted herself, the crew all looked terrified and we were definitely in real danger of foundering. The Bosun went below in the early stages to attempt to lash the cargo, but broke a leg fairly quickly, quickly, after that they decided to head into wind and just let it roll, and we did this for three or four days. Our quarters were at the top level of a cargo hold, where standees, four layers of steel beds hinged to pillars between floor and ceiling, had been rigged by the same blokes who did the trucks, and the whole lot was breaking loose in large chunks. As the ship rolled we were looking straight up the steep stair/companionway to the deck, and seeing solid green water - not a pretty sight, especially as everyone was rolling around in their own mess, as there was not a man who wasn’t thoroughly sea-sick! The poor cooks had been provided with chicken hut kitchens bolted to the outside decks, no fiddles the stove tops, they did their best, but the results only went flying, so they had to give upwith trying. What aon journey! We called at Gibraltar for bunkering, then on to Malta. There were attempts to discipline us into blancoing our kit and polishing our brasses, we soon put a stop to that by throwing every bit of cleaning kit overboard. The CO ranted ‘there is enough room aboard this ship to clap you all in irons’, he must have  been reading too many Hornblower books, and who would have driven the trucks? Arrived Arrived in Malta, we were brought stern on to the quayside in V Valetta aletta Harbour Harbour,, and an attempt was made to sort out the tangled mass of machinery below decks. It didn’t last long, as there was a strike of riggers in Malta as well (also taking advantage of our national emergency!) and so gash dock labour and the ship’s own derricks were used to warp the trucks up and over into lighters alongside. When they brought the second or third truck up, the little wizened chap on one of the swinging warps on the boom ran out of line and let go, and as the end whizzed through the blocks, the boom swung across, hit the superstructure and bent, and the loaded truck  dropped about a yard, snapped the wire, and went straight through the lighter below, direct to the harbour   bottom, where it probably lies to this day! da y! The following morning we tried to get under way. way. The tug towing us out was late arriving, so the stern lines to the quay were let go, and we pulled out to the bow anchors. Unfortunately a ship had arrived in the next  berth during the night, and her anchor chain was fouling one of ours, so we swung gently round the harbour  on the scope of our chain, bouncing none too gently off several other ships. One was being coaled by men carrying baskets up a ladder, they ran for their lives, and one or two ships had officers jumping in silhouette like cartoon drawings, telling off our captain through loud-hailers in fairly strong language. W Wee laughed till we cried, what an outfit! When we got finally clear we steamed on for Suez. Although radios were not allowed we did have one or  two aboard, and had been following the BBC news with much interest, so we knew that we were going to arrive too late to be of any use. However, we arrived off Suez, knowing that hostilities were over and done with. A fleet of ships of all sorts were moored in the roads, including destroyers and aircraft carriers. There we lay for ten whole days with no idea of what was to happen next. Mail arrived a couple of times via a minesweeper which did the rounds of the shipping every day, day, and we were much buzzed by aircraft from the carriers. Eventually our leader, Major Nightingale, Nightingale, scrounged a lift ashore on the minesweeper to try to get some orders. While he was ashore a nasty swell developed, and by the time the minesweeper brought him back, it had several attempts to come alongside, bending itself badly against our ship‘s side. Poor old  Nightingale, commonly referred to as ‘Tweety ‘Tweety Pie’ was a bright green after a couple of goes, no doubt feeling very lonely on the minesweeper’s foredeck as he tried to grab the Jacobs ladder, and we kept up a  barrage of ‘drown, you b-------, drown’, which can’t have been much help. He finally made it, and once he

 

had recovered his composure, addressed us from the poop. The bad news was that he had no orders for us, and the good news was that he was to fly back to UK from our next port, and would see us again, probably in Blighty. The ship got under way. We watched anxiously, as the ships wake going one way meant Cyprus, the other way meant Malta and on the way home. A cheer went up as the wake curved to the right. We had already suffered rude gestures from the other half as they steamed past us on their way home, while we still struggled to arrive. We We did our best to enjoy a bit of relaxation, attempts to occupy us usefully in chipping  paint on the upper parts of the ship were abandoned as it was soon discovered that gratings and ironwork in general were in such as state that there was nothing left under the paint except brown rusty dust, so that whole sections of gratings and upper works in general were disappearing entirely under the chipping hammers, which hardly inspired confidence in those parts of the ship which were under water! We finally pulled into Southampton Roads under Cowes on the day before Christmas Eve. I was on fire  picket that night and managed to sneak a good scrub in fresh water in the ships officers shower during the small hours of morning, we had been washing in seawater for weeks without any salt water soap, and we were all covered in masses of boils. I had lost two and a half stone in ten weeks. When we got ashore we were taken to Netley Hospital, overlooking Southampton Water, Water, where we were reunited with Major   Nightingale. He told us that we would not be allowed home until the ship was unloaded and all the equipment signed for. We We had a conference amongst our -selves, and a message was passed to Major   Nightingale that as far as we were concerned, he had until eight oclock that evening to change his mind, as we were going in the morning whether allowed or not. He returned eventually to announce that after  consultations he had changed his mind, and in the morning we were driven off in three ton lorries howling a few last insults at the major, who must have been very glad to see the back of us. How he got on with writing off the damaged and missing equipment, I have no idea. We We spent one more day in the army after  Christmas leave, handing in our kit, then were discharged to civvy street. I had done an extra month the first entire time, and now had awas further four months service Reservecall-up, thank The Suez incident a complete fiasco as far from as wethe could tell. Atmy thelast time one fell intoHeaven! the trap of  thinking ‘those in charge must know what they are doing’, but hindsight and history tells that the powers that be really were utterly completely incompetent, and that our private impressions on the ground, of utter  chaos and incompetence on a huge scale, were absolutely justified. Can anyone tell me why we loaded hundreds of wheelbarrows onto ships, and hundreds of Elsan toilets, when troops were leaving for a short sharp desert campaign? I have had no faith in the public image of leadership, or in the mostly ludicrous coverage by the media, ever since. While I was away my O Level results had come through, I had passed in all four subjects (English, Maths Physics, and French), so at last I had some qualifications, for the first time since my father had said “of  course, there will always be the farm’. I saw an advert for Scientific Assistants in the Meteorological Office, and went up to Barton Hall, Preston, for interview. interview. They were quite impressed with my science, since I had read a book all the way in the train, and when they asked me what was in the top of a barometer  tube, I said ‘mercury vapour’ which is a better answer than the usual ‘a vacuum’, which Nature abhors. It may have been pedantic, but gentle reader, I got the job! When I found out the address of the physics tutor  to thank him for his efforts and tell him about the job, he said I was the first pupil who had ever done that! In February 1957 I reported to RAF Hemswell for training. This was a wartime airfield in Lincolnshire, home of the last operational Lincoln bomber squadron. I was a civilian attached to the squadron and living in the Sergeants Mess, though this was interpreted by the mess committee as including a very rough emergency annexe across a muddy sports field, where I was placed more or less on my own, living in a wartime hut with an electric fire element built into the wall permanently on to keep the damp at bay. My main memory of the place is the noise that the aircraft made as they ran up their engines prior to takeoff just outside my window, which brought down a steady rain of plaster from the ceiling. The Lincolns eventually made their final trip to the junk yard for breaking up (by Marshalls at Shawbury), the commanding officer performing a highly irregular and none-rated full loop as he took the last one of the type for it‘s last flight. Once I had a year’s service in, and finding life at Hemswell and Lincolnshire in general a bit dull, I qualified for service overseas, requested it, and was posted to Wildenrath Wildenrath in Second Tactical Air Force, Germany. I bought a new car (duty free), a Ford Anglia 1172cc side valve, which  became one of my favourite all-time vehicles, as it was a lot sportier than most. Once I removed the cooling fan it beat an Alfa Romeo in a Station Car Club sprint - mind you I burnt off half my tires doing it, and the other chap was careful! Wildenrath was a fairly boring place, the only consolation was that the Dutch  border and the wild west town of Heelen was nearby, and some good nights out resulted, though I fear that I was sometimes in no fit state to be driving home - especially over the international border, but the police

 

couldn‘t be bothered with foreign troops being silly silly.. I had other postings, to Ahlhorn, on the North German  plain south of Oldenburg, and Gutersloh, another of the ‘clutch’ area of Rhineland not far from Wil Wildenrath, denrath, where most of the British Army were stationed. Ahlhorn Ahlhorn had its moments, although the area of the north german heathland was fairly flat and uninteresting. The airfield was surrounded by a very high security fence, herds of wild deer used to find their way over it, but were too wary and skittish to go out through the exit gates, and when driven, crowded against the fence so couldn’t jump over it, and accumulated in embarrassing numbers. In the summer, swarms of red harvest beetles covered the ground to the extent that the grass became bright red with them. I tended to be short of cash there, having taken my car on a short HP HP,, but had an arrangement with a couple of mess members without transport, so I supplied the car and they paid expenses, and we got to Oldenburg, where there was a very good fish and chip barge on the river  in the town centre. We also used to frequent the local railway station bar which did excellent food - one thing about Germany is that ordinary staff in such places take a professional pride in their work, UK is getting better but still has a way to go. I grew rather besotted with a very large waitress there - fortunately she wouldn’t take me seriously! We We also went to a café at the local Cromlech, the Opferstein, which did wonderful cream cakes and ‘erdbeeren mit schlachtzahne’ - that’s strawberries and whipped cream - it’s funny how one remembers the really important things! We also discovered a wonderful situation at Bad Zwischenahn, a very large inland lake, where a military hospital (I think RMH Rostoff?) had closed down, leaving the attached sailing club still running for some mysterious reason. The clubhouse was deserted, very pleasant, fully staffed and stocked with about a dozen GP14s and a few Tornado dinghies. They made the four or five of us very welcome and we did our best to keep up the bar turnover. The first time we went sailing, on a Sunday in August, we were caught out in the middle of the lake, suddenly realising that we were alone on the lake and that the skies had become very threatening. A heavy heavy storm with thunder and lightning drenched us through and battered us with hailstones, we were badly frightened and sank ‘Eternal Father,, strong to save’ not entirely as a joke, and were deeply thankful to get back to the club and take a hot Father shower. An object of interest at Ahlhorn was the cockpit of a two-seater jet fighter, I think a Vampire, which had suffered a flame-out (loss of engine power) on approach, and had come down in some dense conifer  forest not far away, they swished over the treetops and when all the banging and clattering died down, they were sitting in a bare cockpit stuck up a tree, completely unharmed, the rest of the aircraft having been shredded away by the gentle caress of the tree-tops! I was posted back to Wildenrath Wildenrath eventually, eventually, then two vacancies arose in the far north of Germany, Germany, on the island of Sylt, where there was a NATO air-to-air and air-to-ground firing range. Myself and another  volunteer, Jim A-------- from Paisley, travelled up from Wildenrath in my car, stopping at Ahlhorn overnight, where the British had recently departed, leaving only a rear party in situ. The SWO offered us  beds for the night, we went up to the railway station for a good meal and came back in the early hours. The German guard commander inspected our passports, which were stamped with the authority of the ‘Director‘DirectorGeneral of the Meteorological Office’, which impressed him no end, as he wouldn’t let us in until he had turned out the full guard and presented arms to us, the only time that has been done for me while a private citizen! Sylt was a truly magical place. An island in the North Sea level with the German Danish border, one of the northernmost of the Friesian Islands, it was offered a choice by b y Hitler’s government in 1936 of either a railway or roadway connection with the mainland. The islanders decided that a roadway would just bring day trippers who would bring their own rations, so with great forethought they settled for a railway connection, and so one has to drive a car onto a railway flat truck at Niebull and be taken to the island. It is made expensive partly to keep out the impecunious, and many rich Hamburg people had holiday homes there. It is also popular with Scandinavians of all kinds, and especially popular with the FKK (Frei Korper  Kultur) naturist movement, or ‘Abyssiniens’ as naturists are commonly called. The population consider  themselves to be Friesian rather than Germans, and have a temperament and a language all their own. The language has a lot in common with English, indeed short sentences can be the same as English, and Angle, nearby on the mainland, is where the name England is derived from. The old farmhouses are built looking inwards with very few windows to be seen, against the North Sea weather, although even then most of them had been developed into guest houses or converted into expensive second homes. The island of Sylt is long and thin from north to south, and rather lovely, mostly of sand dunes, with a  bulge amidships and small fishing havens at each end. The town of Wester Westerland land lies on the west coast on the middle bulge, and was, and still is, mainly devoted to parting visitors from their money. There There were three lighthouses, List, Hornum, and Rantum, each with its own distinctive sequence of flashes, and it was

 

separated from the mainland by shallow tidal sand flats, with deep water off the western coast. The island sunsets were famous, and each holiday season there was always a line of holiday makers along the main  promenade at Westerland, Westerland, clicking their cameras on a sunset sequence, which must have become pretty hackneyed! Our airfield was also on the central bulge, on the edge of town, and we lived in the Sergeants Mess as honorary sergeants, and had a uniform with ‘special duties’ shoulder flashes and our own war  office cap badge, a fairly rare one. We had impressed upon us the need to treasure badges and flashes and return to issuing depot in London after our service, on pain of all sorts of penalties, but I still have mine and no-one has ever asked me for them! The uniform was only to wear if the Russians went to war, so that we conformed to the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war war.. As an ex-soldier I was happy to wear mine now and again just to baffle people, especially down town! We We worked shifts in the control tower, the airfield was a busy one as there were sometimes as many as five fighter squadrons at a time flying all day on gunnery practice, either against sea targets or banner targets towed b by y the station’s own Gloster Meteors, ancient aircraft driven by a pair of the first jet engines invented. We had a bunch of fairly eccentric pilots flying the Meteors, and with a turnover of Belgian, British, and German squadrons there was plenty going on. Most of the German fighters were F86 Sabre jets, neat and sporty little planes, and fun to fly. Others I remember were F105 (Widowmaker!), Javelins, English Electric Lightnings, Lightnings, Hawker Hunter, the last of the Vampires, Beverleys on exercise with the Parachute Regiment, and bombers Canberra, Victor, Valiant. There were also visits from the University Air Squadron Chipmunks, and a visit two or three times a week  from the Second Tactical Air Air Force shuttle service by Anson (or Cloth Bomber) on which I travelled a couple of times, acting vaguely as second pilot, and pretending to navigate with a BP road map, which were the best available for the purpose! Some of the pilots, especially the new German Air Force, were very young and inexperienced, and it was sometimes a gripping sight to see a new squadron arrive from all directions at once, rather like a swarm of  gnats. The meteorological office worked shifts in order to prepare early morning briefings for the visiting  pilots of Belgian, German, English, and even Canadian fighter squadrons who came for three weeks at a time to practise air to ground and air to air gunnery, gunnery, the air targets were long banner cloth targets towed by Gloster Meteors, they were old and slow but reliable, and just about up to the job. Having time off in normal working hours, I used to hang around the ready room of the ASR (Air/Sea (Air/Sea Rescue) Sycamore helicopter section, since a mate of mine, Mike Rogers, was signaller/navigator signaller/navigator with them, playing Scrabble and other harmless pursuits. They were kind enough to take me out on some of their exercises, and the first of these trips lingers in memory memory.. The chopper climbed straight up to a couple of thousand feet, I was admiring the map of the island spread out before me in the cloud-dappled sunshine, when the pilot muttered ‘Exercise 3’ or some such jargon, the engine cut out suddenly, and we dropped like a stone, leaving my stomach several hundred feet up with no means of support. Just short of the ground the rotors were whipped from ‘fast freewheel’ to to ‘bite the air hard’, and the inertia settled us quietly and gently amid the scattering sheep. ‘Did you speak?’ asked the pilot, who had heard my strangled scream. ‘Just clearing my throat’ I said diffidently, diffidently, but we all knew I had screamed. This was standard initiation procedure! Other  exercises included finding a SARAH (Search and Rescue and Homing) beacon either floating in the sea, or   buried in thecreeping dunes with the aerial showing, and then ofdunes, courseand there were the practise ‘stealth’ approaches, up just on naturist courting couples in the suddenly appearing overhead - great fun! These games had to stop after an aircraft ‘went in’, as the saying was, and the duty chopper needed to drop off a couple of freeloaders before plucking the pilot from the water - no harm done, but the delay could have been critical, so there was a big fuss and things were tightened up a lot, no more free rides. Luckily I wasn’t involved in that little controversy. Since we were on shifts, paid no taxes, and were provided in the Mess with three square meals a day free of  charge, our modest salaries went quite far in late night celebrations. Sylt in winter had its own charms, it was prone to thick North Sea fogs, and many a winters night was spent in our favourite cellar bar drinking hot Flensburg white rum grog. A bottle bottle was placed on the table, a steaming kettle, and a sugar bowl. The rum level was marked on the bottle label, and charged by the inch until chucking out time, which might well be when the birds were singing outside - in summer you always tucked your sunglasses in the top  pocket when going out for the evening!! Highly convivial tipple it was too, especially given the warmth of  a tiled stove to cuddle up to, not to mention the handsome maidens running the bar! The ‘Inselbahn’ a quaint narrow gauge railway ran the length of the island, mainly to drop holidaymakers off at the various beaches along the way way,, some of which were naturist, others not. There were hand turntables at each terminus, at the havens hav ens of List in the north, and Hornum in the south. The ports at some seasons were used by the shrimping fleets, and our search and rescue helicopters would frequently lower a

 

 bottle of cheap (2.50DM!) brandy in a bucket in exchange for a bucket of shrimps, fresh from the oil-drum  boiler on the boat, for the mess. W Wee had a favourite bar at each of these, and often drove the one road running the length of the island to visit them. There was much soft sand alongside the roads where the dunes encroached, and it was normal to carry a tow-rope, which made us many new friends and brought us many drinks for helping strangers out. We had the best of both worlds, the visitors had to pay a ‘kur-tax’ for  every night on the island, and summer prices, we paid winter prices all the year round where we were known, and this made a big difference - a beer at 1DM instead of 2.50DM. We We were allowed into the island casino, while the locals weren’t, and we bought resident season tickets for the ‘Abysinnien’ n naturist aturist  beaches, while visitors paid through the nose by the day. We could drink cheaply in the mess until midnight or later, then go down town at the best moment. I had many friends in the town, our barman W Willy illy Frenzel and his girl friend Helga von Menkenburg, Eddie the head waiter at the Inselbahnhof, and many others. There was a thriving underworld in the old seaplane barracks at Rantum, where a shallow polder made a seaplane landing space. The planes had departed, but the large multi-storey multi-storey barracks was full of displaced  persons, including Yugoslavian Yugoslavian and Ukrainian, and East Germans, and I can hardly credit that I moved freely through this rabbit warren in the early hours, dark and unlit, and drank in the bars there, without coming to any an y harm whatsoever that I can remember. W Willy’ illy’ss Helga lived there which may have had something to do with that. There were times when harm was threatened, for instance, I had a girlfriend, Erica, who managed an island cellar bar in the winter when the owner was away spending her ill-gotten gains. She had been banned from Hamburg for reasons which were never clear to me, and had become the long-term girlfriend of Henry Muller, who had all aspects the electrical business on the island completely under his control. He ran a gang of young lads who carried out his orders to a T, and ruled them with a rod of iron. The previous bloke who crossed Henry had been found when a thunderstorm flooded the culvert under the Freidrichstrasse, Freidrichstrasse, the main shopping street, and the body bod y had been deliberately left to cause a blockage. When I stole Henry’ Henry’ss girl friend, who I think hoped to get English citizenship through marrying me, Henry passed a message via the mess barman, my friend Willy, that I was not allowed into Westerland. I really enjoyed dangerous histrionics in those days, and had no intention of allowing this ban, so bought myself a highly dangerous carving knife and went down to interview Henry in his storeroom surrounded by his cohorts. He was astonished to say the least, but unsure of my intelligence connections, as I had been down town accompanying security patrols, wearing my special duties uniform. When When asked, I had explained that my flashes meant ‘Spezial Dienst’, which was the outfit that did most of the Gestapo’s Gestapo’s dirty work during the war, so when I told Henry he would be run off the island if anything happened to me, he really believed me. I have proved since that I have some talent for play-acting, so feel I can tell this story and be believed now. Eventually I handed Erica back to Henry, and I hope that they are still happy, also his very nice wife and children! Henry had a passion for English kippers, and I sent him a box from the Yorkshire Yorkshire coast later on. I still enjoy a hint of danger, but not quite that much! After four years on the island, the airfield, which had been a Nato base, was due to be handed back to the Luftwaffe, so we were gradually posted back to the UK. I left with great regret - sorely tempted by job offers or The taxi wrench driver - of butleaving life on was the island without anchor of a said Ministry job would have a little of toobarman rootless. terrible thoughthe -‘Ah, ilex77,’ my local friends, ‘thebeen Insel-Hexe has got you - you will be back’. It is very strange how some places capture the imagination -both Pencraig and Sylt have remained magical places in memory- I think because they both represent  periods when my relationships with others were strong, fresh, and exciting. High points at Sylt were many, owning my first small boat and making sails for it, days when the map of the island was drawn in the sky  by cumulus cloud, a day when whirlwinds hung down most of the day from the edge of a cloud sheet along the western coast, summer days when coming off a night shift meant going down to the beach after   breakfast to join a band of lovely late night ladies to sunbathe in a giant circle dug as a windbreak and with strictly limited admission! admission! Foggy nights in winter spent by a tiled stove in a cellar bar drinking rum grog with the same lovely ladies, trips all over the island in the search and rescue Sycamore helicopters, accompanying my pal John Monday, police sergeant, sergeant, on patrols of the town night-spots, dressed in my mystery uniform (with Korean medals!), but above all, being totally accepted as a friend by the local low life of waiters and bar-girls, taxi-drivers and mess staff, a state of completely belonging. We were also fortunate in having a good bunch in the office; Jim A---A----------- remained a friend although our  ways amongst the locals parted. When we arrived Vic T------ was in charge, he became one of my best mates and we had many a mad episode. Downey Armour, Armour, with his wife Kirsteen, was in charge for most of  my stay, he was a tremendously warm personality, and had been one of the very first weathermen on TV at

 

Alexandra Palace. They were friends as well as bosses. He drank quite a lot, and smoked like a chimney, chimney,  but would take on three people at squash and thrash them, between coughing bouts. Downey had to give me a severe wigging on the orders of the Station Commander when I pulled off the best joke of a lifetime, which was inviting two carloads of ‘ladies of the town’ to watch the station Open Day from the Control Tower balcony where our office was - I was on duty but nipped down to fetch them just in time to occupy all the Rest Room armchairs, meant for the upper echelon of Station wives, then out came the coffee and  biscuits. This was a very public joke, as the display was the social occasion of the year and the only time when the town bigwigs had the chance to come onto the airfield. Westerland Westerland society divided clearly into those who thought me a slightly mad hero, and a few who cut me dead. Downey shook me warmly by the hand and congratulated me on the splendid jape, as soon as he had delivered the compulsory wigging! Vic T-----T------ had been posted down to Wildenrath or Gutersloh, down south, but now and again the shuttle Anson would radio ahead to say he was on board, I would groan, and immediately request a couple of days off, which Downey would grant, so that I could join Vic in a quick blast around our favourite wateringholes. There were some very nice guys among the permanent staff of the airfield, although the contribution from the Belgian cooks was sometimes a bit greasy, greasy, they were very fond of chips. A coupl couplee of Belgian staffsergeant fitters had the room across from the one shared between myself and John Evans from Cardiff, maybe Jim A-------- was in there too for a time, I can’t quite remember. Anyway, the Belgians cooked their  own food to save on mess bills, and made some pretty nasty smells. There was a secret room with no windows hidden behind a wardrobe in their room, where they kept a local lady for some time, I only spotted her once or twice slipping in and out via a downstairs corridor window in the early hours, I kept their little secret! One of Vic Traver’s best pals was a Belgian pilot, Guy Mailbergs, I think he may have  been the one who went A AWOL, WOL, scrounged a fully armed aircraft from some Belgian base, and made an unauthorised bombing attack on the palace of some rebel leader in the Congo. As far as I remember it failed to kill the sought-after politician, and the pilot more or less got away with it. Another minor coup was when John Monday and I gave two prominent ladies a lift to Hamburg, on our  way to a touring holiday. holiday. W Wee knew that two of the helicopter pilots and families were leaving on our train, and sure enough, we had two helicopters on each side of the train all the way to the mainland - the ladies were thrilled to bits! Then there was the time when I and the CO’s CO’s writer, a completely barmy Irishman,  brought two ladies in to Sunday Tea in the sergeant’s mess, scandalising the ‘City Fathers’, elderly misogynists who used to spend days arguing about sixpence breakages on the Mess bills. The thing was, when they looked up the rules to bring us to judgement, they found that this was the only meal when guests were allowed! The same barmy Irishman accompanied me down to the Munkmarsch hostelry, hostelry, on the eastern coast, where the station sailing club kept their boats. We had a few drinks with Pincher Martin, the Station Security Officer,, and Club Commodore, agreeing that the wind was hopelessly strong for sailing, then as soon as he Officer left we took Erika and her ten year old son, Eckhardt, and Annete, another friend of Erika’ Erika’s, s, out in a Tornado dinghy, aptly named as the station anemometer recorded fifty-five knots in gusts at that time. We hurtled and down in an wind, but I was only onewe who knew anything at all abouttosailing, so if I had up gone overboard weoffshore would have perished forthe sure. Still, sang ‘Eternal Father, strong save’ and came safely ashore again, the others never realised how close to disaster we had been, even with a bare minimum of sail on. That same Irishman took the extreme liberty of borrowing my own little fat boat on the day I completed fitting it up with leeboards and a felucca rig, and then had to go on shift. He left it miles away across the marshes, with the gear all smashed. I had to go across and tow it back on foot, catching a foot disease known to fishermen at that time as ‘red rot’, which took years to clear away, and I hadn’t the heart at the time to rebuild the sailing rig, it had been difficult to scrounge the materials for it. Y You ou couldn’t hold a grudge against Paddy, as he was totally mad, he elected me an honorary Irishman for St Patricks  Night, we went to the Black Kat Klub at Kampen in the early hours, and he knocked me clean through a big stained glass window without touching the sides, we were both a sorry sight the next morning at breakfast, he with bruised knuckles and me with two black eyes and a bruised chin, the mess staff howled with laughter.. We laughter We split the damages between us. I got my own back though, the next time he had been out on the tiles I asked ‘what’s all the blood on your car?’ He He rushed out to look, I had unbolted his bumper and re bolted it around the railings at the front of the mess, and that baffled him completely. completely. Paddy as CO’s writer  had loaned me two fine volumes of the Royal Navy Manual of Seamanship from the CO‘s library library,, I returned it after Paddy left and swore when I realised he had crossed it off the inventory for me! I recently (May 2000) had the privilege and tremendous pleasure of visiting Sylt again, courtesy of some

 

friends in Schleswig Holstein who were able to borrow a farmhouse and take myself and Mary there, they drove us all over the place and we had a few beers, although there wasn’t really really time in our few days to do much searching for old faces, and those not-so-young ladies are either in wheelchairs or pushing up daisies  by now! The island was still the same though, the spell is still there, and I even was able to get onto our old met office balcony on the old control tower tower,, now a makeshift and tumble down Lutheran place of worship the tower glass is still there though in a highly dangerous state, and a naïve sculptor rents the ground floor. floor. The airfield is now a fairly large civil airport, there is a flying school and a Loran beacon there. Life back in the UK seemed really dull after Sylt, my posting was to Shawbury, northeast of Shrewsbury, which was a Master Diversion airfield, which meant broadly that although it was open round the clock in order to accept aircraft which had an emergency or were unable to land elsewhere, very little else went on there. We We were in a building separate from the control tower, which meant we couldn’t follow anything that did happen, and the outlook from the office windows was dull in the extreme. The only excitement came occasionally in the middle of the night, when a brief nap would be sharply broken when a V-bomber V Valiant aliant or Victor Victor would take advantage of our 24 hour Master Diversion status to make a practice ‘touch and go’ landing, whispering in, then opening the throttles quite suddenly just opposite the office windows - not good for the nerves! There was one hangar across the far side of the runway which might have been slightly interesting, as experiments were being carried out there to get a Canberra to fly higher than Russian fighters - Britain’s Britain’s attempt at a cheap contribution to the ‘Spy in the Sky’ programm programmee as per the Americans Americans with their U2 aircraft, I think somewhere about 68,000 feet was achieved, we weren‘t supposed to know, but they had to  be briefed on upper winds etc.. The method consisted of flying the Canberra for maximum height with extra spoilers on the wings, then filing a couple of thou off the spoilers and trying again. These experiments were considered so secret that we were ordered not to see the hangar out of our window! Our chief officer  in the Met Office was of Czechoslovakian extraction extraction and later became the head man in charge of Russian translation - of course I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that they could have chosen a more normal person for the job- not that I ever heard a word against the chap. I have been security checked myself and found the process totally ludicrous. There was some University Air Air Squadron activity at weekends in Chipmunk aircraft., otherwise there was only an occasional aircraft landing to be serviced or scrapped by Marshalls Ltd. I went a couple of times on detachment to Tern Tern Hill, where they had helicopter navigation training, but there again there was no contact with the flying, which all happened somewhere out of sight. I lived in a caravan in Shawbury churchyard, cold as charity, in a van with little insulation, my toothpaste froze and the bed was cold even with three inches of newspaper underneath the mattress. Shift work prevented any serious social life, the office staff  was too small to make for any social activity, activity, and generally life was pretty dull. I went to my father and Kay between shifts, they had moved to Guilsfield near W Welshpool elshpool while I was at Sylt, as my father had retired, but I was never there long enough to know anyone in the village much. I tried for a posting but there was little sympathy from MO 10, the department responsible for postings, as mere grumbling cut no ice with them. Eventually candidates were sought for a one year posting to the Persian fortothis as I wanted to get some cash saved up, Sylt having sucked in all my wages at the time,Gulf, so offI went I went Sharjah for a year. Modern times at last had caught up with me, and the journey was by RAF VC10 aircraft to Bahrain, and then a C130 from there to Sharjah. I am so glad to have been there at that time. The first oil was brought in on Sharjah territory during my year there, and the oil revenue has changed everything since then, and there is now a forty-inch pipeline glugging away via Muscat into tankers, which is really big bucks. Then, Sharjah was much as it must have been for thousands of years, a hot dusty hell-hole on a muddy tideless creek on the shores of the Gulf, with Dubai to the southwest, and the promontory of Ras el Khaima to the northeast, sticking out to narrow the gateway to the Persian Gulf, or Arabian Gulf as one must call it in Arab circles. Sharjah was one of seven small states combining into the Trucial Oman States, and at that time was very poor, with its only income arising from the sale of postage stamps, of which an infinite variety of issues were made, supervised by the Sheik’ Sheik’ss family family.. Sharjah was a single soft sandy street lined  by buildings made of mud brick, mostly crumbling and needing, but not getting, constant attention, none of  which were more than a single storey. storey. There was one block of concrete flats on the shoreline, owned by IAL (Indian Arab Airlines) who were the major communications and airport management agents in the region. Communications were via very ancient morse code sets manned by b y Pakistani operators, and transmission conditions were such that for most of the year they were unable to make more than occasional

 

contact with the rest of the world. W Wee did hydrogen balloon ascents every six hours round the clock seven days a week, this involved up to two hours peering through a theodolite at the rising balloon, which carried a candle lantern after dark, then assuming a fixed rate of ascent (highly inaccurate) and working out the figures for upper wind speed and direction between readings, ending up with a coded message which was then supposed to reach the outside world via the radio transmitters, but rarely did. This was done in shade temperatures of 120deg, (but we had no shade!) in clouds of stinging sand-flies, stripped except for brief  shorts and Arab head-dress of agal and kaffiyeh, cheese-cloth and black knotted rope, a necessity in that climate in the summer, to shade the eyes from intense glare, and filter the dust. One drank vast quantities of  water mixed with lemonade powder, two gallons per day minimum, and I drank much more than that. There were also large salt tablets to be swallowed, and anti-malaria paludrine tablets. The The climate was very extreme, there was a system whereby the humidity and temperature dictated how much time a working  person could work, but this didn’t apply to us! As far as I remember, above 90deg F and over 90 percent humidity,, no outside work was to be done, but we just carried on. Temperatures at night were reasonable humidity  but the humidity was the over-riding factor. During the night cool winds from the desert were the general rule, with humidity sometimes sometimes down to 2 or 3 per cent, then when the sun blazed over the horizon at dawn, the effect was just as if someone had just switched on an electric fire, and literally within seconds the first trickle of sweat would appear and continue until after dark. Soon after sunrise there would be a complete 180 degree change of air movement as the sea breeze from the hot air over the sands took over, and the humidity would go from single figures into the nineties, one could feel the difference instantly as the  boundary layer crossed the room, and the hygrometer went straight across the chart. The office for much of  the time was dripping in condensation, there were air conditioning units set into the walls but they the y were often on the blink and away for repair, leaving large holes in the walls, and the weather logs were kept in tin cupboards for long periods, while the walls and ceilings continually dripped with condensation. The land around Sharjah was flat and low-lying, and was made up of extremely fine sand which was  brought down by the prevailing winds from Iran to the northeast, and settled like talcum powder powder.. In many  places one could sink in up to the knees just by b y wriggling the toes, and vehicles used smooth very wi wide de low  pressure tyres. The Gulf was affected to some extent by small tidal surges brought about by the winds up and down the Gulf, and there were miles of salty flats along the coast which were very treacherous. Traf Traffic fic  between Sharjah and Dubai chose between many tracks in the sand, and as one track became unusable another was tried out. Much of the surface had quicksand beneath a sun-dried salty crust, and the main route area contained the remains of trucks sinking, like very slow ship-wrecks, beneath the sands where they had become stuck. The salt crust was very fragile and walking on it produced all kinds of eery creaks and groans from underground. There would be nothing for miles to which a recovery rope could be anchored, and it was dangerous to stop in the vicinity of a foundered truck, so they were instantly abandoned, with their loads, even if brand new, new, and then avoided. There were routes inland towards the mountains of the Haudramat, the Jebel Al Ahkdar rose to the south, and the curve of the earth as the mountains sank over the horizon towards the Y Yemen emen was easily apparent to the eye. I spent many happy happ y hours flying over the whole area in the Tw Twin in Pioneer aircraft based at Sharjah, and some of the scenery villages, was extreme. The mountains werewere madealmost of crumbling pumice, with many  plateau which contained and many valleys which completely inaccessible, as areas any of  water runoff was swallowed into the sandy valley floor. There would be perhaps a few date palms where the water came near the surface, and the deeper valleys were shaded for some of the time. Sharjah was the headquarters of the Trucial Oman Scouts, Arab levies with British officers on secondment. The officers tended to fancy themselves as Lawrence of Arabia, and wore lots of after-shave. The Arab rankers were mostly primitives sent by their sheiks for a bit of military training, which came in handy as there was still much tribal feuding in the area, as many of the boundaries were vague and disputed, and oil was about to  be discovered. Most of the ‘battles’ consisted of a few untrained bods with ancient weapons, taking potshots at each other from well out of range. Once honour was satisfied they would all go home quietly, quietly, but the Scouts went to see fair play play.. They also ran a few camel patrols, and had some very nice Arab horses. The Sheik also had some nice horses. W Wee regularly flew pairs of Trucial Oman Scouts into remote places where they monitored political activity and trade, and the trusty ‘Twin-Pin’ took us to small settlements with no visible pathway to the outside world, and our arrival must have been the most exciting event by far. We often made short landings on small sections of plateau where the only way of taking off was to take a run, fall off the edge, and then pick up flying speed, quite safe if done by an expert like our Fred Hicks, who was at that time the last war-tim war-timee non-commissioned Master Pilot still flying. Many of the Arab sentries we carried were terrified of flying, and cowered in a corner. I took some wonderful pictures from

 

the cockpit, and had one memorable photo reproduced in a half page picture on the front page of The Times - with my name on it! I sent it in as being an area ‘very similar to the Radfan’ as the Radfan crisis was just getting under way. way. This was a view of terraced date palms, lemon trees and vegetable plots in a very deep valley towering above the aeroplane. I have since tried to get a copy of the paper but haven’t managed it yet. There were underground channels (fallajes) which carried water the eighty or so miles from the foot of the mountains to the populated areas along the coast. These could be seen from the air as endless lines of   blotches which were the result of a series of holes dug by hand by small boys to make the underground channels, which had to be kept continuously full of water, as they otherwise crumbled in. Some of the channels had existed since biblical times, and there were very strong taboos protecting them from vandalism during the tribal disputes which were a local way of life, as once blocked they fell in rapidly rapidly.. There were also dried up wadi or creek beds which only filled with water perhaps twice in a lifetime. Underground there was a general flow from the mountains eighty miles away towards the Gulf coast, and this was exploited by means of simple wells dug not far from the shoreline, where brackish water was hand  pumped or lifted by bucket and rope, and carried into Sharjah on donkeys, and sold. At the wells one was offered a drink in a very dirty glass, and it would have been very bad manners to refuse. The Inter-Tropical Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, which is technically the boundary between tropical and temperate climes, moved during the seasons across the Indian Ocean to lie off the Muscat coast, was held up for  several weeks by the mountains, and then leapt over them and inundated the Trucial States with violent thunderstorms, causing flooding with salty water which exploded power stations and transformers, and corroded everything metal. I had a ring-side seat when the high voltage transformer serving most of the camp was slowly inundated during a night shift in the old tower, and finally exploded in a shower of  sparks. The moisture also ripened all the bacteria which were produced in the dry periods and caused a smell of old socks which was quite overwhelming. For several months of the year the prevailing winds came from Iran, and very deep dust-clouds were carried by the air and settled gently over the Trucial States, States, forming a fine dust which was extremely tiring to walk through. I lost four stones of weight without trying, and felt as if I was floating along. To make life more interesting, I paid a hundred pounds for a half share in a long wheel base Landrover, Landrover, a fairly old but basically sound vehicle, kept running by the attentions of  Arab mechanics who were geniuses at made do and mend. Unfortunately they were a bit weak on radiators, and the pounding of the sand tracks continually produced leaks. It was compulsory and also very advisable to log all journeys in advance when venturing outside the simple route to Dubai or a few miles up the coast to Ras el Khaima. I attempted once to officially join up with a convoy of Trucia Truciall Oman Scouts crossing the mountains to Fujaira on the sea coast, but had to turn back after my radiator sprang, and only onl y just succeeded in reaching the coast using my four jerrycans of water in the radiator. radiator. When I did arrive at the sea, it was anyone’s guess which way to turn along the beach, I turned left and was rewarded by reaching Ras El Khaima which I knew was north of Sharjah. That was really the only serious trip I attempted, but the Landrover got us often into Dubai, which was picturesque with dhows and age-old trade in desert commodities. It is hard to describe how primitive life still was in many ways. We went several times a party fromof thea Sergeants Mess for a day trip invessel, the Political official dhow, a beautiful solid as teak miniature standard Indian Ocean trading with anAgent’s Arab crew. crew . There was some fishing for shark, but I never got the opportunity to go. In the prison in Dubai, which I visited once with our head of security who was there on some errand, I was approached by a couple of deep brown  blokes in rags, lugging sand from one side of the compound to the other. ‘Hey mate, got any fags?’ they asked, and when I enquired, they were a couple of naval ratings who had hired a fishing boat and then thrown the Arab owner overboard where he was eaten by b y sharks. They were held there indefinitely without trial, it is amazing what powers rich with oil money can get away with! Sanitation for the Sharjah locals was a simple matter of squatting beside the shallow creek every morning, ladies bundled up in the black robes which always enveloped them. They wore a burqua, a face-mask with nose-piece, if well off decorated with gold or embroidery, and toe and nose rings of beaten gold. Sharjah souk was an alleyway of soft sand with mud buildings on each side, roofed roughly across with palm fronds for shade, and ladies forced to pass a dreaded ‘Nasrani’ (Christian, usually coupled with the word ‘dog’ in Arabic!) stood with faces to the wall for fear of the evil eeye, ye, and remained there until all danger was past. A large part of the local economy of Dubai, and to a lesser extent of Sharjah, was devoted to the working of  gold, and they were masters of beating the gold thin to make impressive chest-pieces and esoteric female ornaments, making the maximum show of a quantity of gold. The smuggling of gold was a very major part of the local economy, economy, along with oriental brocades and

 

Japanese cameras and electrical goods. A permanent permanent trade cycle was made up of silver from the mines in Pakistan, sent to Switzerland for the international market, and the proceeds used to buy gold (never less than 18ct, none of the cheap 9ct used for most UK jewellery) which was then smuggled into India to meet the insatiable appetite there for gold as family investment and adornment. the proceeds crossed the border  with Pakistan, and the cycle continued. The daily price of gold was a constant topic, and every street urchin would be up to date on the price. 66Rupees the tola was the going price then, for a tola, which was a small  bar the size of a little finger, and standard currency for small deals, as were English sovereigns and Maria Theresa silver dollars, and fifty dollar American American gold pieces. I wear a signet ring of soft gold, melted from a sovereign before my eyes in Sharjah, in a cocoa tin over a charcoal fire with a small boy working two hand bellows and poured into a plaster mould. UK jewellers expect it to be fake as it is roughly made, but soon find that it is sovereign purity purity.. It cost me about six pounds and is worth about seventy now. Many expatriates sent home small bars hidden in parcels, I am sorry I didn’t as the thousand pounds I saved would have been worth much more sent home in that wa way y. My female relatives all received lengths of  Shanghai brocade which was very cheap in Dubai souk. The gold smuggling racket was open to investment by anyone, and paid a going rate of 20% over 2 or 3 weeks. Unfortunately as a nobody, nobody, your investment was liable to end up as part of the one in five or so shipments routinely captured by arrangement with Indian customs along the Bombay coast. The gold smuggling dhows looked ancient and battered, but had extremely powerful modern diesel engines (mostly ex-London bus) which left most other craft standing. In my time there, the Sheik of Sharjah built a new palace and was asked by Pakistan what present he would like. They sent him a set of solid silver windows for the new palace, but the plane carrying them took the  bullion straight on to Switzerland without being unloaded, they must have been worth a tidy few bob! He was also often given racehorses by the oil exploration companies, Arnold Arnold Hammer flew in often in his  private B17 flying fortress, I remember a pair of horses which took two days to unload, as they arrived in such a terrified state, but I don’t think they came in the B17! Sharjah’ss heydays came in the days of the great flying boats, when it was a major stop on the route to India, Sharjah’ and the fort, now a hotel run by a very weird manager, still still had some of the Imperial Airways Airways cutlery in use. Hammond Innes stayed there when researching for ‘The Doomed Oasis’, and my houseboy remembered him well, very long fingernails he said! Sammy, Sammy, so-called for his resemblance to Frank  Sinatra’ss friend, was quite a business man in his way, running the laundry which did all the camps wash. It Sinatra’ was fascinating to talk to him, as he had spent his childhood herding goats from the coast across to Buraimi and into Saudi Arabia, crossing hundreds of miles of desert on foot in the most arduous conditions. A After  fter  that being a servant on the camp must have been a doddle! He had a dignity which could still be seen in Arabs of the interior, but which the coastal Arabs had long lost, having been corrupted by a life of   brutalised piracy, piracy, exploitation, and smuggling. We saw people in from the mountains rolling on the ground with helpless laughter after seeing themselves in the photographers mirror outside his booth in Sharjah, some natives had no notion of a graphic and could not tell which way up to hold a picture, even of  themselves, not being saturated with such images as we all are today. today. There was still a tradition thatrags a slave reaching the flag-pole in head the Political Agents the grounds would be freed, and judging from the tattered of those trotting with heavy loads between dhows and the quaysides of Dubai, some of them cannot have been far from being slaves. The poverty of some is hard to describe, to see a family living in a palm-frond, or ‘barousti’ hut, pulling up water in buckets from very deep wells to water a few miserable plants, made one feel very well off indeed by comparison. There was a regular queue at the camp medical centre of families with children bitten by camel spiders, who could easily penetrate the barousties, this caused paralysis of the bitten side of the body and could cause death. A threat around the camp came from the packs of semi-wild scavenging dogs, mostly of a wiry Saluki type, who roamed around after dark, slept in holes in unlikely places, and could easily be stepped on by the unwary.. There was supposed to be a nominated dog shooter on the camp, but this post always seemed to be unwary given to some dog lover lover,, who never did the job properly. properly. The dogs were half wild, they scavenged among the graves of the poor on a sand bank between the airfield and the town, and brought fleas into the air-vents of the camp buildings, so that there was a constant need to set off DDT bombs to saturate the buildings. One of our chaps kept a pet dog, and I was very badly bitten when visiting, having sat down in his woven armchair I had a complete ring of lumps where my skin met the chair. One night there was supposed to be a party in the IAL flats, I had a few in the Mess bar and decided to walk in to find the party, when I got there the flats were dark and I set off back to the camp in the moonlight. There was a mad woman permanently bricked in at one end of the Sharjah souk who kept up a

 

terrible howling, and as I came out of the main souk into the square in front of the palace, there was a  padding behind me and when I looked back there was a mass of dogs converging on my tracks. My hair  stood on end, and it took a very determined charge with a handy lump of rock to make them stand back. Walking slowly slowly,, I could hear them following me at a distance, and was very glad when they gave up as I reached the edge of town. Across the airfield within sight of the office in the old control tower was a building where the bodies of  Hindus were cremated, when there was a funeral the fire only lasted a short time, and there would be a column of black smoke, abruptly cut off at the base, hanging in the air and rising slowly as it drifted away in the breeze. A nice clean way to go! The shift system at Sharjah was pretty horrific, we started at 3am for  a balloon ascent at 4, worked until 9.00, came back at five until ten, worked a day the next day, then 3am the following day, day, ad infinitum. W Wee got double the usual UK rates of overtime, and since our weekly hours were up to 150 or so some weeks, the pay wasn’t bad, but they were very wearing hours, especially as the climate was so terrible. The Radfan crisis blew up which meant a lot more traffic for Sharjah, and balloon ascents every four hours round the clock for us. The only way we could keep it up was to be woken by the duty policeman, who took us to the office and stayed until we were awake and working. In the middle of this lot I had a crisis with impacted wisdom teeth, the visiting dental officer sent me off to Steamer Point Hospital, Aden, for an operation, the only time I have been glad to go to the dentist! I went down to Aden in a C130 transport aircraft, and was able to get a smashing view from the navigator/bombaimers position in the nose of the plane. W Wee flew across the Trucial States to Masirah, then down the coast to Salalah, where there was another small airfield. The valley there was a good source of sea breezes, carried inland just as far as the desert plateau level, and there was a sharply defined area of wonderful green vegetation, which almost hurt eyes used to the surrounding dusty desert. The sea was sparkling clear, and I was sure I saw some giant sting rays the size of houses. The current wells up along the coast and the sea life is amazingly rich there, Masirah regularly sent consignments of beautiful crayfish to the mess at Sharjah. There was some problem at the Hospital as all civilians were treated as officers, and I insisted on being treated as a sergeant which was my equivalent rank, it didn’t make much difference but was a matter of   principle with me. I wouldn’t be so fussy now! I came round from the operation feeling pretty battered, as the retractors had torn my mouth about half an inch each side, the surgeon was there and apologised for the mess they had made, he said they had a hell of a job getting my four wisdom teeth out. I was totally disgusted to be sent back to Sharjah the very next day, as I expected a few days off, but no such luck! I did manage one trip to Aden for a short leave break, the aircraft took an illegal route across the Yemen Yemen and flew for some hours across the great Empty Quarter Quarter,, which is covered in sand dunes, which march imperceptibly across the landscape as the sand grains blow up to their crests and down the other side. One could clearly see this process from the air, water-holes water-holes were gradually encroached on by the dunes, disappeared so that another nearby hole had to be used for some years, then reappeared as the dunes marched imperceptibly on. The timescale on view was staggering, one could clearly see how centuries of  camel caravans had raised the ground around the water-holes with their droppings. The dunes were naturally broken into vast areas, each with an identically shaped dunes, the shapes dictated by the direction and speed of mentioned the various how winds that could blow in that particular patch, often each wind lasted. I have already clearly the curvature of the earth could be and seenhow at Sharjah, as the mountains sloped away down towards the Yemen. Yemen. The clarity of the air was unlike anything in the UK, one could be dazzled by the lights of a vehicle in the mountains forty miles away. away. Mirages gave conflicting impressions, often seeming like large areas of water, so that one could drive along the coast towards Dubai, apparently keeping the sea in sight on one side, then find the illusion shattered when joining your own fresh wheel marks. The mirages could take very complicated forms, sometimes a landscape with buildings appearing in a direction where there were none for hundreds of miles. aircraft sometimes flew between Sharjah and Dubai at very low level, and one would see perhaps five different aircraft, some right way up, others upside down, each landing on its own runway and all equally definite. V Very ery confusing! At other times of year visibility was terrible and the very air full of grit and evil smells as the prevailing winds carried more material down from Iran and Iraq to top up the dust making up the desert surface. We went sometimes to a creek outside Sharjah to bathe in the waters of a pool there, but the water was stagnant and if a camel had been in it the smell in a shallow layer against the surface was enough to make you cough for the rest of the day, and the occasional dead dolphin didn’t help matters. On the beach were many holes of land crabs, they the y were uncanny as movement sent them instantly underground, you often sensed that they were there but never actually saw them, only a streak out of the corner of the eye. Rather  like the fleas in fact! We also went fishing with rods in the mouth of the main creek, there was a village,

 

formerly a leper colony, at the mouth, and we waded in up to our waists as a relief from the humidity. humidity. Lads from the village, which was now a small fishing community, community, came and were much amused by our approach to fishing, especially letting anything go! We caught mostly parrot fish, which had beaks like wire cutters, and sting rays, whose tails were the traditional A Arab rab wife-beating implement, and very effective I would think. I marvel now that we could have been so stupid to wade in the mouth of the creek like that, as sharks were never far away, and sting rays were supposed to be quite dangerous. The fish on sale in Dubai market were mostly of the tuna or giant mackerel types, with very red and well-blooded flesh, but we never caught anything as useful as that, in fact we baited with slices of luxury fish bought in the market, and caught rubbish, which amused the locals no end. Life at Sharjah was mostly hot and dusty dusty,, and the hours gruelling, but it had its moments and I am very  pleased to have been there at that time, before the oil money started pouring in. Sharjah now has a Japanese inspired ship repair plant, already in decay, and where the leper colony was there is now a Holiday Inn, but I’m sure their customers have less fun than we did. The roads are all tarmac and there are multi-storey office blocks and hotels all over the place. I flew back to the UK thankfully thankfully,, and Britain seemed wonderfully green and the rain a wondrous blessing. The aeroplane flew the right hand way with stop at Istanbul, and there was a good view of Mount Ararat in the distance, rather like Fuji-yama on Japanese screens. The salt and gypsum flats of Iran looked to be even  bleaker than the sands of the Empty Quarter. Quarter. Back at Shawbury, Shawbury, life seemed even more boring than before, so I applied for a selling job with Crosse and Blackwell, who took me on to cover North and Mid Wales, from Conway to Anglesey to Aberdovey, and Montgomeryshire, and worked for them for exactly a year, the whole of 1965. It was a complete change from working for a government department, the only criterion was the amount of soup and salad cream you could shift. I did a very high mileage, as my territory held far more sheep than people, and sheep don’t consume much soup. The grocery trade was going into a period of intense change, as the traditional small grocers shops and small chains went out of business or were taken over by group buying chains. Spar and Mace shops bought all their goods centrally, centrally, and any deals that were done with wholesalers on my territory were handled by the Area Manager, so potential for sales was fading away quicker than new customers could be conned into buying. A few independents made use of our anxiety to sell by buying then not paying until the solicitors letters were flying about, but this made for an unhappy atmosphere. I was living with the folks at Guilsfield, and driving off to be in Blaenau Ffestiniog by opening time, practising the smile, then trying to get some poor manager to taste a new soup flavour from a flask was not an inspiring way of  spending a wet Monday morning. The firm concluded that I had the potential to be a good bread and butter  salesman, but would never break any records. I did win a prize trip to Amsterdam for two, and took my sister Madeleine, but this happened by mistake, as I was credited with a couple of lorry loads of salad cream which my area manager conned a wholesaler in Menai Bridge into ordering. It was all still there at the end of the season and the firm took it back, but I had the holiday in the meantime. The trip had its moments, we met in the London Hilton for cocktails etc, and did all the tourist things, the Five Flies restaurant in IAmsterdam Amster with flags into thebe.ice cream, and told the tour of the Amstel that I  brewery  brewery, , but wasn’tdam really assparklers impressedand as national I was supposed When I even the area manager didn’t envy him his every so slightly larger car, we decided that I wasn’t cut out for the job, and I handed in my notice, although they did offer me a patch in Manchester, which absolutely did not appeal. To my surprise, the Met Office agreed to take me back in my old job, and m my y first posting was to a radiosonde course. This was to do with upper air sampling using hydrogen balloons towing a simple transmitter, transmitter,  powered by lead acid battery and switched by a small windmill, which sampled pressure, temperature, and humidity,, and sent a signal back to Cambridge recorders which wrote a chart of the signals. This was then humidity analysed using simple Perspex scales and the results combined with a radar plot of the track, giving wind direction and speed at various heights, and the whole thing was then coded into a standard international message and sent out over the worldwide network of such messages by tele-printer from Bracknell. I enjoyed the course, which was for twelve weeks at Hemsby in Norfolk, with digs in nearby Ormesby St Margaret. I was the ace of the course, taking to the practical side very quickly, quickly, and was transferred to the supervisors course which ran alongside ours. When it came to the final written exam, compulsory in civil service courses, I was called into the head man and told I had completely fluffed it, and in the end they multiplied everyone’s everyone’s marks by the same percentage in order to give me a bare pass. I still don’t know what happened! My first posting was to Aberporth, in Cardiganshire, at the southern end of Cardigan Bay. Bay. The

 

Royal Aeronautical Aeronautical Establishment there was mainly to do with weaponry trials, and calibration of  navigation instrumentation. instrumentation. W Wee had an office standing high on the hill overlooking the launch pads where rockets were fired. The rubbish heaps were full of ancient rocketry going back years, and some of the old cable runs had about a square yard of wiring, ancient and modern, as many trials teams laid networks and abandoned them when finished. The work could be quite interesting, we were connected to the trials tannoy system and could follow trials out of one ear while doing other work, new hands found this difficult at first,  but it soon became second nature. I shared a flat with one of the others in the mews of a local mansion, we were on shifts but not too bad a system, usually evening, day, day, morning/night night, sleep day, day off, seven days a week. If you could do a couple of swaps of a complete set of shifts you could manage several days off without taking any leave. I bought an early kit for building a Mirror dinghy dinghy,, No 6550, and built it in the stables below the flat. With With this boat and a small classic British Seagull outboard I had much fun. The tides made sailing in such an inefficient vessel difficult, difficult, as they ran faster than the boat could every sail upwind, and several times I and a mate were stranded up the coast at Tresaith and Llangranog, where we would prevail upon the local landlord to treat us as shipwrecked mariners until someone could come with money to pay for the beer and fetch us. They were very tolerant. I spent one winter living in a cottage near  the sea at Tresaith, although the summer rates were too expensive, and it was very satisfying to find driftwood for the fire after storms. I took up with a lady who was working in the bar of the social club, and was soon living with her at a  bungalow she was building at Ffostrasol. After eighteen happy months of this, I rashly married her, she having just been divorced by her previous husband for unreasonable behaviour/cruelty. behaviour/cruelty. I didn’t attend the  proceedings, as I thought I knew better, and that TLC would conquer all, but unfortunately I was completely wrong, and had to depart the area in great distress less than a year after marrying. A After fter a couple of weeks to recover, the Met Office tried to put me into a hostel at Bracknell, working under totally alien conditions as a robot chart plotter in headquarters there, one plotted frantically and was allowed maybe two minutes between charts. Letters from my wife pursued me, and I was completely off my head at the thought that she would pursue me to Bracknell. In the end I was on sick leave for more than two years, ending up  back at Guilsfield. My father died during the time that I was married in Cardiganshire, and Kay was kind enough to give me a roof over my head in Guilsfield, and later when I began to recover but not enough to hold down a job, she moved from her home in a bungalow, to another bungalow a hundred yards away, but this time with the estate shop attached to it, in order that we might run it together and I could gradually get  back into a working state. For this I must be eternally grateful to her. Life as a small shopkeeper was quite different to anything else I had done. We did a main ‘shop’ once a week from wholesalers in Welshpool and Shrewsbury, had bread delivered daily from Ian Hughes bakery in Llanfair,, fetched pork chops and sausages from Barry Pryce, and made up morning papers for delivery by a Llanfair  pair of lads on bicycles. The shop was just an extra ten feet on the end of the bungalow, with a connecting door from the kitchen. We built a store in the back with a Marley prefabricated garage. VAT came in about then, which was forcing small businesses to keep better books, and proving to many that they couldn’t afford carry on! We had thesell. advantage small with low overheads, Kay evening, had her pension, and we ate to anything which didn’t I joinedofinbeing with very a village dramatic society Victorian Victorian and found that I immediately took to performing, although to date I had never tried such a thing. As I began to get  back into some kind of confidence in myself, a passing village person heard me singing operatically in the outside store, and asked if I would like to join him in a Shropshire Drama Group production in Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury. I went and very much enjoyed a part in Gama Gurton’s Needle, an early English drama, where I became the short of a long and short partnership with George Waters, who was a solicitor in Shrewsbury who later   became the area NODA rep. We played at Attingham Park, a mansion just outside Shrewsbury, in the music room, which has a beautiful W Wedgewood edgewood ceiling, which didn’t fall in when I sang, though I half expected it to. We We were accompanied b by y an eccentric combination of harpsichord, trumpet, and trombone, and achieved a really convincing Early English feel on our best nights! This was to be the start of a long association with amateur theatre. I have listed productions and dates at the end of this piece, as it is a long list. Shropshire Drama Group was run by Bert Amies, County Drama Advisor, Advisor, a gentle man with strong views on theatrical matters, who had a vast store of theatrical background knowledge, having served his time at the drama school attached to the Old Birmingham Rep. Later he persuaded me to audition for a place at the school, and I performed before Betty Richards, who at that time was over ninety and had been there since the days of Sir Barry Jackson, when Birmingham Rep were in the forefront of national theatre and sent

 

travelling shows all over the country, the first to try out many so-called ’trendy modern’ innovations like motorcycles in Shakespeare! Former pupils of the school have included Sir John Geilgood and Sir  Lawrence Olivier. Olivier. Modesty forbids me from telling what she said about me, but the gist was that although I was not a Hamlet, I was a good potential Polonius, and that character actors often have more satisfactory careers than the stars. They offered me a place at the school, and I stood on the platform at New Street station with my coat round my shoulders feeling that life was really about to take off! Powys Education Authority soon brought me back down to earth, when I went down to Llandrindod W Wells ells to ask about a grant they chopped me right down to earth, the grant I was seeking was a discretionary one, and no such grants were being dished out, having recently stopped as the recession was beginning. While helping out in a local election I worked alongside Ann Lloyd Morgan, who persuaded me to join Buttington Operatic Society. Society. They were a very mixed group of mostly local farming people, a mixture of  Welsh and English people. I was in the chorus of Pirates of Penzance that first year, year, and took to it like a duck to water. One of the chorus ladies accompanied me to Llanidloes to see their production of HMS Pinafore, and Mary and I were married in February 1976 at the registry office in Welsh Welshpool. pool. Our  honeymoon was a memorable one, some family friends of Mary’s owned a converted chapel in Llanafan, above Cwm Ystwyth, and were kind enough to lend it to us, as they did with other impecunious people. The evening before the wedding I had been asked to provide an entertainment for the Hunt Supporters dinner-dance in Guilsfield, Guilsfield, and so some eight of us had a table at the function in exchange for doing a bit of  singing and a light one-act piece. Like most do’s of that type, the audience wasn’t used to the idea of  shutting up and giving the performers a chance, so we did our best through scraping chairs and people moving around talking, but it went down fairly well and we earned our free wedding supper! The next morning was a blustery one, and after the ceremony we set off via Devils Bridge for Llanafan, hearing on the car radio that the roads of South Wa Wales les and the uplands were gradually closing down due to blizzard conditions and drifting snow. I remember that the roadside wire fences were all covered in blown dried grasses. We We eventually struggled up the hill from Llanafan to the top of the hill, but had to leave the car and carry our cases the last couple of hundred yards, as snow was beginning to pile up here and there. The chapel was incredibly cold, we struggled to light the smoky old fire (since replaced with a proper wood  burning stove) and found that the place felt warmest with doors open and the wind blowing straight through. We We sat that evening with our eyes streaming, fronts baking and backs freezing, and went to bed fully kitted out in woolly hats and gloves - a honeymoon to remember. remember. It was all great fun though, and we remain eternally grateful to our benefactors, as we were not well off and uncertain what the future held. My stepmother, Kay, Kay, had unfortunately taken dead against Mary and her mother, who was the kindest of  creatures, and so there was no way of continuing at the shop working for her and being married to Mary. Mary. I was approached by Ian Hughes of Llanfair Bakery, Bakery, who told me that he was taking over the family business of Watsons Watsons of Welshpoo Welshpool, l, an old established grocery store on the main crossroads of the town, and asked me if I would like to be manager for him. I accepted, and spent the first month doubling up with the Watsons in order to get the hang of the place. They were a local Quaker family of several generations in the  business, and still did most of their trade by delivering grocery orders to farms locally. This was a method which wasphased rapidlyout disappearing, we had My to keep for was the bigger customers, it was gradually in favour ofand the although counter service. rightdoing hand itman Les Woodvine, Woodvine, who had been with the business since leaving school, he was a grand chap with a pretty well-worn line of wit with the old dears. We We increased business to some extent, Ian moved the emphasis somewhat upmarket towards delicatessen and to bakery products and cream cakes, with a view to shifting more bakery output, but about that time money was becoming generally tighter, and our luxury targets had to be curtailed somewhat. Ian had taken a young partner, and they had plans for a number of outlets. Unfortunately Ian’s Ian’s young partner  died quite suddenly of a heart attack, and eventually it became clear that the way ahead for the business was through the Spar organisation as a convenience store, which was a fairly new concept but gaining ground fast. As we moved towards that, the staffing emphasis was more on part-timers, and I realised that my job was the most disposable one. A n note ote from myself to Ian passed one which he sent me on the same day,, telling me he had come to that conclusion, and so we agreed to part amicably. day amicably. Ian and I remained on good terms, and he always treated me very fairly fairly.. Unemployment had risen considerably, considerably, we were living fairly cheaply as Mary looked after her mother at Glebe House, Guilsfield, and Gran, as I called her, was a lovely person who always allowed me full living space in her household, and put up with my ways, which may well have been less genteel than she had been used to. We had a wonderful relationship, and when she died in April 1993 it was a sad blow to both of us, although she lived to 95 without becoming a burden on anyone, which is just how she would have wanted

 

it. I now more or less earned a living painting and decorating, as I was of a practical nature. The old age  pensioners who made up most of my customers were unaffected by the recession, and the more prudent ones could afford regular redecoration. I could only attract regular business by charging considerably less that a normal trade price, but managed to put together some sort of income, albeit at a fairly low level. Mary was used to living frugally and neither of us were greedy for more, so we were never short of a tenner  even at our worst times. I had continued with my m y amateur dramatic activities activities,, and Bert Amies had a high enough opinion of my capabilities to talk me into applying to go to Coleg Harlech, in Meirionnydd, helped in the persuasion b by y Baldwyn Davies, of Guilsfield, who had always encouraged me and who took the part of the other tramp in the two productions of ‘Waiting for Godot’ which Bert staged. This play was fairly crucial in influencing my thoughts at the time, and in retrospect it is hardly credible that Bert entrusted me with such a crucial  part. He assured me afterwards that I could never be asked to do anything in the whole of drama which would be harder than that. I interviewed for Coleg Harlech, and was one of the one in five or so interviewees accepted. The difference this time was that the grant was mandatory, mandatory, and once offered a place, nobody could stop me going. g oing. My grant was quite generous, as at fifty fifty,, I qualified for the highest band of age allowance, and a second home allowance, marriage allowance, etc. In October 1983 I duly started at the college. The courses were of two years duration, and resulted in a diploma, which, while it was not quite an automatic entrance to university, university, in practice usually resulted in admission, especially for those universities with which the college had a special relationship. One chose two subjects, and a major ‘long study’ pr project oject in the second year. I began by taking English and Social Studies, but found the jargon so woolly and off-putti off-putting ng that I soon changed to English and History, which was much more hard-centred, although the idea of having to remember dates put me off. The accommodation at Harlech was mainly in a ten storey tower block of stressed concrete, with mostly double rooms, a few singles, and a lift through the centre of the building. The students were an extremely mixed bunch, some were there as a form of bursary from trade union activities at Halewood and such factories, and a few seemed to be fanatical trouble-seekers. In the first year there was a permanent ferment of political activity, activity, frankly I can hardly remember what it was supposed to be about, but there was a student occupation of the college offices, and a High Court injunction taken out against certain students. The poor domestic staff of the college were unable to be paid for some weeks as the timesheets etc were locked in the occupied offices, which didn’t seem a very good ‘socialist’ consequence. The kitchens were closed down for several weeks, and there was a temporary soup-kitchen and shop run by some students, they were several hundred pounds astray by the end, but this was never satisfactorily resolved. resolved. Having said that, there were some very good social activities. Graham Allen was the Warden’s deputy, and something of  a playwright, he was on the interview which accepted me, and I saw my chances click when I mentioned that ‘Waiting for Godot’ had changed my life. He was very interested in my long study, which was on the Italian Commedia del’Arte, and I was proud he producedwith it as him a good thesis.Thomas’ Graham did some work with drama productions, and when I was co-producer of aexample version of of aDylan ‘Going Home’ when the HMI came inspecting the college. They especially commended our Swansea accents, which was good going as we had just evolved a general purpose South Wa Walian lian patois! I also ran a few workshop sessions, we did one on ‘ritual’ whi which ch involved carrying one person in procession while chanting mantras, a couple of union hard men came out of boredom and were quite frightened by it, they wouldn’t travel in the lift with me after that! I managed to arrange for Shropshire Drama Group to bring a  production of ‘The Comedians’ to the excellent theatre at Coleg Harlech, this was a perfect small round theatre with very good acoustic and a well-equipped thrust stage - also the usual bolshie theatre technician! I brought a very bright red length of plastics factory remnant from Guilsfield, this was very impressive against a matt black stage and appeared in almost everything. W Wee did several productions, including a splendid pantomime where I was one of the Seven Dwarves, and a boxing show by Ken Campbell where I was the MC. Also a really first class production of ‘The Erpingham Camp’ by Joe Orton, I was the holiday camp manager in that and had a splendid on-stage funeral, with Union Jacks and red white and blue  balloons descending from the flies. If I never have another funeral, they can’t take that away from me! There was a pretty sordid under-life at the college, thrashes were held, mostly at weekends when I wasn’t there, in ‘The Pit’, a ghastly shed down below by the car park which was often knee-deep in broken glass. It was fitted up at regular intervals with disco equipment, but this was always vandalised at the first

 

opportunity, and a lot of funny cigarettes were smoked down there. This did not appeal to me, and it was opportunity, noticeable that the heavy users had a style of their own, namely dirty, unkempt, incapable of concentration for more than a few seconds, and on the whole extremely unhappy when not blown out of their minds. No thank you! I ran some sort of car during my time at Harlech, and got home most weekends, it was an hour  and a half drive. I remember when the kitchens were closed, I sold an old banger complete with a roast chicken brought from home, as a sweetener! I made a few good friends at Harlech, Keith Riddington, who I first shared a tower block room with had to drop out due to domestic problems, but went on to take a degree at Lampeter Lampeter,, alongside his wife Angela, who also went to Harlech. They stay stayed ed in Wales Wales,, running a book business in Newcastle Emlyn, and Mary and I are still in touch with them. Another friend was Freda, an ex-policewoman who knew a lady who had a riding school not far away on the slopes of the mountain above Llanbedr, she was glad of someone to exercise her horses as she suffered from arthritis arthritis,, Freda and I went up several times, it was great fun galloping through the woods in the twilight with views over Cardigan Bay spread out before us. The land up there was incredibly stony, Keith and I went up to plant some trees once but the roots seemed to go straight into cavities between the boulders, it seems unlikely that any would have survived. The course ended with the usual exams, and almost all who survived the full course passed. I had opted for  Aberystwyth,, being nearest to home anyway, Aberystwyth anyway, and with a good relationship with the college, and I was accepted as a fresher for October 1985. I had found a part time summer job driving for National Milk Bars of W Welshpool, elshpool, which started at Easter  and took me through the long summer holidays, this involved taking very good cream cakes from the  bakery at Welshpool Welshpool to their several branches, from Machynlleth up to Llandudno and Colwyn Bay. Bay. This was really a good day da y out at the firms expense, the Mercedes was pleasing to drive, the drops were far  enough apart to make the work very easy, and Mary could come with me whenever she chose. There was free coffee and a meal thrown in, and for three da days ys a week between decorating jobs. They were excellent employers, and paid a stamp for me although they didn’t have to, and I was able to make those years up later, which was handy. Starting at Aberystwyth Aberystwyth was a daunting prospect. The first year I was in Ceredigion Hall on the sea front, and got off to a bad start, as they gave me a poky pok y little room at the back of the building, which would have  been ideal, but it had just been made habitable, and the room below fitted out as a laundry with tumble dryer.. Each time I returned from home, the walls were running with condensation and the bedding damp, I dryer even tried buying damp course plastic sheeting and sealing off the floor. In the end after three weeks of   pleading they investigated and found that the dryer had been installed with the vent pipe not reaching the outside wall, so the steam was blown into the cavity. Once that was fixed, the room was quite cosy, but it was hard to be enthusiastic about Halls after that. I had opted for a joint degree in English Literature and Drama. For Part One in the first year, I chose Italian as my third subject. The drama lectures were very enjoyable, of course my acting experience had given me a very solid grounding in stage work in general. Unfortunately my own brand of ‘stage charm’, a quality which cannot be acquired, rather clashed with that of the main tutor in practical drama as entertainment. He ran things on a very personal basis, so it was no great whenInmy backmysterious suddenly seized upback during a warm-up in thecut drama class, during a game of knee I touchloss football. some way this trouble completely me off from acting, and although had some success from visiting a Chinese lady in Abery Aberystwyth stwyth who did explosive things with my back, it  put an end to my drama activities for a while. Italian studies were enjoyable, my interest in Commedia Del’Arte helped here. The Italian professor had little practical drama experience but was very interested in  period Italian theatre. He found my study of Commedia Del’Arte interesting interesting and covering areas which he was not aware of, and asked me for a copy copy,, and I was coproducer with him of a play by Goldoni, ‘La Locandiera’, taking it to Bath and Swansea universities and to Gregynog for an Italian tutors seminar. seminar. The Italian exam at the end of Part One was a doddle, it was made up only of translation from Italian into English rather than the other way round, and myself and another bloke, who hadn’t written a single word, left together at half time, I was at home in Guilsfield by the end of the exam and got 85%, to my astonishment. After much heart-searching, influenced by my back trouble, I elected to go for a straight English degree, and this simplified life considerably. considerably. There were lots of lectures to attend, and I was too conscientious, it took a long time for me to realise the futility of attending lectures which bored me, like a long series on James Joyce and ‘Ulysses’, not to mention ‘Faery Queen’, -if that sort of thing doesn’t grab you then it is a waste of time to try. Degree finals were about the toughest thing I have ever done. There were eight threehour exams over ten days, fortunately not two on the same day, and I worked an ‘old soldier’s’ system of 

 

going in with a few answers worked out and looking for questions which my answers best fitted, there are always ‘banker’ topics. The The second of my exams was a disaster, so I more or less gave up after that; my  performance improved and answers became more flowing. Thank heavens my English has always been good, at least everything was spelt correctly! The relief on dotting in the last full stop at the end of the last exam was tremendous and nearly blew the top of my head off, and left a terrible emptiness after all that stress. In the end I got a respectable enough 2.2, which was really down to Mary more than myself, she gave me such solid support through trying times that she should have been awarded the degree. We We managed very well during those five years in college, and I feel very privileged to have had such a wonderful experience, with a stable home life to fall back on, which many students lack. My experience of life enabled me to work out which were the key unavoidable factors, and hammer them hard. Many students failed to do this, some getting chucked out for not handing in essays  because they sought for perfection, when a simple laundry list with their name on would have sufficed to allow the tutor to tick the list, and keep them on the course. There is no doubt in my mind that stickability and low cunning were the real qualities put to the test, and of course the backing from family and friends! The drop-outs tended if anything to be the cleverer ones, with very high expectations of themselves, or else those who just couldn’t cope with deadlines and with a false perspective of staff attitudes, there was always help to be had for anyone who was making any effort at all. Freedom to some people means lying about all day! I had a tendency to blast into an essay as soon as the subject was offered, and usually felt a bit lonely towards the deadline dates, when I could take it easy and everyone else was making a last minute push to get something on paper. Although Although I got stuck and desperate a few times when an essay refused to take shape, usually they came together pretty well, and I usually managed to end with a chuckle, which several tutors found to be a redeeming feature of my not-very-intellectual studies! I would certainly recommend a degree course as a mature student, to anyone who is interested in improving their perceptions of what makes the world go round. My background had given me a very scientific outlook  and to see so much human nature at close quarters, particularly in the young, was a revelation, and not always a pleasant one. Coleg Harlech was very intense in that one could not choose the people one mixed with, as the small size of the student body meant that everyone knew everyone else. At Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth, with 2500 students and growing rapidly, one only mixed with the chosen few with the same interests, and never  saw the others who didn’t. A hobby is a necessity to get away from the stress of study study,, I found the Gilbert and Sullivan Society a great help in unwinding for the first year or so, unfortunately the producer producer,, a member of the college musical staff, saw fit to take offence when a production had to be cancelled due to financial pressures, and he made sure that the society folded and has been kept under ever since, as he has threatened to take the society officers to court for non-payment of his fee. How a man can do that and consider himself a music-lover is beyond comprehension, as he has deprived the entire student body of the chance to take part in G & S productions, even after he has left for pastures new. Of course my experience of drama added much to my first year, and Italian was a real pleasure to learn, although even there the staff  were split into two camps who did not meet ever. In the end, the benefit of a course like this comes down to the attitude of the student, this alters along the way andlots it isofup to each person realise when going awry and do as something it. There is his always help available fortothe asking, andthey staffare will move mountains long as aabout student is doing or her best, however limited that may be. I always had enough money to live on, finding grants adequate, with one simple proviso, - keep away from pubs and any amount of money is enough, - go to pubs and money is never enough. Students can live on almost nothing if they set their minds to it, and there is no reason why the world should keep them in booze, nicotine, or other unnecessary substances. Above all, they must stay away from ‘grass’ and other supposedly ‘harmless’ mind mind-altering -altering substances, in my observations of them they almost always lead to a certain giggly irresponsibility irresponsibility and lack of self-esteem which undermines happiness and cleanliness, and there is plenty of cheap clean healthy enjoyment to be found in fresh air and the opposite sex! Back in civvy street with a thump, nobody seemed to want an elderly English graduate. For a few months I was Family Aids Organiser for the Community Mental Health Team (CMHT) in Newtown, but it was extremely poorly paid and although a fulltime job, one was on casual terms of employment, which were something out of the Dark Ages. Although desperate I handed in my notice, went as an ET trainee to Montgomeryshire District Council, and eventually was offered a post as Personal Assistant to the vacant  post of Director of Environmental Health and Housing. Writing about that must wait until I am safely up the road with early redundancy, expected in April April 1996. Suffice it to say that life at MDC has been much

 

more interesting than expected, local government is NOT all councillor’s ancient nieces poring over dusty  papers, and my colleagues subscribed generously to a magnificent kissogramme kissogramme for my 60th birthday! I have always expected that one day I would write this last period up, but find that the time is not yet ripe, and now I doubt if it ever will be. be. Sleeping dogs should be allow allowed ed to sleep on... Myself and her outdoors are both thoroughly enjoying our retirement, we have just enough to manage on and take short breaks in our touring 2-berth caravan, and we have spent just over a year in total over the last ten years in our current van, I shall put accounts of these trips on this website eventually, eventually, as winter finally sets in - although it is now 21 November and it's not here yet! And finally - here is a summary of  Dramatical Parts Wot I Have Took - well most of them anyway:-Date Venue Title Part Mar-74 Guilsfield ADS Victorian Musichall chorus  Nov-74 Buttington Operatic Pirates of Penzance(G&S) chorus Sep-74 Guilsfield ADS Dock Brief Fowles Jan-75 Shropshire DG Attingham Hall Gammer Gurton's Needle singer(rustic) Mar-75 Guilsfield ADS Happiest Days of Your Life schoolmaster Harrington May-75 Shropshire DG Musichall Dark of the Moon chorus and bit part , ASM, bells!  Nov-75 Buttington Operatic Princess Ida(G&S) King Gama(baritone) May-76 Shropshire DG Tech Coll Waiting for Godot(Beckett) Estragon  Nov-76 Buttington Operatic Gondoliers chorus  Nov-76 Guilsfield ADS Romanoff & Juliette The General(Usti General(Ustinov nov part) (local critic reported -'could have been Ustinov himself'!) May-77 Oswestry Operatic Soc Yeomen of the Guard(G&S) Colonel Fairfax(tenor!)  Nov-77 Buttington Operatic The Sorcerer John Wellington Wells(baritone) Jan-76 Shropshire DG Musichall Lysistrata(Aristopha Lysistrata(Aristophanes) nes) Spartan Ambassador  (great backwards pratfall in the Music Hall, Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury, dressed only onl y in three  balloons! Best laugh of the week..)  Nov-78 Buttington Operatic The Arcadians(G&S) Doody(comic baritone)  Nov-78 Shropshire DG Oswestry Waiting Waiting for Godot(Beckett) Estragon (again - oh my God the agony!) (Bert Amies Amies said 'you will never be asked to do an anything ything harder than this' - and it was true!) Jun-78 Shropshire DG Telford The Tempest(W.S.!) Caliban to David Profumo's Prospero (full coat of canal mud! I smelt terrible! C Caretaker aretaker didn't care for iitt much! David's mother, Valerie Hobson, said 'the little fat guy is the one to look out for' - too late in life, darlin')  Nov-79 Buttington Operatic The Quaker Girl(L Monkton) Jeremiah(comic lugubrious) Mar-80 Shropshire DG Musichall Equus Stage manager (Very hard work!)  Nov-80 Buttington Operatic Mikado(G&S) Koko Mar-81 Buttington Shropshire Operatic DG Musichall Precious Bane(Mary Webb) Innkeeper & etc  Nov-81 Katinka Thaddeus Hopper(American) Dec-81 Guilsfield ADS Arsenic & Old Lace Parson  Nov-82 Buttington Operatic Iolanthe(G&S) Lord Chancellor  (I peaked about here, I think!) Feb-83 Shropshire DG Oedipus Rex attendant , Ambassador  Feb-83 Shropshire DG Sganarelle(Moliere) Georgibus Apr-83 Own Group End of the Beginning(O'C Beginning(O'Casey) asey) Darry (comedy Irishman) (all the old ladies said we should have won! } Dec-84 Acts Theatr Ardudwy, Ardudwy, Coleg Harlech King Cole pantomime, boxing referee, introducer, etc. Apr-85 Acts Theatr Ardudwy,Coleg Harlech Return Journey(Dylan Thomas) narrator (our common Welsh dialect admired by HMI from Swansea!)!) Mar-85 Acts Theatr Ardudwy,Coleg Harlech Arms and the Man(Shaw) Major Petkoff   Nov-85 Acts Theatr Ardudwy,Coleg Ardudwy,Coleg Harlech The Erpingham Camp Erpingham ((holiday!) camp manager) (wot a fantastic funeral I had, Land of H & G, red white and blue balloons raining down,etc!) Dec-85 Acts Coleg Harlech Snow White Bashfull (dwarf!)  Nov-85 UCW Aberystwyth Aberystwyth Man a la Mode(Moliere?) Hodge (English dim dancing man, fell over footlights (in character character,, of course..))

 

Mar-86 UCW Aberystwyth Yeomen of the Guard(G&S) chorus  Nov-86 UCW Aberystwyth Aberystwyth Medea Greek General (big hat!) Mar-87 UCW Aber(toured) Aber(toured) La Locandiera(Goldo Locandiera(Goldoni) ni) Count (Italian language play) (played to Italian teachers, and convinced them I spoke it! Well Well I did in the play!)  Nov-88 Buttington Operatic HMS Pinafore Captain of the Pinafore  Nov-89 Buttington Operatic The Merry Widow  Nov-90 Buttington Operatic Pirates of Penzance(G&S) A modern Major General  Nov-91 Buttington Operatic La Vi Viee Parisienne  Nov-92 Buttington Operatic The Gondoliers Grand Inquisitor   Nov-93 Buttington Operatic Princess Ida(G&S) King Gama(baritone)  Nov-96 Buttington Operatic The Mikado(G&S) Koko  Nov-97 Buttington Operatic Valley of Song Gwilym, comic Welsh butler   Nov-98 Buttington Operatic Yeomen Yeomen of the Guard(G&S) Jack Point(jester) (another good death!)  Nov-99 retired, but ...  Nov-00 Buttington Operatic Iolanthe(G&S) Lord Chancellor   Nov-01 Buttington Operatic The Sorcerer John Wellington Wells (Sorcerer) (faded away into pyrotechnic p yrotechnic HELL HELL))  Nov-02 Buttington Operatic Merrie England Walter Wilkins (Shakespeare's chief player!!!)  Nov-03 Buttington Operatic Sir Joseph Porter KCB- finally clapped out!!! (Note: My home-made KCB will be appearing in a Birmingham production shortly, so book now!!!)  Nov-04 not there for health reasons  Nov-05 not in it but did a camcording which came out reasonably well Well, not quite finished! I did make a feeble comeback comeback:: Nov-06 Buttington Operatic Society short fat policeman on the end, just about.. may manage a couple more if spared... AND I WAS WAS SP SPARED! ARED! I WASN'T WASN'T CLAPPED CLAPP ED OUT!!! Oh yes you you was Shut Up!! Here's a turnup for the books! I went for a flu jab in autum autumn n of 2005 it seems ages ago - and my blood pressure was dangerously high - I should have been gone before that... that... but the right medicatio medication n brought it down to fairly normal, normal, and took two stones of weight off, off, SO... thank you Doctor! Operatic White Horse Inn  Nov-07 Buttington Mr Grinkle Grinkle (as per Fred Fred E Elliot lliot in Corry Corry Street) (Nice things said...)  Nov-08 Watch Watch this Space - but batteries giving up the ghost...  plus a few workouts and workshops along the way way,, not to mention all those school and old folks Father  Christmases... Not a bad career, career, eh? (SO F FAR!) AR!) At least I can claim to have mad madee a few hundred people chuckle, and along the way, a few old ladies confessed to wetting their pants laughing, nobody can take that honour away from me... It will surely get me a pass through the green channel at the Pearly Gates! AND I have already had several really good funerals...