Roamer: Scrape fat, guard coal and avoid Cynthia on national service

It was a cultural shock! I was a real ‘mammy’s boy’, never having washed or ironed any clothes in my life and certainly not darned a sock.

Suddenly I was responsible for it all.

The other big shock was home sickness, a real sickness which for me lasted about three weeks.

To summarise, I guess in those few early weeks I became a self-sufficient man standing on my own two feet.

What of Square Bashing itself? Well, there was the discipline, lots of running about and being constantly shouted at.

But there was another more stringent layer of discipline which we had to contend with.

Basically, they were trying to ‘break’ you so that if someone said ‘jump’ you jolly well jumped!

You could refuse, yes, but then you would you find yourself on ‘Jankers’ - a punishment in two parts - either the ‘tin room’ or guard duty.

The ‘tin room’ was in the cookhouse.

Frying was done on large tin trays and during the night someone had to scrape off all the fat, often just using cold water and a scraper.

Eugh!

Guard duty was no joke - on your own, in the dead of night, freezing cold, guarding a pile of coal! There was a great spin off - whoever was on duty could officially ‘raid’ the cookhouse and take all they wanted, for themselves and their colleagues.

All manner of folk were drafted for National Service.

In our billet there was an engraver from Hatton Gardens.

So if you were writing to your girlfriend, for a couple of bob he would embellish the back of your envelope with flying cherubs and swirling ribbons.

The officer in charge of our section was a professional golfer; another was the well-known bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk. Although not so well-known to one lad on guard duty who shouted “Halt, who goes there?”, got the answer “John Shirley-Quirk” and replied “yes, and I’m Mickey Mouse!”

I remember standing outside the NAAFI window listening to a concert pianist playing Chopin on the knackered piano.

Yes, National Service took all sorts.

One day, we were summoned for an FFI. (‘free from infection’!) We had to strip off and stand beside our beds.

The medical officer, using a little stick, lifted ‘it’ up to carefully inspect for infection. As the medic was leaving a wee voice from the back shouted, “Who won, sir?”

The billet erupted.

Then we were lectured on sexually transmitted diseases, ending with the admonishment to avoid Cynthia in the local village.

We also watched a Technicolour film on the horrors of VD and Gonorrhoea.

Was it coincidence that we had overdone sausages for dinner that day, or did the cook have a sense of humour?

Wednesday afternoon was for sport and you could choose from several - I elected swimming.

The camp didn’t have a pool, so we got the town bus and I followed everyone off the bus…into the cinema!

Towards the end of the eight weeks came the dreaded assault course.

The first obstacle was a ‘window’ made of railway sleepers. To jump through this, we had to point our rifle forward, as if attacking someone.

The next obstacle was a hedge which we had to crash through, holding our rifles sideways across the face.

My friend got it wrong-way-round and went through the window with his rifle across his face.

The rifle butt jammed against the woodwork and broke his nose!

Then it was all over, and I moved camp to the Trade School.

I had signed up to be an instrument mechanic, so it was back to school for two months of auto pilots, bomb sights, terminal velocity, air pressure, Ohms Law, gyros, etc.

And what did I get from Square Bashing? Camaraderie and team work.

Boy, we had some fun and got up to some high jinks despite the cold baths, polishing boots, leaping about and being constantly shouted at.

I also learnt how to dismantle a machine gun faster than the next bloke though I never had cause to use that skill.

Oh, and I never met Cynthia either!