Four years with the colours would not be too irksome as we continued with our apprenticeships. We were eighteen and nineteen-year olds, and halfway through our third year National Certificate engineering course, and the prospect of one evening a week at the Territorial drills at Tennal Grange in Harborne would be a welcome break from the homework we gathered each Wednesday from the Suffolk Street Technical College.
The first few Mondays at Tennal Grange saw us gradually acquiring all the paraphernalia that goes to the conversion of a civilian to an army recruit - the battle-dress uniform of such a texture that the collar rubbed the skin of our necks raw and boots that had a similar effect on our feet. Then a gas mask, and a tin helmet and mess tins, and much else, but it was the issue of a Lee Enfield rifle and a bayonet that really put the final proud touch to our soldierly ensemble.
The rifle was familiar to me as I used to play with one that was stored in the box room of the house where we lived in Londonderry. My father was in the Ulster 'B' Special Constabulary, and when he went on duty he wore a dark blue uniform old style Army webbing ammunition pouches, and carrying his rifle and my Job once a month was to Blanco the webbing and polish its bits of brass.
Then I would load the rifle with a clip of .303 bullets and take playful practice aim through the bedroom window curtains at passing neighbours, each unaware that they were in the sights of a high-velocity rifle with a ten-year olds finger on the trigger! So, in some aspects of Army training at least, I was several years ahead.
So Monday evening succeeded each Monday evening of drilling, marching and training throughout the early Spring months of 1939, and we cheerfully cycled from Tennal Grange after each session with no more serious preoccupation in life except where we would go cycling for our summer holidays.
So went the last summer of our youth: for some of us the last summer ever.
As part of the 48th Division and one of three transport companies of the Royal Army Service Corps. - Stores, Petrol and Ammunition. We had been occupied so far each week with the fundamentals of Army training, the drilling and the slow progress towards marching in step. With the exception of one of our squad who, to the total distraction of the drill sergeant, had developed the technique of swinging his right arm forward at the same time as his right leg went forward. Repeating the same with his left. Now this is difficult to do and even more difficult to detect as the cause of the irregularity of rhythm in a marching squad, as all the feet are in step, but something somewhere appears awry and the drill sergeant never really came to terms with this particular phenomenon.
We regularly marched along Court Oak Road for the entertainment of the locals, and as we improved in style and slowly broke in our stiff new Army boots, our weekly on-foot mileage lengthened, but as a transport unit we had not yet seen, or laid hands on any sort of vehicle except for a tiny dual-drive Morris Commercial training truck, an oddity with twin steering wheels, accelerator, brake and clutch pedals, with the instructor and trainee sharing the central gear-lever and hand-brake.
Obviously this one meagre teaching facility did not give many of us the opportunity even to sit in the cab to recognize the controls, let alone have an instructional drive.
Greater opportunities were soon to be had, however. Our Territorial Camp was due to be held in August on Salisbury Plain, where we could be let loose in large army lorries without danger or impediment to anyone else but ourselves.
The middle of August found us in bell tents, "Twelve men per tent, feet to the pole" at Fargo Camp on the Plain. We had only just started to grow beards worth the name and the second agony of every day was the cold-water shave. The first agony of course, was the embarrassing early morning effort of will needed to sit in public with ten others, perched along a rough surfaced horizontal pole, with ten pairs of bare buttocks aimed into a deep latrine pit some six feet below. The pole was of such a height that anyone of average leg length could only just maintain his balance on it by stretching his toes to keep contact with the ground. A position that cut off all circulation to the thighs, and this, combined with the continual hazard of over-balancing backwards into the pit was a perpetual laxative.
Illustration by 'JAQ
Our daily training routine with the heavy lorries increased and we sat in the evenings in the Mess marquee, lit in the summer twilight with paraffin-smelling hurricane lamps, bragging how we had, that proud day, mastered the art of double de-clutching and changed from first to second gear without crashing the gears.
The training camp was coming to an end and we sat and talked of soon returning home. A worldly-wise NCO heard us. "You won't be going home" he grinned. "I bet that within a week we'll be at war! "Our summer idyll ended. Within a week we were.
On Friday the 1st of September, a radio broadcast called all Territorial units to their Drill Centres dressed in full uniform and carrying all their kit including rifle and bayonet. I decided that the war could wait for a day and caught the early-morning Austin works bus the following morning from Burcot where I lived, to Rednal, raising a few eyebrows and ribald comments from the regulars when I climbed aboard an already overcrowded bus with a full kit-bag, back-pack and rifle.
I reached Tennal Grange about an hour later and was immediately greeted by Company Sergeant Whalen with the threat of a court martial for failing to report in time for hostilities to commence, War had still not yet been officially declared and they gave a distinct impression that they had only been waiting for me to turn up before the kick-off. This almost appeared to be true for no sooner had we been issued with groundsheet and blankets and settled down on our respective spots on a bare barrack-room floor for our first night's uncomfortable sleep when 11 am on Sunday the 3rd of September was upon us and we sat in the same spot on the same now neatly folded pile of blankets in almost uncomprehending silence as Neville Chamberlain announced on the wireless that we were now at war with Germany. "Four years with the colours", the form we signed had said and we'd only joined to avoid having our apprenticeship studies disrupted. We hadn't bargained for a war. Sod Mr. Marsh.
Life for a while now became a repetitive blur of drilling, marching, gas lectures and physical training. Punctuated with intervals of sleeping the sleep of the exhausted and eating the food prepared by three amateur cooks. The leading one of which had got the job on the strength of voluntarily admitting, when an appeal for cooks was put out as having once cooked for 12 Scouts at a Scout Camp some years before.
My first moment of military disbelief was spawned when, during one of those early meals the routine visit of the Orderly Officer accompanied by the Orderly Sergeant was made to our hut where we sat on the floor trying to swallow soup from our mess-tins that was so burnt as to be uneatable.
"Any complaints?" yelled the Sergeant, not expecting a reply "Yes sir", spoke up someone to our amazement and admiration. "What is it Lad?" asked the Sergeant. Squinting at the culprit to mark him for later attention. "This soup's so burnt we can't eat it Sir", was the reply. This was the cue for the Orderly Officer to join in the charade "Let me taste it Sergeant", he said. Taking a ladle and dipping it in the insulated container holding the remnants of the soup, he swallowed a large mouthful. We waited expectantly. "Nothing wrong with that, at all", He said. "Get on and eat it". His face remained un-contorted, but his eyes had started to water as he strode briskly from the hut. As the Orderly Sergeant followed he caught a murmured comment. He swung round and demanded: "Who called the cook a c**t" There was silence. He turned and left the hut to join the Orderly Officer. A chorus of voices, as though on cue, followed him ... "WHO CALLED THE C**T A COOK!"
Tennal Grange was merely a staging point in our transition from civilian to soldier and we were soon to move on. Meanwhile, a considerable number of men much older than us joined the unit with an aura of mystery about their origin. They were referred to as the "volunteers" and we were actively discouraged from mixing with them. Some time went by before the secret was out. They were all short-term prisoners convicted of minor offences, and had been offered immediate release from prison if they joined the Army. Before long we were mixing freely, and learning much of their history. One was most proud of his record and reckoned that he had already done his anti-Nazi bit by becoming treasurer of the local branch of Sir Oswald Moseley's Black shirts, accumulating the funds, and then absconding with the cash, and he felt wronged in being sentenced. Another had lived off his wits and told of one of his successful enterprises selling anti-house fly cubes from a stall in the Bull Ring. The cubes he sold at sixpence a time were made from cheap wax candles melted into a shallow tray, cut into cubes and wrapped in waxed paper.
His stall displayed two plates of meat: one covered in buzzing bluebottles while the other stood untouched with one of his wax cubes on top. "One of these cubes in your pantry ladies, and you'll never be plagued with flies again!" was his sales pitch the cubes sold rapidly. Clearly it was not in the interests of good business to point out that the untouched cube-bearing piece of meat had spent all night soaking in paraffin, while the flyblown piece was over a week old.
