This little bit of my memoir "Monkeys and Parrots", is about kit inspections at Catterick Camp. I actually still occasionally use the phrase "Stand by Your Beds" when I walk into a room, thus confirming the impression of geriatric lunacy that many people have of me.
“Stand by your beds!” The entry of an inspecting officer or NCO into the barrack room was always heralded by that cry, from one of the NCOs in attendance, followed a flurry of leaping to attention, and a deal of activity at the door as people of increasing importance came in – a corporal, a sergeant, perhaps a sergeant major -- and then stood back waiting for whoever was the senior to make an appearance. In basic training, routine inspections were carried out by your troop officer, usually a second lieutenant, although the company commander, a major, would make regular visits, and occasionally we’d see the CO of the Regiment, a lieutenant colonel. He’d peer at your name card.
“Haigh, eh! Where are you from?”
“Barnsley, Sir.”
“I see. Well, your kit seems OK. Keep it up, play fair with us and we’ll play fair with you. Any questions?”
“Please can I go home, Sir?” (Just joking. The real answer was --)
“No thank you Sir.”
“Good, good, carry on.”
If you were unlucky, the RSM, following along behind the Colonel, would look more closely at your kit.
“I can still see the joins in these bootlaces! You’re an idle soldier!”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Do them again and show them to your corporal this afternoon.”
“Yes, Sir, thank you Sir.”
“Don’t thank me. Just think yourself lucky you’re not parading at the orderly room to show them to me.
“Yes, Sir, thank you Sir. I mean just Yes Sir, without the thank you, Sir.”
“Are you taking the piss, Signalman.”
“No, Sir. Sorry Sir.”
“I’m watching you. Remember that!”
“Sir! Yes Sir!”
Your own troop officer, a National Service second lieutenant, would be following behind. If he was the right kind of young officer, who’d got to know you, he would, after hearing an exchange like that, give you a crafty wink and a grin. (In his own training, it has to be said, he’d certainly had worse experiences. But because he’d been to public school he was used to it. )
The remarkable thing about all of it was that it was entirely ritualised. It could have been scripted, and it was often delivered with an undertone of genuine humour.
So familiar did the order, “Stand by your beds!” become to all ex-servicemen (and women) that it passed into the language. People used it when they walked into workplaces, raising a rueful smile of reminiscence. Even now, you hear it from time to time. Now it’s a joke. Then, it could loosen strong men’s bowels.
Monday, 28 December 2009
Monday, 21 December 2009
Monkeys and Parrots 5.
How to display your bootlaces.
Quite a lot of my "Monkeys and Parrots" memoir -- most of it in fact, as it currently stands -- is about my National Service with the Royal Corps of Signals. There's a longish section on the basic training we had at Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire, in the freezing Winter of 55 -- 56. There are a few paragraphs about the rigours of kit inspection, and this little snippet describes how we had to display our spare bootlaces.
Spare bootlaces. The dividing line between spare bootlaces and insanity is finer than you think. That’s because this is how, in 1955, with the Cold War at its height, the Royal Corps of Signals, at the very core of the Free World’s communications systems, displayed its spare bootlaces for inspection.
First, you took your bootlace -- which was of leather and maybe two or three millimetres square in section – and coiled it tightly so that it became a flat disc a little larger than an old penny. Then, using a piece of black cotton, you tied it so that it would stay coiled.
That was just the start, the easy bit. The object now was to treat the coiled bootlace in such a way that the coils themselves – and, if possible, the cotton thread -- became invisible, and you were left holding a shining black disc. This you achieved first by ironing the bootlace disc on both sides with a hot iron, and then by polishing it with boot polish. The process was repeated until you had an object of beauty the real nature of which could not have been guessed by anyone outside of the madhouse which was the armed forces in the Nineteen Fifties.
From your two spare bootlaces you crafted two of these jewel-like objects, and displayed them proudly, in their allocated correct positions, on your kit layout.
The really, really, sad thing about this was that you could get really absorbed in the task -- relishing the challenge of producing the best spare bootlace display in the Regiment.
All of this kind of thing has been described many times, and I only mention it here so as to confirm its truth, in support of all those National Service veterans who are assumed to be rambling and senile when they tell their tales. Don’t trouble your head wondering at the sense of it all, because there never was any. However incredible the stories you hear of bullshit in the barrack rooms, don’t doubt, only believe.
How to display your bootlaces.
Quite a lot of my "Monkeys and Parrots" memoir -- most of it in fact, as it currently stands -- is about my National Service with the Royal Corps of Signals. There's a longish section on the basic training we had at Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire, in the freezing Winter of 55 -- 56. There are a few paragraphs about the rigours of kit inspection, and this little snippet describes how we had to display our spare bootlaces.
Spare bootlaces. The dividing line between spare bootlaces and insanity is finer than you think. That’s because this is how, in 1955, with the Cold War at its height, the Royal Corps of Signals, at the very core of the Free World’s communications systems, displayed its spare bootlaces for inspection.
First, you took your bootlace -- which was of leather and maybe two or three millimetres square in section – and coiled it tightly so that it became a flat disc a little larger than an old penny. Then, using a piece of black cotton, you tied it so that it would stay coiled.
That was just the start, the easy bit. The object now was to treat the coiled bootlace in such a way that the coils themselves – and, if possible, the cotton thread -- became invisible, and you were left holding a shining black disc. This you achieved first by ironing the bootlace disc on both sides with a hot iron, and then by polishing it with boot polish. The process was repeated until you had an object of beauty the real nature of which could not have been guessed by anyone outside of the madhouse which was the armed forces in the Nineteen Fifties.
From your two spare bootlaces you crafted two of these jewel-like objects, and displayed them proudly, in their allocated correct positions, on your kit layout.
The really, really, sad thing about this was that you could get really absorbed in the task -- relishing the challenge of producing the best spare bootlace display in the Regiment.
All of this kind of thing has been described many times, and I only mention it here so as to confirm its truth, in support of all those National Service veterans who are assumed to be rambling and senile when they tell their tales. Don’t trouble your head wondering at the sense of it all, because there never was any. However incredible the stories you hear of bullshit in the barrack rooms, don’t doubt, only believe.
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Monkeys and Parrots 4
I'm posting excerpts -- and they are excerpts, just tasters -- from my unpublished account of the years when I in my teens and early twenties, at a time when the world was a different place. This one is called --
A small reunion.
In 2007 a handful – maybe a dozen – elderly people gathered at a pleasant Yorkshire hotel on a beautiful Summer day. I’d helped to bring them together, and they are all my friends, although we meet but rarely. What we have in common is that we were all in the same form at school. In those days, secondary schools like ours – a local authority grammar school – didn’t have the kind of flexible timetables that allow different kinds of grouping through the day. You stayed with your form all day, for almost everything. As a result you became a very close knit band. Just how close is best shown by the fact that in about 1990 we had a proper reunion which was attended by all but two of the original class of thirty.
There weren’t that many of us there in 2007 – maybe a dozen, and about the same number the following year when we met again at the house of one of our number. Both gatherings were sparked off by the knowledge that during 2006 two of our number had died, the beginning, we accepted, of a steady attrition that will gradually accelerate now towards its natural end.
The 2007 reunion, full of memories of the ones who had died, was quite beautiful, really, like a scene from a tranquil, life-affirming English film. It was so wonderful to see these old friends, very much in their prime, smiling, relaxed, entirely comfortable with each other. It was, I should have explained, a mixed school that we went to, and so we were a mixed group of elderly folk. Now, though, we were free of the adolescent hormonal tides and tensions that flowed through us in those far-off school days. Well, almost at any rate. I, for one, and I guess this applied to everyone, was conscious all the time that many of us knew toe-curlingly embarrassing things about each other, all not so much suppressed as deliberately dismissed as irrelevant. Only occasionally, perhaps, did someone wonder why the person across the table smiled in a certain way, or suddenly went mentally into another place.
And do you know, the other thing about being free of the hormone thing is that we saw each other so much more clearly. We were free of adolescent self-obsessed posturing and inhibitions, and frankly I think we’ve mostly turned out to be nicer people than we were in those far off days. Nothing to prove now, I suppose.
Something else struck me, too. It was that some people were instantly recognizable, little changed in over fifty years. Others were the exact opposite – you could stare for ever and not see any sign of the younger version. What does that signify? Well, nothing really, except that people are different from each other.
What did we talk about? Why, school of course. What else? Our memories were the usual ones – this or that teacher, what happened to old so-and-so. There were revelations – things you didn’t know about people, including the stories that everybody except you knew at the time. We all had slightly different takes on our teachers, because we weren’t all equally good at everything. So there were those who really liked our Latin teacher, to me a fearsome lady who gave me nightmares.
On the whole, though, the memories were good ones.
A small reunion.
In 2007 a handful – maybe a dozen – elderly people gathered at a pleasant Yorkshire hotel on a beautiful Summer day. I’d helped to bring them together, and they are all my friends, although we meet but rarely. What we have in common is that we were all in the same form at school. In those days, secondary schools like ours – a local authority grammar school – didn’t have the kind of flexible timetables that allow different kinds of grouping through the day. You stayed with your form all day, for almost everything. As a result you became a very close knit band. Just how close is best shown by the fact that in about 1990 we had a proper reunion which was attended by all but two of the original class of thirty.
There weren’t that many of us there in 2007 – maybe a dozen, and about the same number the following year when we met again at the house of one of our number. Both gatherings were sparked off by the knowledge that during 2006 two of our number had died, the beginning, we accepted, of a steady attrition that will gradually accelerate now towards its natural end.
The 2007 reunion, full of memories of the ones who had died, was quite beautiful, really, like a scene from a tranquil, life-affirming English film. It was so wonderful to see these old friends, very much in their prime, smiling, relaxed, entirely comfortable with each other. It was, I should have explained, a mixed school that we went to, and so we were a mixed group of elderly folk. Now, though, we were free of the adolescent hormonal tides and tensions that flowed through us in those far-off school days. Well, almost at any rate. I, for one, and I guess this applied to everyone, was conscious all the time that many of us knew toe-curlingly embarrassing things about each other, all not so much suppressed as deliberately dismissed as irrelevant. Only occasionally, perhaps, did someone wonder why the person across the table smiled in a certain way, or suddenly went mentally into another place.
And do you know, the other thing about being free of the hormone thing is that we saw each other so much more clearly. We were free of adolescent self-obsessed posturing and inhibitions, and frankly I think we’ve mostly turned out to be nicer people than we were in those far off days. Nothing to prove now, I suppose.
Something else struck me, too. It was that some people were instantly recognizable, little changed in over fifty years. Others were the exact opposite – you could stare for ever and not see any sign of the younger version. What does that signify? Well, nothing really, except that people are different from each other.
What did we talk about? Why, school of course. What else? Our memories were the usual ones – this or that teacher, what happened to old so-and-so. There were revelations – things you didn’t know about people, including the stories that everybody except you knew at the time. We all had slightly different takes on our teachers, because we weren’t all equally good at everything. So there were those who really liked our Latin teacher, to me a fearsome lady who gave me nightmares.
On the whole, though, the memories were good ones.
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Monkeys and Parrots 3
The centre of my existence for quite a long time at school was a small room in one of the classroom blocks. I had an interest in model aeroplanes at the time, and I and a group of like-minded nerds asked the head if we could have an aeromodelling club at school. He agreed, and actually gave us our little room. We proposed to use it, so we said, for building models, and we were allowed to go there at lunchtimes.
In fact, we did no model building there at all. We brought half-built models in from home and left them around. We even put on a special exhibition of our work one day, which gained us considerable, and much needed brownie points, even though not one stick of what we exhibited had originated in school. No, the modelry was where we spent all our time nattering and laughing, indulging, as teenagers always have done, in what one of my friends always called “erotic parlance”. The room was always known as “The Modelry” and was effectively our common room, a sort of disreputable alternative to the prefects’ room, of which, needless, to say, I was never a member. The de facto leader of our band of brigands was a very big boy always known as “Boris” (His name was actually David, but not many people knew it -- teachers always used surnames in those days anyway) At fourteen Boris was six feet four inches tall and weighed fourteen stone - a good lad to be friends with. He was an expert builder of model planes, a good cyclist, and competent pianist and was very, very funny. He was also, in his spare time, a flight sergeant in the Air Training Corps. His descriptions, with sound effects and facial grimaces, of the conduct and habits of the young louts he took to annual camp had us in stitches.
Tragically, and short-sightedly, the school establishment didn’t rate him at all, because, well, he didn’t fit the mould. Even his leadership of the model club, with the exhibition which he organised, was looked on with patronising amusement. Of his Air Cadet activities the school knew nothing, yet he'd gathered lots of serious qualifications as a Cadet. He was one of the few to become a cadet senior NCO, so it was clear the Corps respected him and gave him responsibility. Yet he was a thorn in the flesh of his teachers and left school before taking any exams. Why did they let that happen? Eventually, he went into the Royal Air Force where he became an Air Electronics Officer, flying with the “V” Force of advanced jet bombers, Victor, Valiant and Vulcan, that carried our nuclear deterrent. He'd simply got his education elsewhere, in a different way.
So the years passed, and in no time we were sixteen, ready to go into the sixth form. Our form members knew each other very well by then, and we were, by modern standards, young men and women. The implications of that, however, will have to wait till next time.
The story of Boris will be recognisable to many. The student who's rebellious at school but has a different sort of life outside -- in sport, maybe, or a band, or a cheerleader group. Fortunately Boris's outside life led directly and seamlessly to a worthwhile technical career. These days, I suppose -- I hope -- that a school would know about Boris's ATC life, would celebrate it, and add it to his portfolio in some way.
In fact, we did no model building there at all. We brought half-built models in from home and left them around. We even put on a special exhibition of our work one day, which gained us considerable, and much needed brownie points, even though not one stick of what we exhibited had originated in school. No, the modelry was where we spent all our time nattering and laughing, indulging, as teenagers always have done, in what one of my friends always called “erotic parlance”. The room was always known as “The Modelry” and was effectively our common room, a sort of disreputable alternative to the prefects’ room, of which, needless, to say, I was never a member. The de facto leader of our band of brigands was a very big boy always known as “Boris” (His name was actually David, but not many people knew it -- teachers always used surnames in those days anyway) At fourteen Boris was six feet four inches tall and weighed fourteen stone - a good lad to be friends with. He was an expert builder of model planes, a good cyclist, and competent pianist and was very, very funny. He was also, in his spare time, a flight sergeant in the Air Training Corps. His descriptions, with sound effects and facial grimaces, of the conduct and habits of the young louts he took to annual camp had us in stitches.
Tragically, and short-sightedly, the school establishment didn’t rate him at all, because, well, he didn’t fit the mould. Even his leadership of the model club, with the exhibition which he organised, was looked on with patronising amusement. Of his Air Cadet activities the school knew nothing, yet he'd gathered lots of serious qualifications as a Cadet. He was one of the few to become a cadet senior NCO, so it was clear the Corps respected him and gave him responsibility. Yet he was a thorn in the flesh of his teachers and left school before taking any exams. Why did they let that happen? Eventually, he went into the Royal Air Force where he became an Air Electronics Officer, flying with the “V” Force of advanced jet bombers, Victor, Valiant and Vulcan, that carried our nuclear deterrent. He'd simply got his education elsewhere, in a different way.
So the years passed, and in no time we were sixteen, ready to go into the sixth form. Our form members knew each other very well by then, and we were, by modern standards, young men and women. The implications of that, however, will have to wait till next time.
The story of Boris will be recognisable to many. The student who's rebellious at school but has a different sort of life outside -- in sport, maybe, or a band, or a cheerleader group. Fortunately Boris's outside life led directly and seamlessly to a worthwhile technical career. These days, I suppose -- I hope -- that a school would know about Boris's ATC life, would celebrate it, and add it to his portfolio in some way.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
