Boy Entrant; The Recollections of a Royal Air Force Brat (42 page)

Jack Hawkins spoke again to pay tribute to Malta and, as we heard his voice for the second time that evening, spotlights lit up a huge replica of the George Cross that hung over the arena. We were told that from that time on, Malta has been formally known as Malta, GC.

All too soon, the Royal Tournament was over. At that moment I felt that having been able to watch such a great spectacle more than made up for the disappointment that I had felt earlier about our band only being the warm-up act. And after watching the quality and professionalism of the other participants, I felt that it had been a privilege to have even been included in the same show.

We wearily made our way out of the arena and climbed aboard our coach for the journey back to RAF Halton, where we would spend the night. There wasn’t much to see as the coach sped through increasingly empty streets, heading out from the centre of the city. Street lamps flashed past and I think I fell asleep in the soft comfort of the snug seat. At Halton, we hastily made our beds and tumbled into them exhausted. It had been a long but eventful day.

CHAPTER 10

Coffee and Biscuits with Mr. D

O
ur return to St. Athan coincided with the Whitsun holiday weekend, during which the majority of boys were able to go home on a 96-hour leave pass. For those of us who hailed from the far-flung corners of the British Isles, the travel time needed to get home and back within the 96-hour period made it an impractical proposition. But life is full of compensations and we could at least look forward to a few fleeting days of easier life on camp and a lot less competition when it came to wooing the local girls.

I remember being at Barry Island that weekend in warm sunny weather, where Paddy McGowan and I practised a little of our Irish charm on a couple of attractive Welsh lasses. Paddy came from Portstewart—a small seaside resort about five miles from my home town and had recently come up to the Wings as a member of the 30th Entry.

Our uniforms, coupled with good grooming, were our greatest assets when it came to attracting girls, so a smartly turned out appearance with well-shined buttons and boots, together with well pressed trousers and tunics was a “must”. Anything else that could be used to enhance this basic appearance, without making us targets for the constantly-patrolling snoops, was an advantage. By rights, I should have removed my temporary corporal trumpeter stripes, now that the Royal Tournament was over. But with no one around to challenge my right to wear the stripes, I conveniently “forgot” to remove them for the duration of the long weekend, hoping they would make a big impression on the fair sex.

It seemed to work, because Paddy and I spent a great Whitsun weekend as a foursome in the company of some girls we met. In retrospect, it’s probably a safe bet that the stripes had absolutely no influence on the young lady that I had somehow managed to impress, but they certainly helped to boost my self-confidence and, in the end, that’s what seems to count most in all of life’s challenges.

It was just as well that the long weekend had been pleasant, because the week that followed didn’t start off very well. On the first day back in Workshops after the break, Corporal Tech. Turnbull, my class instructor, passed on a message that I was to immediately go and see Mr. Dimbleby, the Warrant Officer in charge of our training. My stomach suddenly felt knotted up on hearing this and I immediately headed towards Dimbleby’s office, anxiously pulling on my beret as I left the classroom. On my way there, I recalled Ginge Brown’s description of “having coffee and biscuits” with the big man. It sounded funny at the time, especially when it was happening to someone else, but now it looked as though the joke was on me and it didn’t seem funny in the slightest.

On arriving at Mr. Dimbleby’s office, I knocked timidly on the open door, causing him to look up and see a very nervous Boy Entrant standing in the doorway, clad in denim overalls.

I stepped across the threshold into the small office, gently closing the door as I did so and came to attention in front of his desk.

“Okay, you can stand at ease lad,” he said, peering up at me over his half-rim glasses.

He was a slightly rotund middle-aged man and although, from a distance, I had at first mistaken him to be a Warrant Officer, it was now obvious that the insignia on the cuff of his tunic was not a Warrant Officer’s “Tate & Lyle”—the RAF slang for the Royal coat of arms worn as a badge of rank by WOs. It was actually a slightly different insignia that incorporated the Royal Coat Of Arms surmounted by a small gold RAF eagle, with the combination enclosed within a larger laurel wreath. This, in fact, was the badge of Master Aircrew. In other words, he had served as an aircrew member, achieving a rank equivalent to that of a Warrant Officer. On the left side of his chest, just above a double row of campaign medal ribbons, he wore the “brevet” of a Flight Engineer. This was a small disc-shaped piece of black cloth inscribed with a white letter “E” inside a gold coloured laurel wreath. From the left side of the disc, a single feathered wing jutted upwards at an angle, its tip pointing towards the wearer’s left shoulder. In my personal gallery of heroes and villains, this put him on the side of the good guys—non-commissioned aircrew members were heroes to me.

Following his instruction, I stood at ease, but felt far from really being at ease. Mr. Dimbleby—the Mister title was commonly accorded to Warrant Officers and Master Aircrew—picked up a manila file folder from his desktop and methodically paged through the paperwork inside, frowned and then looked up at me.

“Oh, the Royal Tournament,” he said, nodding his head slowly and pronouncing the words in a mock upper-crust voice. This little piece of sarcasm effectively deflated any hope I had that band practice would be accepted as a legitimate excuse for my poor academic performance. Dimbleby pushed himself up from his chair and came around the desk to where I stood, studying the open file folder that he held in both hands as he walked.

“Do you want to pass out with your Entry?” He asked, the tone of his voice suggesting that the answer had better be yes.

“Yessir,” I replied truthfully.

“Well, lad,” he said, his face now only inches from mine, “if I were in your shoes, I would give up the band and start reading my notes a lot more. You might still be able to pass out with your Entry, but only if you work very hard from now on.”

He walked back around his desk and settled down into his chair before continuing, “The best advice I can offer you is to give up the band. Some people can combine the band
and
their trade training, but you’re not one of them. You need to concentrate on the thing that’s most important and leave band playing to those who can do both.” He paused, then, “Do I make myself clear?”

The air in the workshop area seemed much cooler and the atmosphere less claustrophobic than it had been just a moment ago, in the confines of that small room. I had already known, before being invited for “coffee and biscuits” with Mr. Dimbleby, that I’d fared badly in the end of term trade test. The Squadron Leader who had interviewed me during my Induction had warned that the subject matter in my chosen trade as an aircraft electrician would be difficult and that I would have to work very hard to pass the course. Well, he was right. We had long since passed through the simple topics like navigation lights and other 24 volts DC equipment.

Some weeks previously, we had entered into the realm of alternating current, or AC as it was more commonly known. Direct current had been difficult enough, but in the end it was easy to understand. You flipped a switch and the current flowed through the circuit and did the work. There were formulas like Ohm’s Law and mnemonics such as Maxwell’s right-hand corkscrew rule to memorize, but they were relatively simple to grasp. Alternating current, on the other hand, behaved in mysterious
ways. It wasn’t just satisfied with the resistance in a circuit. Oh no, it had to behave weirdly with coils and suchlike, creating something else called reactance that was treated like resistance, but couldn’t be measured directly with an ohmmeter and was only present when AC was applied to the circuit. Not only that, alternating current
alternates
—it changes from positive to negative several times a second. On aircraft this change from positive to negative then back to positive and so on, occurs 400 times every second. For certain circuits this so-called frequency can be as much as 1600 cycles per second. On top of that, there are all kinds of mathematical relationships to contend with that involve things like the square roots of 2 and 3, or pi or the sines and cosines of angles, all of which make quick mental arithmetic calculations all but impossible.

Memorising all the important formulas and being able to use them in calculating things like voltage, power and reactance required lots of study and concentration. The sad truth now confronting me was that band practice for the Royal Tournament had taken up far too much time—time that would have been much better used in studying and learning the skills of my trade, to help me get successfully through the phase tests. Obviously, my band skive was a luxury I could no longer afford, so I promptly handed in my trumpet and removed the little crossed-trumpets badge from my sleeve. The corporal trumpeter stripes had already been removed by this time.

There was some consolation in that I had at least managed to elude relegation to the 30th Entry, but such a close call didn’t leave me totally unscathed. Because my trade test results were so low, the proficiency badge that most others were awarded was withheld in my case. When Corporal Longfellow handed out sets of two miniature chevrons that were to replace the single inverted chevron worn by most of us on the cuff of our right sleeves, there wasn’t a set for me. My name was called out, filling me with hope that I would get the second stripe anyway, but Longfellow only handed me my permanent pass without the stripes. When I looked inside the pass, I saw that an entry had been made in the authorization space for the second badge, but it was unsigned and a line had been neatly drawn through it. The message couldn’t have been plainer: I needed to earn that badge and the only way to do that was to study hard, starting off by making sure that I passed the weekly classroom tests.

* * *

Workshop practice was a regularly occurring feature of our training. Its purpose was to develop our skills in mastering the practical side of our chosen trades, so that we would be useful members of a servicing team when we went out into the regular air force, instead of just being useless human encyclopaedias of technical information. By this time, we were learning and practising the intricacies of making soldered connections to multi-connector plugs and sockets. It took considerable skill to neatly solder individual wires into the reverse ends of between 12 and 15 of the tightly-spaced pins that were packed within a diameter of approximately one and a half inches. Using too much solder would always result in large blobs of the material jutting out from the connections, just begging to cause short circuits between the pins. Applying insufficient heat to a joint during the soldering process, however, would eventually result in oxidisation between the solder and the pin, causing a gradual increase in electrical resistance at the connection that would create problems later on.

During this particular period of workshop practice, some of my fellow classmates stumbled on an easy way to make some extra money. In normal circumstances, such initiative might be considered highly praiseworthy and worthy of encouragement. But in this case, the circumstances could hardly be described as normal, and that’s simply because the boys weren’t actually earning any cash. No, in fact when I say they were making extra money what I mean is that they were quite literally manufacturing it!

It all started as a joke.

At the outset of the session, we had been given the task of mounting a number of electrical components on a 20 cm square of blank aluminium sheet metal, in the precise layout indicated by an engineering drawing. One of these components was a multi-pin plug, typical of the type used for interface connections on aircraft electronic components. The drawing called for a perfectly circular hole to be cut at a specific location on the metal square and into which the multi-pin plug was to be installed. The hole needed to be just wide enough to accept the plug, with the certainty hanging over our heads that course marks would be deducted if it was too wide, or if it was any shape other than a perfect circle. The only tools available for achieving this were a shared hand drill and the hand files contained in our own tool bags. Most of the waste metal would be removed by drilling a circle of small holes slightly within the prescribed diameter and then rounding out the hole to its final dimension by carefully filing away the remaining metal.