Boy Entrant; The Recollections of a Royal Air Force Brat (5 page)

Docking at Liverpool wasn’t an easy business. The ship entered a lock, which was then slowly flooded to raise the water level by several feet. The operation lasted for what seemed an eternity until, finally, the upper lock gates swung open and we moved forward a short distance to tie up at Princes Dock. On the shore I caught a glimpse of my first real live British Bobby with his peculiarly English policeman’s helmet. The policemen of the Royal Ulster Constabulary that I was used to seeing in Northern Ireland wore flat peaked hats and walked around with holstered revolvers at their waists. This policeman, like all British Bobbies of those days, was completely unarmed. He stood by the gangplank as we disembarked and I somehow expected him to say “Evening all!” like Dixon of Dock Green used to do on TV.

Sergeant Malloy gathered us together and then we walked the half a mile distance to Lime Street Station, as a group, to catch our train for Cosford. This was a huge railway station, making my little Coleraine station seem like something out of Toytown and even making Belfast’s York Road look pathetically small. And the sulphur laden smoke belching out of all those coal-fired steam engines filled the air with an acrid odour that was much, much worse than the smell of the Mersey. I remember a popular folk song from around that time that went by the title Maggie May. Not the one that Rod Stewart made popular years later, but an older more traditional one with a chorus that went…

Oh, Maggie, Maggie May,

They have taken her away,

And she’ll never walk down Lime Street anymore.

You may search from here to China

You’ll not find a girl that’s finer,

That is finer than my darlin
’ Maggie May.

Every time I heard that song and especially the line about Lime Street, that terrible smell would come right back into my nostrils and my stomach would retch just like it did that morning in Liverpool.

Sergeant Malloy found the train that we needed to board and shepherded us on to the platform. The train was made up of a dozen or so red and creamy yellow coloured British Railways carriages of the era. This colour scheme was popularly known as “blood and custard,” and for me, it stood out in stark contrast to the uniform emerald green colour of railway carriages back home in Ireland.

The RAF had reserved a few compartments for us, so we clambered aboard and were pleasantly surprised to discover that these English trains were really very comfortable. More so than those that I was used to back home and the quality of the seating was definitely a huge improvement over that of the
Ulster Monarch
. At last, we were able to spread out and had hopes of catching up on some sleep. But there was a great sense of excitement too and that made sleep impossible for a while. After all, this was another country and there was a lot to see and absorb.

After half an hour or so of waiting, the train finally pulled out of Lime Street station with a shriek of its steam whistle and a violent jerk, then we were on our way. At first we passed through the grimy industrial heart of Liverpool, but then soon found ourselves rolling smoothly through the sleepy early morning English countryside. There were fewer hedgerows and larger fields than in my native Ireland and the countryside seemed flatter too, all of which confirmed what I’d learned from Mr. Murphy during geography lessons at St. Malachy’s.

Our route took us to Crewe, a major railway intersection in those days, where we then needed to change to another train that would take us further south to West Bromwich. There was an hour or so to wait at Crewe for the next train, so we grabbed the opportunity to find something to eat. Getting food aboard the ship that morning had been next to impossible, so I was famished in spite of the queasiness brought on by the combination of ship’s motion and the unforgettable Liverpudlian aromas. But all we could find in the British Railways canteen were cellophane wrapped egg sandwiches that seemed to have been prepared hours before. Since there was nothing else available, I bought a couple of the sandwiches and a cup of weak lukewarm British Railways tea to wash them down.

About thirty minutes after finishing my sandwiches, the train to West Bromwich arrived at the platform. We climbed aboard and settled down for the hour or two that it took until we pulled into West Brom. After that it was a local train, which wasn’t quite as comfortable as the other two main-line trains we’d travelled on earlier, that took us all the way into Royal Air Force Station Cosford, where we arrived some time around midday.

Sergeant Malloy shepherded us from the railway station to the Guardroom at the entrance to Cosford RAF station. There was some paperwork to complete and then, before long, we were issued with bedding, a white pint-sized “china” mug and a knife, fork and spoon. We were then led in procession, carrying our pile of blankets and dining implements, to a group of wooden barrack rooms, each of which contained probably twelve to fourteen RAF barrack-room style beds, but were otherwise sparsely furnished.

The beds, as I was to discover later, were identical throughout the service. The standard RAF barrack room bed consisted of a sturdy metal frame, painted light grey and supporting a horsehair mattress. The actual support for the mattress was a steel lattice stretched horizontally across the frame and held taut by a series of small springs set approximately six inches apart. One end of each spring was hooked into a hole in the frame, while the other end was fastened to a special eye on the lattice. Although the purpose of the springs was to keep the lattice stretched tightly, over time the springs on most beds weakened, resulting in the mattress sagging in the middle so that anyone sleeping on it couldn’t avoid rolling into a dip created by the sag. The depth of the dip depended on how old the springs were. In a transit type of billet, such as the ones in which we were being accommodated, the beds all tended to be old so the sag feature was very pronounced.

Bedding consisted of five thin blankets—what the folks back home called army blankets; a feather pillow in traditional striped cloth; a pair of white cotton sheets and a pillowcase. It was all strictly Spartan in nature, but I could have slept on a plank that night so it didn’t really matter. I don’t think there was any one of us that had a clue about how to make a bed, but we all managed to get our blankets and sheets creatively arranged into something that we could at least sleep in. Later, we would be taught the fine art of bed making, but that was still a little way down the road.

We were hungry. Not one of us had eaten a proper meal since leaving Belfast the previous day. Getting meals outside of the appointed mealtimes was apparently as easy as getting an Act of Parliament passed, but the good sergeant had been given a meal chitty at the Guardroom. He now wheedled the reluctant cookhouse staff into frying up some eggs, beans and potatoes for the ravenous youngsters in his charge. But long before the food was served up, one of the cookhouse staff brought out a big stainless steel urn filled with scalding hot tea, to which they had already added milk. Taking turns, we filled up our china mugs, added sugar and gulped it down. It didn’t taste much like the tea that I was used to at home but, as they say, it was wet and warm and I was grateful for it. Not only that, it helped stave off the hunger pangs until the meal was ready. Altogether, the food was plentiful and filling, which was more than I could say about the “home cooked” near-starvation diet that I suffered at the hands of my stepmother, Annie. Yep, I thought, this is alright!

Our visit to Cosford lasted something like four days in all. During that time, in addition to being poked and prodded by doctors, we were interviewed individually by officers whose job it was to gauge our suitability for training and to steer us into the trades they felt we might best be suited for. The Squadron Leader who interviewed me looked at my file and then smilingly informed me that I met the requirements to train as an aircraft electrical mechanic. He told me that this was a difficult trade to get into; that there weren’t many openings and that I should feel privileged to have been selected. But, he warned, the training would be difficult and so I needed to work hard if I wanted to pass out as a fully-fledged Aircraft Electric Mechanic at the end of the Boy Entrant training. I was so thrilled that I’d been given the trade of my choice that I really only half heard what he said about working hard and all that stuff. It was the sort of speech that grownups always seemed to make, but my thoughts were soaring up amongst the clouds where I saw visions of the people who would be proud of me and the riches and rewards that learning a trade would bring with it. Here at last was my chance to break free from the chains that had shackled me up until now—my oppressive family life and the unfair Northern Ireland politics of religion that prevented me from getting into a decent trade. Would I be bold enough to reach out and grasp this opportunity? The need to decide loomed just around the corner.

In between interviews and medical examinations, the remainder of our stay at Cosford consisted of being shown something of the Boy Entrant way of life. A “Leading Boy” took us on a tour of the Catering Training School, proudly showing us huge vats in which the food was cooked, mixing machines and a weird implement that was supposed to be used for shredding beef. I’d never before heard of beef being shredded, let alone there being a special piece of equipment for accomplishing the task. As the highlight of the tour, he led us into a room that contained a fine display of little hors d’oeuvres and petit fours. We were allowed to gaze at them for a few moments before the Leading Boy proudly informed us that Boy Entrant trainee caterers had created them that very day. Someone asked what was going to happen to them, maybe hoping that we might be allowed to sample some. But our tour guide loftily replied that they would be served in the Boy Entrants’ mess. That took some believing! Such delicacies just didn’t seem to go with the class of food we’d become accustomed to partaking in the Boy Entrants’ mess.

Another tour guide took us to a room full of desks with the kind of Morse code keys that used to be seen in the old Western films. We were told that this is where the Wireless Telegraphers were trained to send and receive code. The same tour also introduced us to another high-tech item known as the teleprinter. Nowadays, this venerable machine would be classified as a museum piece, having been replaced first by the fax machine and then by the modern miracle of e-mail. But, at the time, it was impressive.

Mostly, however, these were ho-hum tours. I wasn’t interested in being a wireless telegrapher and I sure as hell didn’t want to be a caterer. No, what really got my juices flowing was a tour of the Boy Entrant training workshops. These were in hangars and they had real live aircraft in there. A Hawker Hunter sat proudly in one of the hangar workshops. It was the first one I’d ever seen at close range and it had to be one of the most beautiful things that I’d ever laid eyes on. Even though its flying days were finished, it was every inch a thoroughbred, looking sleek and shiny sitting there in its dark green and light grey camouflage livery with the swept-back wings and streamlined Perspex canopy gleaming and glinting in the hangar lights. We saw some other planes in the hangar; a Vampire I believe and some prop-jobs, but seeing the Hunter was my epiphany. It made me realize that caring for and being around beautiful aircraft such as this was what I wanted to do.

Up to this point, everything had been something of a boyish adventure—a game, really. Events had just progressed from the time that I’d answered the newspaper advert, like a snowball rolling downhill that starts off small, but grows larger and speeds up with every inch it travels. Now the situation had become serious and I had an important decision to make. There was still time to back out and some boys did, but I didn’t want to do that. So I made the decision that this was to be my future—it was what I wanted to do—promising myself that I would stay on this path wherever it led. I rationalized that even though it would subject me to military discipline and training and I’d seen and heard enough to have no illusions about that, it couldn’t be worse than the unhappy life from which I was desperately trying to escape. In fact it seemed to hold out great promise. And now, with the hindsight of years, I regard that decision as the most important one that I ever made, without exception, even though I was a boy of only 15 at the time. The space age that was just dawning had a name for it; I had finally achieved escape velocity. There would be difficulties ahead for sure, but I still shudder to think how my life might have worked out if I’d backed off and not made that very important choice.

During our few days at Cosford, the Boy Entrant’s uniform became a familiar sight. It consisted of the basic regular RAF blue serge tunic and trousers, but with a few embellishments, the most striking of which was the hat. There was nothing remarkable about it in itself, just the standard RAF issue, but what made it different was the brightly coloured chequered hatband—two rows of alternating colours—worn by Boy Entrants in place of the black hatbands worn by regular RAF servicemen. I recall that the pattern on the hatband of a Boy Entrant being trained in the catering trade, who escorted a party of us on a tour of the Catering Training School, consisted of red and yellow squares. But that was only one colour scheme; there were others, although his was the only one that sticks in my memory from the visit to Cosford.

Two other interesting features elevated the Boy Entrant uniform above the drabness of its regular service counterpart. One of these was what looked like a brass cartwheel about one and a half inches in diameter worn on the upper sleeve and set against a coloured disc that was slightly larger at about two inches in diameter. The other feature was the set of small upside-down stripes worn by many boys at wrist level on the cuff of their tunics. Some had one stripe, some had two and others had three. I could now picture myself in one of those uniforms and was eager to get on with the process of being able to wear one soon. But all in good time. First, we had to go back to our homes and wait until October to be called for our induction into the Service.