In My Wildest Dreams (22 page)

Another job handed to me was to write a weekly précis of the films coming up at the local cinema in Wanstead. This only involved collecting the publicity material from the manager, roughly working out the story and compiling the column. It assured me of a free seat at the pictures twice a week, although the manager made it clear that if I took anyone else they would have to pay and I was accountable for such accessories as ice cream.

From my thirty shillings a week and what I could add to my expenses, I had to pay fifteen shillings for my keep at the hostel. Next door lived a nice wealthy couple called Hensher – he was a furniture manufacturer – who, wanting to encourage me on my way through life, told me that if I ever needed anything, but
anything,
1 was to go to them. Many years later I met with widowed Mrs Hensher on a cruise liner and she recalled that the only imposition I made on their generosity was on the night immediately following their offer. 'We wondered what you wanted,' she laughed. 'You came to the door and reminded us that we offered to help you in any way – and then asked if we had anything you could use to go to a fancy dress ball. We gave you a table cloth and you went as an Arab.'

I recall the ball well because the reporter assigned to cover it for the paper, a handsome lad with a well-rehearsed enigmatic smile and a trilby, put a card saying 'Press' in his hat brim and won a prize as a reporter. Walking home with Tom Merrin, we found a horse with a bowed head wandering towards us through the gloom. It had a forlorn halter around its neck and Tom suggested that we should tie it to somebody's door knocker. There was a small cottage nearby and we coaxed the horse down the garden path and hitched him to the brass knocker. As he moved about the knocker began to knock and an old lady wearing a nightie who came to the door had a terrible fright when the horse walked in.

With my pocket money I began buying books. Neville Cardus's
Autobiography
was the first and
How to be a Sporting Journalist
followed, and then
The English Counties in Pictures
and
The Poems of Rupert Brooke.
A girl I had taken to a few dances gave me a
Bedside Shakespeare,
which was the nearest we ever got to any bedside. These books are on my shelves today, each with the square-lettered inscription: 'L.J. Thomas, Iona House, Hollybush Hill, Snaresbrook, London, E. 11.'

My life on the paper was enjoyable although every week at Voluntary Place was an unending frenzy. When so many editions were produced in such a rush on such machinery and with such facilities, mistakes did creep in. There was a libel action when a court report stated that a man had cruelly burned his wife with a
red-hot
poker. The poker had not been red, but white. The man's defence was that he did not realise it was hot. Then someone in error consulted a year-old calendar and all the various twenty-five papers announced that summer time would begin (or end) on the Sunday night. It was a week early. People missed appointments, children were sent to bed at the wrong time, and a bus company was in chaos. Somehow the extraordinary monster croaked on.

When Christmas came it seemed quite logical that I should go back to Dickies. Unfortunately, on the usual basis that I was the one without family commitments, I was assigned to cover a football match at Ilford on Christmas morning. In those days there was a Christmas Day train service and at the final whistle I hared down the street to Newbury Park Station and arrived at Kingston, on the extreme opposite side of London, at three in the afternoon, just in time for the plum pudding.

One day to my astonishment my brother turned up at the hostel. We had kept conscientiously in touch since our reunion but I was quite unprepared for his arrival. Barnardo's had again overlooked telling me. After a long six years we were to live together again. It was not easy. He was a roamer, a law unto himself, who liked to wander off with the milkman, and have me searching the streets for him as we had once done in faraway Newport.

He left his mark in various places, which included the incident of his initials carved in the soot underneath the local railway bridge. Last year I was being interviewed by a woman writer and I mentioned the death of my elder brother in Tokyo. When this appeared in print the word 'elder' was omitted and I had a letter from a boyhood friend of Roy's sympathising with me on his departure, and recalling that his initials were cut deep into the organ loft at Long Grendon in Buckinghamshire where he spent his years with his foster parents.

On the very day my brother arrived at the hostel, however, something else occurred. When I returned from work there was an important-looking letter waiting for me. On His Majesty's Service, it said, and instructed me to report to Devizes Barracks, Wiltshire, where they were going to make me into a soldier. Or try.

No bright-eyed, patriotic volunteer of the Great War ever looked forward to being recruited into the army more keenly than I did. At one point, between my registering for national service and receiving my reporting orders, I actually marched into the local Ministry of Labour office and demanded to know exactly
when
I was to be called up. I thought they had forgotten me. This eagerness to get into the army was only matched, after a short period in uniform, by my eagerness to get out again.

I decided that if I were to play my full part in the forces of my country then I ought to be posted to the Army News Service, which produced magazines and handled press and public relations. To this end I wrote to the War Office (on notepaper potently headed the
Woodford Times)
and informed them of the luck that was about to come their way. Since the primary thing that military life achieves in a conscript is to blunt ambition, this aim was at once thwarted. Its attainment was initially and lastingly damaged, I was later to realise, by my first interview with the civil servant to whom I reported for national service registration, some three months before my actual call-up.

'What is your profession?' he enquired over his glasses and the counter. Then, as if he thought the words might be too difficult: 'What do you do for a living?'

'I'm a journalist,' I replied, pulling my collar up and striking an attitude which looked as if I might start asking a few questions myself.

He sighed ill-temperedly and laid down his pen. 'Aw, come on, son,' he said. 'I haven't got all day. I'm fed up with you kids coming here and telling me you've got fancy jobs. You can't all be ruddy field marshals.'

'I'm a journalist,' I repeated firmly. I fiddled in my pocket for my union card.

'What sort?' he grunted. Then sarcastically, 'Editor of
The Times
are you?'

'Not yet,' I replied modestly. 'I'm a junior reporter.'

He wrote: 'Junior
porter.'
I did not see my records until many months later and I was shocked at the libel. In the event, I suppose, I was very lucky I did not spend my army time carrying loads around on my head.

One of the motives behind my eagerness to serve the King was my desire to cut for good the bonds that still held me to Barnardo's. After all I was eighteen, a trifle old for an orphan. In the event, of course, all I was doing was moving from one institution to another. For me the army was nothing new; I was back in a dormitory again. Another aspect of my military ambition was that it might enable me to travel overseas and meet a lower class of woman. I was weary and frustrated with the Saturday dances; with walking hand in hand, the cumbersome kissing on doorsteps and the long lonely treks home after the last bus had vanished. Nothing ever
happened.
Once, with trembling hand, I had touched a girl's nipple and as if I had pressed some activating button she burst into tears. This was no way for a lusty young chap to live.

So truly a Virgin Soldier, I boarded the train to Devizes, Wiltshire, to commence the great adventure. My calling-up papers had disappointed me in one way, in that I was not joining a famous regiment. The War Office had blundered. It also remained indifferent to my pointed suggestions about the Army News Service. I was joining the Royal Army Pay Corps. They were going to train me to be a clerk.

Reluctantly I cast aside the thoughts of putting through a telephone call to Whitehall protesting that I could scarcely add up my expenses let alone the army's, or demanding at least to be conscripted into my father's old regiment, the Royal Artillery, or into the Royal Engineers like my Uncle Bert who had fallen so fatally into Newport dry dock.

My complaint, of course, had firm foundations, for in the British Army it was commonplace knowledge that if you desired to be a parachutist then you applied for a posting as a cook. Equally any men with culinary skills found themselves dangling on strings in the sky. It seemed to me illogical that, at some expense, the Government was going to keep me for eighteen months doing something for which I had no aptitude whatever. Even when I eventually settled to the dull and drearsome life in the Pay Office in Singapore, I had good shorthand speed and I could type, but these jobs were allotted to civilians while I tried to make sense of army accounting.

My entry in
Who's Who
sums up succinctly the resulting period of my life. It says: 'Army service 1949-51. Rose to lance-corporal.'

At first, however, it was almost as brisk and interesting as I had hoped, even if I continued not meeting-women. Basic training, the nightmare of so many writers who have described it, I found to be enervating. It was July and the Wiltshire weather was fine. We pounded up and down the barrack square, shouting out the time of the movements like chorus girls; our feet emerging with howling blisters from boots stiff as tombstones. On the firing range I discovered that I could not close my left eye independently to sight my shots and so I either had to fire the 303 service rifle left-handed or somehow block out the vision of my non-aiming eye. We were among the last soldiers to use the elongated weapons, for they were phased out quickly after that, and the monster proved impossible to aim and control with the wrong hand. The first time I tried, the kick jolted it sideways, to the extreme anxiety of the recruit in the next firing position.

'Right, Thomas,' bellowed the sergeant-instructor. 'If you are not to inflict widespread and nasty casualties on your own side, you 'ad better block up your left mince pie with somatt.'

Thus I had to fix a handkerchief under my beret or steel helmet, hold the other end tight between my teeth, thus cutting out the vision of the contrary eye. 'Good lad, Thomas,' approved the instructor on inspecting the white device. 'When you want to surrender – wave it.'

For the first few days we went around like cardboard men in the new, stiff, ill-fitting, battledress. Some big youths had to embarrassingly march up and down the square in their own clothes and shoes until outsize supplies arrived. There were twenty or so men to a barrack hut, the buildings arranged in what were known as 'spiders', each section of huts being linked by corridors. A good-natured Scots corporal slept in a room at the end of ours and there was a similarly humorous NCO in the neighbouring barrack room, a big, blue-chinned Cockney whose shouted orders could be heard in distant Devizes on market day. The platoon sergeant was a small springy individual, a little action-man, full of bullshit as sergeants were thought and ought to be. Bullshit was a word we began to use with energy; also fuck and fucking. I had never used this oath since my mother warned me that it was the Devil's private word and I could drop dead on the spot, but now I renewed the acquaintanceship with enthusiasm, and I've been using it on and off ever since. Apart from 'bollocks' there were few other swearwords. The ones we used were designed to fit each and every occasion.

My years in Dickies had prepared me better than most for the army life. I was accustomed to hearing twenty different rhythms of breathing in a long, moonlit room. One night I heard one of the youths sobbing under his sheets. 'Don't worry,' I advised with the voice of experience. 'It's only for eighteen months.' At that he cried even louder.

Dollops of bromide were put in our tea, it was said to reduce our sexual urges, and there was plenty of shinning up ropes, running across fields while shouting, lying in ambush among red ants, marching and counter-marching and charging into a room full of tear gas (for what purpose I never discovered). There were lectures on the cleaning of rifles with a pull-through, oil bottle and a magic piece of material called four-by-two. And, of course, there was bayonet practice.

Nothing about military days has ever had so much note from writers as bayonet practice. To anyone of any sensibility it was the most revulsive and haunting part of training. Firing bullets at distant targets was a remote pretence, even though the holes they gouged out of the earth were ominously wide, but to thrust a bayonet was something more personal and proximate.

'Them channels, down the side of the weapon,' mentioned the action-man sergeant with anticipatory enjoyment. 'What are they for? Anyone?'

The squad regarded him dumbly, no one liking to mention it. The bayonets gleamed in the Devizes sun. 'Blood!' he would bark at us, running his finger pleasurably down the groove. 'For the blood of your enemy, the one what you have just slaughtered. Now, let's see how you can use them.'

A line of sand-stuffed sacks, already hanging like executed men, were the targets of this barbaric rite. It has become a familiar scene in books, plays and films, and for me, as for many, it never loses its personal horror. In Carl Foreman's film of
The Virgin Soldiers
two twee privates (one played by the ballet dancer Wayne Sleep, then unknown, as were others in the cast who subsequently became famous) are required to charge at the sacks. As they do they emit the traditional howl: 'Stick it in – twist it – pull it out.' One of them faints.

It was very near the truth. In the unlikely event of the Royal Army Pay Corps having to charge 'over the top', steel pointing towards enemy torsos, then I'm afraid there were more than a few, myself included, who would have been unable to bring themselves to make the final deadly thrust and would have doubtless known the consequences.

What was extraordinary, however, considering that most of the recruits had been conscripted very much against their will, was the way we began to think and act like regimental robots. There was a barrack room competition with points awarded for the cleanest coal bucket, the neatest beds and for the smartest man on nightly guard duty. He would be 'stick-man', be dismissed from the duty and return to his comrades in triumph with another ten brownie points on the total. The eventual prize was an extra day's leave.

Such was the enthusiasm to get the man detailed for guard as shining as possible, that almost surrealistic rituals were observed. To send him unblemished to the parade was everything. Everyone in the barrack room would take a hand with the preparations. No virgin ever went to a marriage bed more enhanced. His uniform was ironed until the creases cut, his buttons and buckles were burnished as gold, lead weights inserted into his trousers ensured that they hung symmetrically over his balanced gaiters. Spit, blacking and other mystic and unmentionable combinations, steeped in army lore, went into the lustre of his boots. His hair was cut, his nose was blown, the interior barrel of his rifle reflected the probing human eye. At the end he was arrayed in his panoply and
carried,
yes
carried,
on a litter to the guard parade, so that no speck of dust would dull him.

The litter carriers, having deposited this khaki peacock, would then repair to the barrack room, for it was considered bad luck to remain watching the guard parade while the chosen soldier was drilled and inspected by the orderly officer. If he returned to the room, having been dismissed from the guard, there followed scenes of rejoicing. Often he did not return, for competition was keen, and we would wait with gradually descending spirits. Once our champion, having failed, returned during his four hours off-duty, and burst into remorseful tears. Admittedly it was the youth I had heard crying in the night, an emotional individual with the unfortunate surname Bandy, but it was an emotive moment. We had sent him out spick and shining and he had failed the officer's survey.

'I farted,' he wailed. 'I couldn't help it. I just farted.'

Weekend leave came after a month in camp during which our social activities were confined to drinking cider at the NAAFI and having Sunday breakfast in the Church Army canteen. Our first freedom was greatly anticipated and on the Friday night there was a queue to use the barrack room ironing board. I had to admit to myself, as I stared into the full length mirror provided at the gate guardhouse (to make sure you looked smart as you left camp), that the vision presented was somewhat less than the conquering hero. My uniform remained as stiff as sandpaper except at the knees and elbows. I wore the insignia of the Aldershot District on my arm, crossed searchlights which looked reasonably martial, but the words Royal Army Pay Corps bowed across each shoulder in blue and yellow did nothing but diminish the warrior image. Some of the old hands wore shoulder flashes which merely said 'RAPC. Enquiring girls in pubs and dance halls could then be told that it was the Royal Army Parachute Corps ('Tomorrow could be my last day') and quite a lot of them believed it.

If the aspect of a non-combatant was something I wished to avoid then my beret betrayed me even more than the shoulder flashes. It was of the old-fashioned khaki variety, unyielding and ridiculous, squatting on my head like a squashed brown cardboard box. I had tried sleeping on it, stamping on it, soaking it overnight, throwing it against the barrack room wall, but it retained its stiff grotesque shape, and my embarrassment. Few men have ever looked less soldier like than the narrow youth topped with the ill-shaped hat who boarded the train for London on that August day. A kindly lady enquired whether the bristly khaki was very hot to wear and her husband grunted: 'He's too skinny to sweat, ain't you son.' My cap badge was a sturdy lion surmounted by a crown, below it a scroll with the words
Fide et Fiducia.
Faith and Confidence. Sitting in the corner seat looking at 'Royal Army Pay Corps' reflected in the window I had very little of either.

My leave was spent in the only home I knew – Dickies. Old boys strolled back regularly now that Vernon Paul had taken over as Superintendent. They went back, sometimes having only left the previous week, and sauntered about the terrible old pile with a proprietorial air and hands in pockets, something that the Gaffer had never allowed even on the most shivering of mornings when we were lined up in the open in our vests waiting for our turn in the wash-house.

Many of my generation were now doing national service and they strutted about more than most, telling the little kids how tough the home was in their day and relating unlikely adventures of their careers in the army or air force. One boy, Tom Chaffey, had joined the Royal Marines for
twenty-five
years, and he had a splendid and well-deserved dark blue dress uniform.