Growing up in Lee-on-the-Solent Page 9

  As soon as kit cleaning had been completed, it would be time to set the Flight ready for inspection, which in the beginning was every Friday night. Inspection was conducted by the two Leading Apprentices of the Flight, and I am sorry to say that they took their authority very seriously. Once our blankets, sheets and mattresses were folded to form a rigid box shape, the lining-up began. On each side of the Flight, the apprentices whose beds were nearest the entrance and those whose beds were furthest, after making sure that their own beds were the correct distance from the wall, held each end of a long piece of string against the end of their bed frames, pulled the string taut, and then each bed in turn was moved to line up exactly with the string. Great care had to be taken not to mark the floor. The process was then repeated for the mattresses, ‘blanket boxes’, wooden locker and trunks. Finally the benches and tables were lined up and then before you knew it. - joy of joys! - it was time for inspection. ‘Stand by your beds!’

  Maybe it was because the Leading Apprentices had been through a similar process, and thought that they were carrying on a tradition. Or possibly their promotions had gone to their heads. Whatever the reason, these inspections were a far from pleasant experience. We would stand at attention for a long time, listening to the very slowly approaching tirade of abuse, with comments such as: ‘where did you grow up?.... In a pig sty? ... Look at that filth.’ This would have been when the one carrying out the inspection had run his finger along some obscure part of the bed frame and found a minute area of dust. One particular evening the inspection had gone on longer than usual - it was approaching two hours - and there were only a couple of dozen of us in the Flight, when one of those who had already been inspected collapsed. That inspection ended there and then. After that, inspections never lasted more than an hour unless it was one that was carried out just before a Wing Commander’s inspection.

  Starting as a disorderly rabble, it was surprising how quickly we came to being a unit on the parade ground. There was a certain satisfaction in carrying out drill routines in a way that we performed each part in complete synchronism. ‘Atten...shun!’ followed by ‘Smack’ as one sound. This was the beginning of a ‘camaraderie’, in which the unit became much bigger and more important than its individual parts. Loyalty to the Flight became all-important. I would not like to pretend that it represented the establishment of lifelong friendships. Many members of the Flight, including me, still had their own aims and interests at heart. However, there was this all-embracing and profound sense of being a unit.

  Of course, the drill was only a small part of our training. We had lectures in a series of wooden huts and we would be marched from one hut to the next after each lecture. Over the course of a year we were tutored in a large range of subjects including electrical and electronic theory, blueprint drawing, and numerous others, in what was possibly the best education in the country. In addition to the square bashing I enjoyed the educational part immensely and did rather well, satisfying my urge to be up there with the best, possibly at times being the best. We also had time in the workshops where the ultimate aim was for each of us to produce a radio receiver. It started out with us having to file a piece of cylindrical brass rod into a rectangular block with a perfectly square cross-section. I can’t say I shone at this task, but I eventually got there. Hanging in the workshops there were large notices with messages such as ‘Near enough is no measurement’ and ‘Care and caution are essential when you work at high potential’.

  Outside B Squadron - Note the trousers don’t fit

  After six weeks we were given fourteen days’ leave and issued with travel warrants to get home and back. An encounter with a naval officer just after I had arrived at Portsmouth was a little confusing and embarrassing. As I passed this particular officer I saluted, longest way up, shortest way down, I hadn’t gone more than half a dozen paces when he called out ‘Hey you laddie, come here! ‘ I turned round and walked briskly back to the officer ‘Sir?’ ‘If I had to salute every serviceman that I passed along here I would never put my bloody arm down, do you understand?’ ‘Yes Sir!’ I replied. Almost forgetting myself, my arm twitched, but I managed not to salute him. He turned and made his way back to HMS Vernon, and I carried on to the Gosport ferry. I had the distinct feeling that if I hadn’t saluted him he would still have called me back. Later in the year when I was back at Cranwell, I witnessed an opposite kind of incident. We were on a break between lectures when a group of apprentices from one of the senior entries walked past a new Pilot Officer. He was so new that the single thin stripe on his sleeve shone with an iridescent blue. ‘Hey! You lot come here!’ They turned and strolled back. ‘Why didn’t you salute me?’ he demanded. ‘We’re on NAAFI break Sir.’ ‘Oh right’ said the newly qualified, and mystified. ‘Right - carry on.’ They strolled on, smiling to themselves.

  A ‘Rocky’ Start

  It was during my first leave that I met Jean Burtoo. With Brian and a couple of other lads, I was sitting on the beach near to where the old derelict building had once stood. We had been watching a replica Viking ship, like the one that is portrayed on the Gosport crest. It had been rowed from Gosport to the skeletal remains of the pier. Jean was with a girl friend and they were out for an afternoon stroll along the cliffs. They had stopped just above where we were on the beach. I guess she must have liked the look of me because she flipped a tiny pebble at me to attract my attention. The family joke is that I still have the scar from the ‘rock that she threw’. We started chatting; I was definitely attracted to her. At the time, she was working and living-in at a Dr Lyttle’s in Southsea, and this was her half day. Being in service at that time, especially when you ‘lived- in’, meant that your employer practically owned your life. After we had been talking for a while, she said that it was time for her to get back to where she worked, so I walked her to the Inn by the Sea bus-stop. When we got there she decided to phone Dr Lyttle’s wife from the public phone booth. ‘I’ll see if I can stay for a couple more hours,’ said Jean as she went into the phone booth When she came out, her face told the me that the answer had been no, and she made a very un-ladylike comment that confirmed this. Nevertheless before she got on the bus we made arrangements to meet again, which we managed to do briefly before I returned to Cranwell the following week. We exchanged addresses and she said that she would write to me and she was as good as her word - she wrote to me every week, although I must confess that I did not reply as frequently. Well, that is how it all started.

  It was really special to get those letters, particularly during the next three months until my next leave, and then over the next two years or so, despite the occasional ribbing by whichever Leading Apprentice gave out the mail. All apprentices who received letters from their girlfriends were subjected to ribald comments, when the mail distributor took long, lingering, appreciative sniffs of some of the letters that they were distributing. It was customary, at that time, for young ladies, when writing to their sweethearts, to put a little scent in their letters, as Jean did. Although those of us who received such letters would feign embarrassment, I think with hindsight we were quite pleased because it gave us little of what is sometimes nowadays referred to as ‘street cred’. Jean and I met up again on my next leave at Christmas.

  After the return from our first leave, we were issued with rifles and bayonets, and this added a whole new dimension to our drill practice. The rifles were old Lee Enfield 303s. Even if I had saved the 303 bullets that I had acquired on my marauding visits to Browndown ranges a few years earlier, they would have been of no use because the firing pins had been filed off the rifles. The rifles were basically for drill purposes, although later we did use them for bayonet charge exercises. The bayonets were the large eighteen-inch variety, which were still in use at that time. We were drilled in the various rifle moves including slope arms and, my favourite, present arms. It was, for me, deeply satisfying to hear the totally synchronised slap of hands on the rifle straps agains
t the rifles, in unison with the boots of the right feet hitting the parade ground as one. The most difficult exercise was ‘fix bayonets’ which had to be completed while looking directly to the front, and most certainly not looking at where the bayonet was being fixed. There was the occasional clatter of a bayonet falling on the parade ground during drill sessions.

  Perhaps it was a case of nerves on the big day, but on one major parade it did happen to one unfortunate apprentice next-but-one to me in the squad. The bayonet had not secured properly, and as we came to attention it fell to the ground with what seemed to be an inordinately loud clatter. The ‘unfortunate’ kept his head and didn’t try to retrieve it. We were under strict instructions that, if we did drop our bayonet, we had to leave it where it fell. ‘You do NOT bend down to pick it up! ‘This order was followed by a description of what the NCO would do to anyone who attempted to reclaim a dropped bayonet; it was a descriptive and lurid account of where and how he would put the bayonet.

  That particular parade also had another spectacular mishap. It was a very warm day, and the band on parade was playing immediately in front of the squad that I was part of. A red-haired, kilted apprentice in the section of the band that was playing the bagpipes, was overcome by the heat and slowly collapsed into a crumpled heap on the parade ground. The bagpipes accompanied his slow descent with a discordant dying lament. I am not sure whether this was a contingency plan or not, but three of the drill NCOs marched on to the parade ground, picked up the apprentice and the now-dead bagpipes and carried them off ‘in step’ to the shade of the trees that lined the west end of the parade ground.

  Apart from being an implement, ‘airmen for the use of’, on parade grounds, the rifle also had to be used with the bayonet fixed for exercises, in which we had to charge at and attack straw-filled dummies. Some of the dummies were suspended in frames and others were placed flat on the ground. Throughout the charging and ‘sticking’, we were told to shout and scream, and use any obscenities that we wished. On that day I was surprised at the extended vocabulary of some of my compatriots.

  Whenever I was on leave, it was good to see that the Tower cinema, dancehall and bars were as popular as ever, and of course as I was now old enough to go into the bars in the Tower, I was a regular patron when I was on leave. It was in one of the bars in the Tower, soon after I joined the RAF that I met and became friends with Ken, who was a couple of years older than me. He lived in Gosport Road, and we both belonged to the ‘Shorthouse’ clan. Ken was a printer in the Merchant Navy, and worked for the Union Castle shipping company. We became regular drinking buddies when we were both home at the same time. He was on a regular run from Southampton to South Africa, which meant that he had a week off every six weeks. The Union Castle ships would leave every Thursday evening and sail down the Solent past Lee just after five o’clock, as regular as clockwork.

  There was a period towards the end of my first year at Cranwell when Jean and I went through a rough patch in our relationship and we had fallen out, probably because I had failed to reply to far too many of her letters. It was so bad that, although I was on leave, I hadn’t even been in touch with her. One evening I was out having a few drinks with Ken and I told him that Jean and I were no longer seeing each other. Maybe I was getting a bit maudlin. The upshot was that I suggested that he might like to take her out because she was good company, and she was probably feeling a bit down because we had broken up. About a week later he did get in touch with Jean and took her to the cinema a couple of times, but Jean subsequently told me that they had got on well as friends but that there was no romantic spark.

  It must have been a couple of months later, when I was probably feeling sorry for myself and rather lonely, that I wrote to Jean and she wrote back. As a consequence we made up and started to exchange letters more frequently. On my next leave, in addition to taking Jean out, we took Ken out with us too on a couple of occasions. It was to be another five or six years before I was to introduce Ken to Sheila, a young lady who I knew from where I worked. After that we went out as a foursome, and not long after that, Sheila and Ken got married.

  In the 40s, 50s and 60s pubs were very male-orientated; not only did licensed establishments not allow children on the premises for fear of losing their licence, but ladies unaccompanied by a male were usually not welcome. There were unconfirmed stories that landlords did not allow unaccompanied ladies, except the Sally Army, into their establishments in case the wives of their valued clientele got to hear of it, and then suspected that the husbands were spending their money on something other than beer. Of course ladies were allowed to work behind the bar: in the 60s one of the barmaids, who I knew very well by sight, from the downstairs Tower bar, was murdered outside the San Diego Road Post Office in Gosport.

  The second time that we went out as a threesome, Jean, Ken and I had been to Martha’s Bar in Commercial Road, Portsmouth. Although Jean had not had a lot to drink, she had mixed her drinks, and became a little too merry. Therefore we decided that it would be better to walk back to Southsea rather than taking a bus, to give Jean a chance to sober up. With me on one arm and Ken on the other, she was walking along Commercial Road, singing and trying to dance. A passer-by said in a conspiratorial voice: ‘Better watch it mate, there’s a copper just down the road.’ We had great difficulty in keeping her quiet but managed to get past the policeman without incident. Nowadays, of course, Jean’s joyful singing and dancing would go totally unnoticed, but in those days that certainly would not have been the case. If a policeman was at all suspicious about anyone’s behaviour he would stop them and then ask them to walk in a straight line. If it wasn’t done to his satisfaction they could end up at the police station, charged with being drunk in a public place or even with being drunk and disorderly. Having got past the policeman without incident, we walked the mile or so to the park opposite the doctor’s house, where the three of us sat on a park bench for about a quarter of an hour while Jean composed herself - that is, after she had cried her eyes out.

  As the saying goes, ‘the course of true love never runs smooth’. Well it certainly didn’t in our case. Only a few months after this episode we had a second ‘break up’. Although I can’t remember how it came about, I thought that I had really cooked my goose this time. It was during my next leave, a few months later, that I went to Southsea one evening to meet up with ‘Lord Malvern’ - actually it was Dennis Jepp a fellow apprentice from the 2M6 entry. He lived in Malvern Road and somehow he became known by that title among friends. We had a few drinks in the Clarendon, which was his local. Although it was quite early and we had been in the pub for only a couple of hours, we decided to call it a day - there just didn’t seem to be much of an atmosphere. It must have been about nine thirty. ‘See you on the train next Sunday’ I called out and set off walking towards Handley’s Corner to catch a bus to the Gosport ferry.

  As I walked down Clarendon Road, I went past where Jean worked. After I had passed the doctor’s house and walked a couple of hundred yards further on to where there was a telephone booth, on the spur of the moment I decided to phone Jean, just to hear how she was getting on. If the truth be known, I felt a bit guilty and had some remorse about the way in which we had broken up. Jean answered the phone: the doctor and his wife were obviously out. I noticed that she had answered very quickly. I only just had time to say ‘hello ...’ and she promptly replied ‘I know where you are, you stay right there!’ She paused and added ‘DON’T YOU MOVE! ’ then the line went dead. I did as she said, and probably because I was feeling guilty I did not panic and do a runner. The next thing I saw was Jean coming along the pavement, quite briskly and purposefully, in her slippers. You can tell a lot from body language, and I don’t mind telling you that I was more than a little apprehensive. At first I thought that she was going to give me a good dressing down and then possibly a hard slap, but no, she came up to me and said quite coolly ‘Just come back with me. I want to have a word wi
th YOU.’ She took me by the arm and walked me unresisting back to the doctor’s house. When we got there, she explained that she had been looking out of the window and recognised me by my walk.

  After a long chat in which I told her how wrong I had been, and that I was sorry, we made up, she gave me a cuddle and forgave me and we made plans to meet again. A little while after that I left and walked the mile-and-a-half back to the ferry, not bothering to catch a bus - just feeling good.

  Although in those days, there was no ‘try before you buy’ in relationships, I am not trying to suggest that, bearing in mind the natural increase in hormone activity, we spent all of our time polishing our haloes. Nevertheless, we enjoyed each other’s company and our thoughts began to turn to us eventually being married, and Jean became known as John Green’s girl.

  Our relationship had had on-and-off periods, which were usually my fault. No! To be truthful they were always my fault. I really must have needed my head examining. Anyhow, from then on our relationship was on a firm footing, and we still occasionally reminisce about that time when we ‘made up’ for good.

  Jean and me Below Bar at Southampton

  The time came round all too quickly for me to make my way back to Cranwell, but when it did, Jean came to see me off at Portsmouth Harbour station. Once back at the Apprentice School, Jean’s letters resumed their weekly appearance, and I improved my replying to her letters. At the camp, we soon got back into our routines of drill, lectures, workshops and the like, and life was good. I was enjoying all aspects of the training, perhaps with the exception of some of the ‘bull sessions’, but it did seem long a long time to my next leave. When at last it did come round, on arriving home it was so irritating - as it had been on every previous occasion - that whenever I met someone that I knew, invariably they would say ‘Hello, on leave again, when are you going back?’ This would usually be on the first day of the leave.