After our return on the following Monday morning, re-invigorated and much more confident, we exchanged our temporary digs for more permanent quarters.
Aldershot has been the home garrison of the British army since the Crimean War. It is a sprawling collection of establishments whose architecture represents almost every military development from the motte and bailey to the Nissan hut. Our ‘spiders’, collections of wooden buildings connected to a central covered passageway, were vacated in favour of blackened three story buildings of once-red brick, standing in stark rows, facing each other.
These decaying edifices were known as the Wellington Lines and the one I lived in had been erected as a cavalry barracks. The ground floor had once been employed as stabling for the horses while their riders occupied rooms on the upper floors. In our time, they housed the offices, storerooms and ablutions. Access to the upper floors was via outside cast-iron staircases and landings and tip-toeing by even one pair of hobnailed feet would cause them to reverberate to wake the dead.
Each building bore the name of a famous battle of the Peninsula Wars: Badajos, Salamanca, Telavera. There was at least one member of every squad whose grandfather had been quartered here during the Boer War and who claimed that they were condemned as unfit for human habitation even then. At least the horses had been moved out – probably at the insistence of the RSPCA - but this had also eliminated the natural heating system that the animals had provided and the inclusion of a pot-bellied stove in each room hardly made up the loss.
The dormitories were furnished in a manner that even the Spartans would have described as ‘Spartan’. Our quaint iron bed-frames, possibly designed by Procrustes, could be telescoped when not in use, the lower half fitting under the upper half, thus reducing their footprint and doubling the available floor space. The mattresses accompanying these monstrosities came in three parts known as ‘biscuits’.
(Many years later, I encountered similar furniture in Australia at the Old Dubbo Gaol Museum!)
Kit and caboodle, when not on display, was crammed into individual footlockers, together with our meagre personal possessions, while our packs sat on a small shelf above the bed head and our greatcoats and towels hung on a nail below.
The floor was of scuffed bare boards that could be relied upon to produce a pile of dust no matter how often they were swept. At the rear of this salubrious chamber was a single toilet labelled ‘For Night Use Only’ and a narrow stairwell leading to the ground floor, which was our fire escape. This whole scene was illuminated by three or four unshaded, flyblown, 25-watt bulbs dangling from the ceiling.
Close to the entrance was a partitioned-off cubicle known as ‘the corporal’s bunk’ and this boasted a bed, a chair, a small table and a wardrobe Such was the luxury that our junior NCOs enjoyed!
Accommodation, nowadays, is usually rated up to five-stars: ours, under a similar system, might have earned five black holes!
It was on this memorable day that we first made the acquaintance of the Lance-Corporal who was to be our instructor, (tor-)mentor and live-in tyrant.
I shall refrain from naming him as I have no desire to be sued for defamation so I shall refer to him by his initials which were, appropriately, A.H. And, as these are shared by another well-known dictator, I shall henceforth refer to him as Adolph! The word ‘bastard’ is often used as a term of affection among men but it never acquired this connotation in any reference to this particular individual. A conscript, like ourselves, he was cursed with a pinched, unsmiling face, pale watery eyes, thin lips and a permanent dispeptic scowl. Whatever his parentage - and there was much speculation as to that – he was the epitome of meanness. The military hierarchy had applied its collective effort in finding unpleasant tasks to occupy most of our waking hours. Adolph obviously felt that these were insufficient and devised a few torments of his own, designed to waste what little of our precious free time that was not devoted to ‘bullshitting’, thus ruining our evenings. His inventions took the form of a mess-tin inspection, or some-such pointless exercise, timed to keep us out of the canteen. He had only one saving grace as far as I could discern: he was as thick as two short planks! Each squad occupied a dormitory containing around twenty bed spaces. However, there were usually a few more than twenty men in a squad and the collective overflow was housed in another dormitory at the far end of the verandah. Adolph would invariably forget to invite the ‘odds and sods’, of which I was one, to the evening’s festivity. We would know about it, of course, as intelligence of that sort travelled with the speed of light, but we would feign ignorance and make ourselves scarce at the appointed hour. When Adolph realised his oversight, he would dispatch a messenger to summon us but, invariably, the birds had already flown! Our absences did not endear us to our superior, naturally, but as we were bound by mutual hatred anyway, it hardly mattered - except that we had to watch our backs! We still had to maintain our kit, of course, despite Adolph. Our webbing belt, gaiters, ammunition pouches and sundry straps and haversacks had to be blanco-ed daily. Each evening, we congregated in the ‘blanco room’, a cavern in the bowels of the building, to carry out this messy operation. Khaki-Green No. 3 Blanco, the prescribed application, dominated the décor, coating its furniture, walls, floor and most of the ceiling. On a busy evening prior to an important inspection, the thrifty could simply dip a brush into the sludge beneath their feet to effect an immaculate finish. Buttons, cap badges and other brass fittings were cleaned with Duraglit, wadding impregnated with metal polish, then buffed with a yellow duster. At least half an hour had to be devoted to shining our boots, particularly our ‘best’ boots, which were expected to gleam like mirrors at our final parade. The time-honoured way was to ‘bone’ the toecaps with a toothbrush handle in an attempt to eradicate the crinkly ‘chrome’ finish which was a feature of the new leather but we quickly learned a few old soldiers’ tricks which made the task a little easier. Boots could be endowed with a more resplendent sheen if they were first burned. The toecaps and heels, especially, were smeared with a thick layer of boot polish and then a match was applied causing the treated parts to be enveloped in a faint blue flame. When this had burned away and the soot and charring removed, a smooth surface remained. More polish was now applied and with the application of lots of spit (yes, it does help!) and elbow grease a patina of hard polish would be built up from which a dazzling sheen would emerge. Unfortunately, there were hazards attached to this method. If the flame was too intense, the stitching could be burned through. One story circulating, apocryphal but oft repeated, involved a recruit with immaculate footwear coming smartly and crashingly to attention on parade and a pair of exquisitely polished toecaps flying into the face of the inspecting officer! Later, we would add a few more labour-saving dodges to our repertoire, for example, soaping the insides of our trouser legs before pressing so that the creases were firmly glued in. Some keen souls even went to the extent of oversewing so that they became permanent. A few fishing weights, threaded onto a string, would be introduced into the trouser leg, just above the ankle, so that the bottoms hung neatly down over the gaiter. The serge material of our uniforms was as hairy as a badger when issued but it could be smoothed almost to the quality of fine suiting by ‘shaving’ it with a safety razor. The added advantage here was that a near-threadbare uniform denoted long serve and the wearer was not, therefore, identifiable as a ‘sprog’. Unfortunately, we never discovered a remedy for our greatcoats smelling like wet sheepdogs on rainy days! In addition to these necessary chores, the barrack room had to cleaned, although this was a largely futile exercise as it always looked just as dingy afterwards as before.
Our daily training program consisted of interminable marching and drilling, interspersed with PT, lectures (and sometimes film shows) on such weighty matters as how to avoid contracting scabies and ‘crabs’. Then there were classroom sessions in which we were instructed in the duties we were expected to perform in the service of the RAOC.
The Royal Army Ordnance Corps* is the oldest logistical organisation in the British Army. As the word ‘ordnance’ implies, it was originally charged with the supply and maintenance of its guns and ammunition. The cap badge depicts three cannon and three cannon balls as testimony to this function. It is immediately obvious to any observer that the balls are too large for the cannon. Critical comments on this inconsistency are frequently the cause of fist fights, when affronted wearers feel it incumbent on them to defend the honour of the Corps, particularly in licensed premises on Saturday nights!
Over time, the Corps had become the supplier of most of the army’s other requirements, including all armoured fighting vehicles and transport, and the myriad bits and pieces required to keep them functioning. Along the way, it had also acquired responsibility for the provision of mobile bath and laundry facilities in the field, an activity which, in the eyes of some, lowered the tone of the organisation.
The bulk of the RAOC personnel were, as might be expected, armourers, mechanics, storekeepers and clerks. Those of us who had entered the army straight from school were deemed to be literate but possessing few other ‘useful’ skills, so we were destined, without any option, to become the latter. My occupational training was therefore dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the military distribution system, office procedure and a typing course although I would have welcomed something a little more stimulating.
The rotation of our training schedule required us to vary our dress and accoutrements several times a day – shorts and runners for PT, rifles and ammunition pouches for drill, books and pens for classroom work, etc. This called for frequent excursions to our sleeping quarters, ‘at the double’, to effect the changes. The noise generated by a thousand pairs of ammunition boots on metal stairs and balconies, several times a day, was such that all bird life had long ago vacated the area for miles around!
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