Every trade and profession has its own argot and the Army is no exception. As raw recruits at Aldershot, it was necessary for us to acquaint ourselves with the new vocabulary…..quickly or else! We soon became familiar with such terms as ‘Shun, Kweek Mar’, E’bart Tu’n and ‘Alt, and those who didn’t were soon introduced to yet another new word, ‘jankers’! The buzz-word at the time was ‘nignog’, which was yet to acquire any racial connotation, and was commonly defined as ‘a pregnant fairy’. NCOs had a great time with this tag. Make an error and ‘You’re-a-nignog-what-are-you?’ would be bellowed into your ear, to which you were required to respond, contritely, with ‘A nignog, Corporal’.

Any conversation or discourse, when officers were not present, was liberally interspersed with the choicest Anglo-Saxon epithets and, although none of them was completely new to me, I was astounded to hear them used in such profusion. The ‘f- word’ was the most common, also the most versatile. It was verb, noun and adjective, as required, and, for emphasis, could even be inserted into another word, as in ‘im-f***-ing-possible’!

As we moved further afield, our lexicon expanded. Each of the services has it’s own vocabulary. We called the RAF ‘Brylcreem Boys’. They called us ‘Brown Jobs’, a double-entendre which had lavatorial overtones! The most colourful patois was the Navy’s. Belonging to the oldest of the services, it had had more time to develop, I suppose! They called themselves ‘The Andrew’ and their speech was laced with nautical terms seldom understood by landlubbers. My Navy friends aboard Lancashire let me into some of their secrets.

A quartermaster in the Navy was a gunner, unlike ours, who were storekeepers. ‘Slops’ were items of apparel and, together with everything else on issue, they emanated from the ‘slop chest’. ‘Pusser’s slops’, (a corruption of Purser’s) were those which had been issued legitimately, not ‘liberated’ or purloined, and anything spare was ‘gash’. The First Officer was always known as Jimmy, regardless of whatever name his parents had bestowed upon him and the Captain, out of his hearing, was ‘Father’ or ‘the Old Man’.

The British Army (and, earlier, ‘John Company’s’ troops) served in India for almost two centuries and as this occupation had ended only a year or so before I joined, I encountered plenty of still-serving regulars who had spent a sizeable portion of their time there. Every Corps and almost every Regiment had also served in Egypt, where there was a British military presence from 1881 to 1957. Not surprisingly, a large number of Arabic, Hindi and Urdu words and expressions had been absorbed into the military dialect, some even into the English language proper, the most apt, in this context, being khaki. During subsequent service in Malaya and elsewhere, additional local words were adopted and the result was a slang that was polyglot but surprisingly articulate.

The British soldier is not a natural linguist, I hasten to assure you! Tommy is convinced that if you shout loudly enough in English, gesticulating wildly, no foreigner except a congenital idiot could fail to understand your meaning. However, there are a few words, usually of a sexual nature or associated with food and drink, which he deems it essential for him to learn, then, having acquired these, he rests on his laurels.

We quickly adapted to our new vocabulary. Our washing was dhobi and the person who did it, a dhobi wallah. The Hindi word ‘wallah’ is applied to anyone who carries out a menial task, hence ‘kitchen wallah’, ‘garden wallah’, etc. Civil and Military sahibs and memsahibs in India even applied the term, in a derogatory fashion, to their own compatriots engaged in commerce and trade, calling them ‘box wallahs’. When we had money it was akkers or feloos and when we didn’t we were maskeen or skint. Our food was makan or conner (konah, konna?), a girl was a bint or a bibi (Arabic and Hindi, respectively) and a hut in a kampong (Malay for village) was a basha. ‘Hurry up’ was jildhi in Hindi and lakass in Malay. We even managed a couple of words of Japanese, yasme ’being a break (as in smoko) and a fried egg sandwich was called a banjo. Good was bagose, bad was mankhi, soon was pichi and anything surplus was buckshee. When we turned in at night we threw ourselves down, exhausted, onto our charpoys.

Anyone acting strangely was doolally, after the military mental hospital in the Indian town of that name: a young officer was a chico : any local liquor from Cairo to Shanghai was called arrack and we ourselves were swaddies or squaddies, who travelled about in gharries when we were not marching.

There was never a need for an Enigma encryption machine in the British Army, in my opinion: any secret couched in the vernacular would be unintelligible to anyone else except another Tommy!