Sergeant Gregson's War

by Jim Gregson

  Sergeant Gregson’s War

  Jim Gregson

  © Jim Gregson 2016

  Jim Gregson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Prologue

  The Cyprus emergency of the late nineteen fifties wasn’t a war at all, really. That’s what we were constantly told, even though almost as many British personnel died there as did in ten years in Afghanistan. Even when I was involved in it, it didn’t feel like a war – or not for most of the time. I’m still not sure how I got there and I never felt like a soldier.

  The British army of 2016 is a professional army. The men who die in the service of their country are properly mourned. Their bodies are brought home in honour and the people of Wootton Basset have created a respectful ritual around the arrival of remains.

  Sixty years ago, things were very different. Cyprus was a long way away in 1956. Almost as many British personnel died there as in Afghanistan. But the bodies were not brought home. Dead men were buried in Cyprus, baffled colleagues standing to attention with the mournful notes of the bugler’s last post to give a few moments of solemnity.

  The British army of the fifties was not a professional one in the modern mode. It was composed mainly of old sweats who had served during the Second World War of 1939-45, and young amateurs who did not wish to be soldiers. This was because the National Service Acts meant that all fit young men were conscripted for two years into the military service of their country. For most of us, this was an irritating interruption to whatever career we were planning for ourselves. The old sweats strove manfully to mould us into an efficient army and we young men resisted, knowing that for us the army was not our future.

  A few of these unwilling recruits were pitched into unexpected action. For them, national service constituted two years of high farce tempered by occasional moments of tragic melodrama. This is an account of one such experience.

  The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

  One

  The fourteenth of March 1956 was a cold, grey day, with a brisk breeze blowing in from the Welsh hills. I handed in my rail warrant at Oswestry station, reared myself to my full height of six feet four, and left the station with what I hoped was an air of confidence.

  Always present yourself with an air of confidence, because it will impress employers. That was the one precept I had been handed by the almost totally useless university appointments section of Manchester University. They hadn’t mentioned the army.

  Two years of national service. Might as well make the most of it. All my seniors told me that, before shaking their heads with an air of wisdom imparted. You should be able to make yourself useful in the army with a BA, they said. Only two per cent of the people in the country emerged as graduates, so you were part of an elite. You owed it to the country and to the generous citizens who had funded your grant to give something back.

  I was barely twenty-one and young for my age.

  I think I had a vague hope that I would do something during my army service that would make Joy proud of me. Joy was the girl I had left behind me, the fair and unsullied girl whom I was determined would one day become Mrs Gregson. Unsullied despite all my efforts at a vigorous sullying. Joy should be unconfined, I told her breezily through our tortured physical wrestlings. But Joy remained resolutely confined, despite my rampant testosterone and my desperate invocations to her elusive hormones. Seven years with the Loreto nuns were proof against my every sally and my every attempt at a sully.

  There was a naivety about me which even a schooling with the Irish Christian Brothers had failed to eliminate. I suppose some of my more sentimental elders might have found it a touching naivety. The army was not sentimental.

  An assorted crowd of young men left the station at Oswestry with me. It swiftly emerged that almost all of us were bound for the army camp. Two large lorries in military green awaited us. The driver of the first one stood impassively in front of it as we approached uncertainly. He waited until the first of us were within a yard of him before yelling, ‘You bastards get in the back! And don’t fuck me about!’

  We obeyed meekly, shuffling our bottoms along the wooden seats as more and more of us climbed aboard. I’d never been called a bastard before, except once in drunken fun. It would be another decade before the F-word was first uttered on television and the Lady Chatterley trial sanctioned its appearance in print. I tried not to show it, but I was a little shocked, despite three years’ university study of English Literature and an extensive knowledge of Shakespearean bawdry.

  My experience as Lecture Secretary of the Manchester University Catholic Society was clearly not going to be of great relevance to my national service.

  The benches in the lorry became more and more crowded. I was forced further and further from the tailgate, right to the front, behind the now invisible driver. There was no sound save the heavy, irregular breathing which denoted a collective nervousness. I was pressed tight up against the only man in uniform, who wore an immaculate white belt and a ‘Military Police’ epaulet on his shoulder. In view of this involuntary intimacy, I felt it incumbent upon me to speak to the one person here who was already a soldier.

  I’ve never been much good at small talk. I eventually managed, ‘Regular soldier, are you? You look much too smart for national service!’ Not a conversational gem, and my nervous giggle didn’t improve it.

  The uniformed man didn’t look at me directly. He glared around at the mass of civilian humanity which was now crowded uncomfortably into the vehicle. Some sort of truncheon appeared mysteriously within his powerful fingers; he studied it and caressed it, as fondly as a man about to embark upon masturbation. Then he said, ‘If any one of you fuckers steps out of line, I’ll beat the living fucking daylights out of him! Just give me the fucking chance, that’s all I ask!’

  This proved to be a fitting introduction to the service of my country. I experienced the first of the deep depressions which were to be a feature of the next two years.

  *

  The rest of my first day in the army passed in a disagreeable blur. I was issued with two ill-fitting khaki uniforms (serves you bloody right for being such a long fucker!) and a series of bewildering items like drawers, green cellular, and puttees, khaki, which were identical to those worn by my father during the Great War to end wars. I received and donned the green denim fatigues suit which I would wear for most of the next ten weeks.

  I was informed that I was not a private but a gunner. This was because I had had the immense good fortune to be conscripted into the ranks of the Royal Artillery. My army number was 23405488 and I was to memorise it immediately. The dog tags I now wore round my neck and next to my skin were stamped with that number, so that my remains could be immediately identified after I had been blown into honourable bits. My neighbour and I grinned at this suggestion from the sergeant, in a mistaken attempt to lighten its impact. We were warned in an enraged scream that any repetition of such levity would see us charged with ‘Conduct prejudicial to good order and army discipline.’

  The army didn’t seem to go
much on humour.

  A man with two stripes on his arm now introduced himself to us. We should never forget that he was not a corporal but a bombardier, distinguished by the white lanyard on his left shoulder. He would be in total charge of the twelve men in his barrack room for the next two weeks.

  It was Bombardier Barton who gave me my first experience of the army’s preoccupation with trivia and the life-and-death importance attached to it. Barton took apart the broad belt which was standard army wear and laid its contents reverently on the table in front of him, like a priest preparing the Eucharist.

  The belt itself was to be blancoed bright green at regular intervals. ‘This is straightforward, even for daft bastards like you. The brasses aren’t.’ He glared at me as if I had already perpetrated some dire military offence – already I was learning that NCOs picked on the biggest bloke in the ranks to assert their steely authority. He brandished the dull metal strips which enclosed the belt and were adjacent to its buckle. His eyes bulged with a fanatical emphasis. ‘You will Brasso these like hell! They must they glitter in the bleedin’ dark. These brasses must be absolutely shit hot!’

  I had never heard that expression before. I hadn’t been sheltered and I’d gone through three years on the football fields and in the bars of a university, but the fifties was a repressed era, in language as in other things. I blanched a little, but most of my fellow squaddies nodded dutifully, even eagerly. They were going to find these things much easier and make much better soldiers than me.

  ‘You shits are going to be paid for being fucking nuisances!’ announced Bombardier Barton. This brought some sycophantic laughter and even a little applause. I could now gauge the level of humour which was to prevail during our basic training.

  We each received one pound two shillings and sixpence a week – we were still sixteen years away from decimalised coinage. From our first week’s wage, we each had to purchase a tin of Brasso and two tins of Kiwi black boot polish (‘Don’t think you can economise, everything else is shit!’). Once these and various other kit maintenance items had been purchased, I had just under five shillings left. I bought a book of stamps for my letters to Joy. It was the nearest I could get to a declaration of love.

  We were entitled to spend the pittance we retained in the NAAFI – ‘Except that you bastards will never get there, because you’ll be bulling your fucking boots and polishing your fucking brasses until lights out.’

  More ragged laughter. But this proved to be no more than a grim statement of fact.

  Two

  I was the only graduate in this intake. That did not prove to be an advantage. It made me both the loftiest and the best-educated of the men in my intake. It is not a good thing be in any way individual in the ranks of the British army. The whole idea of basic training is to instil unthinking and unquestioning obedience in the common soldier: to make of him an unthinking automaton who will obey orders without query. Any deviation from this norm is regarded with deep suspicion, even when it is beyond the control of the recruit, as was my height.

  ‘Think you know everything, don’t you, you long streak of piss?’ was the aggressive opening query from a string of NCOs. I had never claimed to know anything. Indeed, in this environment, I found that I knew absolutely nothing and understood even less. I maintained a resolute silence and wished heartily that I was five feet four instead of six feet four.

  Less noticeable would have meant less derided. Instead of which, I had a large, shapeless uniform and large, shapeless boots. These boots proved to be a source of great misery. They maintained an obdurate dullness, despite my increasingly desperate efforts to conjure from them the requisite mirror-like shine.

  Boots, and particularly the toecaps of boots, were of crucial importance to bombardiers and sergeants, and thus ultimately to the commissioned officers who would conduct the final, much-feared inspections of our kit. These exalted beings were rarely sighted and were invariably spoken of as deities far above the petty worshippings of greenhorn gunners. We spent three hours each evening with our tins of Kiwi boot polish and yellow dusters, caressing the toes of our army boots. You spat gently and sparsely upon the sacred surface, dipped your dustered forefinger delicately into the polish, and persuaded the toe of the boot you clasped to become a black mirror, by means of hundreds of gentle circular motions.

  The trick, which I never mastered, was to take this seriously. For most of the occupants of my Nissen hut, the shine on their boots quickly became the most important thing in the world, far outstripping family and home and even the curves of Marilyn Monroe’s bottom in their aspirations. The army was their mistress now, and they consigned themselves willingly into this new lover’s arms. They blancoed their belts, polished their brasses, and persuaded their boots to gleam with both diligence and pleasure. They gave the toecaps of their boots more thought and more delicate attention than they would have accorded to sensitive female flesh.

  I, on the other hand, found it difficult to commit myself to my new army mistress, who seemed to be offering little positive response to my increasingly frenzied foreplay. My boots acquired a sheen that would have been perfectly adequate, even outstanding, in that civilian life which was becoming daily more remote. But I couldn’t see my face in them. That was the test applied with relish not only by Bombardier Barton but increasingly by the men around me. We were competing with other barrack rooms, they reminded me with increasing fierceness. I tried to point out that the now hated opposition were merely men recruited on the same day as us and being made to jump through the same absurd hoops. This was dismissed as heretical and possibly mutinous.

  Bombardier Barton lived in a room two yards from the door of this sweatshop where we dwelt and toiled. He became intensely conscious of my recalcitrant boots. ‘You’re a snake in the fucking grass, Gunner Gregson!’ This became to my dismay also the mantra of some of my companions, as they became ever more anxious to carry our section to victory against the anonymous villains who threatened our supremacy.

  They desperately wished to have more immaculate beds and turnouts than those in the other huts. They were single-minded, as the army required them to be: they wished only to win this contest, which had been contrived for them by the authorities who now controlled our every movement and almost our every thought.

  At twenty-one, I was not strong enough to be as loftily dismissive as this account implies. When Bombardier Barton inspected the left boot on which I had spent the three hours of my evening, flung it into the farthest corner of the hut, and branded me once more as ‘a fucking idle twat’, I was thoroughly miserable. I waited for lights out, buried my face in my pillow, and thought of Joy and the loving, innocent world she represented. That world seemed now an impossible distance away and my isolation was at its most abject. As I was constantly reminded, the army system had broken better as well as much tougher men than me.

  Two of my fellow gunners determined that they would put the same brilliant shine on the toecaps of my wayward boots as that which already characterised their own immaculate footwear. I fear this impulse stemmed not from companionship, but from the fear that they might miss out on the coveted title of best hut through the failings of this elongated and over-educated individual.

  They spat judiciously on the toecaps of my boots and polished diligently for at least an hour. Then they looked at me accusingly and repeated the thought I had voiced in vain to them for several days: ‘The leather in these damned great boots is no fucking good!’ I felt a certain relief in his acceptance of this, but my Samaritan offered no further solace. ‘Typical of you, you great fucking egghead!’ he said resentfully. He flung the offending boot disgustedly on to my bed and retreated to fondle his own flawless toecaps.

  I have a picture taken at the end of that first fortnight. I look fit and surprisingly smart in my uniform. I am smiling happily, which proves emphatically that the camera can lie. I have no idea whether or not we won the ‘best hut’ accolade which had dominated our lives for the longest
two weeks in my young experience.

  We were now scheduled to move west, to the Royal Artillery camp at Tonfanau, near Tywyn on a remote section of the Welsh coast. The NCOs informed us with great relish that facilities at Tonfanau were primitive in the extreme and that the only local inhabitants were wild Welsh sheep-shaggers who would menace life and limb. The British army has been driven through centuries of military triumph by a confident and aggressive racism.

  But a light blazed suddenly through the darkness which engulfed me. For the first time since we had entered the camp, we were to be allowed out. We were to be released for two hours on Saturday afternoon, before we proceeded to the rigours of a further eight weeks of basic training on the Celtic fringe. I spent most of the hour we snatched in the NAAFI on Friday night in the queue for the telephone, waiting to feed in my money and give Joy the news.

  She was waiting outside the gates when I was released, the finest sight I could recall in my young life. And she flung herself joyfully into my arms. I peeled her away reluctantly from my lanky and instantly excited frame. Thankfully, the evidence of my excitement scarcely showed beneath the khaki of my bulky battledress trousers. I explained with appropriate stiffness to Joy that it was against regulations for trainee gunners to consort in public in this way. She gazed at me in wonder, as if I had declared myself a stranger. The British army was indeed a potent force, she said. It had controlled the arms and hands she had found so inventive and troublesome over the last three years.

  I muttered darkly about the bromide the mysterious higher authorities were reputed to put into army tea. This innocent maiden had not heard of such dark deeds and I had to explain the theory to her. Joy giggled and said that she was sure the authorities controlling the honourable British army would not tamper so basely with the flower of the nation’s youth.