Sergeant Gregson's War

by Jim Gregson

  ‘They fucking would!’ I assured her vehemently.

  It was a conditioned reflex after a fortnight of hearing the word in almost every sentence. Joy had never heard the word voiced in her family, not even when wet wallpaper had disintegrated in her father’s hands when he was at the top of his stepladder. She thought she might once have caught it from a drunk before he was ejected from one of Manchester’s all-night buses. I had survived seven years with the Irish Christian Brothers and three years on the playing fields and in the lecture rooms of the university without using the word. Now, after a fortnight in the army, it was automatic and unthinking.

  I tried to explain this to my shaken beloved. She nodded dully. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, when the word is used habitually and unthinkingly by television comedians, it is difficult to convey how rare and shocking its use was sixty years ago. Joy was scarcely a shrinking violet after three years of English Literature at university. She said it was probably inevitable that the army would have a coarsening effect and I nodded vigorously. She felt horribly priggish and I felt very stupid for making her feel so.

  Our conversation was abruptly terminated when I sprang to rigid attention to salute a gun as it was towed past us by an army truck. She stared at me in amazement, but I had to hold my pose of rigid attention until the twenty-five pounder disappeared from sight. I then explained to her that when you were in the Royal Artillery you saluted all major guns, because they were the symbols of the regiment’s raison d’etre.

  As Oswestry was a centre for the regiment, our conversation and our precious time together was continually disrupted by this obligation to spring to my full height and salute the nation’s armaments at frequent intervals. I wouldn’t recommend it as a courting aid.

  Three

  On the next day, we savoured the train journey to our new camp, finding that any contact with the civilised outside world we had left behind was welcome. Even your seniors did not scream obscenities at you there. The last part of our travel, the slow train journey southwards down the Welsh coast, was savoured as fully as the last yards of the condemned man on his march to the scaffold. The picturesque seaside town of Barmouth was our last glimpse of civilised life before the barriers closed firmly around us and announced the next stage of our translation to soldierhood.

  My next eight weeks were little different from those experienced by the many thousands of national service recruits who were bent over the years to army discipline. The ideal was announced to us shamelessly by the major who was responsible for this shambling assortment of greenhorns. Men must obey orders unthinkingly in battle conditions. Therefore all ‘other ranks’ must become mindless automatons. All individual thoughts and reactions must be willingly and eagerly sacrificed to the wills of those above us.

  I wondered treasonably if that applied even when the orders were demonstrably stupid and delivered by the incorrigibly ignorant. I had enough sense by this time to keep such thoughts strictly to myself.

  The conditions and facilities at Tonfanau were as primitive as we had been told they would be. The barrack rooms were a long way from lavatories and washbasins, and there was rarely anything other than cold water available. But spring and better weather were at hand, although both of them seemed reluctant to take on Cambria. We were frequently reminded by our latest tormentors of how lucky we were to have missed the frozen pipes and icy latrines of winter.

  I took to racing down to the wash-houses and scrubbing myself vigorously from head to foot each morning. Many of my companions arrived there fully clothed and contented themselves with a reluctant shave. They were curious about my hygienic extremes, but I told them I felt the need to wash away the army and everything it stood for from my limbs each day. That was an affectation devised on the spot. It was a thought I should have kept away from Bombardier Philpot, who slept in the room adjacent to out barrack room.

  When we were sure he was out of earshot, we called him Bombardier Pisspot; the range of army invention is very narrow.

  There is no point in reporting the full detail of my Tonfanau experience. I suffered the oddities and indignities of human experience reported by the millions of other young men who endured the tribulations of national service. We were universally white, though from a great variety of locations and backgrounds. There was a mysterious section of the regular army known as the Women’s Royal Army Corps – the WRAC – but there was no thought of calling up young women as well as young men for national service. The idea would then have been considered brutal as well as ridiculous.

  I learned to double march to the drill square and the cookhouse and anywhere else my platoon was required to be during the day. This meant that you moved everywhere in a brisk, rhythmical trot, keeping in step with your fellows and listening for the screamed instructions of the professionally manic NCO behind you. I quite enjoyed the exercise and the group ethic.

  On the drill square where we spent an hour or more each morning, depending on our performance, I was always ‘right marker’. This status derived purely from my height; the tallest man was always accorded this role. It meant that I led the drill movements and that the whole of the first rank of men had to take care to keep in line and in step with me. It also meant that I was the first to be inspected whenever an officer appeared on parade. This in turn meant that young subalterns, anxious to assert their authority from the outset, came to me first and visited the full force of their invective upon me.

  I cut my chin a little when shaving at six o’clock in ice-cold water, and was reviled for my clumsiness. My Royal Artillery cap badge was a fraction off the horizontal one day, a tad short of glitter the next, which meant that a second lieutenant was able to regard me as if I was a bad smell which had suddenly assaulted his nostrils and spit through clenched lips the words ‘Filthy turnout, Gunner.’ This in turn warranted a hysterical screaming from a suitably outraged sergeant. Further down the line, I would probably have excited no comment.

  I was glad when we moved on to the drill, at which I proved reasonably competent. Once I had learned not to ‘jack-knife’, a deviation from the upright which always threatened one of my height, I moved, wheeled and right-turned with confidence. I even contrived to provide frequent sparks from the hobnails in my recalcitrant boots as I sprang to attention, a phenomenon which impressed my fellows and accorded me a childish pleasure.

  I was less successful in preparing my kit, my bed, and the tiny section of the barrack room for which I was responsible as we prepared for the inevitable rounds of inspection by NCOs and commissioned officers. I found it difficult to accept that grown men could be seriously expected to shine not only the hobnails in their boots but the heads of the nails which anchored their floorboards. These had to display the flawless sheen of precious silver. Yet my companions accepted without question that this glitter would be a decisive factor in the battle for military supremacy with neighbouring barrack rooms.

  And there was a new form of torture which I found a source of particular agony. Some Torquemada of the Royal Artillery had decided that all items of our kit except woollens and greatcoats should be ironed meticulously into squares exactly nine inches by nine inches. They should then be laid out in an approved pattern upon the soldier’s bed, ready for the officer’s inspection and approval.

  My build ensured that I would have great difficult in achieving this textile mosaic. My height meant that my every garment was bigger than anyone else’s in the barrack room, and thus required more effort to iron into the sacred nine by nine inches. I laboured hard all week, but I was fearful of the Saturday morning inspection on which our collective fate would rest.

  When the officer arrived with his attendant sergeant and bombardier, he inspected me at close quarters whilst I stood to attention and stared steadily at the ceiling. He stared at my chin as if he had detected a large and particularly malodorous turd, then asked, ‘Is this the graduate?’ He managed to invest the three syllables with a wealth of distaste, as if dismissi
ng someone at the base of a caste system. I wondered if that was something they taught at Sandhurst.

  Bombardier Philpot’s strangled voice confirmed that it was. The lieutenant nodded curtly, then moved down the room, past other beds and other men standing rigidly to attention. He made no comment, though he seemed to nod approval of the nine by nines of the smallest and dimmest man in our platoon. This was a postman from Corby, whom I resented for no other reason than that his uniform fitted him perfectly and his nine by nines fell into immaculate squares upon his bed without any apparent effort from him.

  I thought for a moment that I had escaped, that I might even have passed muster. But the officer returned to my area and contemplated my efforts with a burgeoning distaste. ‘This man’s bed is a disgrace!’ he announced to no one in particular. Then he bent his knees and inserted his cane successively into the squares of garment which had caused me such quantities of sweat and tears over the preceding days. He used his swagger stick to fling them high and wide to various parts of the room, so as to emphasise his contempt.

  I continued to stare rigidly ahead during this performance, as military discipline demanded that I should. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a pair of my drawers’ green cellular hanging from one of the lights. They hung there for a moment, then descended after a few seconds on to the head of the diminutive postman whose layout had been approved. That immaculate marmoset stood as stiffly at attention as a marble statue, with my derided undergarment hanging like a stricken crow upon his forehead.

  I was seized with a sudden internal twitching, which threatened to erupt into full hysteria. This I knew would land me in the glasshouse for an extended stay. I bit my lip fiercely and shut my eyes until I heard the sounds of the departure of the inspection party. Bombardier Philpot was back within two minutes. I had been disconsolately retrieving my kit, but his arrival forced me to spring once again to attention.

  Pisspot came so close to me that I could smell his disapproval. He stood beneath my chin, breathing heavily and gathering together his vocal resources. Eventually he bellowed, ‘Gunner Gregson, you’re a fucking disgrace! What are you?’

  ‘I’m a fucking disgrace, Bombardier.’

  ‘You’re a fucking filthy fucking man! What are you?’

  I would have liked to dispute filthy. But I knew the rules. I dutifully repeated the alliterative phrase.

  ‘You’d be on a fucking charge if you weren’t getting your fucking jabs this after-fucking-noon.’

  I marvelled anew at the NCO’s ability to insert the epithet between the syllables of individual words. It was the sort of linguistic invention that would have interested Shakespeare, though I’m sure he would have been more inventive in his range of obscenities. I collected the clothing which had given such offence and prepared to endure the medical measures that would ensure my immunity against the vast range of dangerous illnesses which a hostile world had prepared for the British Empire and the British army which defended it.

  The ubiquitous Bombardier Philpot was there to direct me to the end of the queue. This was to ensure that the needle was at its bluntest after it had pierced the skins of the rest of the platoon. There was none of this namby-pamby modern nonsense about a separate needle for each man, nor any thought that the injections against different diseases should be administered separately and with time-intervals for recovery. We received a welter of injections against tropical, semi-tropical and more local diseases. We then trooped back to our barrack rooms to endure thirty-six hours of swollen arms, agitated limbs, mild fevers and high temperatures. The weekend was our ‘recovery period’.

  As right marker on the drill square on Monday morning, I felt rather groggy. But my deficiencies were masked by the collapse of two of my companions, which meant the termination of drill for the morning and a chance to shiver on our beds for an hour or so. Pisspot interrupted my own rest to tell me with an appropriate contempt that I was due for a ‘wosbie’ next morning.

  This was a War Office Selection Board (WOSB), the preliminary interview designed to identify people with officer potential, who were to be extracted from their units and given the training to become commissioned officers. My unsuitability for such distinction was the one subject on which I ever agreed with Philpot. ‘But I don’t want to be an officer,’ I said aloud when he had gone. I looked fearfully towards the door of the barrack room, lest any lurking NCO should overhear such blasphemy.

  When we resumed our training in the afternoon and were introduced to the intricacies of the Bren gun, the wosbie dominated my thoughts. I was glad when we were eventually directed to ‘take five’. This meant that we could sink down thankfully and light up whatever ‘dockers’, or remnants of cigarettes, we possessed – smoking was then universal and a symbol of manhood. I watched the man from the next platoon who had committed some misdemeanour running round the parade ground with a twenty-five pound shell held above his head until he collapsed in a sobbing heap.

  ‘I don’t want to be a fucking officer. I don’t even want to be in the sodding army!’ I said with feeling.

  The gunner beside me spoke with a convincing sincerity. ‘Don’t you fucking worry. They won’t want a stupid fucker like you to be a bleedin’ officer.’

  It was a very accurate forecast. It was swiftly apparent to me that the authorities were doing no more than going through the motions. Commissions were not available to national servicemen, apart from a few public school men who had spent years in the officer training corps and already possessed the correct clipped accent and air of superiority. I received the first of many blandishments to sign on as a regular. Many military blessings and much financial bliss would be accorded to me if I committed myself to five years in the army. In some mysterious and undefined way, I would be transformed into officer material as soon as I signed on as a regular. I wanted to say that the only officer who had spoken to me since I had arrived at Tonfanau had considered me a disgrace and a liability, but this did not seem to be the moment for elaboration.

  Once I had shown that I was resolute about not signing on for more than my two years, the WOSB interview was swiftly concluded. The colonel behind the desk looked at me as if I stank. Then he frowned down at the papers in front of him and said with unconcealed distaste, ‘St Joseph’s College, Blackpool. Isn’t that a Roman Catholic school?’

  I agreed that it was and prepared myself to enlarge upon the idiosyncrasies of the Irish Christian Brothers. That usually amused people and brought me a measure of sympathy. It was not permitted here. The interview was concluded within sixty seconds. I was returned to my billet and told to concentrate upon becoming an adequate gunner.

  The other incident of note during these eight weeks of intensive training was my classification as an expert marksman. I had learned quickly to be surprised by nothing in the army, but this outstanding piece of military farce astonished me and provided welcome merriment for my fellow-rookies. It also had a future effect which I could not have anticipated at the time.

  My status was achieved on our single visit to the firing range. I had never in my life fired a .303 rifle. Yet within thirty minutes I was adjudged the finest shot in the unit. There was an appalling simplicity about this judgement. Everyone knew it was wrong, but no one had any idea how to manipulate the system to put it right. For a student of literature, the ruling carried an appropriately Kafkaesque stamp.

  As we lay upon our stomachs on the damp earth and were pushed into the approved position for steady firing, the two important instructions were clear to all of us: don’t release the safety catch until instructed to do so, and don’t press the trigger until the sergeant well to the right of the distant targets waves a green flag. I took my time when the moment came, preparing myself for the strong kick of the butt of the .303 against my shoulder which I’d been told to expect. The white cardboard target with its series of circles was too far away for me to have any clear idea how accurate my shooting was, but most of my series of six bullets seemed to hit the cardbo
ard rather than miss it altogether, as some were doing.

  I was anxious to do the best I could, because lying beside me with his legs widely and expertly splayed was eighteen-year-old Gunner Capstick. Capstick wasn’t very bright, but he’d already told us that he was an expert shot. He claimed to have won prizes on fairgrounds and even to have lured a well-rounded girl into bed after winning her a necklace of false emeralds. I knew by now how tales grew in the telling, but I was secretly impressed by this one, after my many unsuccessful attempts to lure Joy into my bed.

  Capstick seemed very content with his efforts. When the red flag was raised to still all firing, he rolled on to his side and relaxed with the air of a man with four aces in his hand. Then came an agonised yell from the staff sergeant who was examining the distant targets. ‘Capstick, you fucking idiot! You’ve ignored your own target and fired all your fucking shots into the one next to yours!’

  There was general hilarity in the ranks. There was then considerable discussion among our seniors as to how they should respond to the fact that Gunner Gregson’s target had twelve shots in it, whilst Gunner Capstick’s had none. The solution they decided upon was very simple. Gunner Capstick was clearly a hopeless marksman and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the range again.

  Gunner Gregson, on the other hand, had too many shots in his target. It was only fair to assess him on his best performance; his best six shots would be the ones rated and his wilder ones would be ignored. Result: Gunner Gregson was clearly the finest marksman in this intake and was recommended for specialist sniper duty, if the need for it should arise during the course of his service.

  Poor Barry Capstick, who had secured this distinguished result for the man firing next to him, was plainly a liability, in view of his unsullied target. He was transferred at the end of our training to the catering corps and the cookhouse, where his inability with a rifle would not endanger his fellows.