by Alan Hackney
Sometimes the period was commandeered by Mr. Boo tie for the imparting of information, with diagrams, on the strength of a German battalion or the composition of the ideal raiding party.
One week he gave a lecture on Navigation by the Stars.
“A very good guide, you’ll find, is the Plough,” he was saying. “And then there’s Cassiopeia, too.”
“What about Erculs, sir?” asked the old-stager Fred.
“About who?” asked Mr. Bootle faintly.
“’Ercules, ’e means, I reckon,” put in Cox.
“Oh well, we’ll—er, come to Hercules in a minute,” temporised Mr. Bootle. “Anyway, you should be able to find the Plough quite easily by its distinctive shape. Or perhaps you call it the Big Dipper——”
“Excuse me again, sir,” broke in Cox. “Just to interrupt you a minute. I was comin’ out of the cookhouse the other mornin’ after breakfast and you could see the stars quite plain.”
“Half a sec——” began Mr. Bootle.
“Yer,” said Cox. “I was lookin’ up to find the North Star just like I always do: I always like practisin’ findin’ the North by the stars …”
“Just a min——” began Mr. Bootle.
“Well,” Cox went on relentlessly. “I was walkin’ along, lookin’ up, when some bloke come the other way in the dark and run right slap into me, bash! Nearly took me photo. Hit me right in the bugle, he did.” He paused to clasp his injured nose.
“Yes, all right, some other time,” put in Mr. Bootle hastily. “Now. to get the North Star …”
“Sir,” said the old-stager Fred. “Owjoo get the Africa Star? Only I ’aven’t got a medal yet.”
*
Sometimes when the birth-rate man did not turn up Sergeant Leggett would ask for volunteers to give impromptu lectures.
“The object of this,” he explained, “is to give you geezers practise in public speakin’. Anyone got any subject?”
“I don’t see it ever done me any good,” Cox said. “We ’ad this sort of caper in my battalion and these blokes were always tellin’ you ’ow to keep pet rabbits, or you’d get some college bloke on about the Old Egyptians. Why, we ’ad some bloke once give a talk for a full ’alf-hour on some Eye-tie poet in the Middle Ages, and we ’ad to ’ave ’im because no one else couldn’t think of no subject. What I mean is, where’s it get you? You want sunnink useful.”
“Well,” said Sergeant Leggett, “you give one, then.”
“All right,” said Cox. “The English railway system. My system with the railways is dead simple. What you mustn’t ever do is get rattled and do sunnink barmy. Take it here, for instance. You never want to go from Gravestone East. Always go from Gravestone High Level on the 2.5. They’ve only one bloke on collectin’ and ’e ’as to do both sides. Wait till ’e’s over doin’ the down platform for the train that gets in at 1.58 and walk straight on as though you ’ad your ticket. When it comes in, never travel in a corridor coach and get in the first because the jumpers don’t bother so much with them. Then, never go straight up to Victoria, or Charing Cross, but change at somewhere like Bromley and get off at Camberwell Road. Wait five minutes, then go out up the steps where the ticket office is, in that entrance hall. There’s a hell of a bloody draught blows through there, so the bloke who issues and collects tickets there only keeps the pigeon-hole at one side open at a time.
“Soon as a train’s unloaded, ’e shuts up the ’ole on that side and opens the other one for issuin’ tickets again. So then you just walk past casual. If there’s anyone around, you make as if you was goin’ to leave your ticket on the ledge, like they do when the window’s shut, only you want to take one instead, if there’s any there, and most likely it’ll be still valid next time you come up.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to ’ave a ticket to start with?” asked Sergeant Leggett, absorbed in the subject, as was everyone else. “What I do, I buy a return ticket for the first station up the line, and up the terminus I pay from the first one down the line. Comin’ back, you ’and in the return half.”
“No,” said Cox, “you never want to do that. At my last battalion they all used to do that on week-end pass, and one week-end they was jumped on. The railway brought in the red-caps and they inspected all tickets at an intermediate station. There was eighty-four on orders on the Monday. The railway said there was a hundred and nine tickets issued on the Saturday to this first station up the line, and only five blokes got out there. No, best to keep ’em in the dark. What the eye don’t see the ’eart don’t grieve over.”
“Yer,” said Sergeant Leggett. “Yer, I catch your meanin’ all right. Don’t any of you blokes do it any more after this, or I’ll make it hot for you, never mind the railways.”
“What you can do, Len,” said Cox, “one very safe way, is go up with some bloke who’s barmy enough to ’ave a ticket, and get ’is missus to meet you at Victoria on the platform with two platform tickets. Then when you go off the platform it looks as though you and ’er ’ave come to meet the bloke with the ticket. Anyway, ’e needn’t buy a ticket if ’e’s on a proper seven-day leave because ’e’ll ’ave ’is free railway warrant, won’t ’e?”
“Oh yer, of course,” said Sergeant Leggett thoughtfully.
“Half a jiff, Coxy,” interposed one of the platoon. “Spose it’s one of these long-distance rattlers where they collect the old tickets when you’re on the train? Owjoo go on then?”
“My friend ’ere wants to know,” said Cox to the company, “Spose it’s a train to say Manchester and the jumper comes round on it, so’s you get off at the other end with no barrier. Okeydoke. What you do is all club together, buy two blokes tickets. You can do this with up to ten or eleven blokes. Right, you buy these two blokes tickets, and all the rest get platform tickets to see ’em off. Right. Then, very important, you must make sure you borrow an A.T.S. cap before you start off. Okay? You get on the platform and of course you all get in the rattler and off you go. You keep in the corridor, and you ’ave one bloke each end sentry, on the lookout for the jumper comin’ along. When ’e’s comin’, they all get in the lavatory a bit sharpish and keep dead quiet, except one bloke. He stands outside the old door ’olding this A.T.S. cap and the two tickets. Now the old jumpers usually knock on the doors and wait till you come out, so you can’t get away with it that way. But what this bloke does, ’e gives up ’is ticket and stands there twiddlin’ this A.T.S. cap, and ’e says to the jumper, ‘Oh,’ ’e says, ‘my wife’s in there,’ ’e says, and ’ands over the other ticket, too. That’s psychology. Then, of course, they all come out after, and nip off quite natural at the other end. ’Course, if one of you’s got a free warrant, so much the better. You only got to buy the one ticket to go with the A.T.S. cap.”
“Stone the crows,” said Sergeant Leggett, overcome by the possibilities.
“Proper cure, old Coxy is,” remarked the questioner.
“Pulverised old Len, that did,” said Fred.
“That’s enough,” said Sergeant Leggett. “Outside in F.S.M.O. for an endurance test.”
“It’s all bloody go, this training,” said Cox.
CHAPTER TEN
THE ENDURANCE TESTS alternated weekly with route marches, each increasing in length and severity as the weeks went on. As Mr. Bootle came on them all, no modifications were possible. In the ordinary course the training was frequently interrupted by cries from Sergeant Leggett of: “Right! Five-minute smoke for ten minutes.”
Stanley liked the weapon training and fieldcraft. The technique perfected by the sergeant and corporals was to parade the platoon ten minutes early in the morning and double them keenly out of the back gate of the camp before Mr. Bootle came on the scene. Rapid progress would be made through the wooded country under the escarpment, and after a brief exercise in camouflaged movement the platoon would retire to one of the several overgrown chalk pits which showed up as glaring white wedges in the escarpment skyline. The small quarries, long disused, had been
annexed by the forest and overgrown by shrubs, springing from a thick bed of leaf-mould. They lay up steep, winding, rocky paths, and Sergeant Leggett stood no nonsense about getting there. The platoon toiled up the paths in battle formation, a scout-group ahead, preserving strict march discipline. Once at the objective, however, they would set about the leisurely ritual of lunch.
The lunch break lasted anything from three to four hours, spent round an enormous fire into which the N.C.O.s would throw experimentally the thunderflashes and blank rounds drawn for the day’s exercise. Every sort of moral pressure was brought to bear by the platoon to extend the lunch break even further. Members would surreptitiously bank up the fire so that it would seem ludicrous to leave it for the chill of the winter countryside. Others would start long sly arguments about the superiority of regiments they had formerly been in, so that Sergeant Leggett was in honour bound to make reply. When all else looked like failing, it would fall to Cox to recall some absorbing incident at great length.
The map-reading schemes were even more pleasant. On these, it did not matter whether Mr. Bootle joined the platoon in time or not, for they were all split up into syndicates of three or four men, to make their way invisibly, as though in enemy country, to distant map-references. As the object of the exercises was always to stay unobserved (Mr. Bootle and two lance-corporals toured the area on bicycles and penalised anybody they spotted), concealment had the blessing of the authorities.
After opening time in the mornings few syndicates were observed at all, unless Mr. Bootle happened to fling open the tap-room door of some likely country pub. The final reference point for the rendezvous of all the syndicates was chosen carefully by Sergeant Leggett, and transpired every time to be a public-house or a village tea-shop, in which platoon headquarters, consisting of the sergeant and Corporal O’Connor, awaited the arrival of the syndicates.
As the training gathered momentum Stanley felt more and more inclined to go sick, for a bit of peace. The endurance tests became more intense, and the route marches longer and more frequent, and in the last three weeks the cushier schemes tailed off altogether.
The physical activity was continuous. Map-reading and lectures gave place to daily P.T. Cox and one or two more of the old hands managed to develop foot-complaints with comparative ease, were excused parades, and left behind as hut orderlies while the rest slogged off for the day with haversack rations and filled water bottles. When the platoon came back at five the cheerful and relaxed hut orderlies provided them with hot water to boil out their rifle-barrels, made filthy by the firing of blanks.
“All go, innit, mate?” Cox would say sympathetically, pouring the water down a funnel in his best market manner. “Next gent, please. Oo, you dunnarf look rough. Nice drop of fisherman’s daughter? Don’t be shy, girls. What don’t speak don’t lie, and what don’t corst much can’t be very-very dear.”
Stanley, however, seemed incapable of developing anything convincing except a constant tendency to fall into a weary sleep.
Such short route marches as Cox did in fact join were enlivened by his stirring marching songs. Stanley sent the words home to his father.
My dear Father, (he wrote)
Perhaps you may like to have the following for your anthology. The tune is roughly that of “A Hundred Pipers”.
SOLO: “The Buffs, the Buffs, they’ve gone away,
They’ve left the girls in the family way,
And now they’ve seven-and-six to pay.
The Buffs’re a terrible lot.”
OMNES: “A Knife, fork, spoon; a razor, comb and a lather-brush,
A knife, fork, spoon; a razor, comb and a lather-brush.”
There are two, or more other verses, but as far as I can see they are identical with this one.
Your loving son,
Stanley.”
His father replied:
My dear Stanley,
Thank you for the song, but I’m afraid its inclusion would involve extending the scope of my monograph to cover works of a purely military character, mnemonics for different regimental bugle-calls and the like; an extension I do not feel justified in attempting at the present juncture. My volume two is presenting somewhat of a problem as it is.
I hope the air-raids are infrequent and that you will soon be having another attempt at a commission.
Your affectionate
Father.
Some days later, however, Stanley was able to make a contribution which his father received enthusiastically.
I am sorry (Stanley wrote) that you feel unable to include anything military. Our regimental bugle-call here, for instance, has the following words attributed to it:
“You’ve
Got-a-face,
Like-a-chicken’s-arse.”
I am writing, however, mainly to give you the words of the song called: “Gorblimey-innit-all-right, eh?” which I have at last tracked down for you.
The speed is roughly that of “Any Old Iron”.
SOLO: “I keep a little public-house, although it don’t keep me,
Because my mate Spud Murphy, ’e’s par-tic-u-lar you see;
’E comes round every evening, ’e’s always on my ear,
’E drinks up all my whisky, then ’e drinks up all my beer.”
OMNES: “Gor … BLIM-ey innit-all-right, eh?
Gotblimey innit-all-right, eh?”
SOLO (resumed): “There ‘e is, on my ear,
’E never thinks of buyin’-any-beer,
And last week,
’E ’ad the ruddy cheek to say,
‘I’ve just come round for me Christmas box.’”
OMNES: “Gorblimey-innit-all-right, eh?”
Second Verse:
SOLO: “Outside our house each evening, two lovers sit and spoon,
And from the way they carry on, I reckon they’ll be married soon.
He calls her duck and darling, in fact, they are red hot,
In return, she calls him, her own forget-me-not”
OMNES: “Gor … BLIM-ey,” etc.
SOLO: “There they are, both in love,
She calls ’im ’er turtle-dove.
My old woman,
She ’ears every word they say,
She wants me to call her names like that—”
OMNES: "Gorblimy-innit-all-right, eh?”
Musical notation is beyond me, but I can sing the tune for you if you are interested when I come home next.
Their usual P.T. corporal was on seven days’ leave, and for a week they had a new one. On the Monday afternoon he came skipping lightly out of the gymnasium, a lithe little figure in his horizontally striped jumper, and addressed them, running on the spot the while.
The platoon looked dubiously at him.
“Where’s he expect to get doin’ that silly caper?” muttered Cox.
“Right, lads,” chirped the P.T. corporal in the odd high-pitched voice of his calling. “Running-on-the-spot-with-me, begin! Knees-up-up-up-up-up! Into-the-changing-room, GO!”
While they were changing he came in, rubbing his hands briskly, saying cheerfully: “I’ve gotchu a run today, lads!”
“Makes a change,” said the old-stager Fred.
The corporal led them rapidly out of the camp and ran them four miles in half an hour, in boots.
“Cor stone me,” groaned Cox at the end of it. The whole platoon was nearly speechless from the exertion.
On the following day he came into the changing-room again and announced: “I’ve done you a favour, lads. I’ve gotchu another run. Now, don’t let me down.”
Nothing would convince him that they really preferred the comparative leisure of intermittent leaping over horses in the gymnasium. Off they went again, and returned collapsing.
On the Wednesday he announced yet another favour, to be met with groans. Nothing loath, he trotted them cheerfully out again, convinced that they really liked it.
And on the Thursday, after an even longer run in boots, he exhorted them at
the end of it: “Now, don’t let me down, lads. When we get in the gate, bags of puffin’ and blowin’. Make outchu bin runnin’ a long way.”
The platoon were on their last legs and could do little else. This so pleased the corporal that he revealed his intention of getting them another run for the Friday.
Half the platoon spontaneously announced their determination to go sick rather than run another step.
“Oh!” said the corporal, offended. “Oh! All right. All right! From now on we stick to the pukka programme. Right!”
He went wrathfully away, and on the Friday kept them at it in the gym. The whole platoon was cheerful about it, but the corporal considered this a mere pretence and was baffled. He therefore went round the final parade, saying: “Haircut. Getcher haircut,” to several of the men, and dismissed them.
*
As it was pay night, Stanley went quietly to a cinema. When he came out he bumped into Cox and several others from the platoon who were just changing pubs and who urged him to join them. They would not take no for an answer and dragged him along.
“Now, my old mate Stan,” said Cox. “Name yer poison.”
So it happened that an hilarious group sailed up to the camp just before eleven. Everyone but Stanley sobered up enough to book in at the gate. Stanley, however, was singing loudly:
