Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  I missed the cash-register excitement of piece work, when every hundred done meant pence and shillings in my pocket. For the moment work was slower, and I almost slept on my feet, soon getting used to the whine-scream of handsaws and the juddering of sanding machines, and the air that was thick with the finest sawdust and motes of baked glue even though extractor fans contributed to the noise by driving some of it into the street. On my way home an occasional gob of orange spit flashed into the gutter. I wouldn’t wear a cap to prevent dust thickening my hair, unwilling to assume the badge of a workman settled in for life. A cursory wash every day in the scullery had to suffice until total immersion in hot water at the public baths on Saturday afternoon.

  The factory was one of thousands all over the country kept going by women and girls, youths like myself, and men above military or retirement age. A bonus system helped output to reach its maximum, and we carefully watched the charts pinned to the office door. My next job was bringing half-inch boards six feet by three from the presses on the floor above into the cellar for the finishing processes. The edges were still ragged with protruding veneers, but I soon became skilled at getting out splinters and then, with care, avoiding most.

  Two boards at a time were carried to start with, adding gradually till I could hold five or six. This number was not an obligation, but I took pride in testing and increasing my strength. Some of the workers in the cellar were women and girls, and I fell in love with one or two, unknown to them, as they sat chatting and laughing around a large table – taping, filling and scraping the boards to perfection.

  In keeping the cellar tidy and provisioned with work I was the assistant to Bill Towle, who was two years older, though we had known each other in the district for years. As children we once went rambling over the Bramcote Hills with a couple of his father’s old pipe bowls, filling them with tobacco from nub-ends picked off the street. The smoking was enjoyable, but not the sickness that followed soon after.

  In tea-break and dinner hour (I brought something to eat from home, for there was no canteen) Bill insisted on teaching me unarmed combat, in which he was certainly an expert: what to do when attacked with a knife (he used a real one), how to break out of a half-nelson (calling for speed, agility and cultivated aggression), the trick of throwing someone who aimed a kick at you (he wore heavy boots), tackling an uprising fist (his was particularly meaty).

  Strong and adept, he slung me all over the boards, until my quick reactions got the better of him from time to time. His father had marked him down for the Royal Navy, and Bill already had a sailor’s way with women and girls, as well as an inexhaustible warehouse of the filthiest jokes imaginable, not to mention a staggering capacity for booze. Because of his physique, and perhaps abilities, he had become a part-time soldier in the local Home Guard company, and said he would take me with him to their church hall headquarters so that I could enrol as well.

  To say there was something unsatisfactory about my life at that time would be correct, but only to the extent that it was not full enough. I had plenty of friends, took a girl out now and again, did a certain amount of reading, and was as much interested at the goings on in Russia and the geography of the battlefields as in the system which the Germans were trying to break. Arguing for what seemed the human fairness of such a social regime gained little agreement from my workmates, though they didn’t think me a complete fool either, since we talked about other topics with a marvellous sense of humour, often bickering in the most basic terms as to whether jazz, which they liked and I did not particularly, was better than all other music.

  The captain of the Home Guard unit looked at my five feet six inches of height, which needed another year or so to attain the final three. ‘You’re too young at fourteen,’ he smiled. ‘Either come back at sixteen, or go into the Army Cadet Force.’

  As it happened, I joined the Air Training Corps, having read something about it in the newspaper.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I walked into the hall of a school on the evening of 1 October 1942, with Arthur Shelton and a few other youths, to enrol in the Air Training Corps. Flying-Officer Pink, the squadron adjutant, told the warrant officer to put us in line with other potential recruits so that he could see what raw material had come into his orbit. I didn’t think he had been so close to anyone from a factory before, most members of the ATC being either at grammar school or working in shops and offices.

  Flight-Lieutenant Hales, the commanding officer, later recalled that I wore a bit of old bootlace for a tie, and looked like someone who had climbed out of a barrel of shoe polish. This sounds exaggerated, though there could be some truth in the picture, because I worked in the same shirt for a week, a clean one not being put on till after the Saturday bath. Deodorant was non-existent, and we managed with strong wartime soap.

  Mr Pink was short, somewhat rotund and, when without his cap, seen to be thoroughly bald. After asking our names and ages he demanded those of us to put up a hand who did not brush their teeth. I had to signal this admission, which I did without embarrassment, never having considered my mouth to need that kind of attention.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m going to put you recruits on probation for a month, to see how you behave. If everything goes well you will be given a uniform, and then you’ll be able to write the word cadet before your name, but don’t forget that, in the meantime, if you want to belong to 209 Squadron, which is second to none, let me tell you, you will clean your teeth morning and evening! Is that understood?’

  It was, and a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste were paid for out of my next week’s spending money. The only thing I didn’t like about his otherwise sensible speech was that he put me, among others, on probation, and had not accepted me immediately as being the finest possible acquisition.

  My limbs were so unco-ordinated that for a while I had difficulty in marching correctly, but the drill soon taught me how to move, and my aspect smartened quite a lot. Lectures were given twice a week for a couple of hours in the evening, with an optional assembly on Saturday afternoon, which I went to, and instruction also on Sunday morning, ending with a grand review of all 400 cadets of the two West Nottingham squadrons. The only attendance I disliked was that for the monthly church parade.

  On each ordinary occasion, however, I made sure that the uniform trousers were pressed to a sharp edge, and my shoes well polished. I would hurry home from the factory, have tea, a good wash, get into uniform, then quick walk a mile to the school. On Saturday afternoon, and again on Sunday morning, it was a round four miles to different buildings, and because buses were infrequent and often full, or stopped running by nine in the evening, I never used them, knowing in any case all the short-cuts of the area.

  My knowledge of maps decided that I would train to be a navigator, and many hours were spent studying at home. There were classes in subsidiary subjects, and Arthur Shelton, who was clever with anything electrical (and chemical: we once tried to make gunpowder) wired up morse keys and buzzers, so that we practised until we could take and receive faster than anyone else in the squadron. We also improved our English, and learned mathematics, the principles of flight, aircraft recognition, engine theory, meteorology, navigation, RAF law and administration, health and hygiene, and anti-gas regulations – the Initial Training Syllabus for aircrew, in fact – our teachers being business and professional men who gave their time free. The reckoning of the day changed its character when calculated from midnight to midnight, all navigational problems and squadron orders being based on the twenty-four-hour system.

  At annual camp we were attached to an aerodrome for a week, and the RAF looked after us. The first place was at Syerston, too near Nottingham for my liking, where we slept twelve to a bell tent and it rained most of the time, but we were given demonstrations of parachute packing, took a turn on the Link Trainer, and were shown the rudiments of air-traffic control.

  Going by rail to our second camp, my first train journey as a grown-up, I follow
ed the route through Lincolnshire with my National Road Atlas, noting every lane, bridge or stream, to the amusement but, possibly to the satisfaction also, of Mr Pink who accompanied us. This time we slept in Nissen huts, and on the range fired twenty rounds each from Short Lee Enfield rifles, which left me with an aching shoulder. Strangely enough, though always left-handed, I picked up a rifle and used it in the normal right-handed way. We were also instructed in infantry tactics and street fighting, creating mayhem among the blocks of the married quarters with blanks and thunderflashes.

  In less than a year from joining I had gained the Proficiency Certificate Part One, but was too young to be given either the paper or the badge, for no one was expected to pass under the age of sixteen. The only part of the test which I had to take twice was drill, but I received high marks for English, mathematics and navigation, and the absolute top for signals. When Flying-Officer Wibberley, who ran a motor haulage firm, asked what he could give me as a reward for my success, I asked for a copy of The Complete Air Navigator by D.C.T. Bennett, the bombing raid pathfinder of the timer. This book, generously supplied at the cost of fifteen shillings, joined my much-read library, and from it I learned, among other things, the Greek alphabet, also noting the motto at the beginning: ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of safety.’

  My father disliked me putting on a uniform but hadn’t been able to do anything about it. His permission was needed before I could go flying, however, and this he was reluctant to give, because he was genuinely afraid for me, considering the aeroplane to be a dangerous kind of transport. There had been cases, though he couldn’t have known about them, of cadets being killed in accidents, or in planes shot down by German nightfighters roaming the sky above training airfields. I forget whether it was his signature I obtained (something he was normally glad to give, in order to show he wasn’t totally illiterate) or my mother’s, since I was quite capable of forging either, but a group of us were taken by bus to RAF Newton, seven miles from Nottingham, to go up for the first time.

  In a hangar smelling of peardrops, or ‘dope’ as we called it, we were given a parachute, told which handle to pull if we had to jump out of the plane, and sent to wait our turn outside the flight hut. The parachutes banged against our behinds as we walked across the grass and hauled ourselves on board the De Havilland Dominie, a twin-engined biplane of plywood construction, with seating for a pilot and ten passengers.

  The Polish pilot taxied to the edge of the field for take-off, put the nose into the wind after a long slow rumble over the grass, then increased speed until the fixed undercarriage parted from the earth. Such a moment of truth could not have been more spectacular. At a couple of hundred feet, as the aircraft gently turned, or ‘banked’ as we had learned to say, the first blue elbow of the Trent came into view. Fear of air-sickness was forgotten at the sight of familiar landmarks between the Fosse Way, straight as a Roman ruler, and the Derbyshire foothills fading into the green haze.

  Smoke from the marshalling yards and factories lay south of the city but, immediately to port and starboard, visibility was good enough to distinguish churches and park spaces, streets and railway lines, the castle squat on its sandstone rock and Wollaton Hall among the greensward, as well as old hideouts and well-run routes that up to a few minutes ago had seemed so far apart but that now in one exposing vista made as small and close a pattern as that on a piece of lace. From 1,000 feet the hills appeared flat and lost significance, but the secrets of the streets covering them were shown so that no map could have done the job better, doubly enthralling because I hadn’t seen a street plan of Nottingham which, with the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps, were not sold to the public during the war.

  Distance opened in every direction, countryside and townscape from the vantage point of the clouds, on this first flight of many. It was obvious at last where part of my mind had always been, and I knew that if I could get so far vertically off the earth there should be no limit to the mileage I might do on its surface. Eyes ached in closely concentrated search, till after twenty miles the stately old Dominie turned east to join the circuit for a landing, and we were taken to have a meal in the Polish airmen’s mess. What was eaten there has been forgotten, but I do recall that pudding came on the same plate as the meat, thus providing a culinary signpost towards life with a difference.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Armageddons come and go, as did Stalingrad, a great Soviet victory. Germany must be booted into the dust, but when? I wrote to Stanford’s in London for a large-scale map of the Volga-Don area, and it came to me rolled in a cardboard tube. Nothing but the best was good enough, if I was aware of its existence, and if I could meet the price, which wages allowed me to do. Two shillings included postage and packaging, and the map was worth every penny. The scale was sixteen miles to an inch (I still unroll it from time to time) and Stalingrad was called Tsarytsin because the map was twenty years out of date, but the rivers and contours were the same as during the battle and those, I thought, would never change, though on going there twenty years later, when the place was called Volgograd, certain waterways had been added or enlarged. For the remainder of the war I followed events on maps in Baedeker guidebooks which could be acquired for little (at times nothing) in Frank Wore’s cornucopia-shop.

  Orders occasionally came to the factory for a quantity of jacquards, superstrong sheets of cardboard used in the lace trade. Holes were punched in them according to the design, and I wondered if a few wouldn’t still be those of my father’s brother Frederick, who had long since disappeared to London. He had been back in Nottingham for some years, but wasn’t spotted by any of the family till after the war.

  Each jacquard measured two feet by four and was put together on the same principle as plywood, but with paper and special paste. The antiquated machinery was in a dingier part of the cellar, and my job was to hump hundredweight sacks of alum and flour to a vat and empty them in, stirring to an even broth with the requisite amount of hot water to make the paste. Overalls and boots got caked with the stuff, and I would go home stinking like a pig.

  The next stage of production was more agreeable. Several of us worked in the large and often sun-filled attics hanging hundreds of jacquards to dry in rows under steam heat. While they did, time was our own. Often two or three of us pulled ourselves up and down by rope on the goods hoist, till the strangulated shout of the foreman scattered us to the four corners of the factory.

  I taught map-reading to George Meggeson, an army cadet sergeant swotting for his Certificate ‘A’, pencilling elaborate topographical maps with their conventional signs on reject jacquards, so that he could pass the latest in infantry tactics on to me. Sometimes we were called down to help despatch the jacquards, which task I did not much relish, but I learned how to make and tie a parcel.

  Close to sixteen, I was earning over two pounds a week, but knew there was better money to be made. I had a girl to take out, and wanted to save. On a couple of occasions I worked double time during the holidays to help clean the flues of the furnace. Though the fires had been out for twenty-four hours the narrow space we crawled along like Tom Sweeps to push out the banks of soot was fiercesomely hot. Coming home from such overtime I was black from head to foot, but the extra hard-earned pound went into my pocket.

  Between fourteen and eighteen every day seemed like three, every week like a year, every year a decade. After eight hours’ work, the long full evening until eleven or midnight was another day, followed by a third of dream-packed sleep. Two evenings a week were given to homework, mainly the study of navigation, and ATC lectures took up two more.

  Friday and Saturday nights were spent with my girlfriend who worked at a clothing factory making army uniforms, and lived on a housing estate. At sixteen she was a tall, mature girl with a full bosom, and long brown hair worn in a neat fringe at the front. Our main entertainment was the cinema, or simply walking the streets, but there was real delight in the promise and comfort of being with her, and indulging in whatev
er trivial talk of the moment interested us. My first real love, she was trusting, passionate and generously willing, so that we were soon ‘going all the way’ on the living-room sofa while her parents were out, sometimes on Sunday night as well, for her father was an amiable coalminer who liked to sit with his wife over a few drinks in the pub.

  Of the two items to be considered in sexual relations, the first was venereal disease, or a dose of the pox, as Bill Towle put it, but it was unlikely that any of us would catch such an affliction because we were young, knew each other, and stayed within the group. The second fear was that of getting the girl pregnant, and to avoid this I called every week at the chemist’s to buy a supply of Durex, it being assumed that those who did not take such precautions asked for all they got, and a bit more. As Arthur Shelton’s father said: ‘When you get married, a penny bun costs tuppence!’

  On the remaining evening of the week I would go out with John Moult, another cadet, crawling the pubs and knocking back a pint or so of Shipstone’s ale. The headquarters of the squadron moved to a place three miles away, and on the long journey home Johnny and I would enliven the empty streets by a caterwauling of popular songs, or try to figure between us the names of the – as then – forty-eight states of the USA, or otherwise test each other on general knowledge. He asked me where Leonardo da Vinci’s mural of ‘The Last Supper’ was, and told me the church and the place when I admitted not knowing, his question coming back to me on visiting Milan and seeing it for myself many years later.

  On Sunday afternoon we listened either at his house or mine to a half-hour programme of light classical music, thus becoming familiar with the names of at least some of the great composers. Neither of us found time to read anything except textbooks, and I was practising more advanced navigation at the table in my room, its surface littered with charts and drawing instruments. I learned what stars, planets and constellations were useful to navigators, the names of cloud formations in meteorology, as well as how to recognize every type of aircraft.