Boy Entrant; The Recollections of a Royal Air Force Brat Read online

  We had all received a letter advising that we should be prepared to be away from home for a few days. The arrangement was that we would undergo some testing in Belfast and those who passed this successfully would then travel from there to RAF Cosford in England. I’d never been to England before. In fact, up to that point, Belfast was the furthest distance I’d ever been from home in my entire life and that was only a piddling 60 miles from Coleraine. So the prospect of going to England had me really fired up. This seemed to be the adventure to beat all adventures.

  In all, there must have been close to a hundred boys in our group that day. We came from all corners of Northern Ireland and there were also some boys from Southern Ireland. I remember some of them by name: Niall Adderley, Cecil Burden, Charlie Cunningham, and Billy Cassidy. Most of us were ordinary middle of the road well-scrubbed working class kids, but this was the era of the “Teddy Boys” and one boy showed up in full Teddy Boy attire—long drape jacket with its velvet collar, drainpipe trousers and a shoestring for a tie. His hair was dark, thick and full, heavily Brylcreemed and slicked back into the “DA”—Duck’s Arse—hairstyle popular with the “Teds”. He looked tough—a real hard-man, as they say in Belfast—so most of us kept our distance. Teddy Boys were reputed to carry flick-knives and cut-throat razors and weren’t afraid to use them at the slightest provocation. No point in taking chances with somebody like that.

  They paid us—they actually paid us! I couldn’t believe it, but we were all instructed to line up and then as our names were called out individually we would step forward, sign on a sheet of paper against our names and an officer then handed us some cash. It wasn’t much by today’s standards, 21 shillings I think, but it was a small fortune to me. The fact that I was able to buy biscuits and pop from the Sandes Home next door was the height of luxury to me. I told myself that this couldn’t be such a bad life, where they give you money just for showing up.

  The Intelligence Test was easy. I loved that kind of test and had lots of previous practice, having passed my 11-plus exam a few years before. The next two tests were a little harder, but not really difficult: just basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, a few fractions, a little algebra and a few written problems thrown in. The written questions were the kind of arithmetical problems that involve farmers who always want to divide their land up in weird ways so that they can spoil some of their sons and be cruel to the others. The English test was mainly comprehension, although I believe we had to write a short essay on “Why I want to run away from home and join the RAF.” No, just kidding, that wasn’t what it was about, although it might have been a good topic, suitable for psychoanalysis. Charlie Cunningham, who was one of the other boys there that day, shared memories of this event with me many years later. He mentioned that a person in RAF uniform stood at the front of the room facing us as we sat at some tables. This person held a list of words in his hand and, as he called out the words, we were expected to write them down on our exam answer papers to test our spelling ability. “Hippopotamus” is the only word that Charlie has managed to hold in his memory down through the corridors of time and personally I don’t recall the spelling test at all.

  Between tests, we went to the Sandes Home next door for lunch—fried egg, beans, sausage and chips, just what a growing lad wanted. The food server was a tall, balding man who was physically handicapped because one of his legs was shorter than the other. A special boot with a very thick sole, which he wore on the foot of his shortest leg, compensated for the difference in length between the two. Although it no doubt helped with his mobility, it looked ugly and caused him to walk with a pronounced heavy limp. In the typically cruel fashion of youngsters, we called him Clubfoot amongst ourselves—after a villainous character that haunted many of us through the weekly cliff-hanger episodes of a Dick Tracy serial which had made the rounds of Northern Ireland cinemas just a few years earlier.

  Later that night, we were accommodated in an upstairs dormitory in the Sandes Home. It was primarily a Christian mission to military people; a place where financially stretched soldiers, sailors or airmen could get a meal and a bed for the night at a reasonable price, if they were willing to behave like good Christians whilst they were there. I learned later that a Miss Elise Sandes wanted to do her bit to save the common soldier’s soul, so she founded the Sandes Soldiers’ Homes to offer them food, lodging and salvation. I wonder what thoughts might have passed through the genteel lady’s mind if she could have seen one of her dormitories packed with around 100 or so loudly boisterous young teenage boys.

  Not one of us could settle that night, because we were so excited about being away from home and out in the big wide world. It must have sounded like a riot from downstairs, because it wasn’t long before Clubfoot paid a visit to us and read the riot act about all the noise we were making. After his departure from the dorm, silence ensued for maybe all of ten minutes and then the noise level was back to full volume again. Clubfoot made several visits that night, getting angrier each time, but eventually we all ran out of steam and peace finally settled on the dormitory.

  Most of us were having a great time, but one boy wasn’t. He could be heard sobbing into his pillow. Next morning many of us were surprised to learn that the crying kid was none other than the tough Teddy Boy. He looked very crestfallen and embarrassed as he got dressed in the dormitory, not the preening hard-man of the day before and was gone soon after that. Things like that make you wonder about what goes on behind the façade some people put up. He had only been away from home for one night, in his own city at that and a real tough guy by all outward appearances. So did he miss his mum, or what?

  We got the results of our tests after breakfast and I was happy to learn that I’d passed. The bad news was that the other two boys from Coleraine didn’t do so well and were sent home later that day. In fact, quite a few fell by the wayside and by the time all the results were called out, we were down to about half the original number of candidates.

  After that, they kept us hanging around all day because the boat to England didn’t sail until evening. We amused ourselves, talked, played cards, read and filled up on junk food purchased from the Sandes Home with our travel allowance. What the heck, we were rich after all and could afford it!

  In the late afternoon, we were rounded up and assembled outside the recruiting office. When everyone had been accounted for, we were paid some more travel allowance to Cosford and given a meal in the Sandes Home. Then, Sergeant Malloy escorted us to Belfast docks, which was just a short walking distance from Clifton Street and ushered us aboard the M.V. Ulster Monarch for the overnight passage that evening, across the Irish Sea to Liverpool. This was a ship of some 3800 tons, built at nearby Harland and Wolf’s shipyard in 1929. She had been pressed into service during World War II and then decommissioned by the Royal Navy to resume her peacetime role of ferrying passengers between Belfast and Liverpool. Despite being overhauled after her wartime service, she couldn’t disguise her venerable age.

  Second-class passengers, like us, were located at the stern of the ship, where the accommodation consisted of one large lounge containing parallel rows of bench-like seating. In an apparent effort to make things a little less Spartan, the individual seats were outfitted with faux leather seat cushions and backrests. There was similar seating around some of the walls of the lounge, but a shuttered bar counter took up most of the forward wall. The ship did have some sleeping accommodation, but as I found out later, these “berths” usually needed to be reserved weeks in advance. It didn’t really matter, because RAF funds apparently didn’t run to that kind of luxury anyway. The lounge was about three-quarters full, so we all managed to find seats on which we dumped our stuff to reserve them before going out on deck to watch the action. I went up there with Billy Cassidy, a Belfast lad that I’d become friendly with. We watched as other passengers boarded the ship until it was time to pull the gangplank away. Soon, a gang of dockworkers cast off the ship’s lines and then we w
ere moving down the River Lagan, past the Harland and Wolf shipyard and into Belfast Lough. Gradually, the nearby shores receded on both sides until we were far away from land and the darkness of night slowly settled over the seascape. I could see the faraway lights of Holywood and Bangor twinkling as the ship slowly eased out of the Lagan estuary, carrying me with it on the next exciting leg of this great adventure.

  About an hour later the ship emerged from the shelter of Belfast Lough and the wind picked up, now that we were out in the open Irish Sea. The Ulster Monarch changed course as we came around the southern headland, now making her way southeast towards Liverpool. At the same time, she met a heavy swell that caused her to pitch and roll in a very noticeable manner. As I later came to learn, this tub was notorious for her poor ability to ride smoothly through rough water and it was even said that she was liable to wallow on wet grass. There was nothing much else to see and the wind had become much chillier, now that we were out in the open sea, so Billy and I then weaved our way back to the lounge. We hung on to anything within reach, in a desperate effort to keep from being thrown around by the up and down and side to side motion of the ship. We were hungry and wanted to find out if we could buy a sandwich from the bar.

  Where there had been a closed steel shutter before, there was now a beleaguered looking man wearing a white shirt and black tie. His shirt sleeves were loosely rolled up to just below the elbows and he was doing his best to deal with the undisciplined mob of male passengers that crowded together around the bar. Each man was noisily competing with his neighbour to be noticed by the barman and have his order accepted. Many of the men were buying beer and whiskey, but some were buying mugs of tea and sandwiches. I finally managed to get myself a mug of tea and a sausage sandwich, then went and sat down on the seat I’d reserved earlier. It seemed comfortable at first, but after a while the unyielding hardness of the wooden bench seemed to come right through the thinness of the seat cushion. Many of the seasoned passengers had commandeered more than one seat, then taken the cushions off and laid them on the floor to make a bed. They were the lucky ones! The seats didn’t recline in any way. Those of us sitting in them had to sit bolt upright. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the wooden armrests prevented any attempt to lie down without an armrest digging into your ribs.

  Later, some of the men who had been drinking whiskey and Guinness started singing. These were mostly tough, weather-beaten looking fellows who never seemed to remove their Andy Capp-style flat caps, but wore them always at a jaunty angle. The drunker they became, the jauntier the angle, often with several strands of straggly grey hair poking out from underneath the peak and sticking to their sweaty foreheads. They were mostly Irish labourers going to hard manual jobs in England and representing what was probably Ireland’s greatest export at that time—human muscle power. They must have made this journey dozens of times and even if they had ever once thought of it as an adventure, that aspect of the crossing had been lost on them long ago. Drinking was what they enjoyed; it eased the sorrow of leaving their families for a lengthy exile and at the same time was just an extension of the normal social life they pursued with their fellow Paddys in the pubs of England after they’d finished work for the day.

  After a while, some of them began throwing up on the lounge floor. No one attempted to clean it up, so the regurgitated Guinness just oozed backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, as the boat pitched and rolled. It was gut-churning to see and I tried not to look, but the aroma became overpowering, so Billy and I went back out on deck to get away from the awful sight and smell. We found a sheltered spot out of the wind and at about the halfway stage watched as the Isle of Man slipped by on the starboard side. At one point, we saw another ship passing us in the opposite direction. It was all aglow like a small island of light in the surrounding pitch blackness of the sea. Our ship must have appeared just the same to anyone watching from the other vessel, which most probably was the Ulster Monarch’s sister-ship making the reverse trip from Liverpool to Belfast. Ever since then, whenever I hear the expression “ships that pass in the night”, the memory of seeing that ship in the cold darkness of the Irish Sea immediately comes to mind.

  We were still on deck when the sky started getting light. It was late summer, so dawn came early. Away on the horizon I could make out the silhouettes of two ornate towers framed in the light of the early morning sun. Each appeared to be topped by some kind of decorative fixture that I couldn’t quite identify. Someone told me that these were the twin towers of the Liver Building, a famous Liverpool landmark and what I saw on each tower was a statue of the mythical Liver Bird that symbolized the City of Liverpool. Oddly, the word “Liver” seemed to be pronounced differently (“lie”—as in to tell a lie and “ver”—the first syllable of Veronica) from the way it was enunciated when used in the city’s name. If I thought that seeing the Liver Birds meant that we were there, then I was dead wrong. It took something like another two hours from the time that I first spotted them until we actually entered the Mersey estuary and by that time I’d had more than enough of being at sea, even if it was for the very first time.

  My first impression of Liverpool was far from pleasant. It was a grimy industrial city and its river, the Mersey, was a stinking polluted waterway. This was all so different to the bucolic land that I’d just left, where everything seemed fresh, green and clean. The smell from the river added to the queasiness that I was already experiencing as a result of having endured the motion of the ship and the sickening aroma created by the drunken navvies of the previous night.

  Docking at Liverpool wasn’t an easy business. The ship entered a lock, which was then slowly flooded to raise the water level by several feet. The operation lasted for what seemed an eternity until, finally, the upper lock gates swung open and we moved forward a short distance to tie up at Princes Dock. On the shore I caught a glimpse of my first real live British Bobby with his peculiarly English policeman’s helmet. The policemen of the Royal Ulster Constabulary that I was used to seeing in Northern Ireland wore flat peaked hats and walked around with holstered revolvers at their waists. This policeman, like all British Bobbies of those days, was completely unarmed. He stood by the gangplank as we disembarked and I somehow expected him to say “Evening all!” like Dixon of Dock Green used to do on TV.

  Sergeant Malloy gathered us together and then we walked the half a mile distance to Lime Street Station, as a group, to catch our train for Cosford. This was a huge railway station, making my little Coleraine station seem like something out of Toytown and even making Belfast’s York Road look pathetically small. And the sulphur laden smoke belching out of all those coal-fired steam engines filled the air with an acrid odour that was much, much worse than the smell of the Mersey. I remember a popular folk song from around that time that went by the title Maggie May. Not the one that Rod Stewart made popular years later, but an older more traditional one with a chorus that went…

  Oh, Maggie, Maggie May,

  They have taken her away,

  And she’ll never walk down Lime Street anymore.

  You may search from here to China

  You’ll not find a girl that’s finer,

  That is finer than my darlin’ Maggie May.

  Every time I heard that song and especially the line about Lime Street, that terrible smell would come right back into my nostrils and my stomach would retch just like it did that morning in Liverpool.

  Sergeant Malloy found the train that we needed to board and shepherded us on to the platform. The train was made up of a dozen or so red and creamy yellow coloured British Railways carriages of the era. This colour scheme was popularly known as “blood and custard,” and for me, it stood out in stark contrast to the uniform emerald green colour of railway carriages back home in Ireland.

  The RAF had reserved a few compartments for us, so we clambered aboard and were pleasantly surprised to discover that these English trains were really very comfortable. More so than those that I was used to back
home and the quality of the seating was definitely a huge improvement over that of the Ulster Monarch. At last, we were able to spread out and had hopes of catching up on some sleep. But there was a great sense of excitement too and that made sleep impossible for a while. After all, this was another country and there was a lot to see and absorb.

  After half an hour or so of waiting, the train finally pulled out of Lime Street station with a shriek of its steam whistle and a violent jerk, then we were on our way. At first we passed through the grimy industrial heart of Liverpool, but then soon found ourselves rolling smoothly through the sleepy early morning English countryside. There were fewer hedgerows and larger fields than in my native Ireland and the countryside seemed flatter too, all of which confirmed what I’d learned from Mr. Murphy during geography lessons at St. Malachy’s.

  Our route took us to Crewe, a major railway intersection in those days, where we then needed to change to another train that would take us further south to West Bromwich. There was an hour or so to wait at Crewe for the next train, so we grabbed the opportunity to find something to eat. Getting food aboard the ship that morning had been next to impossible, so I was famished in spite of the queasiness brought on by the combination of ship’s motion and the unforgettable Liverpudlian aromas. But all we could find in the British Railways canteen were cellophane wrapped egg sandwiches that seemed to have been prepared hours before. Since there was nothing else available, I bought a couple of the sandwiches and a cup of weak lukewarm British Railways tea to wash them down.

  About thirty minutes after finishing my sandwiches, the train to West Bromwich arrived at the platform. We climbed aboard and settled down for the hour or two that it took until we pulled into West Brom. After that it was a local train, which wasn’t quite as comfortable as the other two main-line trains we’d travelled on earlier, that took us all the way into Royal Air Force Station Cosford, where we arrived some time around midday.