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

  Sergeant Malloy shepherded us from the railway station to the Guardroom at the entrance to Cosford RAF station. There was some paperwork to complete and then, before long, we were issued with bedding, a white pint-sized “china” mug and a knife, fork and spoon. We were then led in procession, carrying our pile of blankets and dining implements, to a group of wooden barrack rooms, each of which contained probably twelve to fourteen RAF barrack-room style beds, but were otherwise sparsely furnished.

  The beds, as I was to discover later, were identical throughout the service. The standard RAF barrack room bed consisted of a sturdy metal frame, painted light grey and supporting a horsehair mattress. The actual support for the mattress was a steel lattice stretched horizontally across the frame and held taut by a series of small springs set approximately six inches apart. One end of each spring was hooked into a hole in the frame, while the other end was fastened to a special eye on the lattice. Although the purpose of the springs was to keep the lattice stretched tightly, over time the springs on most beds weakened, resulting in the mattress sagging in the middle so that anyone sleeping on it couldn’t avoid rolling into a dip created by the sag. The depth of the dip depended on how old the springs were. In a transit type of billet, such as the ones in which we were being accommodated, the beds all tended to be old so the sag feature was very pronounced.

  Bedding consisted of five thin blankets—what the folks back home called army blankets; a feather pillow in traditional striped cloth; a pair of white cotton sheets and a pillowcase. It was all strictly Spartan in nature, but I could have slept on a plank that night so it didn’t really matter. I don’t think there was any one of us that had a clue about how to make a bed, but we all managed to get our blankets and sheets creatively arranged into something that we could at least sleep in. Later, we would be taught the fine art of bed making, but that was still a little way down the road.

  We were hungry. Not one of us had eaten a proper meal since leaving Belfast the previous day. Getting meals outside of the appointed mealtimes was apparently as easy as getting an Act of Parliament passed, but the good sergeant had been given a meal chitty at the Guardroom. He now wheedled the reluctant cookhouse staff into frying up some eggs, beans and potatoes for the ravenous youngsters in his charge. But long before the food was served up, one of the cookhouse staff brought out a big stainless steel urn filled with scalding hot tea, to which they had already added milk. Taking turns, we filled up our china mugs, added sugar and gulped it down. It didn’t taste much like the tea that I was used to at home but, as they say, it was wet and warm and I was grateful for it. Not only that, it helped stave off the hunger pangs until the meal was ready. Altogether, the food was plentiful and filling, which was more than I could say about the “home cooked” near-starvation diet that I suffered at the hands of my stepmother, Annie. Yep, I thought, this is alright!

  Our visit to Cosford lasted something like four days in all. During that time, in addition to being poked and prodded by doctors, we were interviewed individually by officers whose job it was to gauge our suitability for training and to steer us into the trades they felt we might best be suited for. The Squadron Leader who interviewed me looked at my file and then smilingly informed me that I met the requirements to train as an aircraft electrical mechanic. He told me that this was a difficult trade to get into; that there weren’t many openings and that I should feel privileged to have been selected. But, he warned, the training would be difficult and so I needed to work hard if I wanted to pass out as a fully-fledged Aircraft Electric Mechanic at the end of the Boy Entrant training. I was so thrilled that I’d been given the trade of my choice that I really only half heard what he said about working hard and all that stuff. It was the sort of speech that grownups always seemed to make, but my thoughts were soaring up amongst the clouds where I saw visions of the people who would be proud of me and the riches and rewards that learning a trade would bring with it. Here at last was my chance to break free from the chains that had shackled me up until now—my oppressive family life and the unfair Northern Ireland politics of religion that prevented me from getting into a decent trade. Would I be bold enough to reach out and grasp this opportunity? The need to decide loomed just around the corner.

  In between interviews and medical examinations, the remainder of our stay at Cosford consisted of being shown something of the Boy Entrant way of life. A “Leading Boy” took us on a tour of the Catering Training School, proudly showing us huge vats in which the food was cooked, mixing machines and a weird implement that was supposed to be used for shredding beef. I’d never before heard of beef being shredded, let alone there being a special piece of equipment for accomplishing the task. As the highlight of the tour, he led us into a room that contained a fine display of little hors d’oeuvres and petit fours. We were allowed to gaze at them for a few moments before the Leading Boy proudly informed us that Boy Entrant trainee caterers had created them that very day. Someone asked what was going to happen to them, maybe hoping that we might be allowed to sample some. But our tour guide loftily replied that they would be served in the Boy Entrants’ mess. That took some believing! Such delicacies just didn’t seem to go with the class of food we’d become accustomed to partaking in the Boy Entrants’ mess.

  Another tour guide took us to a room full of desks with the kind of Morse code keys that used to be seen in the old Western films. We were told that this is where the Wireless Telegraphers were trained to send and receive code. The same tour also introduced us to another high-tech item known as the teleprinter. Nowadays, this venerable machine would be classified as a museum piece, having been replaced first by the fax machine and then by the modern miracle of e-mail. But, at the time, it was impressive.

  Mostly, however, these were ho-hum tours. I wasn’t interested in being a wireless telegrapher and I sure as hell didn’t want to be a caterer. No, what really got my juices flowing was a tour of the Boy Entrant training workshops. These were in hangars and they had real live aircraft in there. A Hawker Hunter sat proudly in one of the hangar workshops. It was the first one I’d ever seen at close range and it had to be one of the most beautiful things that I’d ever laid eyes on. Even though its flying days were finished, it was every inch a thoroughbred, looking sleek and shiny sitting there in its dark green and light grey camouflage livery with the swept-back wings and streamlined Perspex canopy gleaming and glinting in the hangar lights. We saw some other planes in the hangar; a Vampire I believe and some prop-jobs, but seeing the Hunter was my epiphany. It made me realize that caring for and being around beautiful aircraft such as this was what I wanted to do.

  Up to this point, everything had been something of a boyish adventure—a game, really. Events had just progressed from the time that I’d answered the newspaper advert, like a snowball rolling downhill that starts off small, but grows larger and speeds up with every inch it travels. Now the situation had become serious and I had an important decision to make. There was still time to back out and some boys did, but I didn’t want to do that. So I made the decision that this was to be my future—it was what I wanted to do—promising myself that I would stay on this path wherever it led. I rationalized that even though it would subject me to military discipline and training and I’d seen and heard enough to have no illusions about that, it couldn’t be worse than the unhappy life from which I was desperately trying to escape. In fact it seemed to hold out great promise. And now, with the hindsight of years, I regard that decision as the most important one that I ever made, without exception, even though I was a boy of only 15 at the time. The space age that was just dawning had a name for it; I had finally achieved escape velocity. There would be difficulties ahead for sure, but I still shudder to think how my life might have worked out if I’d backed off and not made that very important choice.

  During our few days at Cosford, the Boy Entrant’s uniform became a familiar sight. It consisted of the basic regular RAF blue serge tunic and trousers, but with a few embellishment
s, the most striking of which was the hat. There was nothing remarkable about it in itself, just the standard RAF issue, but what made it different was the brightly coloured chequered hatband—two rows of alternating colours—worn by Boy Entrants in place of the black hatbands worn by regular RAF servicemen. I recall that the pattern on the hatband of a Boy Entrant being trained in the catering trade, who escorted a party of us on a tour of the Catering Training School, consisted of red and yellow squares. But that was only one colour scheme; there were others, although his was the only one that sticks in my memory from the visit to Cosford.

  Two other interesting features elevated the Boy Entrant uniform above the drabness of its regular service counterpart. One of these was what looked like a brass cartwheel about one and a half inches in diameter worn on the upper sleeve and set against a coloured disc that was slightly larger at about two inches in diameter. The other feature was the set of small upside-down stripes worn by many boys at wrist level on the cuff of their tunics. Some had one stripe, some had two and others had three. I could now picture myself in one of those uniforms and was eager to get on with the process of being able to wear one soon. But all in good time. First, we had to go back to our homes and wait until October to be called for our induction into the Service.

  * * *

  The journey home was less exciting. Going to England for the first time had been a fantastic experience, but there was nothing new to discover on the way back, just the long, long trip to endure. So, we got the train back to Liverpool, then the boat to Belfast. The first stop, after disembarking next morning, was the Clifton Street recruiting office where we were issued with railway passes that would take us to our home towns. We then said our goodbyes and headed off in the direction that would take us to our respective homes. I made my way to the York Road railway station and caught the next available train that would bring me to journey’s end.

  About two hours later, when I alighted on the Coleraine station platform, one of the porters who’d bantered with Melvin, Bull and me a few days earlier, when we were setting off for Belfast, seemed surprised to see me.

  “Hello son,” he said, “did you get left behine? The other’uns came back days ago.”

  “Naw, I went to Englan’. I passed the test in Belfast, so they sent me tae Englan’ fur some more.”

  “Did ye pass?”

  “Aye.”

  “And ye’re goin’ in the air force?”

  “Aye.”

  He laughed at this. “The other wee fellas said you’d failed too, an’ said ye’d be home on the nixt train.”

  “Naw, Ah passed.”

  “Well, that’s grand, your Da’ll be proud o’ yeh. When wull y’haff to go away?”

  “Dunno,” I said, with a shrug of my shoulders, “soon.”

  “Well, we’ll be seein’ ye agin soon, then!”

  “Aye.”

  With that, I set off for the short walk home from the station to give the news to the family.

  For the next few weeks I found it difficult to settle back down into the old routine of delivering groceries to Paddy Corning’s customers, knowing that it wasn’t going to be for much longer and that my life was about to change drastically. I saw a lot of my pal John Moore. We had lived near each other when we were younger, had gone to the same school and had been best friends for several years. It was John who introduced me to Elvis the Pelvis. One day he got talking about this record he’d heard played on a jukebox in a little greasy spoon café near the railway station, so I went there with him and listened. That was the first time I heard Elvis—he was singing Blue Suede Shoes. It was so different from the usual run of the mill songs that I was used to hearing on the radio around that time and just seemed so new and fresh. We sang the chorus back and forwards to each other when we were out and about, like a young person’s code that the older folks couldn’t understand. After that, we made many trips to the Railway Place Café to put our money in the jukebox and feed our craving for Blue Suede Shoes over and over again until the proprietor must have been going out of his mind. He was probably pleased later, for a little while anyway, when we latched on to Hound Dog.

  I introduced Melvin Jackson to John. He was one of the two others who had travelled to the RAF recruiting office in Belfast with me. We had become friends and I was sad that he hadn’t made it past the initial exams. But now, all three of us went around together during the short time that I had left. Melvin was very self-conscious about having failed to pass the education test. For years he had dreamed of joining the RAF, but now his hopes had been dashed. His mother took me on one side during one of my visits to his home and in an earnest confidential tone asked me not to tell anyone the reason why Melvin hadn’t been accepted.

  “If anyone asks,” she said, “just tell them that he had failed on account of his poor eyesight.”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  One or two people did ask me during the next few weeks, in a way that made me believe they already knew the real reason, but I stuck to the party line about Melvin’s bad eyesight.

  Coleraine was your typical mid-fifties small town, where all the shops on the main street closed up at six o’clock in the evening and from midday on Wednesdays, which was “half day.” There were two cinemas in town, The Picture Palace on Railway Road, which was better known around town as “Christie’s” after the owner’s family name and The Palladium in Society Street. Both showed a film for two days—two evening performances and a Saturday matinee—and then changed the programme. They were closed on Sundays, like just about everything else in town. And that was about it for entertainment. Young people in their late teens or early twenties could go to dances at The Boathouse, or to The Arcadia Ballroom in Portrush, the nearby seaside resort. Older guys always had plenty of pubs to patronize, but there weren’t many activities available for us 15-yearolds. We thought of ourselves as oh-so-grownup because we’d left school, were working and had a little money in our pockets, all of which we felt entitled us to a night-life. And for our age group, the “in place” to hang around on Friday and Saturday nights was Morelli’s Ice Cream Parlour and Fish & Chip shop, although we never actually purchased very much from that fine establishment.

  We’d stand around outside and watch girls no older than we were promenade up and down the street. They were never alone, always at least in pairs and like us they were there to see and be seen. We would behave in really sophisticated ways, like whistle after them, or try out some very witty pick-up lines as they passed by, such as, “Can I see you home? Where’ve ye been all me life?” Yeah, we really talked like that! Embarrassing, isn’t it? The girls would giggle but usually kept walking. If they stopped it was just to trade some banter. At St. Malachy’s Catholic School that John Moore and I had attended, the boys and girls were segregated and although I lived with two sisters at home there was still much I had to learn about the opposite sex. Our encounters were awkward to say the least, but it was great fun. Yes, we felt so grown up because we’d left school, but the joke is that not one of us had reached our sixteenth birthday. Hell, we hadn’t even started shaving yet.

  The Summer of 1956 in Coleraine,—which mainly consisted of rain between the showers—gave way to autumn, when small boys hurled sticks at the high branches of the local Horse Chestnut trees in the hope of dislodging a few prickly seed-bearing cases. This activity was occurring throughout the British Isles. The dislodged chestnuts were used in an ancient children’s game that English youngsters called Conkers and Irish kids, at least in my neck of the woods, called Cheesers.

  Around this time another familiar-looking package plopped through the letterbox. It contained a letter officially informing me that I’d been accepted to train as an aircraft electrical mechanic at the No. 4 School of Technical Training, Royal Air Force St. Athan, Glamorgan, South Wales and that I was to report to the Belfast Recruiting Office on Saturday, 13th October, 1956. The envelope included a railway warrant that would take care of my train fare and some consen
t papers for my father to sign. I think he gave me the speech again about him not wanting me to go, but that he wouldn’t stop me. I was hoping he wouldn’t, but why would he? Let’s face it, there would be one less mouth to feed and the prospect of a little more money coming in from the earnings that I was expected to send home. So he signed the papers and we sent them back to the RAF.

  Meanwhile, I continued working for Paddy Corning, but there was an omnipresent sense that time was running out and any plans for the future involving friends or home town were becoming increasingly short term as each day passed. I still delivered groceries to the likes of Mrs. Mulligan, but now she always received her full weight of the Gypsy Crèmes.

  And so it was that I pedalled on into October and into a new chapter of my life.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Oath of Allegiance

  My final week in Coleraine was tinged with a mixture of excitement and sadness. In addition to giving Paddy Corning a week’s notice of my intention to leave his employment, there were goodbyes to be said to family and friends. And one of the most important people that I needed to say goodbye to was my Aunt Maggie, so I made a point of visiting her at home one evening on my way home from work.

  In reality, Maggie was my great-aunt because she was my mother’s aunt, but I had been brought up to know her as Aunt Maggie. She never married and therefore had no children of her own, but for family reasons Maggie had raised her sister’s daughter—my mother—from when she was a young child, all the way into adulthood. The relationship she and I shared was therefore akin to that of grandmother and grandson. Although she was kind and generous to my sisters and me, she had never really hit it off very well with my father. Each tolerated the other, albeit uneasily, whilst my mother was alive, but they had a big falling-out after her death and wanted nothing to do with each other after that. Because of this, my father forbade me to have any contact with Maggie, but I disobeyed him and secretly went to see her at least once a week. She always made me welcome and wanted to be involved in my life, but she wasn’t going to be able to come and see me off on the train because she was getting on in years, so I went to see her instead. Aunt Maggie knew why I’d come, and was visibly upset that I would be leaving our home town.