I Came Out Sideways

by George Porter

  This was, for me, the ultimate accolade. I was entrusted with the week’s takings to deposit in the bank. There were three banks within walking distance, and I naturally went to the nearest. It was the first bank I had ever been in and I was enthralled by the significance of the surroundings. My parents didn’t have bank accounts. Sombre dark oak and a respectful silence, only occasionally broken by the clacking of shoes across the polished stone floor. There was quite a long queue, but I was happy standing there soaking up the atmosphere and watching the various business proprietors depositing hundreds of pounds.

  My turn came after nearly half an hour. I strolled up to the counter with an air of self-significance, but when I passed the canvas bag of money and the paying-in book over, my confidence ebbed as the lady cashier smiled at me in a disdainful manner. I was in the wrong bank! Nearly half an hour waiting in the wrong bank.

  The outcome of this blunder was a hurried dash to the correct bank some distance away, and a further fifteen-minute wait. When I eventually arrived at the front of the queue, I was taken by surprise when this lady behind the counter knew who I was and where I had come from.

  “We’ve had a phone call from Scott’s, dear. They were asking where you are. We told them you hadn’t been in. I think they are a bit worried about you.”

  ‘Worried’ was a glorious understatement. Not only was the high-heeled harpy tottering around Crown Buildings on the lookout for me, but the police had been called on the off-chance that I could have done a runner with the takings. My explanation to the manager came as some sort of respite for him, and he contacted the police again to let them know the matter had been resolved.

  This time the cards were definitely on the table. After sanity had been restored, I was once more called over to the bacon slicer. He looked over his wire rims dolefully and addressed me in a resigned fashion.

  “This ...is ... it. We cannot take any more. You will have to go.”

  Precise and to the point.

  “It doesn’t matter, ’cos I’m leaving anyway. I’m joining the army.”

  A stunned silence ensued. And then a golden line was articulated which I took as a splendid compliment, and which has lived with me ever since.

  “Oh, really? Well, all I can say is that Thomas Scott’s loss is Russia’s gain.”

  And so ended, much to my brother’s relief, my short but interesting career in buns and bacon, and I didn’t ever get to find out what my cards were.

  Chapter 10

  The Leaving of Liverpool

  Prior to my journey into the unknown military satellite of Bordon in Hampshire, near the massive garrison town of Aldershot, I had what was supposed to be my interview, accompanied by my father, at the London Road recruiting office in Liverpool. I played no part in it. I was still only fourteen, and parental consent was required, which my father was only too happy to agree to after carefully questioning the red-faced, round-bellied, much-decorated recruiting sergeant about whether or not “there is any of that funny business going on”. There seemed to be a dark side to his questioning which hung in the air for a few moments. Baden-Powell’s reference to ‘beastliness’ sprang to mind. The recruiting sergeant’s face grew a shade redder and his bull neck seemed on the verge of detonation. He spread his stubby fingers wide across a groaning ancient wooden desk as he stood up and gazed across the dank grey room which was dominated by a large framed print of the Annigoni painting of the Queen, and gave my father a glare of hurt indignation. A china mug half-full of stagnating tea wobbled precariously and the overladen ash-tray next to it quivered menacingly.

  “If you are thinking what I think you are thinking sir, you should be ashamed of yourself. This man’s army is a MAN’s army and we don’t have any accommodation for people like that in our barrack rooms.”

  My father seemed satisfied by his indignant reply and offered the sergeant a Woodbine. He happily accepted the offer and they then settled down for a smoke and to an in-depth discussion about the war and the way we sorted the Germans out, my father knowledgeable as ever, no doubt because of his familiarity with The Listener stored away in the attic. And that was my interview. On the way home I was slightly puzzled by the manner in which this interview had proceeded and whether or not I was acceptable to the military.

  “Dad, what did you mean when you talked about funny business?”

  “Never you mind. There isn’t any anyway, so you don’t need to bother about it. All you need to do is pass your entrance test and the medical. And don’t think because you are leaving you don’t have to send any money home.”

  That oft-repeated comment still rankles within me.

  A couple of weeks later I returned to London Road, this time alone, and was shown into a room with desks where about twenty men sat in various states of dishevelment. In strutted a sleeker version of the recruiting sergeant who had interviewed my father.

  “Right, you men. No time to mess about. No use lying because we have ways and means of finding out. Hands up those who’ve been to prison.”

  About half of them raised their hands.

  “Sorry lads, we cannot help you today. If you leave a list of your convictions and sentences before you go we may be able to get back in touch with some of you. We need hard men, but we don’t want any villains.”

  The next question had a stunning reply, because all but three of the remainder of the group were told there was no place for them in the modern army. They were illiterate. This was the first time in my life I found myself at the top of the class. I then proceeded to pass my pre-entrance tests (no mention of a twelve times table or fractions) to indicate to someone in authority that I could spell my name and write a short note on why I wanted to be a soldier. I cannot remember exactly what I wrote, but I do know I mentioned my proficiency as a boy scout and mentioned some of the badges I had acquired including camper, cook, messenger, first aider and fire-fighter. I also exaggerated my skills as a footballer as I always have, even to this day. It’s easy to beat a seven-year-old to a tackle at sixty and boast about your skill with impunity.

  I was then directed to a room with cubicles, to be medically investigated to ensure that I was free from venereal disease, head lice, had no perceptible mental deficiency, and was physically fit to undertake the rigours of army life. I joined a line of more adult recruits who seemed to tower over me, some of whom looked at me suspiciously, puzzled by both my size and apparent age. My balls were squeezed by an old man in a white coat; he investigated my head for nits and my still-sprouting pubic hair for crabs, whispered something behind my back to check my hearing, did some prodding and poking at my abdomen and to my horror inspected my anus. Dr Novak would have shredded him. At the time I had only that year recovered from another bout of pneumonia, weighed in at eight stone and had a thirty-two inch chest. It was noted that I was a Caucasian. I found this to be a bit of a mystery, because I was under the impression that I was a Liverpudlian. When I later eventually arrived at the drill square for an initiation into the skills of turning right and left, swinging the arms and digging the heels in, my Liverpudlian antecedence was reinstated in no uncertain manner, by the NCO in charge of turning a herd of juvenile oddities and miscreants into a well-oiled military machine.

  “Now ’ear me, and ’ear me well, you boys. This intake ’as among you a Scouser. Two things I ’ave to say to you. One, keep your money in your pockets. Two, keep your lockers locked at all times. We don’t trust no Scousers ’ere, they’re worse than the Welsh.”

  My anguished mother took me to Liverpool’s Lime Street station to say goodbye and ensure I boarded the correct train. In common with most adolescent boys, I was embarrassed and angry at her maternal solicitude, especially when she attempted to give me a hug and then help lever me into the innards of the giant hissing iron horse, which was impatiently gasping and spluttering out corkscrews of steam and smuts, eager to convey me on a
journey into the unknown. We were never a tactile family - working-class Victorian reserve had seen to that many years before I was born. After all, I was off to be a soldier and this sort of display of affection was just not on. The word ‘love’ was never mentioned in our house.

  As I settled down alone into my seat in the austerely cushioned, wooden-framed and mirrored compartment, I felt perhaps for the first time, how small and insubstantial I was in the face of all that might follow. As I crossed for the first time over the huge cantilever railway bridge spanning the Mersey, my bravado faded into a haze of apprehension that I couldn’t express. The feeling sometimes returns even now - “who am I, what am I doing?” From that day the philosophic meanderings of Popeye - I am what I am, and that’s all that I am - began to take on more resonant connotations; much later in life Plato was waiting in a second-hand bookshop somewhere to inform me in greater depth. I was soon to learn that the die is cast. Regardless of any changes we attempt, and sometimes succeed at, part of us remains always the same; we are what we were born into. I am still the kid from the outskirts of Liverpool who came out sideways and who bestrode the fault-line, neither poverty-stricken, nor respectable but in the middle, kicking toe-enders.

  To come from being poor to being comfortable is not a rung on the ladder. It may seem so to some from both ends of the spectrum, but a pedigree is still as much of a dog as a mongrel. I take solace in the approach of the stoic warrior emperor Marcus Aurelius - we are as old as the day, no older and no younger. We cannot have the past, and we cannot have the future. We can only have what is. We may change our accents, our dress, our politics and our social mores, and perhaps even in some cases despise our antecedence, all to no or little avail. Kipling could never have been more wrong when he alleged - in condescending doggerel - that

  The Colonel’s lady an’ Judy O’Grady

  Are sisters under their skins!

  No they are not, nor will they ever be. They may both be human, but close relatives? For all his military ramblings, Kipling - like my father - knew everything but never served a day.

  ***

  Some seven hours later my train terminated at Euston Station with a jolt, and I descended hesitantly onto a platform awash with a sea of people in a cloud of smutty steam and replete with a stomach crammed with sandwiches and fruitcake. When I walked into the main concourse I had the feeling that I was lost and would stay lost for ever in the seething, steaming mass of people criss-crossing my own winding path. My instructions were to take the underground to Waterloo, a destination which seemed all the more apposite when I noticed an old man selling newspapers and thought of benign bent old Jack. And then I had my first involvement with a chirpy old cockney.

  “Excuse me, sir - how do I get the underground to Waterloo?”

  “D’ya wanna buy a pyper mate?”

  “No thank you.”

  “Well fack orf then.”

  So I facked off, bemused and disturbed by my very first encounter with someone who spoke like Tommy Trinder and showed scant regard for children in difficulties, because in spite of my bravado, I was still a child. Liverpool, this was not. I was concerned about approaching anyone else for fear of an even worse encounter, but then I noticed in the middle of the mayhem a cubicle offering information with two burly military policemen standing outside. I approached with caution, and as I did so one of them beckoned me over with the crook of his index finger. I was now in the Army, and for all its future faults and despicable contradictions, I became aware that no matter how awful things might get, there would always be someone to ease the path.

  “Where are you going son?”

  “I am trying to find the underground to Waterloo, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir, you call me corporal. Only officers are called sir. Are you National Service? You look too young.”

  “No sir, I mean corporal, I’m a Junior Leader.”

  “Oh, another Junior Bleeder eh? Well sonny, I don’t know why you did it, but you’re in the Army now - there’s no going back. What mob are you joining?

  “The RASC, corporal.”

  “Run Away Someone’s Coming, eh?”

  The joke was lost on me. He shook his head and grinned at me, and then patted me on the shoulder, and I grew two metaphoric feet in stature. Here was I, a soldier in London, being assisted to my unit by a big jovial military policeman. Things were looking rosy. And then he gave me a piece of advice and a piece of chocolate.

  “No matter what happens, don’t ever let them know you are frightened of them, and never, ever, volunteer for anything.”

  I was not sure who he was talking about, but in his next breath he explained.

  “The buggers who train you will try to scare you, but believe me sonny, they are all piss and wind. I’m doing my National Service with three weeks to go, and then I’m on my way home.”

  His advice turned out to be worthy, and had I not been given it so early, I might not have developed my outward appearance of indifference to the verbal contempt which was to be meted out by some of the adult soldiers in charge of our group of youthful misfits, Barnardo’s boys, borstal boys and boy scouts. Some of them would crumble and crack within a few weeks, discharged as unsuitable for military service at the age of fifteen, cowed into submission, mentally scarred and with nowhere to go - not even the fault line. Most, like me, would be fortunate in our own self-awareness, not to be duped into believing the contemptuous picture of us painted by a bully with halitosis bawling in our faces from close quarters and turning purple in the process.

  My first ever comrade-in-arms walked with me to the entrance to the underground station and pointed me in the direction I should follow, and minutes later I was sitting in the bowels of a rattling giant worm threading its way through a seemingly dark and endless tunnel, flashing and grumbling over the track. The blank faces avoiding eye contact with one another were all unaware that, without the building of the Liverpool Overhead Railway, the electric motors under our feet might never have been considered fit for the London underground system. I felt a tang of smug self-aggrandisement.

  My arrival at another Waterloo station, far from that of my still smouldering childhood, was overseen and dominated by an enormous four-faced clock hanging from the roof of the immense concourse, and this time I was able unassisted to find my way to the platform from which a train bound for Liss in Hampshire was waiting to carry me still further into the unknown. Trepidation began to fill the vacuum in my mind, which had suspended reality since stepping onto the platform at Euston station. The unease I sensed was soon to be justified an hour or so down the line, when the train jerked and juddered to a halt at Liss in a windswept downpour, enveloped in darkness. As it trundled off I was left desolate on a platform, waterlogged, shivering and apprehensive as to my fate. The instructions were to go to the station waiting room where transport was arranged to collect me and deliver me to St Lucia Barracks in Bordon. I had by now been travelling for ten hours and wanted to go home. I had eaten all my sandwiches within an hour of leaving Liverpool and hunger was closing in.

  Through the murk I could see a hazy yellow light emanating from the outline of a solitary building, and made my way towards what turned out to be the waiting room. Through the haze I could see that there were people inside and this gave me confidence, although it was soon diminished when I opened the door and was confronted by a Dickensian scene of a steaming cluster of wet unkempt boys, all waiting for transport to what was to turn out to be an earthly equivalent of perdition; a place where normal adolescence would be abolished, and the ways of the outside world would be suspended and upended by a big man with a straight back, bulging eyes, a very loud voice, and a stick to measure his pace. The absurdity of what I had done struck me instantly. I was tired, wet, hungry, disoriented and in the army. This was just the beginning of a night of intense trauma. I was now at the mercy of the military machine
. I had signed my life away for twelve years on a whim at the age of fourteen via an advertisement I saw in a comic at the age of thirteen, secure in the belief that many of Baden-Powell’s boy scouts were warriors in the making, and I was one of them.

  After stilted and subdued introductions, the alpha male in the little party - stubby bitten nails, nicotine stained fingers, slicked back black greasy hair, pustules and no front teeth - addressed us.

  “This ain’t no good is it? If they don’t come soon I’m gonna bugger off home.”

  The raspy Mancunian quack echoed around the dank room. Nobody else spoke. One of them was trying to hide tears that were being forced out of the corners of his eyes. They were betrayed by the streaks of grey on his face caused by wiping his eyes with the cuff of a damp sleeve. We were still children, and this boy’s face personified our plight. A world of make-believe had suddenly come to an abrupt and stupefying end; it was a baleful and totally unexpected introduction to soldiering which is imprinted on my mind still, after all these years.The images are so stark that it could have been last night.

  Incredibly, I met this same boy when he was a man many, many years later after I had lived a different life as far away from the military as I could get, but had taken up work as a tribunal representative for those who claimed a pension for medical conditions and mental problems caused by the services. He was still crying and his poor wife, who loved him dearly, was at her wits’ end. He had been bullied mercilessly for several years and eventually discharged from the military. His plight was put down to his own “lack of moral fibre” and now, in his declining years, all the horrors he had experienced at the hands of bullies had returned to haunt him.

  A drone became a fractured roar, and a pair of dazzling headlights came bouncing out of the blustering gloom. They morphed into a Land Rover which juddered to a halt just before entering the building through its brick wall. One of the devil’s emissaries to Earth burst out of the driving seat and into the road, bawling against the growl of the engine and the rattle of the wind through the trees. The essence of his shrieked announcement was to the effect that we should all get our arses into the back of the Land Rover very quickly. This we all did, the alpha male first in, the weeping boy last, and myself somewhere in the middle, keeping a low profile. The journey to Bordon was fast and daunting, not only for the passengers, but for the maniac who was driving through this deluge. The windscreen wipers were not working, so he was periodically reaching out of his window to try to wipe the windscreen clear with a pair of waterlogged old underpants. Visibility was down to inches. After about ten minutes, which seemed more like ten hours, the vehicle unexpectedly lurched through an uplifted barrier guarded by a spotty First World War uniformed child holding a pick-axe handle. It was very nearly removed from his hand by the roaring Land Rover, intent on entering the guardroom via yet another brick wall. This boy was soon to become known to me as the RSM’s ‘favourite soldier’. He was four feet ten inches tall and as such, when performing rifle drill with fixed bayonets, was a fearsome and dangerous person to be close to because he was so short. It was hard for him to manoeuvre the rifle without stabbing the pointed end into the eye of a neighbour. In addition, his 1914-18 cap was a size too large for him and was secured only by his protruding ears, affording him extremely limited vision.