I Came Out Sideways

by George Porter

  The interior of the guardroom resembled the waiting room, apart from the warmth, shiny floor, sparkling brass handles and a couple of cells with iron barred gates. A large mongrel was sitting dejectedly in the corner of one of them. It turned out that the dog was under arrest and living on reduced rations of bread and water: it had been charged with conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline in that it had urinated on the guardroom wall. It was also charged with gross indecency, a charge that would be dropped because such a serious crime would necessitate the institution of a court martial.

  This was my first experience of the absurdities of military discipline and this experience was attained within minutes of the twelve years’ service which lay ahead. It was indicative of much, but not all, of what was to follow. Much later I was to meet a man called Paul Berry, a man who had suffered the same fate as the dog, although he was prosecuted rather than jailed for his misdemeanour. He was the first person in my life to give me a sense of self-worth. He was on the same plane as Billy Liddell, but the chalk of his life and achievements and the cheese of Billy’s could never blend, although they were derived from the same earthly constituent - humility.

  After some cursory questioning and fractious comment bordering on malice by the guard commander, a soldier with a basin-cut not dissimilar to that of Moe from the Three Stooges with a demeanour to match, directed us through the rain to a hut from which we were to collect basic requirements. These materialised into a mattress, three blankets, two pillows, a pair of sheets, a set of denim work clothes, a pair of boots, a china mug with knife fork and spoon, a webbing belt and gaiters, a set of pyjamas and a beret. A soldier in the stores, referred to by our guide as Fat Henry, produced the equipment and proceeded to load us up and then pointed us through the downpour to a barrack block about fifty yards away. With our mattresses balanced over our heads, we staggered over to it and up the concrete steps like a procession of shield bugs in a hurricane and entered a scene from a Carry On film. I recognised it straight away: it was a bog-standard 1950s Ealing Studios barrack room.

  There was a reception party of quasi-troglodytes waiting to introduce themselves to the newcomers. One was leaping up and down on the bare bedsprings of what was to be my bed, whooping. He was tall, lank, gormless and threatening. Another three boys were huddled around the stove in the middle of the stale-smelling gloomy room, one poking the ashes and feeding lumps of wood into it from what looked like the remains of a door. Indeed, it was a door. The other two were taking turns spitting on the lid of the stove, absorbed by the hissing sound emanating from it. Their bovine activities terminated abruptly when we entered. They encircled us as curious baboons would when about to pick a fight, but not too sure of whether or not it was worth the trouble. The intent was to intimidate rather than offer violence, because they all produced pieces of equipment and clothing which were swapped for our own new kit with a cheery front suggestive of Fagin’s jolly band of juvenile robbers.

  After the initial introduction to our quarters by these boy warriors, they departed, jabbering, with their loot, dragging the remainder of the door behind them and we were left in silence to consider our troubled circumstances. The fire in the stove faded, the room chilled, and the rain battered the windows. The crying boy was now in full flood, and even the alpha male Mancunian had a layer of pallor tinting his cheeks. This was all Baden-Powell’s fault. All because of Scouting for Boys and The Eagle I had ended up signing on for twelve years in the belief that the military would be the making of me, reinforcing my father’s considered opinion that it would straighten my back. I could have made it big in the grocery trade. Not to worry, I thought, perhaps there will be plenty of time to kick balls about. Happily, this turned out to be true. Fortunately for me, and unbeknown to the military, it did do me much more good than harm - because it gave me a perspective on life and the way it should be survived that would never have entered my head were I destined to spend my working life riding around on a delivery bike. At that moment though, I was very hungry, tired, wet, disoriented and more than a little frightened.

  As I was doing my juvenile best to make my bed on a waterlogged foam mattress which by now resembled a sponge, the clatter of boots came striding down the corridor, and in marched a big man with a lantern jaw and a stick. He looked around him incredulously, and for the first time I noticed that the room had no door. It had been ripped off its hinges. His eyes screwed up and he looked at each one of us in turn.

  “Well, this is a fine start lads. You’ve only been here half an hour and a bleedin’ door goes missing. Come on now, you boys, what have you done with it?”

  As he was speaking his eyes fell upon a couple of lumps of wood next to the now inert stove.

  “I don’t bleedin’ believe it! Half an hour, that’s all it took and you’re in the clink before breakfast.”

  The thought of not getting any breakfast, when starvation was becoming more and more a certainty as opposed to an imaginary scenario, was the motive for me to speak up and falteringly tell the big man with the stick of our reception committee and the door’s demise.

  “Get to bed all of you. Lights out in ten minutes. We’ll sort this out in the morning.”

  As if by magic the room seemed to fill up with about fifteen boys all intent on getting into their beds before the lights went out. They had little to say to one another or to us. It transpired that they were new recruits too and had only arrived a few days ago. So far they had spent their free time in the NAAFI to keep warm because their (and our) coal supply had been stolen. So ended my first day as a soldier.

  I must have nodded off at some stage, because it seemed as if almost immediately I was awoken by a bugle call; a sound gentle, novel and quixotic. The more brutal and physical awakening arrived almost instantaneously when another man with a stick burst in through the hole in the wall where a door should have been, switched on the lights and proceeded to bang his stick on the dustbin lid he was holding. Then he started banging his stick on the beds of those who were still in them. Mayhem ensued, as a mad scramble to the washhouse developed. Six washbasins with only cold running water and six lavatories for the use of twenty boys: one toilet had no door, probably again the consequence of the lack of coal.

  Chapter 11

  Reality

  THE REGIMENTAL PLAN

  The clock turned clown and shrieked the dawn of day, with foolish fingers twisted in a smirk. It leered at morning’s spiky spears of light that kicked the shades of sleep back to the grave as conscious thought began to swamp the mind, recalling things that should be said and done. But how and why and what and when and if bobbed up and down inside my bursting brain to make a mock of life’s intended plan, as twisted fate takes hold of mortal aim.

  And then the jagged facts attacked and scratched the waking head. The floodgates burst as day once more raked up the cinders of my past. They fanned again the flame of primal id, defeating time and rooting in the skull as if today was but tomorrow’s then. They unhinged rod-like reason from the scene, transforming months to seconds in the mind with strobes of recall flashing on and off.

  And in the still of early morning’s calm I saw my yesterdays again and heard a silent bugle blow the age-old tune which bolted Kipling’s Tommies from their cots to force them onward in their blood-soaked schemes; the brawny sons of Blighty’s shores and mills tormenting Fuzzy with their bayonets, pissing on his idols, ripping out his guts.

  I’d heard that tune a hundred times before, and thought of home in adolescent fear as daybreak brooded on my crystal boots. They soon would left and right and smash and crash in time with other bugles and the drums, behind the peacock peasant with his stick; the bawling brawling man-beast RSM. His honour was the regimental plan. His duty was to shape and make the man.

  There is no point in describing in any great depth the privations of life for the next two and a half years. The lot of the national ser
viceman in the 1950s has been visited time and time again by those who experienced it, and my introduction to army life was no different, other than the fact that I was still a child and that a national serviceman’s so-called basic military training lasted a mere three months, whereas a boy soldier’s lasted for two-and-a-half years. However, what I can do is speak belatedly for those who didn’t survive this outdated and unsavoury practice of the military to meld children into their conception of men suitable for military service, while discarding and humiliating those who didn’t or couldn’t manage to fit the mould. Bullying was by no means endemic, either by the men in charge or the boys themselves, but it was not uncommon. On the other hand, the concept of bullying is one which can at times go hand-in-glove with what is considered by fools to be ‘discipline’ and a lot of those fools held the whip hand - literally.

  I still vividly remember one of these children, whose situation sets my mind tumbling back in time, glazed in a mist of shame and guilt whenever it is jolted into reverse. He was an ideal victim; an orphan, despised for wanting to be accepted on equal terms as a human being with his tormentors, men and boys alike. He had no-one in the world to turn to. At fifteen years of age he was bereft and alone in the world; downtrodden in a manner that invites brickbats. When leave was granted, he remained in the barracks, for he had no other home to go to. He was always last in the washhouse, last in the cookhouse line, last getting changed for physical training, and last in the weekly cross-country run. Because he was always last to wash, or sometimes never even had the opportunity, he was given a ‘regimental scrub’. Because he was always last in the line for food, he was denied much of it, and as for physical training, the abuse was humiliating and degrading. I didn’t participate in his breaking, but even at such a tender age I knew I should have had the courage to object to it. The adults with their so-called ‘duty of care’ who turned a blind eye were as uncivilised as those who perpetrated and actually participated in such cowardly and brutal behaviour.

  I believe that the ‘regimental scrub’ is now proscribed in the British Army, though still subsists clandestinely in some quarters. There are several variants of it, but the one I was aware of was straightforward and simple in its harsh and merciless procedure. He was stripped naked, dumped in a bath of freezing cold water and scrubbed from head to toe with a stiff broom and scouring powder until patches of his skin fragmented. Special attention was given to his genitalia, which had previously been the object of blackening with boot polish. Then his eyebrows were shaved. This further indignity was intended to display to everyone, including inspecting officers, that he had been the subject of a form of discipline meted out to those considered to be unclean.

  That experience didn’t break him. It was just a matter of course and part of his situation in life’s unbending strictures for one such as him. He didn’t complain, nor did he cry. He grinned and displayed his shaved inflamed eyebrows as if they were an award for his courage in suffering such humiliation. What did break him a couple of weeks later was being urinated on by a brutal towering hulk of a physical training instructor when the boy was lying on the gym floor unable to perform the number of press-ups required by this menacing man-mountain, who considered it sport to punch boys in the stomach while they were hanging from wall bars, or throw medicine balls at their heads when their backs were turned. He was also an expert at nipple twisting, a brutal, painful torture which caused even greater anxiety than the prospect of being punched in the stomach.

  The child absconded, or ‘went on the trot’, in the then jargon of the army. In fact, because they took so long to find him, he was branded as a deserter at fifteen years of age. The reason his recapture took so long was because he had no-one in the world to go to and so avoided apprehension because of his solitary existence. He was eventually discovered by the police living rough somewhere on a beach on the south coast, physically exhausted and surviving by rummaging through waste bins. He was returned to the unit, immediately put in a cell in the guardroom, charged, sentenced to imprisonment in the military prison at Colchester and soon thereafter discharged dishonourably from the army. This ultimate humiliation ensured that employment in civilian life would be virtually unobtainable because of the disgrace he had allegedly brought upon himself. Where he went afterwards I do not know, but I did think of him often, ashamed of my own spinelessness in not trying to help him. The company sergeant major made himself plain at special muster parade, the morning after the unfortunate child was hauled off to Colchester to serve time alongside the adult criminals. He was not the first, but certainly would not be the last.

  “Now hear me, and hear me well you boys. You are in the army, and you are in the army until your service expires. If you go on the trot you will be severely punished. If you desert we will hunt you down, punish you, and then WE will desert you. And mark my words; your punishment will be severe. It won’t just be bread and water you’ll be on, you’ll be doubling up and down your own backsides sixteen hours a day before we throw you out into civvie street where you will not be wanted and where you will be despised for the rest of your lives for breaking your promise to Queen and Country. Now I ask you, is it worth it?”

  And with that we marched off for breakfast to the discordant bugles playing out of time with the drums to the tune of the regimental march Wait for the Wagon. From that moment, my mind was made up. I would be a soldier in name only, but would never, ever let them know my true feelings. I would play the game, but on my own secret terms. I did, and I survived.

  So when the sharp-faced, sharp-uniformed, tin-voiced sergeant screamed down my ear that my parents had been scraped up from the pigeon shit of Trafalgar Square, I continued counting the bricks on the barrack room wall and didn’t even feel a flash of contempt. When the porcine Goering-clone, whisky-sodden, cavalry-reject commanding officer prodded me with his swagger stick, turned my bed upside-down and threw my not-polished-enough boots through the window, I didn’t even flinch. When I was hauled into the boxing ring to go three rounds with a British amateur boxing champion called Ginger, who was nearly two stones heavier and two years’ older than me, instead of covering my head with my hands I took a sideways swipe at him, hitting him on the nose, to wake up a minute later lying sideways with my nose broken and bleeding. His nose had been broken so many times it was just a splodge of rubbery flesh more or less in the middle of his grinning face. Incredibly, he re-set my nose on the spot by knocking it back into line. I spent the next two weeks with a face like a panda.

  Mistakes like this can sometimes have happy outcomes, and because of this uneven confrontation in the boxing ring - not engineered by him but by a deranged physical training instructor - Ginger became my friend and protector for the next six months, prior to his leaving our community of child-warriors for more adult fields, and Ginger was a person to be reckoned with by both men and boys alike. His grin said it all. It was a ‘knowing’ grin, an Al Capone grin - not quite manic, not quite threatening, but disturbingly unsettling when flashed. Regardless of his considerable prowess inside the boxing ring, not once did he raise a fist to anyone outside of it. All he needed to do was curl his lips and grin. To my incredulous good fortune he held me in high esteem because I had hit him on his nose. Beware of messing with anyone befriended by Ginger. And so, from that time on, my life was somewhat blessed. I was never locked in my steel locker and had it pushed down the concrete stairs with me inside, none of my kit was stolen, and I never had to scrape the urinals clean with a razor blade.

  However, clandestine chores of communal benefit were expected and not objected to. Theft of food from the cookhouse and coal in the winter from the adjoining barracks housing national servicemen were obligatory. Both were always in short supply, especially the coal. I thought that 4 Church Road was cold in the winter, but St Lucia Barracks could well have been situated in the Arctic. The only way to retain a modicum of warmth was to either to steal and burn a door, or to pilfer coal. The latter w
as by far the more acceptable exercise, because if apprehended violence would occur, but if a door was liberated, the wrath of the sergeant major would not be satisfied until the culprits were locked up in the guardroom. The dichotomy here, though, was that the guardroom had a plentiful supply of coal and the water was not frozen in the taps. I speak from experience.

  THE AIM OF EVRY JUNIOR LEADER IS TO BE A FUTURE WARANT OFFICER

  This precise but incorrectly spelled banner headline was emblazoned across daily company orders for all junior leaders to see and take heed of, although the subtext was, and no doubt still is, far less apparent; it speaks volumes about the whisky-soaked aging ex-cavalry Officer Commanding hung out to dry, who unrelentingly castigated the children in his care, and his proof-reading ability even when sober. It was subliminally intended to indicate to boy soldiers, regardless of the old saying ‘in every soldier’s knapsack is a Field Marshall’s baton’, that it was nigh impossible, nor was it expected, for any of them to aspire to the officer class; for here is where I was - aged fifteen, poorly educated, and unaware at the time of Wellington’s proud assertion that his soldiers were the scum of the earth. Not a grammar school boy among us. Boys from grammar schools didn’t become boy soldiers. Some, of course, might become eligible to join the officer class later, if they could show due deference to the system and learn not to drop their aitches and their fathers were not dockers. My brother seemed to be more at ease tapping on his bongos and peering through lensless spectacles when his scholastic contemporaries were singing about Flora’s holiday, jolly boating weather, playing up and playing the game. These people were not necessarily the intellectual betters of my brother, but socially acceptable betters, of whom some would become officer cadets, world away from my socially and educationally feeble contemporaries, most whom had a functional reading age of only eight years.