Life as a boy soldier in the 1950s has hardly been made the serious stuff of literature, apart from a few dull, self-aggrandising discourses from those who designed and oversaw the system. Some of the crackpots concerned, who likened the system to a public school for working-class youths, actually believed this nonsense. Many, but not all, of those who trained these young boys in the formative years of their adolescence were indoctrinating them into a set of principles foreign to their young civilian contemporaries, and they were not averse to thrashing them if they felt it necessary to get their message through, although this aspect was not widely publicised in recruitment literature, certainly not in The Eagle.
I have a photograph of myself in Buller Platoon, named after the much vaunted General Redvers Buller of Boer War infamy (20,000 heavily armed British and colonial troops against 8,000 farmers), of whom it is said would not allow his soldiers to crawl on the ground in combat because they would dirty their uniforms, or dig foxholes because it might destroy the beauty of the surrounding countryside. After the gruesome and humiliating debacle of Spion Kop he was dismissed from the army, but nonetheless was feted by the public in response to the propaganda of the day. The photograph I have was taken two years into my service, but it speaks volumes regarding the physical condition of many of the little boys who were soon to be designated men. Many of them, but by no means all, looked stunted and malnourished.
Things are different today. My heart is warmed whenever I see a colonel being interviewed on the television and speaking with a regional accent. The Officers’ Mess will never be the same! Perhaps earlier in his service as a young subaltern, he may have been confused by a doddering red-nosed brigadier for the mess steward. He certainly wouldn’t sneer at my own Liverpool accent in the same way my first platoon commander often did, a second lieutenant with pimples and without a chin, who knew nothing of my background other than that in his eyes it was coarse and of no concern.
I just didn’t feel right in the army, but what else could I have done, a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout with his brains in his boots? There was no going back.
Chapter 12
Homecoming
After six months of indoctrination into the world of boy-soldiering, where spitting and polishing, marching around in circles behind dodgy out-of-tune bugles and drums, climbing over rope bridges and being shouted at had become a way of life, I was allowed home for a couple of weeks’ leave. I had learned to fire a rifle, a machine gun and a rocket launcher, stick and twist a bayonet into a bag of straw impersonating the enemy, strip and assemble a machine gun, experience the sting of tear gas in a closed concrete room and to swing across a ditch in full marching order with a rifle precariously slung over my round shoulder, just like the advertisement in The Eagle. Unlike the boy in the advertisement, I wasn’t grinning. I’d had my nipples twisted unmercifully, broken the icicles off taps to wash, slept under my bed to ensure my kit was laid out and ready for inspection the next morning, only to collect it from the road outside in the rain having had it thrown out of the first floor window - including the mattress. However, because of my association with Ginger I was never required to push an open can of boot polish the length of the barrack room floor with my nose in it while naked. Home seemed a distant and almost illusory memory.
When I wasn’t polishing brass buttons, I was polishing boots, including the studs and the soles. When I wasn’t polishing boots, I was polishing the floor. When I wasn’t polishing the floor, I was polishing my belt brasses, my cap badge, my shoulder tags, my gaiter straps, my chin strap. And then there was the scourge of Blanco - the khaki variety. Large pack, small pack, bullet pouches, cross straps, gaiters, bayonet scabbard and belt. All had to be regularly coated in this substance which had the consistency, texture and colour of a loose bowel movement. The smell was not as acrid, but unpleasant nonetheless. A special room was set aside for this activity and hours of communal wallowing were spent there resulting in a condition known at the medical centre as ‘Blanco Rash’ - raw seeping sores on the hands, particularly between the fingers.
On the first leave home, no civilian clothes were allowed to be worn on departure from these halls of military enlightenment into the strange world of the civilian, a place I used to know where blankets and sheets were never folded every morning into a precise cube, where nipple twisting was regarded as common assault, where doors were not used for firewood and where people slept in their beds and not under them with the contents of their wardrobes laid out neatly on their mattresses. So out I strutted in my WW1 uniform, very shiny boots, a very short haircut and my cap the regulation one inch above the eyebrows, looking like an extra in a silent movie. The world seemed to have changed; I was unaware that it was me who had been changed, but thankfully as it turned out, not irrevocably.
It was impossible to tell my friends of the reality of my new life; boy scouts and boy soldiers are worlds apart and to them I must have looked odd and completely out of place in the budding world of the Liverpool scene in 1960 and I felt it. Here was I, a year younger than them and a soldier, and there were they still at school, some destined to be teachers and others accountants. The army slang which had been imbued in me was incomprehensible to them and it was with difficulty that I refrained from its usage for fear of ridicule. My father beamed with pride at my semi-upright appearance and commented on what a fine pair of shoulders I had gained.
“Look at that Jean, he’s a walking bloody coat hanger.”
He was lying. My shoulders are still as round as they ever were and I remain to this day envious of those who can hang a bag from theirs without the strap sliding off.
I felt as if I had returned from another planet where nothing but disdain and futile endeavour were paramount. Home was definitely where my heart was, and it was pure delight not to have to sleep under my bed. My friends remained friends for the time-being at least and henceforward I would spend as many weekends as I could hitching lifts on lorries to and from Liverpool, often taking twelve hours or more each way to do it, but confident in my belief that in so doing, I would not become alienated from the world I knew and loved, and that the army would not swamp my mind-set with unpalatable half-truths about who I was and what lay in store for me. I had made up my mind, after the shameful episode regarding the regimental scrubbing of a child, that these people - few though they might be - did not have the right to share my company or determine my place in the world.
Chapter 13
Paul Berry
Having reversed a three-ton truck at considerable speed into a wall due to a mix-up between the clutch and the accelerator, after nearly two months of painstaking and anxious instruction from a man whose hair seemed to grow greyer over the same period, it was decided that my future in the RASC (Run Away Someone’s Coming) was not to be involved in any way with transport. Prior to this unfortunate occurrence, driving on the road to Portsmouth during one of the rare occasions they took a chance and let me out of the barracks, I’d had the misfortune to remove a broom from a road sweeper’s grasp and send it spiralling into the air. The road sweeper was unharmed - in the rear-view mirror I could see his diminishing image jumping up and down and shaking his fist. I remember the benign Motor Transport senior NCO in charge of my instruction being quite vexed by my inability to drive a lumbering Austin K4 lorry, without synchromesh transmission, in a straight line. And in no uncertain terms he told me:
“You boy, are a bleedin’ mystery. You can strip and assemble a machine gun, hit a target at one hundred yards with a rifle, prime a hand grenade without blowing your bleedin’ head off, find your way through a tunnel of shit, climb over a 12 foot wall, you are a qualified marksman (experience gained in the slaughtering of flies with an air rifle saw to that) and yet you cannot point a vehicle in a straight line. You are off the course. God alone knows what would happen if they let you loose on a tank transporter.”
Strangely, he hadn’t heard about the Antar t
ank transporter. Thirty tons of juddering 360 bhp muscular metal. The genial driver of this leviathan should have known better, for he allowed me, a mere stripling, into his driving seat to see how it felt. Over a distance of fifty yards across the barrack square I managed to burn the clutch to such an extent that acrid smoke permeated the cookhouse the same distance away.
What has all this got to do with a man called Paul Berry? This man, unbeknown to him, made me what I am and our fortuitous meeting and subsequent friendship was a direct result of my inability to double declutch.
To keep me away from vehicles, it was decided to move me to an administrative role in the army, especially as it was reported that I was good at reading maps and - incredulously to me - my handwriting was considered more legible than most of my contemporaries. And so I was told to report to a Mr Berry, who was in charge of a small section considered to be the crème de la crème of the intelligentsia in one of the huts masquerading as the Bordon College of Knowledge for future Warrant Officers. There were three of us from a total of over three hundred boys.
Situated alongside this community of mayhem suggestive of the halls of Bedlam, was a mild unobtrusive civilian. He was quietly spoken and slight of frame, and his demeanour seemed to be at odds with the military regarding how a man should be. I came to know that all was not as it seemed, as the elderly worldly-wise spinster Miss Shaw had mentioned to me a couple of years prior to my metamorphosis from apple thief to warrior, for this man had a rod of steel for a backbone though few, if any, of my contemporaries ever became aware of it.
Paul Berry was a pacifist and no doubt the whiskey- pickled cavalry officer in charge of us would have had a seizure had he known. Berry was a person who, in my domain, was called a coward, although my contemporaries didn’t know he was a pacifist; they just thought he was a mild person of little or no consequence, save that he spoke to them with a civility which surprised them - in sharp contrast to the verbal abuse levelled at them on the barrack square. The irony was that he could never have been the recipient of a white feather because when he joined the army in 1942 as a young man, he worked in bomb disposal, perhaps one of the most courageous tasks of all.
He taught me to write shorthand, and in so doing opened to me a door to the world of literature and the beauty of the English language which has never since been closed. He persevered with this task to such an extent that I became competent enough to do verbatim reporting, and thus transform my future, from dodgy grocer’s boy to court shorthand writer, to sub-editor, to publisher. He was the first person who actually taught me anything, apart from Algy the bookie’s runner with his detailed instruction on how not to kick a toe-ender and, of course, Alfie Littlehales, the seven-year-old gynaecologist.
I had been told things, but never taught things. Thus the world became a less formidable place and I realised that even if the fault-line could never be crossed, it didn’t really matter. Paul Berry instilled in me a feeling of self-worth which has shaped my life ever since. This hasn’t necessarily made me a better person, because I still have much to answer for, if ever there is a maker to meet, but it has justified my childhood belief about the values and activities of my Saturday-morning screen heroes. Being denied a proper education from the age of eleven proved to be an advantage, because through self-enquiry I learned things that were never taught in secondary schools. I began to realise that speaking with a regional accent was no cause for shame and that displaying ignorance actually empowers the learning process, whereas disregarding ignorance merely affirms a cycle of worthlessness.
Unbeknown to me at the time, for he was not a man to boast, Paul Berry was a long-time friend and literary executor for Vera Brittain, feminist, writer and pacifist, the author of Testament of Youth which ranks as one of the best autobiographical works concerning the total futility and misery of the First World War. He later became the co-author of her much-acclaimed biography. And there was I, Georgie Porter, being told by him that I had the ability to write, regardless of my lack of schooling or poor grasp of grammar.
“It doesn’t matter, George, most of us can’t but some of us can.”
So I started to read ‘real’ books. I began with the Iliad and spent a great deal of free time immersed in a peculiar mix of Greek tragedy and comedy, alongside Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, Dante, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Robert Graves and many, many more poets. I began to feel, if not educated then at least literate, and able to formulate my own ideas into written words. The process has never stopped. Nevertheless, I did keep my activities quiet, especially in regard to the poetry, for had my contemporaries learned of this, my life would have become intolerable.
So, by the age of seventeen I was primed to be a man-soldier - notwithstanding my new-found independence of thought - for a further nine years and indeed, I played the game. A similar game to that I played as a child - I wasn’t like them, but shared guilt by association. The first line of my report on entering man’s service saying ‘Porter is a first-class soldier’ was written by someone who had never met me. It was a godsend. My frailties were never once brought to the fore and my future as a warrior, serving in the illustrious RASC, was secure.
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