Boy Entrant; The Recollections of a Royal Air Force Brat

by Brian Carlin

  As a finale, the kettledrummer and trumpeters solemnly re-entered the arena to perform a closing fanfare, during which the officer in charge saluted the Royal Box. Then the entire troop of cavalrymen slow-marched their horses out of the arena, to the steady boom of the kettledrums and thunderous applause of the spectators.

  But even the noble horses of the Royal Household Cavalry are subject to the call of nature, which wouldn’t have been so obvious if the pomp and circumstance that we had just witnessed hadn’t been immediately followed by the unheralded entry of an overall-clad gang of shovel-wielding, wheelbarrow-pushing young soldiers, who expeditiously scooped up the still-steaming horse detritus, much to the amusement of the audience, who gave them a heartfelt round of applause as they quickly departed the now-clean arena just as swiftly and silently as they had arrived into it.

  When the next display group entered the arena, it appeared that the pooper-scooper crew had been wasting their time, because this event also featured horses. The thick layer of sawdust on the arena floor couldn’t entirely deaden the sound of thudding hooves as three separate teams of The King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery thundered through the open doors. Each team, consisting of six horses harnessed in pairs, was pulling a field gun behind it. What seemed very unusual was that all three horses on the left side of each team carried a rider, who was dressed in an ornate Hussar uniform. Unlike the cantering Household Cavalry, these teams galloped around the arena at a very fast pace, turning and twisting the field gun through many intricate manoeuvres. Given the tight area in which they were required to perform, such sharp turns at speed would probably have been impossible without the three riders each controlling his pair of horses. In fact, there was no other way to guide the horses since the gun that they pulled had no place for a driver to sit.

  Up and down and around and around they galloped, gleaming harnesses jingling and hooves thudding in the sawdust of the arena floor. The Hussars’ uniforms made ours look plain and nondescript, in spite of our braid and white belts. The cap they wore was the most distinctive part of their uniform, being like a flat-topped Busby with what appeared to be a flap hanging over the right side from the crown and surmounted by a stiff plume that stood several inches vertically above the headgear. The uniform itself could hardly be described as nondescript. If anything, it resembled a uniform that could have been worn by Cinderella’s Prince Charming, with its high-necked collar and several narrowly-spaced horizontal rows of ornate gold braid that covered the chest area of the tightly fitted jacket. Epaulettes of gold-braid adorned the shoulders and an intricate design in gold piping decorated the lower arms of the sleeves.

  No doubt there was much history behind the uniform and wearing it certainly didn’t detract from their skill as horsemen, as they wheeled their teams to interact with each other and in time with the music that played over the sound system. They performed intricate figures-of-eight and crossovers at a speed that seemed to suggest that a writhing heap of horses, Hussars and field guns could occur in the centre of the arena at any moment. But nothing like that happened and they completed the display without mishap. The pooper-scoopers made another appearance, greeted by some light laughter and applause from the audience.

  We were then treated to a massed pipe band made up of a number of Irish regimental bands. Even though I was Irish, this was a little unusual for me. Growing up, the only pipe bands I’d seen had been tartan kilt-clad in the Scottish tradition. But these pipers wore plain light brown kilts and long green cloaks. I love pipe music and enjoyed the Irish pipes just as much as the Scottish. And they played Irish tunes that had a deeply nostalgic familiarity, all the more so because it had been a long time since I had heard many of them.

  Although there were a large number of other events, let me just describe one more that honoured the island of Malta, GC and made a big impression on me.

  It began with the arena plunged into darkness as props were rushed in under cover of darkness. Then, in the darkness, the deep resonant voice of actor Jack Hawkins came over the arena loudspeakers. He spoke of how the small island nation had been such a thorn in the side of the enemy during the Second World War, because it sat astride Field Marshal Rommel’s supply routes between Italy and North Africa. About half of Rommel’s supplies were sent to the bottom of the Mediterranean by the Maltese forces and this became such a problem for the German High Command that they ordered Malta to be either bombed into oblivion or invaded and captured.

  The island was pounded day and night by endless air raids and seemed ready to fall, but incredibly refused to give in. King George was so awed by the courage of the Maltese people that he awarded the George Cross to the island for its valour. But the decoration, impressive as it was, didn’t help too much—they needed reinforcements, especially fighter planes to beat off the German and Italian bombers. British and American aircraft carriers then arrived off Tunisia, bringing several squadrons of Spitfires which were to be flown off the carriers, land, refuel and then take off as soon as possible to avoid being knocked out while they were still on the ground. But first the bomb craters in the Maltese airfields had to be filled in, so that the fighters could land.

  The display depicted how the entire population of Malta went out onto the airfields and runways to fill the holes, repairing them to provide a landing place for the Spitfires. At one point, spotlights illuminated an anti-aircraft gun emplacement and we heard and saw a realistic simulation of the gun crew firing at enemy bombers. Then another set of spotlights focused on the arena entrance, as a real Spitfire taxied into the display area. Thinking back on it, there must have been some stagecraft involved because the aircraft’s whirling propeller should have kicked up a cloud of sawdust, but this didn’t happen, so I really don’t know how the fighter was made to behave so realistically. Anyway, it taxied up to the gun emplacement where a crew of Royal Air Force, Army and Navy personnel swarmed over it, performing the refuelling and arming operations. Then, when they were complete, the Spitfire taxied back out of the arena and we heard a simulation of the sound of its engine at full take-off power, as it climbed into the sky to do battle.

  Jack Hawkins spoke again to pay tribute to Malta and, as we heard his voice for the second time that evening, spotlights lit up a huge replica of the George Cross that hung over the arena. We were told that from that time on, Malta has been formally known as Malta, GC.

  All too soon, the Royal Tournament was over. At that moment I felt that having been able to watch such a great spectacle more than made up for the disappointment that I had felt earlier about our band only being the warm-up act. And after watching the quality and professionalism of the other participants, I felt that it had been a privilege to have even been included in the same show.

  We wearily made our way out of the arena and climbed aboard our coach for the journey back to RAF Halton, where we would spend the night. There wasn’t much to see as the coach sped through increasingly empty streets, heading out from the centre of the city. Street lamps flashed past and I think I fell asleep in the soft comfort of the snug seat. At Halton, we hastily made our beds and tumbled into them exhausted. It had been a long but eventful day.

  CHAPTER 10

  Coffee and Biscuits with Mr. D

  Our return to St. Athan coincided with the Whitsun holiday weekend, during which the majority of boys were able to go home on a 96-hour leave pass. For those of us who hailed from the far-flung corners of the British Isles, the travel time needed to get home and back within the 96-hour period made it an impractical proposition. But life is full of compensations and we could at least look forward to a few fleeting days of easier life on camp and a lot less competition when it came to wooing the local girls.

  I remember being at Barry Island that weekend in warm sunny weather, where Paddy McGowan and I practised a little of our Irish charm on a couple of attractive Welsh lasses. Paddy came from Portstewart—a small seaside resort about five miles from my home town and had recently come up to the Wings as a memb
er of the 30th Entry.

  Our uniforms, coupled with good grooming, were our greatest assets when it came to attracting girls, so a smartly turned out appearance with well-shined buttons and boots, together with well pressed trousers and tunics was a “must”. Anything else that could be used to enhance this basic appearance, without making us targets for the constantly-patrolling snoops, was an advantage. By rights, I should have removed my temporary corporal trumpeter stripes, now that the Royal Tournament was over. But with no one around to challenge my right to wear the stripes, I conveniently “forgot” to remove them for the duration of the long weekend, hoping they would make a big impression on the fair sex.

  It seemed to work, because Paddy and I spent a great Whitsun weekend as a foursome in the company of some girls we met. In retrospect, it’s probably a safe bet that the stripes had absolutely no influence on the young lady that I had somehow managed to impress, but they certainly helped to boost my self-confidence and, in the end, that’s what seems to count most in all of life’s challenges.

  It was just as well that the long weekend had been pleasant, because the week that followed didn’t start off very well. On the first day back in Workshops after the break, Corporal Tech. Turnbull, my class instructor, passed on a message that I was to immediately go and see Mr. Dimbleby, the Warrant Officer in charge of our training. My stomach suddenly felt knotted up on hearing this and I immediately headed towards Dimbleby’s office, anxiously pulling on my beret as I left the classroom. On my way there, I recalled Ginge Brown’s description of “having coffee and biscuits” with the big man. It sounded funny at the time, especially when it was happening to someone else, but now it looked as though the joke was on me and it didn’t seem funny in the slightest.

  On arriving at Mr. Dimbleby’s office, I knocked timidly on the open door, causing him to look up and see a very nervous Boy Entrant standing in the doorway, clad in denim overalls.

  “Carlin?” He asked.

  “Yessir.” I answered.

  “Come in lad,” he said, not unkindly, “and shut the door.”

  I stepped across the threshold into the small office, gently closing the door as I did so and came to attention in front of his desk.

  “Okay, you can stand at ease lad,” he said, peering up at me over his half-rim glasses.

  He was a slightly rotund middle-aged man and although, from a distance, I had at first mistaken him to be a Warrant Officer, it was now obvious that the insignia on the cuff of his tunic was not a Warrant Officer’s “Tate & Lyle”—the RAF slang for the Royal coat of arms worn as a badge of rank by WOs. It was actually a slightly different insignia that incorporated the Royal Coat Of Arms surmounted by a small gold RAF eagle, with the combination enclosed within a larger laurel wreath. This, in fact, was the badge of Master Aircrew. In other words, he had served as an aircrew member, achieving a rank equivalent to that of a Warrant Officer. On the left side of his chest, just above a double row of campaign medal ribbons, he wore the “brevet” of a Flight Engineer. This was a small disc-shaped piece of black cloth inscribed with a white letter “E” inside a gold coloured laurel wreath. From the left side of the disc, a single feathered wing jutted upwards at an angle, its tip pointing towards the wearer’s left shoulder. In my personal gallery of heroes and villains, this put him on the side of the good guys—non-commissioned aircrew members were heroes to me.

  Following his instruction, I stood at ease, but felt far from really being at ease. Mr. Dimbleby—the Mister title was commonly accorded to Warrant Officers and Master Aircrew—picked up a manila file folder from his desktop and methodically paged through the paperwork inside, frowned and then looked up at me.

  “These trade test marks are very disappointing Carlin,” he said, in a stern voice.

  “Yessir,” I mumbled, by way of acknowledgement.

  “What happened?” He asked.

  “Didn’t study hard enough, sir,” I replied.

  “And why not?” He retorted.

  “I’m in the band sir, and we were practising for the Royal Tournament,” I offered by way of explanation.

  “Oh, the Royal Tournament,” he said, nodding his head slowly and pronouncing the words in a mock upper-crust voice. This little piece of sarcasm effectively deflated any hope I had that band practice would be accepted as a legitimate excuse for my poor academic performance. Dimbleby pushed himself up from his chair and came around the desk to where I stood, studying the open file folder that he held in both hands as he walked.

  “Do you want to pass out with your Entry?” He asked, the tone of his voice suggesting that the answer had better be yes.

  “Yessir,” I replied truthfully.

  “Well, lad,” he said, his face now only inches from mine, “if I were in your shoes, I would give up the band and start reading my notes a lot more. You might still be able to pass out with your Entry, but only if you work very hard from now on.”

  He walked back around his desk and settled down into his chair before continuing, “The best advice I can offer you is to give up the band. Some people can combine the band and their trade training, but you’re not one of them. You need to concentrate on the thing that’s most important and leave band playing to those who can do both.” He paused, then, “Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yessir,” I quickly replied, immensely relieved that I wasn’t going to be relegated to the 30th Entry.

  “Okay, Carlin, you can go back to your classroom now, but think very seriously about what I’ve told you.”

  “Yessir,” I replied, and with that I came to attention then turned and walked out of his office.

  The air in the workshop area seemed much cooler and the atmosphere less claustrophobic than it had been just a moment ago, in the confines of that small room. I had already known, before being invited for “coffee and biscuits” with Mr. Dimbleby, that I’d fared badly in the end of term trade test. The Squadron Leader who had interviewed me during my Induction had warned that the subject matter in my chosen trade as an aircraft electrician would be difficult and that I would have to work very hard to pass the course. Well, he was right. We had long since passed through the simple topics like navigation lights and other 24 volts DC equipment.

  Some weeks previously, we had entered into the realm of alternating current, or AC as it was more commonly known. Direct current had been difficult enough, but in the end it was easy to understand. You flipped a switch and the current flowed through the circuit and did the work. There were formulas like Ohm’s Law and mnemonics such as Maxwell’s right-hand corkscrew rule to memorize, but they were relatively simple to grasp. Alternating current, on the other hand, behaved in mysterious ways. It wasn’t just satisfied with the resistance in a circuit. Oh no, it had to behave weirdly with coils and suchlike, creating something else called reactance that was treated like resistance, but couldn’t be measured directly with an ohmmeter and was only present when AC was applied to the circuit. Not only that, alternating current alternates—it changes from positive to negative several times a second. On aircraft this change from positive to negative then back to positive and so on, occurs 400 times every second. For certain circuits this so-called frequency can be as much as 1600 cycles per second. On top of that, there are all kinds of mathematical relationships to contend with that involve things like the square roots of 2 and 3, or pi or the sines and cosines of angles, all of which make quick mental arithmetic calculations all but impossible.

  Memorising all the important formulas and being able to use them in calculating things like voltage, power and reactance required lots of study and concentration. The sad truth now confronting me was that band practice for the Royal Tournament had taken up far too much time—time that would have been much better used in studying and learning the skills of my trade, to help me get successfully through the phase tests. Obviously, my band skive was a luxury I could no longer afford, so I promptly handed in my trumpet and removed the little crossed-trumpets badge from my sleeve
. The corporal trumpeter stripes had already been removed by this time.

  There was some consolation in that I had at least managed to elude relegation to the 30th Entry, but such a close call didn’t leave me totally unscathed. Because my trade test results were so low, the proficiency badge that most others were awarded was withheld in my case. When Corporal Longfellow handed out sets of two miniature chevrons that were to replace the single inverted chevron worn by most of us on the cuff of our right sleeves, there wasn’t a set for me. My name was called out, filling me with hope that I would get the second stripe anyway, but Longfellow only handed me my permanent pass without the stripes. When I looked inside the pass, I saw that an entry had been made in the authorization space for the second badge, but it was unsigned and a line had been neatly drawn through it. The message couldn’t have been plainer: I needed to earn that badge and the only way to do that was to study hard, starting off by making sure that I passed the weekly classroom tests.

  * * *

  Workshop practice was a regularly occurring feature of our training. Its purpose was to develop our skills in mastering the practical side of our chosen trades, so that we would be useful members of a servicing team when we went out into the regular air force, instead of just being useless human encyclopaedias of technical information. By this time, we were learning and practising the intricacies of making soldered connections to multi-connector plugs and sockets. It took considerable skill to neatly solder individual wires into the reverse ends of between 12 and 15 of the tightly-spaced pins that were packed within a diameter of approximately one and a half inches. Using too much solder would always result in large blobs of the material jutting out from the connections, just begging to cause short circuits between the pins. Applying insufficient heat to a joint during the soldering process, however, would eventually result in oxidisation between the solder and the pin, causing a gradual increase in electrical resistance at the connection that would create problems later on.