Greetings Noble Sir

by Nigel Flaxton

  Fortified by the comparative success of this venture, a small group decided to present Noël Coward’s ‘Private Lives’. Jonny’s friend was Martin Banks, a Cambridge graduate who had performed with the Footlights. They had discovered a former member of the Bristol Old Vic Repertory Company, Sheila Brownlow, quietly living in married quarters as the wife of a corporal. He also had an intellectual background, but they had a young daughter who had appeared unexpectedly, so they married and he joined the RAF to offer reasonable security for his responsibilities.

  The cast list is small: two couples. The two men were available but another woman was required. Deft searching elicited the name of a Squadron Leader’s wife who had amateur dramatic experience. She was tentatively approached and agreed to join the odd and no doubt unique company. I had hammed my way through various plays at School, including Lady Macbeth in falsetto (Gwen Ff-D had a distinct edge on my performance, I admit), and then had continued with a group that, unusually for amateurs, was very good at farce. So I was asked to direct. Seeing the backgrounds of the cast members I felt this would be largely unnecessary. It was. But I feel I added somewhat to the role of dogsbody.

  I was also well placed to build the set, due to my role i/c a workshop. This had to be undertaken from square one. Flats - the scenic sort - had to be made from laths, then covered with hessian - which had to be organised - then sized, i.e. covered liberally in goo to provide a surface on which to paint. As the hessian dried the laths warped, so they all had to be dismantled, rebuilt, recovered, resized, then covered with three coats of base distemper, which also had to be organised, then painted for the two scenes, the first of which is two adjacent hotel balconies, as I’m sure you know. The second is a straightforward room - well, it was in our production. I excelled at directing everyone on these chores and also supplying youthful assistants for the process as occasion demanded.

  The easy going nature of the School’s CO came to the fore in all of this. He allowed us time off, he fixed us up with a colleague to be Officer i/c Drama, who was very useful whenever we wanted unobtainable supplies. The Photographic Unit took publicity shots, posters were printed, advertisements were posted all over the place. We confidently expected the Astra Cinema to be fairly well filled. Then, suddenly, there was an international alert and men were sent here, there and everywhere, so were not available to fill the Astra seats. The performance enjoyed a limited audience. Nevertheless it was rated a success by all who saw it.

  Within weeks of the final curtain we were on our way back to civilian life. I was required to hand in my uniform on the Station, so spent the last weekend on duty in civvies which felt weird. I then set out for a Camp in Blackpool where demobilisation formalities were handled. The quarters assigned to the birds of passage were filthy and I shuddered to use the blankets on the sheetless beds, so with others I walked along the otherwise deserted sands on a warm, moonlit summer night, returning well after midnight to lie on a bed fervently hoping not to collect any small farewell presents to take home.

  Next morning we were summoned to sit on a row of chairs facing a tannoy speaker. This announced that when our names were called we were to move to our left and turn the corner to our right. One by one names issued forth in desultory tones,

  ‘Blackwell........Carstairs.......Evans, J.......

  I had a brief feeling of déja vu. Had my records disappeared again? But it was swept aside,

  ‘Flaxton....’ the voice called, then briefly, ‘er...Sergeant Flaxton....’

  I walked along the corridor, turned right, found a desk at which the progenitor of the voice handed me a railway warrant and two weeks’ pay. I signed, he nodded and spoke into a microphone,

  ‘Hetherington....’ I walked out into civvy street thinking I had just seen the most boring and depressing job in the RAF. My heart went out to him. I hoped he was a National Serviceman and not a career administrative clerk, formerly an apprentice.

  Chapter 21

  I have to pose the question Was it worth it? That begs the further question, Worth to whom? There were three possible recipients of worth - me, the Royal Air Force and the nation at large. Did I, as a modern phrase popular in education has it, add value? Was value added to me?

  The experience provided me with interesting activities and helped my maturity. I was officially an adult on my release having passed my twenty first birthday a few months before. Eighteen became the requisite age well over twenty years later. But would I have matured just as effectively without going into the Forces? Probably, though not as quickly.

  Did I add value to the RAF? Hardly! I spent twenty-five weeks in three forms of training - basic, trade and education. I wonder what the actual cost was? In return I spent six months as an Airframe Assistant when, apart from keeping a very large blackboard up to date for a few weeks, overseen by a senior NCO, I acted as a fetcher and carrier of tools, a cleaner, a wonderful polisher of an aeroplane and, very occasionally, took responsibility to park aircraft. Then I assumed the role for which I was already trained, that of teaching, but found myself with a subject which in any school was undertaken by a specialist. I was only an ordinaryalist in Craft. I assisted to an extent in slightly widening the educational experience of a few flights of apprentices by outside visits, but little else. With that assessment I also have to question whether my experience was markedly different from thousands of other National Servicemen. Probably it was not.

  Did my service contribute anything to the nation? It did in the sense that had international tension built up to an extent that war was again likely, I was in the Forces and could be used more productively. Being readily available was of use. Monarchs of old always had the problem of raising the host quickly. My service book, a document we had to keep at all times and never destroy (so I haven’t), tells me I never left the RAF - I was transferred to the Reserve, so maybe I’m still available. I wonder whether Stores issue zimmer frames?

  In the cold light of judgment by whoever might look at such matters, National Service was not cost effective, but in the uncertain years of international shuffling after 1945 it was sensible to keep conscription for a while. The key problem to a short term of service is responsibility. To train a person to undertake a responsible job in which he or she has to take vital decisions or perform vital tasks requires time. It also requires dedicated people prepared to accept such responsibility and that means career minded men and women. To conscript the undifferentiated mass of young people carries basic problems, the most obvious being that they don’t wish to be conscripted at all. Training unwilling people is difficult. Politicians still haven’t accepted the fact that a proportion of youngsters in schools don’t want to be there and don’t want to be educated beyond a basic level - and their ideas of basic don’t necessarily accord with teachers’ or politicians’ ideas. Conscription exacerbates that problem.

  It is remarkably difficult to educate, train, or discipline a resistant individual in a society that has pretensions to being free. One of my friends at School, who acted in plays with me and occasionally attended the same Church, was called up into the Army. His father, reasonably well to do, was a strict disciplinarian in laying down rules as to what his son could or could not do. I visited him at home once and was astonished to hear him call his father ‘Sir’. Whether his upbringing entrenched his attitude I know not, but he decided no one had a right to issue him with an order. Such an attitude is difficult to uphold in the Forces beyond the first five minutes, so rapidly he found himself on a charge and was sentenced to the inevitable seven days jankers....attending at specified times throughout the day and night outside the guardroom, dressed in full kit suitably bulled up for inspection, then spending the night in the cells. During the first spell, inevitably he received an order, refused to obey, so the process was repeated with further days added....and so on....and on.... He, of course, wanted the Army to dismiss him. The Army, realising, refused to co-operate. Frie
nds said he achieved one hundred and thirty four charges before the end of his National Service which had been useless to both the individual and the organisation. He then took a job with the same diligence he showed during his successful time at School where he obtained good School and Higher School Certificates. I sometimes wonder which side considered itself the winner.

  To-day’s highly technical Forces need to screen their entries for motivation, determination, willingness to accept discipline, ability to accept responsibility, health and intelligence. Certainly there are the humdrum, routine jobs that someone has to do, but each individual has to be capable of accepting a more responsible role when necessary. Short term conscripts are not there long enough to warrant expensive training, are not dedicated to ongoing service, and may be of inadequate intelligence, or anti-establishment, or opposed to armed conflict, or demonstrate any of a host of problems which have to be dealt with.

  So people who call for a return of conscription as a matter of disciplining young people should think again. The Forces are not the institutions for that. If Society really does want a means of exposing all its young people to some form of cohesive discipline it needs an alternative. A Community Service with sensible and thoughtful discipline and care might be the answer, but then objections are likely be raised about cheap labour taking away jobs. The scheme, however, certainly would not be cheap. In the last resort the original question would have to be posed, Would it be worth it? Very careful and wide ranging analysis would be needed to provide a trustworthy answer. Then the party of government would have to decide whether to bite the bullet.

  Chapter 22

  ‘I realise you want to make your career in secondary education, but at the moment we have very few vacancies in that sector. We urgently need primary teachers to cope with the bulge in the child population which has just reached those schools.’

  Mr Bartram, a member of the Chief Education Officer’s staff, was advising me upon my application. ‘You’d find a period in a primary school very useful in the future if you gain promotion in the secondary field. Often there’s a gulf between primary and secondary teachers which is quite artificial. Someone who has experience of both has a useful edge.’

  I might have been suspicious about his line of reasoning had it not been for the fact that he was one of my father’s colleagues, therefore I felt his advice could be trusted. So, very much against my actual wishes, I agreed to alter my application to one for a primary post. I extracted a promise that he would allow me to transfer to a senior school after a year or two. He agreed readily because the bulge obviously would do the same.

  Typically I celebrated my return by starting with a disaster because I was quite unprepared for the interview format. I rashly assumed it was a mere formality. The reason was that I had been interviewed by one of the Authority’s inspectors after I had left St. Andrew’s when I first applied for a post. This had been a friendly chat - quite private - and he had accepted me. Of course he knew I had to do National Service; I assumed that, on my return, my re-employment would be virtually automatic. When I arrived at the interview room I found three other people waiting. I chatted with them and found each lived outside the city and wanted to join its teaching force.

  ‘Where are you from?’ one asked me.

  ‘Oh, I’m a local boy. I’ve just been demobbed. I was interviewed when I left College a couple of years ago and actually did five weeks teaching here.’ The three took a closer interest.

  ‘What was your interview like? They differ so much between Authorities.’

  ‘Oh, it was nothing really. Just one of the local inspectors who chatted to me in his room. We talked generally about the schools I’d done practice in, then he welcomed me to the city’s branch of the profession.’

  ‘Do you think your interview to-day will be the same as that?’ one asked with a note of surprise.

  ‘Oh, I expect so. I imagine it’ll be a routine check to see whether the Forces have left any lasting scars,’ I laughed.

  ‘I was expecting a committee interview.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘You know, when you face a panel, sometimes they’re quite large, ten people or more.’

  ‘Ye gods, no. It won’t be like that at all. For one thing these rooms couldn’t hold that many people. They’re all individual offices. I remember that one was where I was interviewed before - look, the chap s name is on the door.’

  I pointed to a small plaque, ‘E.G. Carstairs’. We looked at all the doors in the corridor which were painted dark blue with cream surrounds. They were identical.

  ‘Now gentlemen,’ a voice broke in upon us. It was Mr Bartram. ‘I shan’t keep you waiting much longer. I just need to check a couple of points with two of you.’ He turned to the others and talked in low tones, consulting some papers in his hand. Then he looked up.

  ‘Fine, no problems there, I’m pleased to say. Now, Mr Flaxton, you’re first in alphabetical order so will you come this way please?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said, and moved with him. He walked a few paces along the corridor, turned, placed his hand on a large brass doorknob and held the door open for me. I looked at him as I passed and said, ‘Thank you’. Then I looked into the room.

  It was not a small office with a single person smiling a welcome at me from behind a desk. It was a very long room indeed and the doorway through which I had entered was at one end. What seemed the longest table I had ever seen stretched the full length of one side on my left. Facing me across the end in the dim distance was a much shorter table placed at right angles. Along the sides of both was an imposing line of faces looking at me. Mr Bartram indicated a chair to my right, just level with the near end of the long table. I collapsed into it and gaped across the acres of space which separated me from the others.

  Mr Bartram set out on a route march to his seat behind the short table in the distance. I gazed at his diminishing figure. Everyone else gazed at me.

  ‘I suppose I should begin by asking Mr Flaxton whether he enjoyed his long holiday?’

  From somewhere on the other side of the long table a gruff voice broke the silence and was immediately followed by laughter. I tried to drag myself out of the panic which gripped me. Somewhere, someone was Chairman and he had just spoken. I searched the laughing faces in vain. He was quite unidentifiable.

  ‘Oh dear, Mr Flaxton doesn’t find that funny. Didn’t you like your time in the Forces?

  This time I spotted him. Ah, now I know who I’ve got to speak to....oh hell....what did he say?

  ‘Er, I’m sorry, Mr Chairman, I didn’t quite catch that.’

  ‘Good heavens, man, you’re not deaf are you? I asked whether you didn’t like your time in the Forces,’ His voice boomed around the vast room.

  ‘Oh, I enjoyed it very much,Sir, very much indeed,’ I replied heartily, trying to retrieve the situation.

  ‘Didn’t you consider staying on then - signing on voluntarily for three or four years and taking a short service commission?’ The question came quite unexpectedly from a different quarter, a lady sitting much nearer to me.

  ‘Er, well, yes I did, as a matter of fact.’

  Another spasm of panic gripped me. How do you address lady committee members? Marm, madam, mam....?

  ‘Why did you reject the idea?”

  Why did I what? For the love of mike listen to the questions....reject....oh yes, the Forces...’I really was very keen to get back to teaching....mm.’

  ‘Good, at last I’ve heard something I want to hear, said the Chairman loudly.

  ‘We have your College report in front of us, Mr Flaxton.’ A quiet but penetrating voice spoke from the smaller table at the far end of the room. I wasn’t sure which person had spoken but the table was so far away I could simply gaze in that direction and get away-with it.

  ‘Major Darnley we all know and resp
ect.’ The room erupted with growls and squeaks of hyar, hyar and ‘ear ‘ear.

  The VP, I thought, aghast. What on earth did he write about me?

  ‘His report upon you was quite favourable, Mr Flaxton. That, and your results which you know of course, suggest we could do worse than offer you permanent employment here. What have you to say to that?’

  ‘Good heavens, I am surprised, Sir: That is, I mean, I didn’t think...’

  ‘You don’t sound very sure of yourself, Mr Flaxton. Let me put it to you more directly.’ The Chairman took up the questioning again. ‘Do you feel you can do a good teaching job here in the city if we appoint you?’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed, Sir. Yes, I would certainly try very hard to help the pupils in my care.’

  ‘Good, that’s better. Now, one final question about those pupils. Perhaps you can explain to the committee why it is that when you left College two years ago you opted for secondary teaching. Now, without any explanation, you suddenly ask to be sent to a primary school. In my experience teachers are usually particular about which age they teach. Can you tell me why you changed your mind so soon?’

  There was a sudden silence and I felt all eyes on me. That is, all except Mr Bartram who seemed busy writing. I thought, Why on earth doesn’t he tell them? I opened my mouth to give the true reason, that I really wanted secondary work but the person dealing with staffing, Mr Bartram there, had asked me to take a primary post. Then, foolishly, I thought of his links with my father, in a different branch of Education Department. If I say that, I’ll let this chap down in front of the whole committee. I can’t do that.