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UNDISTINGUISHED SERVICE
by Patrick Taylor PART 6

The fourth, and most important member of our little coterie was Les Denyer. He completed the group nicely, and was a local government clerk, somewhere on the social ladder, I suppose you could say, between myself and Arnold Ogden; well above Bill Church and all of us well below Andy Tawse! He was the only one of us apart from myself able to understand a bit of what actually went on inside a 19-SET and for a long time worked with me in the various back-of-a-truck workshops. Practical and useful with his hands, he would refer particularly abstruse theoretical problems to me and we made a good team. He was particularly good at "scrounging" luxuries and bits of extra equipment from stores like the more sophisticated Avometers and even an oscilloscope - the sort of thing usually dished out only to REME engineers. He was a very moral and upright sort of person, but full of fun and laughter and by no means a prude. When he found out I was newly engaged he appointed himself my moral guardian and kept me on a tight leash in the pubs and cafes. He had a way of making it perfectly obvious that of course there was no way I could disappear with any of the girls the way so many of the others did, as I was engaged and that was that. I shall never know how I might have behaved had he not been there, and neither will my wife! Suffice to say he was a salutary influence on me and whether it was him who kept me from straying or my own faithfulness is now academic! We would argue politics by the hour and enlightened each other about life in council offices and a merchant bank. The strict adherence in the civil service to grades and years of service, with everyone knowing the salary everyone else was paid in each grade and the horrendous difficulties of jumping the promotion queue, quite apart from the approbium it brought down on you if you did, astonished me after the secrecy among us in my firm about the salary we were paid and the independent personal and private negotiations with our employers by which, with the necessary exams, we could and did jump queues galore. He was equally horrified of course at the way the old boy network got me into a job in a prestigious merchant bank straight out of school without any trouble. I started to absorb his sense of what at the time I saw as fairness, and he was a great influence in making me one of the people who threw Churchill out of government at the end of the war. Although now a conservative of the truest blue, I still believe the complacent conservative thinking of pre-war years needed the jolt it got, and don't regret what I did - just once! But I never voted Labour again!

So there we were, a very mixed bag whose companionship made life so much easier and was an incalculable help to me as a spoilt and snobbish only child in adjusting to the world.

RANDOM MEMORIES

I wish I could give a coherent and consecutive account of our travels through Belgium and Holland until the end of the war, but I kept no notes and find the task beyond me. I shall instead rifle through my memory of incidents and people and record them as they come to me, cataloguing the things that helped to form the person I am in the way that similar incidents and people must have helped form the characters of so many others dragged out of normal civilian life and made into temporary soldiers, sailors airmen.

One of the things the army certainly did not get right was the training of the Signals Officers, apart perhaps from some I never had any contact with - the technical experts in charge of the electronic activities in REME. Our officers seemed to have absolutely no technical training at all. They were never any use at all in solving any of our workshop problems but, because they simply refused to acknowledge this, would meddle in our work and put on a front that exasperated us all. Our officer was typical of the rest and was the butt of much exasperated humour. I remember once being in the battery shop when the battery charger, looked after by Signalman Ford, broke down for some obscure reason we could not fathom. When the supply of charged batteries slowed down and was reported to him he came rushing down to see us, knowing he would be held responsible. Instead of gathering us together to contribute suggestions as to how to solve the problem he stormed in agitatedly and curtly asked us to "let him have a look at it." We all gathered round him with grins on our faces and watched him peering into it anxiously and twiddling the very few knobs it had on it with a look of expertise. Our driver was the troop wit, and suddenly he was heard clearly to announce in a loud whispered aside "You can't get the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Service in this area, Sir." The whole room exploded into laughter. This was a most serious piece of disciplinary cheek which could have landed him in the clink and was a measure of our impatience. Luckily our officer's training in command had been better than his technical training and with the hint of a smile beginning to appear on his face he stormed out with a simple "get on with it then." I gather the army has got this right now, but it does smack of the attitude of a lot of senior management in this country - including chief accountants - who seem to think that anything to do with computers is beneath their dignity and leave it to "younger and more agile minds" or whatever other excuse they can think up when what they really mean is that management is for superior people who don't waste their time learning the trades of the rude mechanicals. I'm sure it was many incidents like this that made me as the Financial Director of my firm design and put in myself - hands on as they say now - one of the first tailor made (no pun intended) computer systems in the advertising industry with only the help of a professional programmer and not put the whole thing out to system analysts and consultants, as so many chief accountants do. You really cannot run technical or specialised people unless you yourself can do anything they can do or, when you get older, can at least make it obvious you have done and know the problems of their job. They will never respect you and you will botch the whole thing, as so many disastrous computer installations prove - put in by managements unwilling to familiarise themselves with the details of what a computer can and cannot do efficiently, and with every detail of the work the people who operate the system have to do.

It is only as I put this all down that I fully realise how the army formed me, if only sometimes by the experiences it faced me with that I would otherwise never have faced. Soon after we arrived in Gheel with the liberating army I was walking down the street one day and heard a lot of shouting and screaming. To my amazement a bed, followed by a shower of feathers from a burst pillow which followed it, came sailing out of a window in front of me, followed by sundry chairs and pieces of bedroom furniture. Almost immediately two or three men appeared dragging a screaming woman out of the front door of the house, strapped her to a chair and started shaving her hair off.Other soldiers appeared and soon the whole town seemed to explode with furniture and personal belongings pouring into the street everywhere while men and women were bundled about and held down in chairs and shaved. Apparently the collaborators and the women who went with the Germans were being dealt with. The Belgians were not very pleased with our reaction to all this, expecting us to applaud with glee. Most of us didn't - we thought the whole thing was bestial and hung around in acute embarrassment not quite knowing what to do. The whole process went on so long that I was able to go back to the workshop and get my camera to photograph it, while the town increasingly began to look like something in the blitz, almost every street littered with debris and many shops and cafes with all their windows broken. Looking as I write this at one of the photographs I took I feel the same disgust I felt at the time. One shows triumphant men, or rather opportunist hooligans, youths and even children, holding sticks and laughing triumphantly at the camera - the usual mindless mob looking for an excuse for pointless violence that we see on the inner city deprived area streets today. The feelings engendered then were amplified when I saw the pictures shown later on newsreels of Mussolini's mutilated body being dragged along the streets of Rome, and other smoked out Nazis being similarly treated by crowds in South America; in all these cases my instinct was to turn a machine gun on the mob. I had no thought that the victims were getting their comeuppance. My views on mobs of any sort, which were formed then, remain the same today, whether they are French Farmers, Trade Unionists, Miners, Greenham Common Protesters, hunt saboteurs or any other self-righteous and self-appointed minority dealers-out of what they see as justice. The seed sown when watching lynch parties in Wild West films flowered in Belgium.

Thank goodness most of our lives were lived at a very much more trivial level. Looking through a small notebook of sketches I kept during this period I find that our approach to life was essentially facetious. Everything was a joke, even the cold that was my most uncomfortable memory. Collecting equipment for repair from the the front line, the signals lorry was hit behind our driver — the wit mentioned earlier in the battery charger saga above - by shrapnel from an exploding shell with a colossal noise; with a great big grin on his face he shouted out "Rear gunner hit - bail out!" and everyone laughed their heads off. His remark was repeated round the whole unit for months afterwards. A silly little story, but it illustrates our generally blasé attitude. We were sometimes downright irresponsible - anything for a laugh. Our feelings towards the Belgian army - what there was of it - could not be described as respectful. Once on a chore because we had little repair work to do I helped the linemen by feeding a pair of telephones lines out of the back of a lorry along several miles of road for a new communications link. No sooner had we arrived at the other end when we were horrified to see a Belgian army truck draw up a few minutes later and proudly hand over to us the other end of the line we had just laboriously laid; both parties looked in horror at the two trucks connected by the two short lengths of cable, one winding out of a drum and the other winding into it. They had cheerfully been "salvaging" the line we had been playing out! This story went round the unit like wildfire, spread in the first place, I must admit, by me. Nothing made you more popular in the lower ranks of the army than a good story to tell against your officers or your allies, both total incompetents in our eyes. This shows how unfair we were to both, but our lack of responsibility when no actual fighting had to done was monstrous. The Belgians soon got their comeuppance. During the riotous and drunken shenanigans at Christmas we were all drinking in the cafe when a signalman ran in and collapsed on the table laughing his head off. Between hysterical bursts of laughter he told us a convoy of Belgian trucks had drawn up at the top in the main square of the town and asked the way to the town of Mol. We all knew that backwards, as did the teller of the story. He deliberately indicated the opposite direction and watched the whole convoy follow his instructions. "That will teach them to collect our wire when we lay it" he said, wiping the tears out of his eyes. Thank goodness the Belgians all around us in the cafe did not quite get the drift of his story. This sort of irresponsible schoolboy humour was typical of our behaviour.

Also in my notebook I found the following note about the dispositions of out troop on a typical day. I quote them verbatim: 14/2/45:

TYPICAL DISPOSITION OF SIGNAL TROOP 557

Corporal Church.......In bed

Signalman Taylor......Stage Lighting (see below)
Signalman Ford........Stage lighting

Signalman Ogden.......Changing batteries for Church Army Girls' canteen.

Signalman Geall.......Toasting over fire (In our workshop)

Sergeant Sykes........Standing in for Bertha's sister's husband in Germany. (Bertha was Bill Church's very accommodating girl-friend who had no objection to Bill servicing both her and her sister!)

Signalman Ford was a dour Welshman who had finally learnt to get along with me after a long period of distaste on my part and what at the time seemed pure hatred on his. The stage lighting he and I were engaged on constituted an interesting phase in the Signal Troop's life - or at least for some of us. The officers in the unit had decided as a sideline to "keep the men amused" by putting on some stage shows with the assistance of the ladies in various organisations like the NAAFI, Church Army, Army Educational Corps and ABCA (Army Bureau of Current Affairs) who were floating about locally as the war drew to a close. This activity continued right up to our postings via Holland into Germany as part of the Army of Occupation and was highly professional in its work. Volunteer signalmen took turns at doing the stage lighting and operating the spotlights - all great fun. We would pile all the props into lorries and jump in beside them with our bottles of plonk and our beef or bacon and mustard sandwiches ready for an interesting and convivial journey to somewhere new and exciting while the pampered officers and the ladies swept along in style later in charabancs. Our venues included the Island of Sylt, where we all drove on to railway trucks to go across the causeway. I must say I went with some misgiving. I had been present at all the rehearsals and the plays they did were all the popular upper class amateur drawing room workhorses of the time like Noel Coward's "Ways and Means" and the even more upper class "Two Gentlemen from Soho". In England I had been driven to total despair at the stupidity of my fellow conscripts during that most beautiful of all films "Brief Encounter" - another Noel Coward story - which had produced howls of laughter, obscene suggestions and cat-calls from the audience. How on earth would the ribald lot we were in 30 Corps take to this sort of stuff? They loved it, and I have no explanation except perhaps that they wanted to be entertained after the discomforts, boredom, and in the case of those at the sharp end, the dangers of their life.

There were many bright moments like this in the general gloom of wanting to leave the army and go home - a day now tantalisingly near with VE day in the offing and in fact so long away, with the "occupation" ahead of us.
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