The sentries at Aldershot Barracks leaped swiftly to attention when they heard the column approaching. An incomprehensible word was barked out by the staff sergeant, sounding something like “Awt”. No one in the column thought it meant anything and continued marching. The four at the front were confronted by a menacing row of guards, each with a bayonet raised at forty-five degrees, and pointed directly at their stomachs. Another step, and they would have been skewered. They halted. The men behind carried on marching, straight into the backs of the men in front. About half the column fell on each other in this way. Being fresh from a sane world where this sort of thing is considered funny, they fell about laughing, but the staff sergeant failed to see the joke. He swore and raged at their imbecility.
The column re-assembled inside the gates and marched another quarter-mile to the billet, a grey rectangular building, four storeys high.
A short way off from this building the staff sergeant shouted.
“In a minute, I am going to say ‘halt’, and that means ‘stop’, and when I say ‘halt’ I want you to stop. Got it?” They continued marching.
“Awt.” Half the men stopped, the other half didn’t. The result was exactly the same as at the gate. The staff sergeant nearly went berserk. Somehow he managed to re-assemble them, marched them another fifty yards and shouted, “Halt.”
This time everyone stopped.
“Right. In line.”
This was no easier than it had been at the station. In fact it was harder, because it was pitch-dark. Men stumbled and fell over each other, muttering and laughing.
“Silence!” roared the staff sergeant.
“Silence yerself, yer bloody windbag,” shouted a voice.
“Who said that?” roared the sergeant.
“Father Christmas,” said the voice.
“Corporal, open the door,” roared the sergeant.
The corporal on duty opened the door of the billet.
“Forward. Quick march,” roared the sergeant, leading the way up four flights of stone steps. At the top, the corporal in charge of the billet opened the door, and the disorderly line of men entered.
“New recruits, Corporal, and a bigger bunch of stupid bastards I’ve never met.” The staff sergeant turned to go. He turned to the men. “You wait. You just bloody wait. You’ll wish you’d never been bloody born, you will.” And with those pleasant words, he departed.
I roared with laughter at this story. We both laughed, Mr Collett and I. Nothing binds people more strongly than the same sense of humour, and the ability to laugh together. I was thoroughly enjoying my evenings of sherry and an old soldier’s reminiscences. The British Army of the 1890s was not something I would have expected to find interesting, but in the firelight, with a good storyteller like my companion, the years came alive.
I was also aware that Mr Collett had become deeply fond of me, which was touching. One of the pictures on his walls was of a pretty young girl in 1920s dress. I understood that this was his only daughter, who had been killed in the bombing in the Second World War. Perhaps I was becoming a substitute granddaughter to him. I didn’t mind. I liked him. He was a dear old man, and reminded me of my own grandfather, whom I had loved and admired deeply, and who had been more of a father to me than my own father. He had died a couple of years previously at the age of eighty-four, and I still felt the loss. If Mr Collett and I were both substituting another person into our growing affection, it was all right by me.
He refilled my glass. “Do you like chocolates, my dear? I bought a box of Milk Tray this morning, with you in mind.”
He reached up to the mantelshelf, and felt for them. I was still a bit chary about eating anything, because of all the filth around the place, and once, when he had produced a grubby plate of biscuits, which I had seen him drop on the dirty floor and pick up, I had said that I didn’t like biscuits. But an unopened box of chocolates was a different matter. Anyway, I loved them. After that, it was always sherry and chocolates. Incidentally, I never saw the bugs again, and after a while I ceased to look for them.
“So you got to your billet, and your head wasn’t too bad. What happened then?”
“We were told to make up our cots. A soldier sleeps in a cot, not a bed. They are constructed in two halves, the bottom half of which pushes into the upper half. This allows for more space during the day in the centre of the billet. The corporal showed us how to do it. The biscuit, which is a soldier’s straw-filled mattress, and two rough blankets, were folded on the top part of the shortened bed. We had no pillows, no sheets. Nothing fancy like that. The corporal told us the sip-but was on the landing.”
“What on earth is a sip-but?” I interrupted.
“Oh, that’s back slang for a piss-tub. There’s a lot of rhyming slang and back slang in the army. At least there was in my day. It may have been dropped by now.
“I remember my first night very well. It was so new, so exciting, that I couldn’t sleep. Apart from which I still had a headache from the girls pushing me against the wall. My thoughts were racing – those girls, my mother, the recruiting sergeant, the staff sergeant, the station, the march through the night. I must have dozed off towards dawn and in my dreams I vaguely heard a bugle call. Seconds later the corporal burst into the billet, shouting: ‘Show a leg now, get out of it. Open those blasted windows and let some fresh air in. It smells like a bloody farmyard in here. Get out of it now, do you hear me?’
“Perhaps I didn’t move, but the next thing I knew was that my cot collapsed, and I landed on the floor. The corporal had pulled the bottom half away from the top half, which was a very effective way of rousing anyone who did not leap out of bed the instant reveille was blown. This sounded at 5 a.m., summer or winter.
“The corporal ordered us to dress and put away our cots and fold the biscuit and blankets. I was in a daze, but the roar of the corporal kept me on my toes. He kept bellowing on about the blankets not being folded straight, and how, he’d never seen such a useless, slovenly bunch of recruits, and how we would be licked into shape and no mistake. He ordered two men next to the door to carry the sip-but to empty it down the drains and clean it at the pump, where it would be left until the following evening.
“‘Right now. Stand by your cots. This is only the reception centre, where you are treated gentle-like. Later you will learn what army life is, when you have been sorted into the regiments what you have enlisted for. Get me. You will have an hour’s drill before breakfast. Then your breakfast, then an hour’s parade, then present to the colour sergeants for sorting. Got it? Right. In line. Down to the parade ground.’
“We got into some sort of line and filed down the stone stairs. In the darkness outside we could hear voices rather like the staff sergeant’s barking out orders. We were put to physical exercises – press-ups, star-jumps, squatting with straight back, step-ups. Imagine all that with a headache and no sleep! But I kept thinking this was better than hanging around the dock gates looking for work, and it was. The last quarter of an hour consisted of the most exhausting exercise so far – running with your knees lifted high at each step. After this, we were starving for our breakfast. This consisted of dry bread and sweet tea. It tasted delicious. After that we were led to the parade ground for another hour of drill. At 9 a.m. a bugle sounded and the colour sergeants marched onto the square, each followed by a duty sergeant carrying a list of names, which they read out in turn. The recruits were sectioned into their colours, and marched off. This happened every day, because the recruiting sergeants were busy enlisting unsuspecting young lads like me every day of the week.
“There were only four Scots Guards recruits that day. It’s a crack regiment.” (Mr Collett said this with great pride, lifting his chin high.) “We were taken in marching order to the quartermaster’s stores, where we were issued with top-coat, cape, leggings, one suit of scarlet, one of blue for drills, boots, shirts, socks, and numerous pieces of regimental dress. We were issued with a rifle, bayonet, and two white buff straps, with pouches that could hold fifty rounds apiece. We were also issued with a busby, the tall fur headdress reserved for Guards. Everyone in the regiment was very proud of these.
“We – the four of us, that is – were shown to a whitewashed barrack room overlooking the square. A corporal was in charge of each billet, and a couple of older duty-men also kept billet there. They showed us how to fix straps for drill purposes, how to roll the top-coat and fix it to the kitbag, how to fix leggings, what cleaning materials we would need, how to place our cape and scarlet top-coat, when not in use, on the racks above our cots – even how the straps of the kitbag should hang from pegs above the head of the cot.”
The pettiness of it all, the meticulous attention to detail, reminded me of my nurse’s training. I told Mr Collett about it. We were issued with three fitted dresses, twelve aprons, five caps and a cape. We were given precise instructions on how they must be worn at all times. The hem of our dresses had to be fifteen inches from the floor, no more, no less. Caps, which were flat pieces of starched linen, had to be folded and pinned to an exact shape and size. Aprons had to be pinned at an exact point above the bosom, and adjusted to the precise length of the dress. Shoes had to be black lace-ups, of a specific style, with rubber soles for quietness. Stockings were black, with seams. Belts and epaulettes were of differing colours, distinguishing the different years of training a student nurse underwent. Full uniform had to be worn at all times when on duty. I recall, in my first year of training, being ordered out of the dining room by a third-year nurse, because I had forgotten to put on my cap. Later, when I became a ward sister, I forgot my cuffs on one occasion when I went to the matron’s office, and was sent back to the ward to get them before I could address her!
We discussed whether this sort of discipline was necessary. Mr Collett said: “Well, it certainly is for men, because large numbers of men living together can easily become like wild animals. Men are brutes at heart, and without the civilising influence of women they quickly revert to savagery. The discipline of the armed forces is the only thing that keeps them under control. I wouldn’t have thought it was necessary for women, though, would you? But I maintain that nurses always look lovely, and so I approve of the uniform.”
I chuckled at this. There is no doubt in my mind that the nurses’ uniform of the early and middle 1900s was just about the sexiest thing ever invented. Nothing has surpassed it for allure. I was not the only young nurse to be acutely conscious of a heightened sex appeal when in uniform. Ironically, the draconian old sisters and matrons who rigidly enforced the uniform seemed to be unaware of the effect it had on the male sex.
Those were the repressive days when student nurses had to live in barrack-like nurses’ homes, and be in by 10 p.m. No men were allowed, and a nurse who smuggled one in would be dismissed if she was caught. Student nurses could not marry. All this was to repress our sexuality, yet we were dressed up like sex kittens. With exquisite irony, in today’s permissive society, when anything goes and nurses can do whatever they like sexually, the uniform has changed beyond all recognition, and the average nurse now looks like a sack of potatoes tied in the middle, often wearing trousers rather than sexy black stockings.
I asked Mr Collett how he coped with all the regulation of army life. Was he as bad as I had been in my early nurses’ training? I must have driven the ward sisters mad. He laughed, and said he didn’t believe it.
“But I had a hard time at first. We all did. The Scots Guards prided themselves on being a crack regiment, so we had more hours of drill, rifle and bayonet training, longer marches, and heavier pack-weights than other regiments. Also we had less time off. We were so exhausted in the evening that we seldom went to the wet canteen. Often I just made up my cot at 8 p.m. and went fast asleep until reveille.
“I had more money than I’d ever had. On a shilling a day I was able to send four shillings a week home to my mother. I knew that would pay the rent, and I swore to myself that I would always pay the rent, so that she need never again fear the workhouse. And I kept that up for years and years, even when I was married.”
I asked him about his marriage.
“Well, after three months at Aldershot, I was given forty-eight hours’ leave to go to see my family, before being posted to Plymouth. Across the court of Alberta Buildings lived a girl I had known for years, but she seemed so much more grown up than I had remembered her, and I reckon she must have thought the same about me. She was the prettiest little thing I had ever seen.” He chuckled fondly, and slowly refilled his pipe. He rubbed it in his hands, and stroked his cheek with the warm bowl.
“We were only sixteen apiece, and forty-eight hours isn’t long, but I knew she was the only girl in the world for me. We reached an understanding that she would wait for me until I was in a position to marry her. Long engagements were common in those days, and couples thought nothing of waiting ten or fifteen years before they could get married. As it happened we had to wait only three years.” He lit a spill from the fire, applied it to the tobacco, and sucked hard. He looked thoughtful.
“It’s a damned good thing I did meet my Sally during that forty-eight hours, because the promises we had made kept me clean while I was at Plymouth. It was a lively town, and ten or twelve regiments were garrisoned there, as well as sailors and marines. There were pubs and bawdy houses in every street, and prostitutes in every bar. I learned fast. You do in the army, and it didn’t take long to figure out that if I went with one of them girls I was likely to pick up VD. That would have been the end of my army career, the end of my hopes for winning Sally and the end of the rent for my mother. So I kept myself clean. All the other chaps said I was mad, and I should enjoy myself while I could. But I saw enough of them go into the venereal wards of the sick bay to know they were the ones who were mad.” He looked severe.