But—the day he turned eighteen at the beginning of August a letter arrived from the War Office ordering him to register for the Forces at the local Labour Exchange.
Merle told him to do it and attract no trouble.
“Don’t want no more coppers pokin’ around here. They’ve had you marked ever since your grandad died.”
He registered, and opted to join the RAF, for no better reason than that blue was preferable to brown, thinking he would, in all likelihood, never hear from them again.
The following week he received instructions to report to the RAF Recruitment Centre at Euston, a twenty-minute ride away on the London Underground. It was not his “call-up.” It was some sort of exam.
Merle said, “Just do it, kid. Don’t ask for no more attention. Like the man said, yer card’s marked. Besides, nothin’ ter lose. Not after them big bombs on Japan. War’s all over bar the shouting. And you was always good at exams.”
He was good at exams. And all this one seemed to be was some sort of crude test of his intelligence. A matter of not banging a square peg in a round hole. A doddle.
Then the shouting—August 15, 1945—Victory over Japan, and a piss-up in the streets to beat all piss-ups, and it was, as she had said, “all over.”
About a month passed—Britain adjusted painfully, if at all, to life under Labour government, life in the nuclear age, and life at peace.
Then Wilderness received his call-up papers. A travel warrant to get him from St. Pancras Station to RAF Cardington in Bedfordshire and a postal order for four shillings. Two days’ pay in advance.
“Oh fuck.”
Merle took the letter from him.
“’Ere. You’re now Aircraftman 2nd Class Holderness, J. of the RAF Regiment.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Oh fuck indeed.”
There was a telling pause as she lit up a fag. Merle striving hard to look as though she was thinking.
“You know I’ve always urged you to keep your nose clean? You know, ever since Abner . . . you know . . . Well this is different. I wouldn’t blame you if you did a runner. Really I wouldn’t. The bloody war’s over. They’re demobbing blokes already. For all we know yer dad’s on his way back right now. What can they possibly want with a skinny bugger like you?”
“No,” said Wilderness. “They’ve got me. Nowhere to run to. They’ve got me by the balls. And I think it pays to know when they’ve got you by the balls.”
“What you gonna do? Join up, keep yer head down and yer nose clean and hope trouble just passes you by?”
“Well I can try,” Wilderness said.
“Fat chance, kiddo. Fat chance.”
The sole consolation in this was that if his father was on his way home, back home from God only knew where, perhaps to be on an RAF station somewhere, anywhere where Harry wasn’t, might be no bad thing.
“Fat chance,” she said again, leaving the phrase echoing around in Wilderness’s mind.
§26
RAF Cardington seemed to take up about half of Bedfordshire. Wilderness was there for five days.
He had his hair cut to regulation RAF length (“Get yer ’air cut! You bunch of fuckin’ pansies!”)—length and regulation being about as close to an oxymoron as possible—was issued with a best and a working uniform, a “cheese-cutter” forage cap (“Stick it to yer ’ead with Brylcreem!”), shoes as well as boots (“This ain’t the bleedin’ army—we don’t live in fuckin’ boots.”) assigned a number (“Learn to recite it in yer sleep! You can forget yer own name, but never forget yer number!”), and told to stamp the number into his personal cutlery (“Knife, fork an’ spoon, nerks fer the use of. Get ’ammerin!”). The uniform could have fitted better, as with every pair of trousers Wilderness had owned since he was thirteen they were too short in the leg. (“You’re a big bugger ain’tya!”). And he ate five days’ worth of bangers and mash, rendered soggy by the limp, dripping grey cabbage piled onto the plate. RAF Cardington seemed to smell of cabbage constantly. Later in life, he had only to catch a whiff of boiling cabbage to see Cardington for a split second in the mind’s eye.
The low point was posting home all his civilian clothes. Nothing, not the brutal haircut, the mindless shouting or the appalling food brought home quite so sharply that they had “got” him. He stuck a note to Merle in the package. “Trying to keep me head down and me nose clean. Don’t bet on it. Jx”
None of this seemed crucial. What was crucial was the careers hut.
“Right. You gotta pick. What do you want to be?”
Wilderness had replied that he would like to be a pilot.
“Nah, clerk, cobbler, barber, mechanic, cook, driver an’ blah blah blah.”
“No, really. I’d like to be a pilot.”
The flight sergeant had laughed at this.
“No chance, son. Not for likes of you. Pick a trade. Wot was you in Civvy Street?”
He could hardly say thief.
“OK, how about driver?”
“Can you drive?”
“Not yet.”
“We got a word for drivers wot can’t drive. It’s clerk.”
He left Cardington a clerk, with a recommendation that he train as a driver—if a vacancy arose. They had got him, and chained him to a desk.
§27
Cardington dispersed its recruits on the sixth day. From Cornwall to Aberdeen, from Pembroke to Suffolk. Wilderness, along with half a dozen new recruits, was posted to RAF Ravenhoe in Essex for basic training. Until the peace Wellingtons had flown out of Ravenhoe to bomb Germany. Now they ferried men and equipment, and half the base was given over to training.
The school cliché had always been that the fat kid who could not tie shoelaces was always last in a race and never to be trusted in goal. Sandy Birch was not fat. He was a skinny redhead who looked less eighteen than fifteen. You would never trust him in goal, he could not tie his shoelaces, nor could he dress on time or shave to a sufficient standard to please the NCOs. He laid out his kit on his half-made bed in a fashion that could only be described as chaotic and graced his first parade with patches of bog paper sticking to his cheeks, crisping with brown stains as the blood dried.
As such he was poison to the RAF corporals charged with licking civilians into the shape of airmen. They ate him all the same.
Wilderness had spotted him as long ago as day two at Cardington, when he had managed to drop most of the kit he had been issued, his personal knife, fork and spoon clattering down with his enamelled tin mug.
Their first pre-breakfast, post-ablution parade at Ravenhoe: 7 a.m., all in working blues—a second-best uniform, designed to get dirty—and boots.
The bog paper was a red rag to a bull. Corporal Turpin passed Wilderness with a glance, stopped and stared at Birch’s face, then let his eyes roll down the length of the boy’s body, to his boots. Each boot had twenty-two lace holes. Birch had missed a good half dozen on each boot.
“Jesus H. Christ. What are you, boy?”
Birch rattled off his name and number.
“No, that’s who you are. I asked what you are? Now, what in God’s name are you?”
“Please, Corporal, don’t know Corporal.”
“Then I’s’ll have to tell you. You Birch are a twat. What are you Birch?”
“A twat,” said Birch.
“Sorry, Birch. I must be a bit mutt an’ jeff this morning. I didn’t hear you.”
“A twat.” Birch said more loudly.
So far Turpin had not raised his voice, but Wilderness readily deduced it was a weapon held in reserve.
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU?”
Birch went red, his cheeks blew out as though he might burst, then he yelled as loud as he could.
“I AM A TWAT!”
Turpin resumed a normal volume.
“No, no, no . . .. ‘I am a twat, Corporal.’”
“I AM A TWAT, CORPORAL!”
“Thank you Birch. You are indeed a twat.”
Wilderness had said nothing. Further down the line, his newfound comrades were grinning and sniggering. Wilderness said nothing. But, any English school will teach you that silence is not the same thing as innocence. Turpin stepped back to him. It reminded him of those moments when a teacher could seize upon the merest expression and decide it was insolence. Wilderness had never been able to work out what insolence was. It defied definition and was so bound up in matters of rank and status as to require an entire chapter in any manual of etiquette. However blank the face, the offended party would profess to read a message in it—invariably it would be found insolent. And Wilderness had long ago concluded that only the insecure bastards hovering one rung above bottom ever bothered with insolence—it marked out the losers in life that they could be so readily offended by silence.
“And you. You lanky bastard. What’s your game?”
Wilderness recited his name and number.
“Could it be, Holderness, that you are a smart alec?”
Wilderness said nothing.
“Answer me, son. Are you a smart alec?”
“Oh yes, Corporal. Smart as they come. Smarter than you by a plank and a half.”
Wilderness wasn’t wholly sure why he’d said this, but had time to reflect as he doubled up under a fist to the solar plexus.
“IF THERE’S ONE THING I HATE MORE THAN A FUCKING TWAT IT’S A FUCKING SMART ALEC! ONE MORE FUCKING CRACK, ONE MORE SNOTTY FUCKING LOOK OUT OF YOU SON AND I’LL HAVE YOU ON FUCKING JANKERS!”
§28
Jankers was universal British forces slang for punishment, usually following a charge of insubordination. It did not require a court-martial.
Jankers duly followed. Wilderness failed to salute a pilot officer, who sent for Flight Sergeant Mills, who shouted at him and rushed him in front of the flight lieutenant, no one of higher rank being available or interested. Wilderness scrubbed lavatories with a toothbrush for a weekend.
Not long afterwards, on morning parade, he laughed at something a chap in the row behind had muttered about Corporal Turpin’s mother. Turpin exploded into a practised routine of “Twat,” “Fucking twat,” and “Smart-alec wankers.” He sent for Flight Sergeant Downes, who sent for the flight lieutenant, who could not conceal his boredom with all of them.
“Is this really necessary, Flight?”
“Rank insubordination, sah!”
“Do you have to be quite so loud.”
“Sah!”
“Call the man a fool and have done, Flight.”
“No, sah! King’s Regulations clearly state—”
“Flight Sergeant, do not start quoting me King’s Regulations. If you want to punish this man, punish him. I don’t know . . . have him whitewash the coke heap . . . polish the lino . . . something like that. But for Christ’s sake stop shouting.”
Wilderness whitewashed coke, and when he had whitewashed it Downes and Mills had him hose it down and do it again. After three days he was whitewashing it by torchlight. Small incident followed on small incident. More bogs to scrub, more coke to whitewash. And the added pleasure of putting a shine upon linoleum floors that already shone. He spent a total of six nights in the glasshouse for minor misdemeanours. They had him marked as a troublemaker.
Along the way he learnt what he had to about marching, cleaning a Lee Enfield .303 (but not actually firing one), the boundless joys of blanco and stamping his feet. It wasn’t enjoyable, but it was tolerable. For some reason planes—surely the raison d’être of the RAF—had not yet come into it. Nor had clerking, nor had the prospect of driving.
What changed things for ever, and most certainly for better, was the cunt.
Yet again they were on parade. Wilderness bored out of his brain, Flight Sergeant Downes shouting orders, Corporals Turpin and Bodell enforcing them, checking that thumbs aligned with the seams of trousers, that feet were splayed at the regulation RAF angle, that heels banged down with the requisite force.
They got as far as Birch.
Today he was not bleeding, but his shirt protruded beneath his blouse and his bootlaces resembled a cat’s cradle made by a three-year-old.
Turpin kicked at his feet.
“What are you Birch?”
Birch knew the routine.
“I am a fucking twat, Corporal.”
“No, no, no, no . . . laddie. That was last week. You have slipped down the slippery slope of sloppiness since then. Birch, you are a cunt.”
Birch said nothing, reddened in the face.
“What are you, Birch?”
“No, corp. I can’t say that. Not that word.”
Turpin screamed, “YOU ARE A CUNT. WHAT ARE YOU BIRCH?”
Birch said nothing, turned his head towards Wilderness to avert his eyes from Turpin’s glare.
Turpin seized him by the chin, turned his head back and an inch from his face yelled, “SAY IT! YOU ARE A CUNT!”
Birch wet himself, a hissing sound of escaping urine, a rapidly spreading wet patch discolouring his best blues, and a splash of orange piss bursting over his shoes and onto Turpin’s. Turpin all but jumped backwards.
“Jesus H. Christ. I do not fuckin’ believe it.”
As he raised his arm to hit Birch, Wilderness blocked it.
“Hit him and I’ll deck you.”