305 - 426..

Over the course of this year, I`ve been recalling what my memory is capable of recalling of the events of my enforced military career.  To help me, I`ve got a copy of this book by Tom Hickman, which is perhaps the most comprehensive history of National Service ever produced.   I`m reading it in bite sized chunks in the bath every night, so it`s getting a bit dog-eared, bordering on the soggy, but it does bring back all those ritual dances that we conscripts went through during our two-years stint.

I did some mental arithmetic this afternoon whist walking Barney through the snowfields of Kent and I worked out that by now, 50 years ago, I had completed 305  of the 731 days I had to do (one of the years was a leap year, hence the extra day.)  This left me with 426 days still to do but looking back, I was surprised how much I had been through in those first 305 days.

I had weathered the storms of a long, cold winter doing basic training in Catterick Camp and been posted to `my` Regiment - the 10th Royal Hussars - who were stationed at Paderborn in what was then West Germany.  I had settled in to the regimental routine, made good friends, got myself established in my part time job as a projectionist in the garrison cinema and made a few appearances for the Regimental football team as a box to box midfield schemer with an eye for a pass and a good engine.  I had spent my 21st birthday on guard duty in the middle of Luneburg Heath, guarding a squadron of Chieftain tanks with a pick axe handle - no pick axe, just the handle.   Oh, and I had passed the entrance test to become a fully fledged member of the PA Club by sinking eight litres of the local lager in one go down at the nearby Fritz`s bar.

Being part of the Regiment`s football squad had its rewards.  We were put through our paces each morning followed by a `special` breakfast.  In those days, the Army concept of a healthy diet for highly tuned footballers was to lay on a huge fried breakfast and gallons of bomide-laced tea.   Another bonus was playing away games at places like Detmold, Bielefeld, Hannover and other teutonic fleshpots where the hospitality of our opponents equally consisted of huge fried repasts with yet more bromide-laced tea.  Only we were never told about the bromide, even if we thought the tea tasted a bit funny.

On a more serious note, Tom Hickman`s book quite properly mentions the fact that hundreds of National Servicemen lost their lives in places like Korea, Malaya and Kenya and their enforced sacrifice has perhaps not been acknowledged as well as it might.   It`s one thing to be in the armed forces through choice by volunteering, but quite another to be conscripted without any choice at all and that was the fate for the millions of National Servicemen between 1945 and 1963.   Fortunately for me, I passed my time in the relatively peaceful backwaters of BFPO 16  and for that I am eternally grateful.  But it could well have been all so very different. 

Those of us who went through the National Service `experience` are all in our 70s now, but the friends I made then are friends even to this day - perhaps a little more than just friends, comrades even - and although 50 years have now passed, those 305 days and the 426 still to come are forever etched in my memory.