A CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATION.....

Well, the day arrived - Thursday 4th February - and 61 years ago yesterday I woke up on the first morning of my conscripted National Service.  I didn`t actually wake up, rather I was woken up by the sound of a very rigid drill corporal banging the end of my bed with a stick. He proceeded likewise through the rest of our barrack room only pausing at the end of Dave Fry`s bed opposite mine.  Dave from London was clearly not used to getting up early and was unamused by his slumbers being disturbed in such a manner.  He was even more unamused when his desire to turn over and go back to sleep resulted in the corporal unceremoniously tipping his bed up, leaving Dave to come to and try to get up from the floor.  Not a good start.

The evening before, we had had a load of clothing and equipment thrown at us from the Quartermaster`s stores, had been subjected to severe haircuts, short `interviews` with an officer versed in the art of personnel selection and thrown together to be formed into a random, confused and tremulous `squad.`  

And all because those of us who were conscripts, as opposed to regular soldiers who had signed on for all this, had accepted the Queen`s shilling.  Mine had arrived in the post along with my call up papers and instructions about where and when to report for duty.  It was a clever and devious trick to send a postal order for one shilling in the post because, having opened the letter  and taken out the postal order, I was deemed to have accepted a contract with Her Majesty to do my time at her pleasure.  Sneaky.

Our squad`s first day flew by in a flurry of activity;  we were shouted at quite a lot on the assumption, I suspect, that it was more akin to `good order and military discipline` to shout orders than to explain what was required.   We seemed to have to run everywhere and we had our first real experience of military cuisine - cordon noir rather than bleu in Chez Catterick.

Come evening time and our introduction to the mysteries of `bulling` - a process by which things like webbing, brasses, boots etc. were required to become literally spotlessly clean.  A few of the `regulars` among us were clearly au fait with all of that, having spent some time in things like the Army Cadet Force, so the innocents among us, myself included, were inducted into the dark arts of bulling everything in sight.

There was quite a bit of webbing to see to, including a pair of gaiters, an item of army equipment that I never understood or came to terms with but they involved scrubbing, cleaning and blanco-ing;  next came the brasses - things like badges - and they too involved cleaning with copious amounts of Brasso.  And finally the boots.  We were given two pairs each - one of which was going to be our `best boots` and to live up to that label, they had to gleam like boots had never gleamed before.   Trouble was that when they were issued they were covered all over with tiny pimples, which had to be removed by heating a spoon over a candle and vigorously rubbing the spoon on the pimples until, laboriously over a few nights, they disappeared so that they could be properly `bulled` with lashings of boot polish  applied with plenty of spit.

 And so the first day drifted into exhaustion to add to the bewilderment and confusion and as I laid my befuddled head on my slimline army pillow, it occurred to me that the term `military intelligence` truly was the ultimate contradiction in terms.  Still, one day done - only 730 left for me to fulfil my contractual obligation.