Open Writing

While I hardly expect a grateful British public to carry me shoulder high and fete me as a hero, it would be nice to think that somewhere in the bowels of the military archives of this great country of ours my small contribution to world safety and the overthrow of tyrants was known and available to future researchers looking into the mass of soldiers whose exploits are largely unknown but who, nevertheless, answered the call to bravely serve the country and its people. But, in those vast archives there is not even a hint of my service in the colours from 1952 to 1955.

I had no idea that I was in the secret service, but I must have been. I joined the Army on a Regular engagement so that I wouldn’t have to serve for two years as a National Serviceman. I was rewarded with an extra thirty shillings a week for my unswerving loyalty and devotion to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her heirs and successors.

I signed papers, was questioned about my religion, had a medical examination, received a travel warrant, had a military haircut from the barber at Green Cross, and in August of 1952 I hied to Blandford in Dorset where I was swallowed up by the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, to be trained as a killing machine and, eventually trained, after a fashion, as a vehicle mechanic.

I was given a military number, 22820103, that is engraved in my heart and brain, another haircut, several hundred pounds worth of military equipment, including a rifle and an illegal bayonet, and five dummy rifle bullets. The Queen, her kingdom, and all her subjects could sleep safely in their beds! Basic training was the most terrifying six weeks of my life.

Next, I was sent to Barton Stacey, inducted into X Platoon, and allowed out to put the fear of God into the inhabitants of several Hampshire towns as I screamed down highways, byways, narrow country lanes, and main streets in a growling four-ton camouflaged Austin lorry, spurred on by an eccentric but likeable lunatic in flying boots and leather jacket who had flown Spitfires in the Battle of Britain and couldn’t get the madness out of his blood.

Two weeks later, I was given a driving licence and made to promise that I would never return. My Spitfire pilot had endured more danger in his two weeks with me at the wheel than he did knocking down Luftwaffe kites. I shipped out to Ellesmere in Shropshire to become transmogrified into a vehicle mechanic.

As to my skills, towards the end of my service a Green Howard officer, one Captain, Bagnall, who took as much dislike to me as I did to him, though with less justification, commented, "I am not qualified to comment on his abilities as a mechanic, but the company transport goes, which speaks for itself." He was being kind.

After Ellesmere, my next posting was to Borden, to the REME Regimental Retraining Unit. This unimaginative copy of Boys’ Town existed solely for the purpose of making soldiers out of those of us that the military machine had failed to turn into soldiers the first time around. Was all that shouting and marching really necessary, and how can all those days I spent on Jankers be so lightly set aside as if they never happened, when I have the marks to prove them?

From there, I was posted to Number 11 REME Workshops, in Sudbury, Staffordshire, to work on a vast array of incredible large vehicles, many of which left my hands in poorer condition that they came into them. I did my best to fix what was amiss but quickly learned to limit my work on the metal monsters to blowing horns and checking lights. Anything more than that proved expensively damaging.

I was at Sudbury for eleven months. I should add that all this time I was paid every week without fail. I mention this because of what is to come in the hope that I will not be alone in my astonishment.

From Sudbury I was posted to Ægypt where after a couple of weeks with the Yorks and Lancs regiment at Shandur, close by Kabrit on the Bitter Lakes through which ran the Suez Canal, I was attached to the support company of The Green Howards second battalion in the Suez Garrison, that place from where we kept our eagle eyes on the doings of those Ægyptians who resented our presence in their ancient and interesting country.

Fortunately, none of their bullets had my name on them, presumably because my presence there was a dread secret, although I didn’t know it at the time.

After four and a half months of Saharan sun, the British Government saw fit to hand the canal back to its rightful owners, and the Green Howards headed for Cyprus, rightly called the Jewel of the Mediterranean. And I went with them. In fact, they insisted I go with them, so they obviously knew who and where I was, and where they wanted me to be.

I travelled from Port Said to Famagusta, Cyprus aboard the Royal Naval corvette, the Empire Shelter, and was in Cyprus for exactly one year, having arrived on the first day of August, 1954, and flying out from Nicosia airport on the same date in 1955.

Once I was back in England, I went through the demobilisation process at Aldershot, and when my documentation was complete I was given a travel warrant back to Huddersfield, being discharged from regular service with the highest rating possible for that length of service, "Very good!"

Thus far, it seems reasonable to conclude that the army knew me, that it had tracked my movements, and had kept good records about my service. The fact that it never failed to hand over a cash amount every pay day certainly lends support to that opinion.

It is not widely known, but Ægypt had been an active theatre, which means that real bullets had been flying in divers directions, and that bombs and other nefarious and devilish devices intended to persuade the British to quit the sands of Ægypt were employed against us, and that they had not been without effect. The weekly "Incident Reports" attested to the mounting deaths along the Canal Zone, victims of a continuing war, although it was not recognised as a war for half a century, and those of us who served there received no formal recognition.

Cyprus degenerated into an active theatre after a few months when EOKA became active. A Greek war hero, Colonel George Grivas, known as Dighenis, led a campaign of terror and obstruction against British interests and troops to try to secure Cyprus as a Greek province. Consequently, the British government issued General Service Medals for soldiers who served there for a minimum of sixty days during what they classified as the "Emergency." But, for some reason, my Cyprus medal was not sent to me.

I re-enlisted in 1960 and was accepted back into the Army, in the Royal Tank Regiment, with my original army serial number. In basic training I won the coveted "Best Cadet" award, signifying some monumental progress from my 1952 Blandford fiasco.

This time I served for eighteen months on work of national unimportance, but my contributions were acknowledged and appreciated by the officers of the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards at the military establishment in Catterick.

In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II gave her Royal Assent for General Service Medals to be issued to veterans of the 1951-54 Suez Canal Zone conflict that has begun in 1951 when Egypt rescinded a treaty made in 1936 on the number of British troops that they would allow in the Canal Zone. Britain and Egypt became entangled in a stalemate, which led to violent disorder and anti-British violence by Ægyptian irregular forces, such as the Fedayeen.

Thousands of soldiers were sent to keep the hundred and three-mile canal open and more than three hundred British servicemen died at the hands of terrorist gunmen, bombers, rioting crowds, and diseases. However, the armed conflict was officially designated an ‘emergency’ not a war, so its veterans were overlooked, and have been designated, "The Forgotten Army."

When I learned that I was due yet another medal, I applied to the Ministry of Defence Medal Office to have them send me my gongs: the missing one for my service in Cyprus, and one for Ægypt. I am an old man, getting older, and would like to have something to pass down to my children. But I was more than a little surprised when they wrote back asking who the heck I was!

They wrote:

We have no record of your Army Service prior to nineteen-sixty!

Right! I pressed my case, wrote back with biographical details, numbers, dates, places, etc., and have just opened their latest letter. It reads in part:

We regret to inform you that after extensive requests to various archives where Service Records are stored, we have been unable to obtain your Service Record.

So here I am, the Unknown Soldier, lost in the Plutonian entrails of the Army Record Archives and, it seems, that wherever my insignificant details dwell in their solitary darkness, they are irretrievable. It is as though I never was.

But I remember my comrades at Blandford, Barton Stacey, Ellesmere, Borden, Sudbury, Kabrit, Shandur, Suez, Dekhelia, and Aldershot.

I remember also the forty-eight and thirty-six hour passes when I hitch hiked from Ellesmere to Huddersfield, often with an army friend to spend the weekend at my home instead of going slowly mad in the boredom of the wooden huts that housed us throughout the week.

I remember travelling back to camp by train and sleeping on the luggage rack outside Whitchurch on the milk train, waiting for dawn to come so that we could creep along to Ellesmere station.

I remember travelling back to Sudbury on the midnight flyer red-eye special coaches out of Leeds railway station, sleeping against the shoulder of another soldier as we leaned against each other to snatch some sleep before arriving at the camp too weary to sleep somewhere around four or five in the morning, with reveille at six!

I remember Johnny Bubb, a whiner from Birmingham who was in every camp I was in, and in every hut I was in from 1952 to 1955.

I remember Roy Davey, a smiling cheerful boy from Cricklewood in London, and the time I stayed with his family on a weekend pass.

Of course I remember others. Tall chaps, short chaps, including Fletcher from Liverpool who had not a hair on his body, but who was deducted a shilling every two weeks for haircuts, and who had to set out his razor, comb, and lather brush for morning kit inspection.

I remember Taffy Parfitt, the card sharp who took the pay of several of his comrades at Pontoon almost every pay-day in Ellesmere.

I remember the little lad from Wiltshire who said he had an Italian razor and couldn’t get blades for it when he was jumped on for turning up for a muster parade unshaven.

I remember the food, it was very good, and I put on a few permanent pounds, having become addicted to Pom.

I remember the elderly Ægyptian gentleman we called ‘Pop’ who sold watches from an old wooden hut outside the camp at Shandur, near the spot where a lad from Morley, Crafstsman Chew sunbathed for two hours on his first day out and kept the whole camp awake all night with his moans and screams.

I remember almost being run over by a silent camel as I lay on the cooling desert floor by the shore of the Red Sea watching towards the jebels for danger, but failing to hear or see the rider coming from my left in the twilight’s dim, and I recall how still and silent I lay until rider and steed were no more than a dark patch in the Cimmerian curtain of night and I could breathe again.

I remember the boys who did not return with the dawn after being on patrol at the filtration plants, or who were sent to guard the water pipelines that brought life to our parched lives.

I remember those decapitated by piano wire stretched taut across the roadways.

I remember small Arab children smiling at the troops who waved to them as they passed through their villages being pulled indoors by frightened parents.

I remember Moses Nicolai, the camp barber at Dekhelia, and the time I was a ‘cumpari,’ a best man, at the wedding of a Greek friend in Pyla village.

I remember Uncle Arthur, an ageing homosexual, who invited young soldiers to his home, ‘Ripon House,’ in Larnaca.

I remember these and many others because I was there! But even as I remember, I have been forgotten. Perhaps my service records are lost down the back of one of the thousands of cabinets that hold the lives and doings of old soldiers in far-off years, and in distant places, in their fusty viscera.

We old soldiers cannot tell all that we know of those years, nor even all that we remember. We cannot share all that we did in those places.

We didn’t question our reasons for being until we grew a little older and more contemplative, having abandoned "the hours of careless youth," if we were of the number blessed to return and grow older.

I do not ask for much for my contribution was very small. But I would like my medals so that my children can remember what the nation has been forced by official negligence to forget! My discharge books were lost many years ago, and careless hands shovelled my ordinary paybook into the dustbin in the long ago, along with other treasures.

The medals, cheap things of no real worth, would at least provide me with some validation for the time I spent in strange places, doing strange things, among some interesting and exotic people, many of whom became my friends, and many of whom will now be dust in the dust, but who will only really die when no one remembers them any more.

Copyright © 2005 Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED