Boys Town

Alan Findlay (a.k.a. Baw) sent this in today. A long post but full of dry, Scottish humor!


Part 1 - Getting in with the crowd

Back in the 1950’s, where old men tend to dwell more and more nowadays, there was a surfeit of school leavers from throughout the lands of the never-setting sun, desperate to get into RAF Halton and so begin a three year apprenticeship in one of the trades associated with fighter aircraft maintenance. Some even came from Latin America (Venezuela) with accents straight out of Hollywood.

Included in the 1957 rush were two tiresome Scots – one from Selkirk the other from up the burn in Gala - determined never to be outdone by foreign exotics, so, in order to be noticed, reverted to the old Border dialect to such an extent they couldn’t understand what the other one was saying – all part of the contest to show which of them was coarsely ‘hame-knitted’ (miserably Scotch).

Events included who spent least money each week and on who could take most salt in their daily porridge. They even cleaned their teeth with the stuff, wrote their letters home on toilet roll, made their own envelopes and recycled old stamps. Embarrassed fellow Scots referred to them as Big Tit/Wee Tat, as they hovered about the beginning of mess queues, and then again at the end of the meal looking for second helpings – was then one fully realised just how much Harry Lauder and London music-halls have still got to answer for.

Baw knew he had made a big mistake following the crowd down to Halton, even before he met the Border Reivers. That was the moment he stepped onto the London train platform in the Waverley Station, Edinburgh, when this seething sergeant rushed across in his tackity boots right into Baw's face. Was like a scene out of every British Army film he ever saw - Baw was playing the part of the young ‘toff’ - all he lacked were a briefcase, a pair of specs and to be tripping over a long varsity scarf.

He had missed his bus in from Bathgate and the next again, having had to rush back up the road to the house to get his precious Mansfield Hotspurs football boots – no point in going to England if it wasn’t to play football. He still made the Waverley on time - didn’t need a wet nurse.

Was a job offer in his pocket he was going down South to see about - he wasn’t a conscript or an air cadet with his head in the clouds. Hadn’t been up in the sheriff court and given a choice between the Armed Forces and Borstal – hadn’t even got a lassie in trouble; would make his own mind up in his own good time, once he had a look around their foreign land. The sergeant had no right to talk to him, a civilian, like that. Wee men in uniform always seemed to have the foulest mouths in his limited experience - maybe too close to their arses.

Baw was supposed to have joined up with the rest at the RAF recruiting office in Hanover Street an hour before. Knew that fine, but right up until the last minute had expected his father to get him a proper job as a printer as promised. He wasn’t in the least interested in dog-fights or downing anybody, except on the football field, or the playground back at school when he was the last man in a tight game.

Good players weren’t to be messed about with on the field, or even railway platforms. All he knew of RAF mores had been gleaned from ‘I Flew with Braddock’ in the Rover comic and the Regal pictures, and he was beyond that now.

He had started thinking things out for himself and there in the Waverley he sensed with dread the trouble he was letting himself in for once tightly cocooned in a uniform and red tape. The next bus home was his only sensible option - his military career would have been the laugh of his pals back home, but quickly forgotten.

Their father, walking him down to the Steelyard(Bathgate Town Centre) just a couple of hours before and saying cheerio at the door of the Dreadnought Hotel public bar without breaking his stride, persuaded Baw otherwise. Had it been wee brother Jimmy(the promising football player) going down the street a message in their father’s company their father would have been carrying the bag - football had always been Baw’s only real hope of ever getting close to ‘fitba daft’ Auld Bob.

Then there were his brothers. They would resent him reclaiming his space in their newly re-arranged bedroom; probably have to settle for a bed in the new garden shed. Anything was possibly back there, except any of them tending his vegetable patch. In next to no time the garden would be back to the sour swamp of clay and reeds he started with - maybe they would miss their ‘daft laddie’ brother who had really craved to be enlisting in Cupar Agricultural College across in Fife to pursue his fascination for plants, particularly potatoes.

Anyway, in less than two years would be getting called up for his National Service and could easily end up out in Cyprus or the Middle East defending the Empire with little more than a bayonet. There was little to be really scared of where he was heading.

Just the week before had been talking to an RAF technician in Boni’s café; a Welshman stationed at Turnhouse, winching the lassie Gibson; said the RAF was the place to be when there was a war on - in the navy the officers and the sailors were in the same boat. In the Army, the officers and men were in the same trench but, in the RAF, the technicians strapped the officers into the planes, waved them off to battle, then went back to the NAAFI and listened to the News on the wireless.

Big brother Bobby, who didn’t get on with their father neither, said from the start ‘would have to make up his own mind’. Their mother and Granny Moffat said he wasn’t to go away down there among a load of strangers - what were the neighbours to think. When uncle Bob and uncle Jimmy, his mother’s brothers, went out to fight Rommel they didn’t have any option and anyway they had been hairy-arsed men, along with their pals from the village.

They had been Desert Rats, until Uncle Jimmy got the job of burying mainly dead Germans and trading their boots for fags. Granpaw Moffat had showed Baw how to press trousers and shirts, how to tie his tie like the royal Windsors and where best to hide his cash. Granpaw had started his time as a tailor in Leith when Queen Victoria was still a lassie.

The RAF had sent him a travel warrant detailing all his connections. When he saw the rest of the crowd the sergeant must have herded down from Hanover Street he began to understand his anxiety; desperate no doubt to get them all accounted for and off his hands and into the London train. Probably one big ‘crocodile’ along Princes Street.

The RAF had booked a whole compartment but Baw managed to get a seat in the next one along, beside an auld wife going down to visit her daughter and her man in Brighton - they had a big shoe shop in a good bit in the centre of the town and their wee lassie Beth was awfy clever.

Was either that or joining the remotely-controlled youth fellowship out on a spree, comparing air-cadet summer camps high points, model aeroplane designs, Eagle comic cut-outs of Dan Dare and rocket ships, and forby the auld wife had sandwiches, a flask of sweet tea, stopped in Gorgie Road and bought her paper at Wullie Bauld’s shop.

Few of the fresh-faced recruits in the booked compartment would have known about Hearts, never mind Wullie Bauld. He would have felt more at ease in the embroidery class with the girls back at Lindsay High - William Wallace must have felt much the same setting out on his last trip South at Edward’s insistence.

As the night express thundered through Ayton station, where their Granpaw Moffat had worked as a signalman, Baw tried to pick out the lights of the Auld Toun on the Eyemouth road, then Burnmouth harbour in the inky darkness at the bottom of it’s sheer cliff, then Berwick; the very edge of the childhood he had shared with his big brother Bobby - they were down there every summer for years stealing the station masters apples and snowball turnips and helping Granpaw Moffat snare rabbits.

Once they were past York the RAF compartment was crammed full with other new recruits picked up on the way down and as noisy as the Winchburgh Sunday School trip the year they went to Burntisland when he cut his foot on a broken bottle and ‘Juicy’ was done for shop-lifting. The wheels were jeering at him; ‘aff yer heid, aff yer heid, aff yer fucken heid’.

‘No empty seats’ was as good an excuse as any. Baw went back through and sat down again beside the auld wife. When they got to King’s Cross there was nobody to meet her so he carried her case out to a bus stop. London was a seedy, rundown looking place, especially the tea-rooms. Maybe it was just a suburb and that way since the blitz. Half expected to see refugees wandering about the boarded up shops.

By the time he got to Baker Street station the rest of the crowd had left; didn’t have long to wait for the next train. Not having slept on the way down, because of the auld wife’s snoring and that drunk soldier and his singing, dosed past his Wendover stop, dreaming he was actually on his way South to Highbury and the start of a very promising career with Arsenal.

Got off at Aylesbury, the next station along, and involved with this auld couple who had mislaid their confidence. She had been a conductress on the buses and he, like his father and grandfather before, had been a shepherd in Kent. They were on their way to a nephew’s wedding, but they all had a cup of tea and a blether first; made Halton about noon, half a crown poorer and four hours after the bright-starry-eyed mob.

The only thing that saved him from being disciplined was his not having been sworn in as yet. Such details were quickly sorted out by the military machine, along with a uniform that almost fitted. Street clothes were sent home. Strong drink, cars and motor bikes etc. were banned even for them over eighteen. Signed on for twelve year, come his eighteenth birthday and him no yet seventeen - was awfy homesick afore the ink was dry; that garden shed would have done him fine.

Haughty military police, dripping with malice and girlie pride in their straight seams and gleaming black boots, guarded the open gates, filled him with forboding. The only adults inside the camp were a constant day-shift of cocky drill sergeants, college lecturers, trade instructors, cookhouse staff and officers.

The day to day running of ‘Boys Town’ was left to final year apprentice NCOs. They dealt with the minor problems. More serious matters were passed onto the officers.

Apprentices were housed in three-storey barracks of red bricks around a large parade ground -landings were flights, barracks were squadrons and groups of barracks were wings. Baw was put into Two Wing and so would wear a blue band round his hard hat. The two other wings were yellow and red.

The place put him in mind of ‘Smith of the Lower Third’, story in the Wizard (the son of a grocer who had bother fitting in). The beds were set out in hospital fashion and by the sound of the high-pitched voices at least half of them were straight out of English public schools or maybe just excited, one of them from Winchester. That impressed the rest of them no end, so it couldn’t have anything to do with the prison.

Baw said to one of them in the lavatory he was from Winchburgh Public, just for a laugh; one’s father was in the Foreign Service. The one with the buck teeth claimed an army major in Germany for his pater.

One of the crowd down the other end had apparently just flown in from Singapore. Just inside the door was what looked like a side ward. That housed the boy corporal. Even without a cape he looked and acted like Batman’s young pal Robin.. This or something very like it was to be his home from home for the next three years. Baw was not a happy camper, but what else did he expect?

The meals and the money were good and the holidays comparable to what the schools got. After the evening meal in the mess that first day he took a wander around the camp on his own. The barracks were on the shoulder of a hillock with some wooded hills beyond. At the bottom the Wendover/Tring road cut the camp in two. Tring was where the racing driver Stirling Moss came from.

Beyond the road were the workshops and the college with plenty flower beds in between surrounded by well kept lawns, beyond that again were the sports fields and aerodrome, then a canal and wide open countryside, as flat and as uninteresting as Bathgate golf course. There was also a proper picture house, a theatre, a hospital and a huge gym all within the camp itself.

As he was passing the gym on that very first day he almost bumped into Dick McTaggart, the Dundee boxer who not only won the gold medal at his weight in the Melbourne Olympics the previous year but also the best boxer award overall. He was on his national service; an orderly in the 3 Wing mess!


Part 2 - Basic Training – Part two

Monday to Friday they marched three abreast down and up the hill behind their three pipe bands twice a day, once on Wednesday, on their way to the workshops for practical instructions or the college for theory and general education. Wednesday afternoon was devoted to sport of one kind or another, including gliding for the high flyers. They even boasted an international pole vaulter?. Visitors, especially military foreigners, were regularly very impressed.



The first twelve weeks were devoted to basic training. Having seen plenty films about life in the army that was exactly what he expected. It was probably much easier than what bayonet wielding infantrymen were subjected to but nevertheless it was still rigorous for young laddies fresh out of school.

What amazed him was how seriously they took the charade and how fervent they all were, almost sacred in their daily devotion to ablutions and red-tape. Back in Bathgate, he didn’t minded giving their mother a hand, gutting the place out when things were getting on top of her - was just something that had to be done and they took a deep breath and got on with it.

Skivvying was about the last thing folk with a choice would have done for a living he told himself and yet here they were enthralled with domestic science, scrubbing and polishing, dusting and sweeping everything that was nailed down or hung up, including themselves and the bits in between.

He tried his best not to stare, to leave them to it, but they resented him from the start for not joining in their frenzy. The sort that grips ants when their nest is under siege. 3 Flight? ( bottom right of barrack down to the right when facing Two Wing NAAFI) was the best flight there had ever been and, to prove it, it’s waxcloth, windows and lavatories had to shine brighter than the waxcloth, windows and lavatories in every other flight.

Whatever extra job they gave him, usually cleaning out the lavatories, he did to everybody’s satisfaction. Then, after attending to whatever bits of his dress or equipment that needed it, he would sneak out the back door across the park and away for a run in the fresh air or a long walk through the woods, always on the look-out for sensible older people and a chaff, especially gardeners or farm labourers. He just kept his stuff in good order.

The rest of them ‘bulled’ their new gear, including their best boots, like regular guardsmen. Nobody ordered them. Wouldn’t have been surprised to come back in some night and see eiderdowns on their beds and them all wearing velvet housecoats - it was if they had all been castrated.

Obviously they had to keep their kit clean and the place tidy. He had no qualms about that, or making up his bed pack nice and square, laying out all the bits and pieces of equipment they had given them, as if he was a wee lassie back in the Raws in Winchburgh playing at shops; if that was what they preferred then he was happy enough to comply. They were paying very good wages.

When you never had very much of anything to call your own, looking after it came as natural as breathing. To somebody who singled turnips and planted tatties as well as lifted them for weeks on end, fed pigs after helping to collect their brook and mucked them out, it was child’s play. But child’s play was all it was.

The lieutenant came round every morning just like a school janitor checking up on the cleaners before they left, obviously bored out his mind but not doubt glad of his easy wee number, him not having to work for a living in the likes of Easton Pit.

The officer would take a bit squint at them, from behind his shadow of a smirk, all lined up in rows at the foot of their beds on either side of the passageway each weekday morning before they were marched down the hill. Seemed one of the easier going chaps, a bit less keen than most to keep himself aloof.

He supported Hearts but his favourite player was Gordon Smith of Hibs. Came from Corstorphine. Baw told him about his father knowing big Freddie Glidden, and running Winchburgh Albion and about the great Wullie Thornton playing for them when he was a laddie, but he didn’t seem all that interested. Like Shotts men, you could always tell the officers but you couldn’t tell them much.

Reminded him of the man he saw give a lump of sugar to a horse once and then got all annoyed when the horse nuzzled at his pocket for more. They didn’t say they were better than him, not in as many words; he was suppose to work that out for himself, but of course he never did, as they all found out later on.

They were in the RAF, or the Royal Air Force. ‘Air Force’ and ‘Raff’ just wasn’t on and the lavatory was the ‘bog’. The strong impression was that, had the officer given out guns and told them that the upstairs lot were really Mau Mau terrorists, they would happily have gone out and butchered them. They all drank cocoa and ate apple fritters like pilots were suppose to do in the Battle of Britain.

Fridays after tea-time was the beginning of the big build up towards the mass hysteria that passed for a Saturday morning; the week’s grand finale; the big parade on the square that lasted till high noon. All it lacked were two or three horses, the Queen or at least a close cousin, some foreign dignitary and maybe a flypast by the Red Devils.

He had nothing against being marched up and down behind pipe bands, swinging his arms and keeping in step and in line with the last man. It was similar in some ways to football training, without the music. Keeping in line was just the same as not getting caught off side. And anyway pipe band music kept him warm on cold mornings.

The other recruits seemed to fit into the scheme of things very easily. Most of them were from small families and those who hadn’t come straight from boarding school apparently spent a great deal of their time at home under the watchful eye of their parents or with their friends in their homes. Life in a billet must have represented some kind of freedom to them compared to their childhood; they were grown-ups, even though they loved pillow fights.

Baw on the other hand, coming from a large working-class family where personal space had always been at a premium and never ever being in the habit of entertaining pals in his home or visiting them in theirs, and not having been a member of a club for years , found life in a billet stifling. Getting outside to walk the streets or even stand at the corner with no money in his pocket and not necessarily saying very much was to him and his pals back in Bathgate much more hairy-ersed mature and so attractive. Back there laddies made their own space and rules. He had cheated his way in (details available on request), and so had nobody to blame but himself - he wasn’t what the RAF were looking for.

Every morning he bought The Times from the van which sat outside the mess. It covered Scotland, particularly Scottish football, better than any other London paper. He was reading it and eating his corn flakes one morning, alone as usual, when he realised the rest of his flight across the room were talking about him reading The Times.

Then they began boasting to each other about how fast their form masters at school could do the crossword. That was when he decided to play a trick on them - his second serious mistake.

When he went in for his breakfast after that he had already folded into his newspaper the previous day’s crossword. As well as glancing through the news he would memorize as many solutions as possible, fold the paper open at the previous days puzzle and nonchalantly fill in what he could remember. His spelling improved.

During the day he would fill in the rest and after tea would cut it out and leave it on his bed ready, apparently, for posting. A couple of times he went out and looked back in the window at them buzzing around his space like fleas round a fresh steaming shite.

Baw and the camp commandant were the only folk in the place who bought The Times, according to the van driver, who owned the newsagents shop in Wendover - his brother was working on a hydro-electric scheme up by Pitlochry and his wife had terrible bother with her feet and dog’s dirty on the pavement in front of the shop - there didn’t seem to be a connection. They were due in hospital for an operation. He was a nervous wreck and so not the easiest of people to follow, yet had more to say for himself than a barber. Most of his customers escaped without their change. It was a big fancy van.

The new recruits weren’t allowed outside the gate until basic training was finished. This meant, among other things, that them who didn’t carry on polishing and scrubbing right through the weekend had to entertain themselves from Saturday noon till Monday morning, save for the monthly church parade.

Baw kicked his heels that first weekend. The following week he got his new newsagent friend Don to bring him in a red track suit(three bob a week) and a tea cosy to cover his red hair. That tracksuit was the nearest he ever came in life to owning a passport (682559 is probably the only apprentice never to have left the UK).

He also made friends with two Scottish national servicemen, cooks and football daft like himself. That was his third serious mistake.

One came from Coatbridge and was on Bellshill Athletics’ books. He was a winger. The other came from Kilbirnie and supported Kilmarnock. They were billeted in wooden huts over the other side of the camp near the hospital. Most Saturdays afternoons and Sundays there was a bounce game of some kind over there and Baw in his tracksuit was welcome to join in.

When he wasn’t across there he was out running about the Chilterns incognito on his own, or along the canal towpath and occasionally in pubs. It reduced the hemmed-in feeling, knowing there wasn’t a fence with barb-wire right round the place. Out on his own made him feel much less lonely. Sometimes he felt as though he was back in Scotland.

In the workshops they messed about with files and hack-saws, squaring off wee lumps of steel plate, then used micrometers to check their work. Some of his classmates could have gauged their mistakes just as easy with a foot-rule. Then they moved onto making nuts and bolts and tempering springs and the like. Having done that sort of thing back at the Lindsay High with Mr. Fleming in the metal work class he was much better than average at something for a wee change.

That didn’t make it any more interesting, but it was what technicians had to be able to do in case they were ever stuck out in a jungle or a desert somewhere without some vital spare part and obliged to make one from scratch. The rest of the class were all desperate to get onto stripping down engines, but he couldn’t see that being much less boring.

One of their instructors hated everything to do with America. According to another instructor a GI had stolen his girl-friend just after the war. Baw wasn’t able to get much more out of any the two pompous pricks. Having a laugh wasn’t on their programme and proper procedures was what they were all there to learn. That was what kept jet aeroplanes from falling out of the sky, even before a bullet was fired. It was a serious business.

The sessions in the college were much more to his taste, mainly because most of their lecturers seem to be sensible Scotsmen, new out of university who treated the RAF as an employer exactly like him. Education was their interest, thinking from first principle, not brain-washing.

They were almost all in their middle twenties, glorified national servicemen who had signed on for an extra year in exchange for a commission and an easy time of it, practicing their teaching skills, deciding whether or not to take it up full-time once they handed back their pilot officer straight-jackets.

That was the lowest officer rank you could get, and they didn’t care any more than Baw did about flying about the place or clinging on to what was left of the red bits on the map.

The college subjects were much the same as at the Lindsay High. Some lecturers wandered off the track more readily than others, like Andrew Binnie, the big football daft civil engineer from about Broughty Ferry, who supports Dundee and taught mechanics with a smile on his face, using models he had built himself out of balsa wood and bits and pieces from a Meccano set. He was impressed when Baw told him he knew Wullie Thornton, Dundee’s new manager who came from Winchburgh. They later on became good pals without the rest of them knowing anything about it.

Andrew near ended himself when Baw related the one about the two RAF national servicemen from Turnhouse airfield, professionals with Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday, who turned out for the Albion under-twenty ones back in Winchburgh against Carriden Hearts in a mid-week cup-tie, and then about their faither selling Hughie Paterson to Broxburn Athletic the week before he was due up in court for stealing lead off Woodend Church roof.

Andrew related some football stories of his own from his days as a player with Edinburgh University. He was a one-footed centre-half with a head like a threepenny bit - the rest in the class hadn’t much of a clue what the fitba-daft Scots were on about.

Baw had hoped to look well in his uniform. He didn’t - was more the trainee bus conductor type than Errol Flynn in ‘The Flying Tigers’. Apprentices came in all shapes and sizes of course, often lacking about the chest and shoulders, but what they had was stuck out and pull back with apparent pride when out on parade and for many of them, who seemed to be interested in little else, parade lasted all day.

A lot of them apparently had been boarders at public schools, sons of officers serving abroad. Quite a lot came from broken homes and moneyed families. They were the type Baw imagined who would have been more at their easy at Cranwell modelling officer cadet uniforms.

Being officers and flying jet aeroplanes was what they must have dreamt about, not stuck on the ground in hangers up to their elbows in engine grease, filing lumps of mild steel and following all the laid down procedures, checking and then rechecking everything like in a factory. Coming from such backgrounds they couldn’t possibly have been nearly as happy as they made out. Maybe they were just lonely for company their own age.

Sticking together, oxstering one another up, being enthusiastic about every thing, even skiving, was probably a reflection of their desperation to be noticed by their superiors, to be promoted, to be marked out for a commission and so be something those back home could be proud of – something similar to myself with regards to football ever since I was a wee laddie back in Winchburgh.

Transcribed for Alan "Baw" Findlay.