Chapter One … The Brown Envelope
One of the happiest days in my life was when I left school in the summer of 1955. I was sixteen and pleased to be free from the homework, the exams, the PT, the enforced games, not to mention the bloody sadistic teachers. I was never top of the class, but I did just manage to attain three passes in the recently introduced General Certificate of Education and was awarded the prize for geography in my final year, although I never bothered to turn up to collect it at the prize giving ceremony.
Jobs were not hard to find in those days and I soon found one as a junior clerk in a large firm of travel agents. I think that my hard working parents were pleased that their son was now a ‘white collar’ worker who wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty.
My office job was, in fact, bloody boring, and at first consisted of all the office tasks that no one else wanted to do. What made it bearable was the interesting crowd with whom I worked. I worked in the continental tours department at a time when ‘package’ holidays were just taking off. My companions were nearly all foreigners mostly employed for their language skills. Amongst this colourful bunch were a former officer in the Polish Army who carried a small pistol in a shoulder holster, a Belgian ex jockey who had served in the British Army in World War II, an Italian ‘gigolo’ who had learned English from the American GIs in Rome and a Frenchman who claimed to have fought in the Resistance. The department manager was a kindly man who eventually gave me more interesting tasks and even issued me with a document saying that I was a qualified ‘courier’ and allowed me to shepherd people on and off the cross channel ferries and boat trains on some weekends. Now whether he did this out of the kindness of his heart or because I had caught him when his secretary was ‘taking down’ more than just ‘shorthand’ is in question, but the experience of travelling to Belgium and France and picking up a few ‘duty-frees’ was very enjoyable, as was my ongoing pursuit of dating every pretty typist in the office. After attending an all boys school, being let loose among all those nubile young women in their tight sweaters and layers of nylon petticoats was like landing in teenage heaven.
Yes, I was a first generation ’teenager’ and I was now having a great time, for it was the early days of “Rock ‘n’ Roll”, coffee bars, sharp suits and fancy haircuts. I loved every minute of it, but like all young men in those days I knew that it couldn’t last and one day it would all end when a brown paper envelope would drop though the letterbox which would begin the process of turning a callow youth into a fighting machine. Well, as I was to find out it wasn’t to be quite like that.
It was shortly after my eighteenth birthday, when I had taken the new girl in the office to see Bill Haley and the Comets, that the dreaded envelope arrived. I remember that the tickets for the concert had cost me a small fortune. The young lady lived in a ‘foreign land’ north of The River Thames and was about to join The Salvation Army. I had to walk most of the way home to Brixton after seeing her home, and when I arrived it was waiting for me on the mantelpiece.
The envelope contained instructions from the Ministry of Labour and National Service informing me that I was to attend a medical board to see if I was fit for military service. Now I had heard all about these medical boards from older friends who had already been called up and knew that just about the only way to avoid conscription was to fail the medical examination. All sorts of tales were told about boys sticking sharp objects in their ears to puncture an eardrum or swallowing all sorts of concoctions to speed up their heart rates or give them symptoms of various ailments. I was to find out just how far some people would go in the very near future.
***********************************************
To be continued.
bigjohn 
