Chapter 9 .. “I do like to be beside the seaside”.

This is a picture of me (2nd from the right) when, somehow, I found myself as one of a ‘guard of honour’ for Air Vice Marshal Foord-Kelcey CBE. AFC. when he visited RAF Wartling for the annual ‘AOC’s (Air Officer Commanding 11 Group)) inspection…

… after some idiot picked me to be a member of the guard for the visiting ‘brass’. I can’t quite remember how this selection came about as a I spent much of my two years conscription thinking up ways to avoid doing anything in the least bit ‘military’; and I wasn’t the only one for, as I recall, many national servicemen had their own ways of “dodging the column” and of showing their dissatisfaction with a life in uniform. Like Bernie who would whistle the RAF march when ‘taking a dump’, and Ginger who would never say “Sir” unless reminded to do so, and would walk ‘miles’ out of his way to avoid saluting an officer.

However, there was one big compensation to being at Wartling, and that was it’s location near the seaside town of Eastbourne, where I enjoyed plenty of free time due to the way ‘watches’ were organised. This was particularly true when the holiday makers arrived in the summer months, providing plenty of attractive dance partners at The Pier Ballroom and The Winter Gardens.

If my memory serves me correctly, there was a pub next to Eastbourne Railway Station. This pub had a bar on the first floor, where our ‘demob’ parties would take place whenever it was time for one of us to return to “Civvy Street”. I remember that this bar was upstairs as I once fell from the top to the bottom of the staircase without injuring myself due to my ‘relaxed condition’ at the time.

This pub was also well located as it was possible to fall out of it’s doors at closing time just in time to catch a train to Cooden Beach, which was the nearest station to RAF Wartling. However that station was about two miles by road from the camp. A little closer if you walked across the farmland. The only problem with this was you could spend the night surrounded by a herd of sheep or sleeping in a ditch.

I do have a very vivid memory of one miserable rainy night on the platform of Eastbourne railway station when I waited with a group of other young airmen for the last train, which would take us back to our RAF station after attending one of those lucky national serviceman’s ‘demob’ parties.

We were chatting and joking amongst ourselves when we suddenly heard the sound of someone singing further along the platform. In fact, it was two of our fellow conscripts who had only recently been posted to our camp after returning from duty at the nuclear test site on Christmas Island. On the way home they had a few days leave in the USA and had picked up a number of records, among which must have been the latest Everly Brothers’ hits.

Obviously we had all had more than a “sniff of the barmaid’s apron”, and so these two lads’ singing may have sounded better than it actually was, but it silenced our chatter.

OK, so they weren’t exactly Don and Phil, and it wasn’t quite one of those “Harmonies from Heaven”, but it did have a strangely ‘haunting’ quality about it as it echoed around that gloomy station.

That was 60 years ago and I’m still here: but I wonder if the same can be said of those two young airmen who had spent a year or more on a Pacific island living in “the shadow of those nuclear mushroom clouds”?

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(to be continued)