1st Btn BEDS & HERTS 1952
As Remembered By A. John Perry
We arrived in a sandstorm, it felt as though your skin was being flayed, we spent two days huddled under blankets trying to keep the sand out of everywhere and I mean everywhere! It got into our footlockers, everything was gritty especially between the teeth, but all good things come to an end and we came out into the world again to find we had a new sight to look at, the Caronia, the liner, stuck on a sandbank in the middle of the Suez Canal. When away from the edge ofthe Canal it is impossible to see the water so there was this large liner sat, seemingly standing, in the middle of the desert! The thing that had us amused were the traffic lights on the Suez Canal - there are 2 arms of the channel and the ships use both at different times so there, sticking up out of the desert, are traffic lights, without the amber of course. Next to the Canal is the most inaptly named thing on earth in my opinion, the Sweetwater Canal. It's too thick to drink and too thin to plough! If you were unfortunate enough to fall in then it was off to the Medical Officer for a course of injections.
Camels must be one of the most irascible animals on this earth, they are always trying to bite, they have a jaw about two feet long and horrible green teeth continually dribbling nasty green foam, if you get close they continually make a rumbling sound from deep within their stomachs. The worse treated animals however are the poor little donkeys, ridden along by people twice their size who kick them in the ribs with every stride. Nights were always taken up with the sound of donkeys braying - what a racket, then in the morning the faithful are called to prayer by a loudspeaker from the Mosque.
Even as a callow youth, I was impressed by the night skies over Egypt - imagine a covering of black velvet then sprinkle with about a million stars, it was reallyweird to go to the cinema which was outside and look up to see the stars. We would look at the newspapers to see that the temperature in our locality was often 120 degrees, we often risked punishment by going barefoot - there was something called hookworm which you could catch with bare feet.
One of our duties was to guard the bridge at El Firdan. This was a hand worked railway bridge over the Suez Canal with the Sinai Desert on one side and Egypt on the other. As the time for a train arrived there would come about 20 Arabs with huge keys which they put into the deck of the bridge and then they simply wound the bridge out across the Suez Canal. There were two sides of the bridge which met in the middle. When opened there would be no one in sight to the horizon but when a train was due there they were - where did all these people come from? This I suppose explains another us for the traffic lights, they obviously stopped the ships when a train was due.
I had a sceptic hand which would not heal so had to go to the hospital for treatment. What a palaver, first your kit is packed and put into company stores, in case you die! Then you do on sick parade, the wait for the truck to take you to hospital. We were looked over by lovely visions - the Army nurses, of course they do not actually handle something as common as a squaddie so they were nicknamed the 'untouchables'. I also had to go for dental treatment and a nice young looking male dentist attended me, asked some questions which I answered, to which he said "Sir". When I lookedat his jacket hanging up he was what looked like a Brigadier, that is to go by his shoulder pips - Whoops!
When I had been summoned to do my National Service it was for 18 months, but after I had been in for about 5 monthsIgotan extra 6 months. Being quick on the uptake I soon workedout that at this rate I would never get out! When we got to Bedford Barracks we got the news that they would keep us for another 10 days because they only demobbed on the second Thursday of each month, when I offered to keep quiet about their mistake if they let me out now, the air got a bit frosty. Eventually there I was back in 'Civvy Street' once more,but the Army still had a sting to administer. While I had been serving my Country they thought up the wheeze of keepingus for 3 more years as territorials, to attend three yearly camps. Then another sting in the tail, because I had missed the camp by a few weeks I would still have to do 3 camps so my territorial service went on for 4 years.
Looking back my first thoughts were to deride the whole business but thinking it out I came to this conclusion, I'm proud that I went from a civilian to a squaddie without any prior knowledge of what was entailed. There were the trips to places that I never dreamed of and when I look at the modern times we live in and the different sense of values, I concluded that us old boys did well.