Paddy's memoirs
Chapter 5
Early Days in the RAF
The early days spent at St.Johns Wood, were in fact quite hectic. I had chummed up with Chas Blythe, a Londoner from the East End who was in every way the opposite in character to me. He smoked, he drank and he womanized and in those days none of those attributes could have been recognized in me. (So there). Apart from getting kitted out with our uniforms, we were having medical and dental examinations, together with masses of inoculations. We were also doing some class work in various subjects. Let us start with the kitting out. The process was quite simple; we were marched to a large warehouse not too far away, in our squads of about forty to fifty strong. It must be understood there were many squads so the time spent queuing was long. We queued until we reached a long counter where we were given various items of clothing to make up a complete uniform. No attempt was made to see if the items fitted, and all was stuffed into a kitbag also supplied. We were then marched back to our billets where we tried things on. If it fitted we kept it, if it did not fit we applied to go on an exchange parade. This process continued until we looked like airmen. You can imagine what we looked like in the middle of the process, half equipped, part uniform, part civvies.
The Medicals en-masse was my first experience of seeing crowds of chaps all starkers with their undercarriages down. That took a little getting used to. Also surprising to me may I say, was the proximity of the Doctor when he said cough. This always seemed a very matey way to discover whether or not one had a cold!
We used to queue for hours outside Abbey Lodge, another of the ex apartment blocks. A building which was used for the mass inoculations, in fact whilst we passed in queue’s slowly along the walls of the building, we used to read the poems etched into the walls by the chaps who had passed before us. Very good some of it was too. When we did eventually get to the medical area we had Doctors and medical orderlies each side of us tackling each arm with their needles and vaccination knifes it was like a sausage machine. Needless to say, like the heroes we were, we gritted our teeth and kept our undercarriages up and locked.
Our Dining Hall was the original restaurant of the London Zoo. This was about ten to fifteen minutes march from our billets. Of course there were some but not many animals at this time and certainly none of the original dangerous ones, these had been moved or put down due to the current emergency. The problem was, that there were so many of us queuing that quite often by the time it came our turn to eat, it would be time to go. Of course the Corporals had gone to the head of the queue and had plenty of time to eat. During the marches to and fro it was not difficult to see which squad had been jabbed, all marching with one arm stationary at their sides. Lo and behold any wag who even pretended to make a pass at the sore arm in those days.
I recall one occasion when we had returned to our billets and the Corporal dismissed us for the morning. My Pal Chas promptly turned round and jumped on a bus. He went home! In the morning on parade the Corporal asked why he had disappeared he replied. “Well Corp, you said dismiss I thought that was it for the day so I went”! Well you can imagine that did not go down too well. But that was my mate Chas.
As far as I can remember we spent about two or three weeks at St Johns Wood and then the Postings came in. The bright sparks, went off to Initial Training Wing and the rest of us were posted to Brighton where we were to undergo courses in maths and signals among many other subjects.