From left: Our house on the edge of Khormaksar’s married patch; one of the four grim barrack blocks, each of which housed some 250 airmen; and a Bedford truck patrol grinds its way at 4,500 ft up the Jebel Sugeima, the arid mountains north of Aden.
RAF Khormaksar was a peaceful place in the 1950s, for the independence movement did not flare up until 1963. Like other bases, it was a large British village community living the same Service life in places and countries far distant and different from its origins. The only difference was in continuity, for most families were posted after a couple of years.
We were allocated a box-shaped semi with verandahs front and rear and louvred doors both sides to allow through passage of air. The kitchen was built on the end gable. At first there was nothing to distinguish the ‘garden’ from the surrounding desert but homesick residents soon diverted the grey water from kitchen and bathroom into a trench at the front. If the rich volcanic sand was so watered the local parrot trees, named for their beak-shaped flower, were 20ft high in less than two years.
Everyone slept on a charpoy, the Indian word for bed, which as Danny has described comprised a wooden frame with rattan ropes tied across it in grid pattern. It was very comfortable once you got used to it, for a mattress would have been unbearable in that heat. Ants could be annoying until the bedlegs were stood in tin cans containing an inch of paraffin. Aircon was unheard of except in the squadron office, where a bulky trailer unit used for cooling aircraft had its long trunk diverted into the doorway, after which the office became very busy with people doing nothing.
School and the RAF began at 8am and ended at 1pm, Monday to Friday. The afternoon heat was adult charpoy time, while we children walked to the seawater pool a mile away at the civil air terminal, with side trips to inspect the visiting BOAC Hermes or TWA Constellation en route to the Far East. Once a week mum would stump up 50 cents for the gharri, the three-ton Bedford QL which left at 2pm daily for Steamer Point lido with its shark-proof netting. Some took taxis to the beach at Conquest Bay and risked the shark, barracuda, sea snakes and sting rays in the shallows.
The open-air Astra Cinema ran six days a week, otherwise there was the BBC news at 9pm if the reception was good enough. We did not attend the Families Club as the main activity was bingo, then known as housey housey. To my Scottish Presbyterian parents this activity was way down there with fornication and the Hire Purchase, though looking at the British economy today perhaps they weren’t so far wrong with the latter.
Before we left RAF Binbrook my headmaster Alfie Gordon, who would do anything to help RAF families, had noticed that I would be away for the qualifying examination, and then found that hundreds of other Service children would also be abroad. He joined my father in a series of letters to the MP for Louth, Cyril Osborne, who raised the matter in Parliament. As a result, in Aden and most overseas bases we 11-year-olds underwent the Moray House Test (MHT), on which the 11-plus exam was based.
On our return to the UK and the ghastly transit camp at RAF Croft, near Warrington, we were told the MHT was unacceptable and I was sent to a grim secondary modern which was by far the worst of the 11 schools I attended. My father again contacted Cyril Osborne and the system was changed, for I and my peers were allowed to take what became the review procedure. Its result took me to grammar school, but a full year behind everyone else. Only now have I found that other Service children went to grammar school on the strength of the MHT. I wouldn’t have missed my childhood journeys but I wonder how many other families were caught by this travel trap ?
While our native bearers Mo and Saleh did the housework, Mum did most of the cooking on two Primus stoves and a paraffin oven which often gave a unique aroma to the food. Kitchen temperatures often topped 40 degrees, but she never faltered. Most of the Moslem bearers would not touch the breakfast bacon or its cooking utensils, and she thought nothing of preparing Sunday dinner with Yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings. Basic provisions, all bought from the NAAFI, included spam (in tins, not the internet pollution), powdered eggs, and dehydrated potatoes. At least they were alleged to be potatoes. Everyone soon became used to taking salt tablets every day and the sherbet flavoured lemon or orange drink made from tinned powder. We Kids preferred Coca-Cola but at 50 cents per bottle we were lucky to share one a month.
Christmas was the highlight of the year, when my parents would open their house to pack in my father’s National Servicemen, stuck in a rocky, arid desert land far from home and family. What was fun for me and my friends 1951-1953 must have been misery for hundreds of young men, most of whom told my father that they considered their Service as two wasted years. Of course life became more exciting a decade later when the nationalist attacks began in late 1963, leading to Britain’s abrupt departure in 1967. Today, long freed from their British oppressors, the good folk of Aden enjoy unfettered life in the delightful Republic of Yemen.
Coming attractions: on his second day at school, the 10-yr-old Geriaviator anoints the Headmaster.