"We couldn't afford healthcare so we died earlier than the middle classes."

Square-bashing at Padgate 1941:

Harry Leslie Smith

The Green & Pleasant Land

Chapter Thirty:

Photo by Chris Curry on Unsplash

The train to Padgate was overbooked. And so, I stood for the duration of the journey staring out through the window of my third-class rail carriage at the sheets of winter rain which fell against it.

Mostly, the other passengers were like me- young men on their way towards being square bashed for King and Country. There was a fug of boyish excitement within the carriage that blended into the collective smell of damp, sweat, tobacco and beer emanating from our bodies.

The train trundled across a cold and bleak landscape of Yorkshire and then Lancashire. It had been four years since my last rail journey when Alberta took me to Blackpool as a school-leaving gift. It was peacetime then and in 1941, my excitement over my destination was tempered by uncertainty about what awaited me in the RAF.

There was also a growing sense of emancipation from my past and the humdrumness of my recent existence in Halifax.

However, the euphoria of change was tempered with a dark thought that becoming a participant in this war might include a letter sent to my mother telling her I had died for King and Country.

I didn't give a flying fuck for Britain, its empire or its soddening class system. I was not alone in my disdain for the way Britain operated to enrich the entitled classes. Many in the working classes were not enthusiastic about fighting the war when it began.

It's not because we didn't value democracy but because our "democracy" didn't value us. It underpaid us and overworked us.

British democracy in the early 20th century had complete contempt for its workers and colonial subjects. We couldn't afford healthcare so we died earlier than the middle classes. We were denied decent housing, proper holidays and the right to leisure. 

So being asked to defeat Nazism to preserve the status quo insulted our war effort sacrifices unless change was promised to how ordinary people existed.

It's why William Beveridge a Liberal Lord was charged by parliament in 1940 with writing a report that set out a blueprint for a post-war British society where all mattered not just the wealthy few and the middle classes that preserved the class system of entitlement. The Beveridge Report wasn't presented to parliament until 1942. But even the promise of it assuaged the working classes who then accepted they must do wartime service because defeating Hitler offered ordinary blokes like me the rich dividends of a post-war welfare state. It's what motivated my teenage self to see RAF induction as a lark rather than a possible death sentence.

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At Padgate Rail Station, I followed other bleary-eyed teenagers along a road that led us to our RAF base for induction.  

My life was about to be radically changed and I looked forward to the metamorphosis that approached.

The closer I got to the gate of the RAF base the more the former person I was- Harry Smith born in a slum, beer barrow boy at the age of seven, school leaver at fourteen, grocer's shop assistant manager at eighteen disappeared. 

I was about to become a cog in Britain's war machine and it didn't bother me. Well, it didn't bother me except for memories that nagged from boyhood about the World War veterans I encountered during my family's doss house years. Their stories brewed in my imagination about the horrors soldiers endured during the Great War and the little thanks they received once the conflict was over.

I tried to ignore those memories about the shell-shocked Tommies who lived cheek-by-jowl with me in the grimiest parts of 1930s Bradford. I wanted to believe this time politics was on the side of workers because the government in this war was a coalition where the Labour Party controlled the domestic agenda.  

Inside the base, I was greeted by a warrant officer who barked.

“Have your enlistment papers ready,” Stand in a neat single file. No talking,”

In small groups, we proceeded into a prefabricated building, where there was a clatter of noise from typewriters and ringing telephones. My papers were assessed by a clerk who asked. “When you volunteered, you indicated you wanted to be a wireless operator. Is that what you still want to do?”

I thought for a moment and agreed it was my preferred choice. The notion of becoming a wireless operator seemed daring to me a cutting-edge technology. 

The clerk signed my enlistment paper with a thick fountain pen and dispatched me to another section of the building where a medical doctor ordered me to strip.

I was prodded from all directions. My pulse and blood pressure were taken. I was measured and weighed like livestock. Finally, I was inoculated against diseases with injections that made the muscles in my right arm ache.

It was a strange sensation to be looked at by a doctor because up until joining the RAF, I had never been examined by one, owing to its expense.

Pushed out of the medical exam room, I tumbled down a hallway marked with arrows which pointed me towards the next station of my transformation, from civilian to soldier, the barbershop. A man with clippers made quick work of my hair with a short, back, and sides cut. 

From there a sergeant spat orders at me to be on the double and get kitted out.

I went to another room where a clerk measured me for my uniform. Afterwards, the clerk went from piles of shirts to heaps of trousers, coats, and boots, and then neatly presented them to me.

I signed that I had accepted: one shirt, one pair of trousers, one belt, one overcoat, boots, a hairbrush, a boot brush, a cap and one kit bag. I agreed; it was my responsibility to keep, in good order, the clothing and accoutrements given to me by the King. Loss or malicious damage to this uniform was a breach of regulations which would result in forfeiture of one’s pay.

I was also given my service number, which I was to memorize. Upon request, it was to be repeated, immediately: “Smith, LAC 1777….”

From now on, the numbers tumbled out of me, as if they had been given to me at the baptismal font.

I was presented with my pay book. It recorded my weekly stipend awarded to me for service whilst employed by the nation. I stammered a very civilian, “Ta.” The clerk ignored me and he wanted to get on with the next fitting, for the chap waiting patiently behind me.

I was sent to another room to strip from my civilian clothes and then I put on my RAF blue serge uniform. I left the building transformed from grocer's assistant to participant in a war against Hitler.

It happened so quickly and irrevocably, but from the moment I wore my rough, woollen RAF kit, my fate became the property of the British state.

It was never my own anyway because under the rules of capitalism in the early 20th century my destiny was always in the hands of someone other than me.

I turned in all directions. I swung round to all degrees of the compass wondering what I was to do next. Where was I to go? I was not alone in my disorientation because other newly uniformed teenagers performed the same movements as me.

My disorientation ended when a sergeant charged at us bellowing. “Get a move on, you lazy lot, on the double and follow me.”

We were led to a pile of dry straw heaped up underneath a raised tarpaulin- to keep it dry from the rain.

There, we each grabbed an empty palliasse and stuffed them with straw, as this was our mattress during our time at Padgate.

Once done, we were marched to our sleeping quarters- a Nissan Hut.

Inside, I hastily found a cot with thin wire springs and dropped my paillasse down on it.

Another recruit took possession of the cot beside mine and introduced himself.

His name was Robbie, and he was from Wigan.

He was missing many of his teeth from poor nutrition, poverty and street brawling. I would learn later, that his Great Depression was like mine, a harsh ordeal.

The sergeant returned and told us to stand at attention in front of our beds. The sergeant passed across the room like an ominous battle cruiser until he was in a whispered breath of me. For a few intimating seconds, the sergeant loomed silently near and then- ordered me and Robbie to fetch coal to heat our hut, which had two stoves at each end.

On the way to the coal shed, Robbie confided.

“I’ll be buggered if the RAF is going to get me killed. I’m getting out of this war in one piece.”

“Never fucking volunteer for anything. The best thing,” he said, “is to melt into the scenery. Don’t give the buggers a chance to remember you.”

“Mate, I don’t think we’ve been that successful if, on our first day, we’ve already been volunteered to haul coal.”

Robbie re-joined.

“Stay to the back of the room, Smith. Stay so far back that no one remembers you.”

We returned to the hut with the coal and received cheers from the other recruits. Later the sergeant returned for us, and we were marched to eat our first meal courtesy of the RAF.

After eating, we were herded back to our sleeping quarters, where the sergeant hammered at us about the next day's bone-breaking itinerary.

“You love birds,” he barked, “get your shut-eye because before the sun sticks her head up and out of her arse, you'll be on the parade ground.

The sergeant doused the lights on his way out.

My first day in the RAF was over. Around me, 25 lads fell into a sleep that was punctuated with farts, snores and somnolent babble from dreams.

Far away in Cardiff, while we slept, the air raid sirens sounded as Luftwaffe forces pounded that city. Henkel bombers attacked and gutted the university, the warehouses, and the industrial housing that hugged the port.  And in Europe, the Nazi war machine controlled the continent except for Russia and the Soviet occupation zones of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

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