I cannot tell a lie and claim that my two years serving Her Majesty in the Royal Air Force, starting as an Aircraftsman 2nd class and rising to the dizzying heights of Senior Aircraftsman, was all unalloyed delight, but one of the positives was that it enabled me to make journeys by train quite regularly I would not have otherwise done; one within five days of donning RAF battle dress blue on three branch lines now gone for ever; plus, later more which I could easily have experienced, but didn't.
I was summoned to take up arms in January 1956 and, having made my way by Southern Electric and the London Underground from my home at Thornton Heath to St. Pancras, there I boarded a Derbybound train, alighting at Bedford. This was hauled by a ‘Jubilee’ 4-6-0. I was never much taken by the’ Jubilees’ which I tended to regard as green-painted Stanier ‘Black Fives’ with nameplates. Pure, biased nonsense, but that's we juvenile trainspotters for you. Likewise on my many trainspotting expeditions to London in steam days I was somewhat dismissive of St. Pancras. for in those days it struck me as gloomy and neglected; no-one seemed much to care for it – about as different from its present glory days as you can imagine.
I doubt if anyone looked forward to being dragged from their mother's loving arms and sent to confront the enemy, whoever and wherever that might be, and the conversation amongst us on that initial journey was a mixture of bravado and apprehension. At Bedford we exchanged the relative comfort of a second class compartment in a BR MkI for the back ofNo.2 Recruitment Centre Cardington and spent the next seven days beginning the process of conversion to ruthless fighting machines. Little did I realise that, when qualified, I would find myself in charge of an Imperial, which was not a state-of -he art flying machine, but a typewriter, left over from the Second, and even possibly the First, World War.
