Eric Sykes - If I Don’t Write It Nobody Else Will

As my duties entailed mainly marching them here and there, there was very little difference from when I was a class leader at Madley, except that this time I had the rank. It was a posting I didn’t understand: surely the army had its own wireless operators? I wasn’t an expert in army procedure, but I felt sure that they must have advanced from the heliograph and semaphore. I can’t remember seeing any of my air force buddies from the course at Madley, and apparently no one recognised me, but as I was one grade above them they were probably under the misapprehension that I was an ‘old sweat’, and after my stint as class leader at Madley I was well versed in marching them from A to B with all the aplomb of a regular flight sergeant.

On our first day I was ordered to march our contingent to the parade ground to await the regimental sergeant major’s inspection. We stood in line in desultory fashion until I saw him approach. He wasn’t marching; he was walking casually as if he was leaving the senior NCOs’ mess, but I was taking no chances. I brought the lads up to attention and to my surprise they did it. The sergeant major instructed them to ‘stand easy’ and then he made his way along the line, asking the odd question and, judging by his smile, receiving some very odd answers. Finally he came to me.

After looking me up and down, he asked, ‘What’s the difference between an AC1 and an AC2?’

I was flummoxed. He might just as well have asked me what was Vera Lynn’s address. So I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, ‘Sixpence a day, sir,’ which I thought quite reasonable under the circumstances.

‘Is that the way you look upon your war effort?’ he asked.

‘The only way, sir,’ I replied.

He looked at me for a time and then almost to himself he muttered, ‘It’s going to be a long war.’

Well into the evening I wrestled with my answer. What was the difference between an AC1 and an AC2?

Each day I marched my seventeen-man contingent to a small place allocated as a classroom for us. Then at mealtimes I marched them to the mess hall. Afterwards I marched them back to our classroom. On the whole they marched pretty well in step, except for one youth, about six feet four. This tall pile of loose bones, with black-rimmed glasses, didn’t actually march; he ambled, and that made me feel slightly uneasy. He was always reading some book or other on the march, and when I stared pointedly at him he’d raise his eyes from the book and give me a dazzling smile. What could I do? I had no real authority and in any case he was thoughtful enough always to march in the rear on his own so that the rest of the squad couldn’t see him. That infectious smile hasn’t changed to this day and we have remained friends. His name is Denis Norden.

Why we were attached to the Second Army was a mystery to all of us and I suspect also to the War Office. I assumed that the First Army were the desert rats in the North African campaign. Apart from these two armies there was the Fourteenth Army, known as the Chindits, fighting a hazardous war in the dark, steaming jungles of Burma, but that leaves eleven armies unaccounted for, and even if you include the Salvation Army there are still ten others in action. As far as the Second Army was concerned, we were being assembled for an assault on the coast of Europe known as the Second Front, and if we were being prepared for the Second Front, what was the First? Questions, questions, questions. What I found most difficult to digest, was how would our attachment of eighteen RAF wireless operators increase our chances of winning the war? But what did we know? We were a very small cog in a massive, unwieldy contraption called ‘Hostilities’.

We were with the Second Army but not of it. They held their parades and we were not included; their every move was governed by King’s rules and regulations, ours by whatever sprung to mind. The RAF pay structure was different from theirs: had I not been an honest idiot I could have put myself down for ten pounds a week—or perhaps not, but I doubt if the army CO was getting that sort of money.

Our schoolroom possessed a blackboard all along one wall. Again questions arose: why were we in a schoolroom and what was there to learn? We were all under the impression that we were fully trained. Another stumbling block was where we were to sit. There were three rows of desks, but they were for infants. It would be impossible for Denis Norden even to contemplate sitting there—we would never get him out. In the event he perched on the desk top, and most of the others followed his example. When they were all finally settled, fags lit up, one of them polishing his boots, and Denis of course engrossed in the pages of his latest book, the others eyed me with a kind of expectancy and I looked back at them, hoping for suggestions. It was then that I noticed a stick of white chalk in the gully beneath the blackboard and, without further thought, as if someone was pulling the strings, I sketched the innards of a wireless set, roughly remembered from a textbook we had had during our course at Madley. The diagram remained clear in my mind but what it represented I had not the faintest idea. It didn’t really matter: it was all a subterfuge. If we were visited by the army CO or his adjutant, it would appear that I was instructing the class in the intricacies of a wireless set—please God they were as ignorant as I was. I explained the plot to the class. One of them would be a lookout to warn of any approaching brass hats and the rest could do as they pleased. It was unanimously accepted and immediately someone started shuffling a pack of cards, and even Denis lowered his book; but there was one exception—there’s always one…In this case it was a little genius called Shackmaster. He was only about five feet four but intellectually he couldn’t have been much behind Einstein. If, for instance, you were talking about the Suez Canal and you happened to mention it was almost forty miles long there would be a snort and Shackmaster would quietly exclaim, ‘Exactly one hundred miles long. It was built by Lessops,’ and before you knew he would be vouchsafing the height of the Sphinx. This we tolerated, but on subsequent days we were to be well in his debt.

Each day we marched from the mess hall to the schoolroom in order to relax and enjoy ourselves. My scheme for a holiday home was cruising along when a sudden cry from the lookout warned us that the CO and his adjutant were approaching. There was a flurry of frenzied activity and when the two officers entered the room the class was facing the blackboard in rapt attention. On seeing them I sprang to attention but the CO ordered me to carry on and I did. Tapping the blackboard with my knuckle, I said, ‘Shackmaster, should this be a triode or a double diode triode?’ Shackmaster was magnificent. He rattled off such verbal babble of technical mumbo-jumbo that Marconi must have wondered where he’d gone wrong, but when Shackmaster started on about electrical impulses bouncing off the stratosphere and megahertz, holding up my hand I stopped him, as, baffled and bewildered, the two officers had left. The cards were being dealt again, Denis opened his book at the marker and I rubbed the board clean and invited Shackmaster to chalk a different diagram on the board in case the two officers came back. Oh yes, you’ve got to be several jumps ahead to be a skiver!

I was still punch drunk at Shackmaster’s grasp of the mysteries of a wireless set. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, streets ahead of anyone I’d ever met, but he was not perfect. Oh no, he was unable to see the funny side of anything, even when he looked in the mirror. Comedy to him was a frivolous waste of energy which left him open to ridicule. For instance, somebody might say, ‘I saw a Blenheim yesterday with one of its four engines blazing.’ You didn’t have to address this to Shack, only make sure he heard it, and as usual his snort would be bang on cue and he would reply, ‘It couldn’t have been a Blenheim. A Blenheim only has two engines.’ This would be greeted by cries of derision and send Shackmaster scrabbling in his pack for his book to prove his point; the trap was set and poor Shack was sniffing the cheese. Somebody else would pipe up, ‘I saw it too. Shack’s right—it wasn’t a Blenheim, it was a single-engined Halifax.’ By now Shackmaster would be almost apoplectic with rage. How could we describe a Halifax bomber as single-engined? On reflection I take no pride in how we baited the poor lad, but I think I learned a very important lesson in life. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are academically, top-class master of this and that: all these achievements must be sprinkled with humour or else your superior knowledge is worthless. I didn’t tease Shack after that; you don’t take a blind man to visit the Tate Gallery.