I arrived at Holyhead train station and was pleased to find
transport waiting. It wasn’t waiting for
me, but I was allowed to jump on board and was taken to Valley. Valley was a huge station with two primary
functions. One, it was a training base for
pilots and two; it was a search and rescue base. I quite liked what I could see, not just at
Valley but the surrounding countryside, and the only plan in my head was to
find out when and where the next eisteddfod was to be held.
So; having been trained in hand to hand combat, various small
weapons, standing still, guarding stuff, pick axe handles, advanced button and
lace removal and now air traffic control, I was told that I was working for the
SWO for two weeks. The theory behind
this was, that as a new arrival you would go around the camp emptying bins,
washing windows, painting hanger floors, hold on we’ve been here before, I was
back to being a TAG!
But no, it was to familiarise the new arrival with most departments
on the unit. You might not know exactly
what each department did, or was responsible for, but at least you would know
where their bins were. Most departments,
or squadrons, would fight for their new arrivals and demand that they be
released from the SWO’s working party so that they could begin their real work. Air traffic control however understood the
importance of the SWO’s party and didn’t intervene on my behalf. I should have read the warning signals.
This working party was based at, and operated from, the guardroom
which meant that you constantly ran across the guard and all the orderly staff,
including the orderly officer. The worst
thing about this was that all the orderly officers were baby pilots, so they
were still finding their feet and actually thought that they were something special. They would try to emulate the media versions
of officers and would always fail. They
thought they had power and wanted to use it.
One young fellow actually told me that I was so scruffy I should go and
buy a new uniform and report to him in the guardroom the next day. He’s probably still in the guard room at Valley
waiting for me to turn up.
Eventually I was allowed to join my unit, which from my time
on the SWO’s working party, I had learned was known as Queens’s flight. The reason for this was that many people on
camp felt that the air traffic people were more concerned with how they looked,
than how well they could do their job.
It didn’t take me long to find out that this was in fact true.
The job was humiliating.
I couldn’t believe that I had been allocated two weeks during which time
I was to be trained in how to answer a telephone. If I could complete the training in less than
two weeks I would be doing well.
Answering a telephone was of course quite different from standing still,
but I knew that if I could stand still, without supervision, I could probably
answer a telephone. It got very tricky
when they introduced writing stuff down that you were told on the telephone,
but nonetheless I made very good progress and became fully qualified on the
telephone. My father who wanted me to be
an airline pilot for Aer Lingus or a dentist would have been so proud.
There were half a dozen different positions around the air
traffic tower that I had to be trained in, most of which involved answering telephones
and writing stuff down. Unfortunately as
I had spent a lot of time, and effort, in formalising my dishevelled look, I
sort of stood out amongst the others with their shiny toe caps and brilliant belt
buckles, something I was often reminded of.
They would happily show me how to iron trousers using brown paper, or soap,
to get a knife edged crease but I preferred the age old method of putting your
trousers under your mattress and sleeping on top of them. Much less strenuous than attacking them with
a red hot iron. You got a sort of crease
but you also got a diamond pattern from the metal net that your mattress rested
on.
There was a rumour that the material our working uniforms
were made from was old blankets that had been relieved from the Russians during
the Second World War. It was a very
rough material and the uniform was known as a ‘Hairy Mary’. Most Hairy Mary’s sported nice brown patches
where the owner had ironed them too vigorously.
It’s a tricky life this military stuff. As for the highly polished toe caps, some
mechanic friends showed me that high gloss, black, paint could usually pass
inspection and required much less effort.
As dear old George Bernard Shaw said “You can always tell an old soldier
by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges;
the old ones, grub.”
I was going crazy and needed to find a camera club where I
could hide, but unfortunately Valley didn’t have one, so I found the next best
thing. The night flying shed. Stop, sheds cannot fly I hear you cry, although
if they could, many men would be extremely happy. This is, or was, a building where all the air
traffic equipment for night flying was kept.
There was an awful lot of it and it constantly had to be maintained,
repaired and cleaned, something the other fellows didn’t want to do as their perfect
little uniforms might get dirty.
I however loved it; I was away from the tower and the
pressure of answering telephones and writing stuff down. In the night flying shed I was on my
own. There were gooseneck flares to be
filled and have wicks replaced. These were
like huge watering cans but were filled with paraffin, with a huge wick that was
lit for night flying, or for use in heavy fog, just in case the electricity supply failed
and the airfield lights wouldn’t work. As
with the change over from imperial to metric, the air force was modernising and
we now had glim lamps which were little, bucket sized, metal lamps that replaced
the gooseneck flares. So we were forever replacing batteries, or the coloured
filters on the lamps, taking the old batteries away to be re-charged. With care, you could stretch some of these
jobs out for weeks.
And then there were the snow flags. Little sticks of wood, about an inch square
and twelve inches long. These would be
delivered from the carpentry shop and would now have to have one half painted fluorescent
orange or red. So beside each taxiway
light and runway light would be a snow flag and a gooseneck flare or glim lamp. The other job the guys hated was actually putting
the lamps or flares, out on the taxiways and runways, and don’t get me started
on their attitude to putting snow flags in.
This involved lots of walking, a bag of properly painted sticks and a
two pound lump hammer. Far too close to
manual work for an air trafficker to accept.
And then you had to remember which end of the stick to hammer into the
ground. Talk about pressure.
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