It seemed a bit daft that I would drive to Liverpool and five
days later return to Germany so that I could prepare myself to fly back to the
UK. But I suppose the moment you declare
yourself to be an international criminal these things happen. Or as they often say, ‘You shouldn’t have
joined up if you can’t take a joke.’ With
the family back in Germany I began my final preparations for Biggen Hill. There wasn’t much more I could do apart from
keep the physical training up as most people, like myself, believed the old adage
about a fit body producing a fit mind. I
had allowed the air force to arrange my trip to Biggen which I regretted. It was nice to be looked after and to be
ferried from one point to another. It
was just that there were so many bloody points.
I think I flew in to Luton, and then was driven to Hendon in
London. That was on the Friday. On the Saturday I escaped and went over to Brixton
and relaxed with Mervyn and Willie. It
was good to catch up with the guys and we did enjoy a couple of beers although
Mervyn wanted me to try out his new favourite cocktail which was a mixture of crème
de menthe and vodka. There was an unwritten
rule in the air force that the night before an exam you would not study but get
completely legless. I for one was not
going to break with tradition, although I wasn’t really starting until the
Monday. On the Sunday I dragged myself
back across London from Brixton to Hendon, collected my kit and made my way to
Biggen Hill, which involved a succession of buses, trains, tubes and taxis.
I was shown to a six man room and settled in. There was a briefing pack so I quickly
familiarised myself with the important places such as the bar and the mess. By early evening the room was fully occupied,
in fact the whole block was fully occupied.
A small number of us were already serving in the forces but most were
civilians. Despite the fact that I had
already been through the selection process before, and successfully I may add,
I was still quite nervous. I suppose
when you are seventeen you don’t have the weight of the world on your
shoulders. That evening I went for a
wander knowing that this was the actual heart of the air force. From the spitfire guys and the battle of
Britain even to 92 squadron itself, Biggen Hill was certainly an iconic place.
I later learned that there are a couple of books about the selection
process that describe the process in detail and suggest certain approaches that
may encourage success. I just kept my
mind open and presented myself first thing on the Monday morning along with perhaps
one hundred other hopefuls. First of all
we were registered and then poured in to various classrooms. I do remember that they fed us exam after
exam. They were all multi choice tests
but what they would do is say there are fifty questions and you have seven minutes
to complete them. So before you open the
paper you are calculating just how long you have for each question. Well; I was.
So, you think right, I’ve got eight point four seconds per
question. There is a huge clock on the
front wall on which they have stuck a large dayglo orange pointer. They adjust the pointer and then tell you to
start. When the minute hand and the
pointer line up with each other your time is up. Of course half your time is now spent
watching the clock and thinking, okay I’ve completed ten questions, in seventy
seconds, so I’ve got three hundred and fifty seconds left for forty questions
which gives me eight point seven five seconds per question. By the next calculation you attempt to make
you begin to confuse yourself. I know
that we were expecting test papers on mathematics, physics and English but one
on languages came and one on geography.
The guys in charge told us to complete them anyway.
Lunch time was upon us in the blink of an eye and most of us
were quite silent as we tried to drag our minds back across the papers we had completed
and wonder how we had got on. After
lunch we again were in classrooms and I found one of these tests quite
funny. Three was a screen at the front
of the room. On it was four columns, displaying
icons like a fruit machine. Across the
centre was a thick black line. Each column
moved from top to bottom. At the top
were four boxes, one above each column and each box displayed an icon, which
changed. We each had a large metal box,
connected to a computer they told us, with four switches in a line. These were heavy industrial switches.
When an icon passed through the thick black line, that matched
the icon in the box above the column, you pressed the corresponding key on your
box. So try to imagine fifty guys
sitting watching this huge fruit machine display, all waiting for a matching
pair to appear, when somebody clicks their switch. Forty nine guys now wonder what they have missed. Someone else clicks and complete mayhem then
erupts as you sit there wondering what on earth is going on. It was funny to think about it later on but
at the time it was seriously frustrating.
After lunch most of us would have gone back to our room and
we may have noticed that one of the beds was empty. On the Monday evening it was quite obvious
that more beds were unoccupied. Whether
or not this was another method of putting us under pressure I’m not sure, but if
it was it certainly worked, for you were more than aware that at any moment you
could fail and be sent back to your unit.
We didn’t actually see people leaving, just the spaces they left behind.
On the Monday evening my head was a complete
mess and I just collapsed on my bed. The
following day was the interview and I don’t think anyone was looking forward to
those.
We all gathered in the large foyer and some began to go for
medicals while others were being interviewed.
Two people would interview you, a Wing Commander and a Squadron Leader. A Squadron
Leader came into the reception area and called my name. I went over to him and we left the area. He stopped outside an office and pointed at a
podium, telling me to place my educational certificates before him. If they were not in order I would be on my
way. Thankfully he accepted my
certificates and we went in to the interview room. I learned later that even the way they had
set the room out was planned. They had
plenty of room but I was sort of jammed in, again, psychologically putting me under
pressure.
They introduced themselves and explained that one would ask a
question while the other would take notes and they would take alternate turns. Off we went.
At one point I heard myself answer a question and was actually wondering
where the answer had come from. It
really was strange. They had asked me to
imagine that I was flying along and saw a submarine pulling away from a
dock. I had fired a missile at the
submarine and I had destroyed it. Two hundred
people had died as a result, how did I feel?
I said that I would probably feel positive, although was really thinking of the
line from Alice’s Restaurant, where he sings, “I wanna see blood, guts and gore
with veins in my teeth, I wanna kill!”
The next fellow then says, “Right, their air defence has
managed to hit you with a missile. You’ve
banged out and are floating down on your parachute. You can see three or four hundred people
coming towards your landing zone armed with pick axes and shovels, the relatives
of the sailor’s you have just killed. From
the other side, the local militia are racing toward your landing zone armed to
the teeth and they are not happy because you have just killed two hundred of
their friends. You have one pistol and twenty
rounds of ammunition. What are you going
to do?”
That’s when I heard myself say. “I would hope that the training I would have
received for such a situation would see me through.” I know I spent the next few moments wondering
where that answer had come from. Then
one of them asked, ‘Do you know what NATO is?’
‘Of course,” I laughed, adding. “I’m
in it.” “So what do the letters NATO
stand for?” Next to the question asking what
your name was, this had to be the easiest question ever. That’s when my brain froze.
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