‘Weekend Soldier’
by Harry Riley
This is fiction and resemblance to anyone living or dead is coincidental
It was 1958 and Arthur my best pal, decided to join the army but I still had two years of an apprenticeship to serve so I couldn’t follow his lead. He had volunteered for the REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) and when he returned home on leave he was full of the excitement and adventure of it all. He would reminisce over a pint at ‘The Trip to Jerusalem’ Pub, about the great comradeship and talk about foreign travel after completion of basic training. He already knew he was going to Christmas Island. I listened eagerly but was stuck in a factory and couldn’t get away to join in the fun. So I decided to do the next best thing and become a part-time soldier. My plan was to join the Royal Artillery (My dad’s old regiment) There was a small Regimental Barracks within three miles of my home address and so I made an appointment and duly joined up for two years service in the Territorial Army. I had signed up for foreign-service duty if called upon and fully expected to do summer training abroad. There was talk we could be sent to Germany but it never came off.
It was now the ‘cold-war’ with Russia’s nuclear threat ever present: to vaporize us all at a stroke.
In the meantime Arthur sent back photos of himself lounging amongst the Pacific Island Palm trees, stripped to the waist and looking every inch the sun-tanned soldier. This was amazing because he was a ‘red-head’ like me and previously only ever went lobster-red and peeled
At least I was now getting involved in soldiering of a sort. I ought to have been grateful but my uniform was thick and incredibly itchy and the only chance I got for rifle practice was at the annual butts when we each had to fire old wartime ‘303’ bolt action rifles in order to qualify for the Bounty Payout.
Having a keen interest in motorbikes I had tried to become a dispatch rider but demand was high and so I chose to be a driver-wireless operator. Instead. Along with several others in our battery I would take my turn to crash the gears of a big truck as the instructor tried vainly to teach us to double-de-clutch up steep hills. It was all good fun but when I eventually became my Sergeant Major’s driver-operator he would only allow me to drive around the camp perimeter at five miles an hour, being doubtful of my ability to brake in an emergency.
Our regiment was equipped with 25 pounder-field-guns and a gun and ammunition limber would be hauled along behind a big vehicle to army firing ranges for weekend training. I soon made friends with a couple of lads who were not particularly educated or articulate but who were full of fun and always playing pranks. They were part of a field gun firing team, one being a Gun Layer and the other being a Loader. I would sit at my wireless set in the back of a jeep watching the guns from a distance as the four-man team swung into action. My two pals would swiftly complete their tasks and then kneel upright at attention with stiff, ramrod backs waiting for the signal to fire. My first close up experience of a ‘25 pounder’ shell being fired was never to be forgotten. There was a colossal bang and a sheet of flame leapt from the end of the barrel. Then the whole sky was filled with a mighty thunderous roar that threatened to split my eardrums as the shell passed overhead towards the distant target. I was scared witless and yet my two pals, right at the seat of the action never flinched, they were like stone statues until they swung into action again to set up for the next round. How they could stand this deafening roar never failed to amaze me. I swelled with pride to know such staunch warriors. These were the kind I thought who had helped us beat the enemy in the last war.
On another occasion I drove my officer to the observation post and sat in the hut along with the officers’ as a senior wireless operator sent down co-ordinates to the gun crew commander. With his crew he would then ‘lay the gun’ to these instructions and shortly afterwards if correct we would see an old tank explode. This was riveting stuff until the third round when we had a premature shell burst. One of the live rounds almost landed on top of us; the deep crater being only yards from our hut. We’d had a lucky escape!
It was a grim coincidence that as I returned home hot and exhausted after the weekend of training that the sad faces told me something traumatic had happened. Arthur my best pal was dead. He was only two years older than me and had survived the ‘H’ bomb tests in the Pacific and had then been posted to Germany. Being a heavy smoker it was thought that instead of sleeping in the tents he had chosen to spend the night in a truck loaded with tyres whilst on maneuvers, but in the night the truck caught fire and his remains were not discovered until the following morning. They said he must have fallen asleep in the back of the wagon whilst smoking.
My mind went back to that night at the pub when he’d come home on leave; we’d grown up together as brothers but he’d had a disrupted childhood after his mother died when he was only ten. From then on he’d been shunted about with relatives. At work he’d had a succession of jobs but then at the pub, eyes alight and proudly wearing his new uniform he’d confided to me that when he’d finally finished with the army he would have a proper trade to come back to. He would be a fully qualified ‘heavy recovery mechanic’ and could get a good job in a garage or even start his own business. It seemed so unfair and still rankles after all these years. I have often thought: why him and not me?
I spent four years in the ‘Terriers’ and enjoyed every moment of it, with lots of happy memories. Nowadays the Territorial Army trains and fights alongside the regular Army much more than we used to do and their weapons and skills are therefore geared to genuine battle conditions. We rely heavily on selfless volunteers like these in this dangerous, ever-changing world.
