We think about killing a lot at school. Not just the Charles Manson serial killer type thing, and the missing estate agents and the hitchhikers who always end up being murder victims, but we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the Second World War.
At school everything about me screams ‘arty fucker’, I do all the plays, I build sets, I decide on costumes, I have poetry painted on my guitar, I am crap at the sciences, and languages . . . so how come I don’t do O-level art?
Because as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, like many of my classmates, I’m an avid reader of books by Sven Hassel.
World War Two ended twelve years before we were born but we’re obsessed with it. The Legion of the Damned is a particularly gruesome (and fictional) account of life as a German soldier on the Eastern Front. Full of a salacious, graphic brutality. We lap it up.
It shares the premise of The Dirty Dozen, which followed. A group of convicts is formed into an army unit with the vague promise of being let off if they do all the dirty work. It’s basically war porn – summary executions, rape, battles, insurrection. Sven Hassel is apparently the most widely read Danish author after Hans Christian Andersen, though Andersen’s oeuvre is also jam-packed with casual violence.
Us Danes!
There’s also a dog-eared copy of Skinhead by Richard Allen doing the rounds of the dormitories. Our hero is Joe Hawkins, a skinhead from the East End. He is forever ‘kicking off’. He’ll pick on anyone: rival football fans, old age pensioners, hippies, coppers, anyone in a pub, or at the church youth group. Not even having a broken bottle pushed into his face will make him reconsider.
It comes out around the same time as Stanley Kubrick’s film of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, which features our favourite actor Malcolm McDowell again. Not only do we enjoy the shocking violence but we love Nadsat – the slang language Alex and his droogs use. Some of us even read the book! We try and use Nadsat, saying droog instead of friend, horrorshow instead of good, cutter instead of money.
It’s a mix of Cockney rhyming slang and Russian-sounding words and in our school uniforms and caps we probably don’t appear as hard and ultraviolent as Malcolm McDowell. We probably sound more like Julian and Sandy – the two camp, Polari-speaking characters from Round the Horne played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams.
The papers are full of stories about ‘juvenile delinquents’ and ‘disaffected youth’, but at the same time we’re watching bog-standard comedies like Are You Being Served, On the Buses and Man About the House on TV, so perhaps it all evens out.
We like to buy bubblegum, not because we particularly like bubblegum, but because it comes with cards depicting scenes from the war. Despite the fact that they lost, the Germans always look more heroic. We just love the shape of their helmets. Peter Sellers even wears one when he goes on the chat show Parkinson. The very word stormtrooper sounds so much more Lord of the Rings than Household Cavalry.
The cards are collectible and swappable, the favourites being pictures of a Stuka, or a soldier throwing one of those grenades shaped like a baked bean tin on the end of a stick. The German uniforms were made by Hugo Boss, so of course they look sharp. Though having played an officer of the First Order in Star Wars, whose uniforms were based on the Nazi ones, I can tell you they’re incredibly tight. After a week of wearing it I come to the conclusion that the real reason the Nazis were so argumentative is because they were so bloody uncomfortable.
And so it comes to pass that a whole bunch of us, when asked to make our choices at O-level, and finding art and German in the same column – opt for German. Little do we know it’s just glorified Latin, full of verbs, gerunds and reflexive pronouns. At no point are we offered a German helmet or a decommissioned grenade.
In an age when a lot of us are wearing greatcoats – the thick woollen coats issued to soldiers – those that can find a German greatcoat are considered the coolest.
And we need greatcoats in order to drink.
What?
Yes.
The Canal Head pub is a mile away from the town. An often-rainy walk down a country lane for us fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. Sixteen-year-olds can get away with drinking in establishments closer to the school, but us youngsters have to put in the extra mile. Quite literally.
We’re lucky enough to live in an age when nobody has any ID and underage drinking is so common that the law barely exists. Even so it’s ridiculously obvious that we are underage with our smooth chins and high-pitched voices requesting vodka and lime – the tiny sixth of a gill shot of vodka and the thick sweet cordial making it the alcopop of its day. We generally send our friend Jim up to get the first round in because he has sideburns and his balls have dropped.
Our logic for the greatcoats is that our regular, prescribed casual wear inescapably marks us out. ‘Sports Jackets’? Which other kids are wearing sports jackets in the early seventies? So the greatcoats must make us look like proper adults.
However, none of the proper adults in the Canal Head are wearing greatcoats. They’re wearing anoraks and Bri-nylon car coats. And smirks on their faces.
Perhaps we’re just too young to recognize that we’ve got a fetish for the war, but the long, heavy coat with its deep pockets is considered the height of chic. We purloin as many as we can from the cadet force stores which are chiefly Second World War relics. When rained upon, the heavy woollen fabric has the habit of releasing the odour of previous occupants. We walk to the Canal Head and back and smell like men who’ve tramped from the Normandy beaches all the way to Berlin with limited bathing facilities.
We are forced to join the CCF, the Combined Cadet Force. Though in truth there’s no ‘combined’ about it, there’s no air force wing, no navy section; we don’t have any planes or ships. We don’t have any tanks either, we just have the infantry, the expendable part of the army, the part with the First World War rifles – no artillery, no bazookas.
And actually, we are not ‘forced’ – it’s compulsory but we go willingly; like underage boys signing up for a war, we’re eager to get a gun in our hands and start taking pot shots at people. Everyone’s got a bit of berserker in them. When we find out that it’s mostly marching up and down while some sixth former shouts at us the whole idea loses its appeal fairly quickly.
They’re obsessed with shiny boots. The boot room is full of young boys whose parents have paid handsomely for a private education, endlessly polishing their boots. The toecaps in particular have to be so shiny that you can see your face in them. I never learn how to do this. Even at the daily inspection for our ‘normal’ shoes as we head over to the main school buildings, I simply give my shoes a cursory rub against the back of my trousers.
The boot polishing is called ‘bulling your boots’ and involves some kind of alchemy which eludes me. You have to wrap a duster around your finger, dip it in black boot polish, then make small circular motions on the toecap for hours and hours and hours. After three days of a constant circular motion the toecap will become vaguely shiny – good start, keep going, another six weeks should see it through.
I try the supposed short cut which involves mixing the shoe polish with some methylated spirit, smearing it on, and setting fire to it. I destroy my boots. Maybe the army isn’t for me.
Thankfully, one of the few masters who is not an ex-serviceman takes pity on me, and I am drafted into his ‘Pioneers’ unit, where shiny toecaps aren’t as important. In the regular army the pioneers dig the latrines, but we already have something not too dissimilar to latrines at the school, they are called ‘the bogs’, so in the Pocklington CCF Pioneers we make . . . canoes! Out of fibreglass.
Despite not needing to go on parade with shiny boots any more, I patch up my burnt toecaps with resin and achieve a permanent shine which is the envy of other boys. Suckers! And making canoes is actually good fun. At one point, once the top and bottom have been stuck together, we turn them on their ends to pour in two chemicals which will create ‘buoyancy foam pockets’ – a honeycomb structure which will trap air and make them float even when full of water. It’s only when I’ve emptied the contents of both tins into my upended canoe that I hear the master say, ‘You only need half a capful of each compound at the most.’ I’ve used a full pint of each. It’s quite spectacular. The two compounds meet and react instantly, frothing up like one of those bicarbonate of soda mixtures used to simulate a volcanic eruption at a primary school – the foam rises up at speed and spews out of the cockpit like an enormous sausage. I end up with a deep understanding of how much people enjoy things that go completely wrong. I can’t remember seeing so many people so helpless with mirth as we stand there in the ‘technology centre’ – an extended portacabin – watching the reaction go on, and on, and on, and on.
Unlike at primary school the ‘lava’ dries very quickly into a solid honeycomb so I end up with a solid canoe. It’s like a giant Crunchie bar only with a fibreglass rather than a chocolate coating. It takes me the rest of the term, working away like Michelangelo with a hammer and chisel, to chip out enough of the hardened foam in the body of the canoe to make way for my legs, but I name her HMS Unsinkable. On seaworthiness trials in the Pocklington Canal my canoe sits much higher in the water than other boys’, which makes it quite unstable – it tips over quite easily but will never sink.
There’s a man who takes us canoeing who’s not the kindly teacher who helped us make the canoes. He’s a specialist canoeist, I don’t know what his link is with the school, he’s not one of the teachers. He takes us two at a time. He has an estate car which is handy for strapping the canoes on top of. He says it’s also handy for getting changed. He puts the heater on and says we can all get in and wriggle out of our wet things. He puts the radio on to make it more enticing – ‘Feel the Need in Me’ by The Detroit Emeralds is playing. We don’t get in. We get changed on the freezing cold canal bank. We can tell he’s a perv. We watch him wriggle about in the back on his own, ‘accidentally’ flashing his penis at us.
They’re everywhere.
When the cadet force is sent on yearly manoeuvres to Allerthorpe Common we’re fed on surplus rations from 1946. Many of the labels have fallen off and we never know whether we’re getting bully beef or custard for breakfast. Sometimes we find a bar of chocolate inside a sealed tin. It’s developed a white sheen, not mould, just a creeping change in colour, a patina, but we eat it just the same. We’re so pissed on the illicit bottles of cider we’ve smuggled into our backpacks that we can’t tell whether it tastes good or bad.
We’re carrying our World War One Lee Enfield rifles and have been issued with ten blanks each. The rule sternly issued by our teacher-officers is never to point our guns at anyone, but the half-cut game is to see if you can hit each other with the wad of fiery hot cotton that flies out of these things at 100mph whenever you pull the trigger. I’m surprised no one is blinded or worse, especially given our attempts at making home-made bombs from weedkiller poured into almost empty tins of golden syrup. The yearly weekend out in the wilds of the common is more akin to a Lord of the Flies re-enactment society than army manoeuvres. But perhaps that’s what real war is like anyway?
The most genuinely military part of these ‘let’s play soldiers’ weekends is the advance on the Plough Inn in the village of Allerthorpe – crawling up to it through the surrounding vegetation to avoid being seen by any teachers – in order to resupply ourselves with cider.