There were twelve of us in a small waiting room lined with wooden benches . . . and three of my co-defendants were taken before me: two As and another B. We were a mixture of reservists and national servicemen, and I’d already been told that the medical the former got was a makeweight – not so much a matter of ‘fit for service’ as ‘not unfit for service’: there’s a subtle difference. The other B in the room was named Babcock, and I guess he’d had a bad time before, because his hands never stopped shaking, and his head gave the occasional twitch. He also looked decidedly jaundiced.
A RAF corporal checked our names off on a clipboard, called us ‘gentlemen’ and seated us in alphabetical order. When I stood up and crossed the room ten minutes later, because I was fed up with the sun shining in my eyes, he almost had a fit.
‘Mr Bassett is it, sir?’
‘Yes, Corporal.’
‘Then sit where you’re fucking well told, sir.’
‘No, Corporal.’
‘What did you say, sir?’
‘I said “No, Corporal” . . . and wash your fucking ears out if you didn’t hear me the first time.’
He swelled like a party balloon receiving the benefit of a particularly decent pair of lungs. And he turned red. Sweat broke along his hairline in his attempt to keep a lid on his temper. If he’d been subject to a medical himself just then, he would never have passed. He literally stamped a foot – I’d not seen that before – before he shouted, ‘We’ll bloody well see about that,’ and banged out through a flimsy door which warped in his grasp.
‘You forgot to say sir,’ I called after him helpfully.
Someone – an L, I think – said, ‘Blimey, now you’re for it.’
The twitcher’s head was now permanently to either one side or the other, ticking like a metronome. I wouldn’t have minded being ‘for it’ if it would get me out of this madhouse.
A huge head, about eight feet above the ground, looked around the door through which the corporal had bolted. It roared, ‘Fucking Bassett – I mighta guessed.’
I said, ‘Yes, WO,’ meekly. Then I grinned, and said, ‘Hello, Alex.’
Watson had told me years ago that the new postwar RAF was so small that you kept on bumping into people you knew. He had been right. Alex was a service policeman, a giant and a sort of recurring nightmare.
He grinned back, ‘Wotcha, Charlie. Heard you were coming back. Thought I’d surprise you.’
‘You did. You sent an idiot in here to look after us.’
‘The corporal is not an idiot. He is your perfectly average corporal.’
‘I see your point,’ I told him, ‘. . . and it saddens me. If I’m too rude for the RAF can I go home now?’
‘Not a chance. You’re all A1 medical passes – bound for glory the lot of you.’ He glanced around the room, and smiled. Tigers smile like that. When Alex was in a room he dominated it by size alone. He didn’t have to do anything else: in that small waiting room it was like being in the presence of a fairy-tale ogre. I didn’t like to ask how he knew our results even before the medical exams had been completed.
‘That thing can’t be A1.’ I indicated Babcock. His tongue was lolling out now. It was a peculiarly large tongue, and a funny colour. A small waterfall of saliva dribbled from his mouth to the lapel of his expensive camel-coloured coat.
Alex said, ‘We’ll give him to the Army then. They’ll make him one of their B1s and call him an LC: that’s all we’ll need from you lot anyway.’ LC was Lines of Communication, a medical grading that kept half-dead soldiers away from the front line, but enabled the mad sods in charge to deploy them just about anywhere else. It meant they still got you, and was no bar to being sent abroad. ‘Now just you lot behave yourselves, and I’ll send in the char wallah – but don’t go for a piss afterwards, you’ll need it later.’ Ah, the romance of serving the Crown.
We did what waiting rooms are designed for. We waited. Babcock’s eyes closed. At times I didn’t know if he was asleep or dead. His twitch became slow, but more pronounced. He was probably still alive. The damp patch on his lapel grew larger. His name was called from behind the door three times before he responded.
He came back into the waiting room half an hour later, alert but miserable. He no longer twitched, and the damp stain was drying nicely.
‘A fucking one. Fucking bastards,’ he snarled at us, and slammed the outside door almost off its hinges as he left. Then it was me.
Two doctors: one female and one male. The female looked as friendly as Irma Grese on leave from Auschwitz. The man could have done with a clean white coat. He looked tired.
He told me, ‘I do the pricks and backsides, just to save the real doctor’s blushes. She does the rest; you’ll find she’s very good.’
‘Am I a prick or a backside?’ I asked him.
‘A bit of both I expect. The Warrant Officer told me you were the troublemaker.’
‘What was the matter with the man who
