On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer by Garry Douglas Kilworth

one-hit confrontation and no real damage done, but it did shake us new kids up somewhat. Was this what it was going to be like when we finally went to the Fulton Block? People stealing kit and striking out if denied? I began to wonder if I’d done the right thing by joining. At least in the grocery store you didn’t get your face smashed in for nothing.
    On another occasion a senior entry youth arrived in our billet around midnight waving a .22 revolver. It had no trigger and the hammer had a thick elastic band around it. He got us out of bed and took us all onto the marching ground. Then using the elastic band he casually fired a round across the parade square. The sound of the shot cracked out over the frosted concrete and the richotets echoed through the night. The youth then strolled away into the darkness, towards the Fulton Block. We never found out who he was, or to which trade or wing he belonged. We simply stood there in the cold night air gaping at his departure, most of us wondering if this youth was typical of all the seniors.
    Once they saw what kind of hell we were in, some of the boys tried to leave. Our parents had signed papers guaranteeing that we would remain to be trained at the school and then serve twelve years in the RAF. Several boys wrote home, begging to be released. One of these was a boy with a terrible stutter named McGarvey, who hated it all so much he began acting as if he were going mad, cleaning his boots with toothpaste and lacing his tea with polish. At inspection we stood by our beds and shouted number, rank and name when the officer walked past us. McGarvey’s stammer made it quite impossible for him to get this out before the officer had long since gone, so he was ordered to start the sequence the moment the inspection commenced.
    However, the only way to get out was to buy one’s release from the Royal Air Force. In ITS it was relatively cheap. Twenty pounds would secure a boy’s freedom. When our weekly pay was five shillings, that amount of money was almost out of reach. One needed sympathetic parents. And it got much more expensive after initial training was over. Eventually McGarvey managed to raise enough money to buy his freedom and almost ran out of the camp gates to get away. One or two others left too. Some were thrown out for various offences. I don’t remember how many, probably only a very few.
    Once we had completed initial training, we were allowed to go home on leave. Like many others, I was as proud as punch, parading before my parents in my new Best Blue uniform and peaked cap with its blood-and-custard band. I would have given a king’s ransom to tell them I was a Senior Boy, or Leading Boy, but I never got promoted. It wasn’t my size that held me back because an even smaller lad than me, an Irish boy called Louis Patterson, made it to Corporal Boy and Louis made a good Corporal Boy too. I was as smart and as sharp as any of them, both in mind and in appearance, but I’ve always been slightly introverted, and that’s a death knell in the services. You have to stand out, be the man who shows the others the way, and that I never have been. I make a good second-in-command, but I’m no leader.
    ~
    Around this time my grandad, old Rhubub, shuffled off his mortal coil. The one-legged lengthsman, sexton and chimney sweep, a Rochford character known by everyone in that market town, died at seventy-two. I had expected a Dylan Thomas exit for Grandad, raging at the passing of the light, but he went in his sleep. In his will he left me his rack of pipes that had been smoked and chewed for over fifty years. I can’t remember what happened to them, but even now I can smell the odour coming from the bulge in his shapeless jacket pocket.
    Nan followed him shortly afterwards, but was less lucky. She went out with lung cancer at a much younger fifty-six years, which didn’t surprise me, since she’d been cooking on a coal fire for most of her life. It wasn’t until