India

For the next two years our home was India. We were billeted for a time at Calcutta Barracks — the black hole, as it was known — and spent some of our hours at the Ronaldshay hut, where there was entertainment laid on for the troops.

It was there that one of our chaps, a man everyone called Tiddles, met a Eurasian girl and began to see her. More often than not he stayed the night with her and slipped back into barracks before reveille. The two of them had a trick of going down to the railway station, where the train would draw out into the sidings until it was time to depart; they would climb aboard and stay there until the off. One night Tiddles cut it too fine and did not get back until after reveille. For that he was charged and given twenty-eight days' detention.

When we were sent up to Ranchi for training, Tiddles was not returned with the rest of us afterwards — unfit, it was put about, on account of his nocturnal activities. Marching back through Calcutta, I was stopped by his girl, who wanted to know where he was. She was frantic with worry, and I had little comfort to give her.

I was recommended for promotion to Lance Corporal, which meant attending a training cadre at Ranchi. Each of a group of four of us was to be put in charge for a day in turn. When my turn came I was handed a destination, a map, a compass and three men, and sent off. We had not gone far along the road before a civilian bus came by, so I told the men to get on it, and on we rode. A little further on one of them spotted the officers' jeep and called out to get down — so down we got, among the sheep and the goats, until the jeep had gone on ahead. We finished the ride in reasonable comfort to the point on the road opposite our destination, then settled down for a good rest before crossing the last mile of country on foot.

When we reached the spot the sergeant in charge informed us that a truck had got stuck in a river ford and that we were to go and free it. The men who had done the march in the proper fashion had had the better of it, for they were able to settle down at the camp while we laboured. I do not think my squad thought much of my leadership that day.

There was time, too, for soldiering of the more peculiar kind. It was decided that the whole battalion should learn basic signalling — Morse, sent with a single flag held up level with the nose. We practised on words like Constantinople, or Mississippi — "Monkey, ink, sugar, sugar, ink, sugar, sugar, ink, pip, pip, ink." Invariably someone would go wrong three-quarters of the way through, and the whole squad would be stopped, hands held aloft, and made to start again from the beginning, everyone suffering for the one man's slip. Having been chosen, a private soldier, to do the instructing, I found it more than a little awkward to keep correcting the officers.