Page 7 - Demo
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15steam and general mess would flood into the room. This would take hours, sometimes all night to clear up. However more on that later. The next room was a study with 4 desks and chairs etc. It was carpeted whilst the rest of the hut had lino which you had to keep polished. Indeed, we kept rags to slide about on the lino to help keep it shiny. We had a batman for each squadron who showed us how to bull our boots and shine our webbing. In fact, we had to maintain all our kit, but the batmen must have done other things for us, perhaps like collecting the laundry and so forth. They were all great chaps and very loyal to their cadets. I think they were all ex-servicemen and one of them had spent the whole war as a POW working in a coalmine. He had tales to tell. We had to tip them each month.We spent the first few weeks learning drill and generally being chased about. I was not that good at rugby and so took up cross country running as my sport. We did sport every Wednesday and then had a high tea, pie and chips or something similar which we all enjoyed, probably because it was comfort food and filling. We also had a lot of PT and so became very fit. Most of the day was taken up with academics which more or less revised our A levels and was very boring, but we had to do something I suppose. After about 6 weeks we passed some sort of inspection and were then allowed to go to the bar in the evening. However, we were only paid 10/6p (52.5p) a day and so had very little money to spend. We also celebrated with a trip to a pub which was amusing as one of the chaps was only 17 and so should not have been allowed in in those days. When we got back to the lines our huts had been done over. Beds tied to the ceiling, mess everywhere. We decided to retaliate, which was only to be expected and so all the other huts were well and truly bolted closed. Still the fire bucket down the chimney worked well and Glyn Davies, the smallest chap in our flight, decided to throw a dustbin onto the roof to make a noise. Unfortunately, he was neither
