Square bash

I learned to read and write late, but in my teens read all around me. I even read telephone books during my PhD, to get a handle [surname analysis] of the amount of immigration to Halifax, Nova Scotia from the Isle of Man. Once you get the habit, you have to read something. I could fritter away my evenings with fluffy but in reality I generally plough through non-fiction, often history. Having knocked off 700 pages of the life and times of the British welfare state, I started on a parallel investigation of National Service [conscription] in the same country . . . of my birth: National Service: conscription in Britain 1945-1963 by Richard Vinen. I was born plunk in the middle of that era, and the idea had been consigned to the dustbin of [British] history by the time I turned 18. National Service, in conscript armies continued long afterwards in continental Europe. Two of my pals in Rotterdam Zoo in 1978 could converse in Morse because they'd served time in Signals. After a hiatus (2010-2017) conscription is back in Sweden. A 2013 referendum about abolishing conscription in Switzerland was rejected by 78% of the voers.

The place I was acquiring my very expensive education was more conservation than most and for a couple of years in the late 60s, almost everyone of my age [14-15] was playing soldiers on Thursday afternoons. I learned to 

• strip down, clean and re-assemble a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle; 
• polish hefty black boots; 
• apply blanco to webbing belt and duraglit to brass; 
• march lef' ri' lef' ri'; halt; salute 
• how to fix a puncture on a 3-ton truck tire (REME)
  

all good dreary-if-wet fun and it would have made my Basic Training easier, if "the balloon went up" and we'd had to report to barracks. 

One of the solid outcomes of National Service was that it stirred the demographic pot a bit: Geordies bunked beside Wurzles, and Cockneys learned a bit of Scouse. Or, as [R], random squadie meets Prime Minister Attlee in Berlin. Much was made, at the time and in the book, about the democratising effects of everyone [toffs and toughs] having to 

• lay their kit out in exactly the same way; 
• march to exactly the same beat;
• eat the same appalling food;
• suffer verbal abuse from a psychotic corporal

It was no use putting on airs unless you wanted to get a telling ironic put-down. After induction, the Gordon-Lennox twins parcelled up their civilian kit and sent it to The Duchess of Richmond, their mother. 'Blimey', said the corporal, 'blokes here sending their clothes home to a boozer'.

It is not surprising that this book intersects with the Wolfenden Report [whc prev] because that committee interviewed extensively among members of the armed forces . . . where sex happened. A regular soldier was discharged and sent to Borstal for having had sexual relations with a horse. His sentence was, apparently, more severe because the horse belonged to his colonel.