RELUCTANT PRESS

"THE CARD PARTY"

By Joyce

My name is Aubrey Parts and Sergeant Major Buller always insisted on calling me 'Private Parts' at roll call. The platoon just about fell apart, of course. The other chaps just had their surnames read out, without the 'Private'.

I don't know which is worse; having a baby if you are a woman, or doing national service if you are a man. Certainly, both are quite a pain. I HATE army life for the simple reason that I am not a military animal, with its 'Hup, two three four, Hup, two three four Lift those feet, dammit!'

Starting at the top our commanding officer was noted for his zeal. So it was written in a GHQ report when the ultratop brass, doing their rounds of military camps to assess the work and 'progress' of hemi-demi-semi top brass, arrived at the camp. They arrived in a fleet of cars, complete with outriders, sirens going full blast and triangular pennants on the bonnets of no less than three Rover motor cars.

Like a lot of Dickensian characters who have names vaguely suggestive of their characters, (the nouveaux riche Veneerings; Lady Dedlock; Snagsby, the solicitor; Tite Barnacle; and Uria Heap; to name but a few) this bugger's name was Major STRICKLAND. He was strict and striking, and if you so much as blinked you landed in the shit all right.

Besides looking me up and down on parade that morning as if I were disgusting, I didn't have much to do with him, thank God! My bete noire, of course, was Sergeant Major Buller and I shall hate his guts to my dying day.

"Take this man's name and number, Sergeant Major. He looks like a bloody dog's breakfast," rapped the major.

JOYCE'S GIRLS BY JOYCE

He always rapped when he spoke and probably even did it when he asked his wife for seconds at his dinner table.

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"More pud, and look sharp about too, you over-weight baggage!"

(It was rumored that his good spouse didn't enjoy sex much and when she had to have it, she simply lay back, opened her legs and patriotically thought of England and Britannia! How troops get hold of stories like that, God alone knows. I suspect it was born in the imagination of the regimental wit.)

"See to it that his Easter Weekend pass is canceled. And YOU, private Dog's body, will have a special kit parade and inspection on Easter Monday all to yourself. And if everything is not spotlessly clean and pressed I will have your guts for garters and you will not leave this camp for the full three months you are here. Is that understood?"

He had no right to talk to me like that, of course. It was very unsoldierly language -Dog's Body! I ask you! I didn't challenge him (ha, bloody ha!) but merely rolled over like a metaphorical puppy dog and waved my legs helplessly in the air and practically pissed myself.

This account is not all about my sojourn in the army. I merely recount it to contrast with the exquisitely lovely and exciting thing that happened to me a month later; to coin a phrase, going from the ridiculous to the sublime.

They were, I suppose, mainly petty little things that put me off the military -the total lack of privacy; no doors on the loos (wanker's alley it was called). Serge uniforms that were unbearably scratchy, queuing up for indifferent grub with tin mugs and plates in the biting cold. The use of the word 'grub' here has a faint echo of that well known old joke pertaining to 'balls', 'knacks' and 'testicles'. The NCOs were given 'nosh' and the officers partook of their 'cuisine'.

The coarse horseplay in the barracks was probably the worst of all (I'm 5' 5" and weigh just under 8 stone) that, and a bullying Sergeant Major who seemed to have it in for me right from the start.

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