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Heroic Goalkeeping
A clerical sergeant who really liked me, to the extent of helping me into the mess with my kit when I arrived there, I’ll call Highly Roberts. I gathered that I benefited from the fact that he had liked the national service sergeant-writer I replaced, and, so it seemed, because being friends with an “outsider” like me was for him an expression of his disillusionment with the British army in general.
Lucky for me that he liked me because he would growl at any male drinking in the mess he didn’t like, even when they tried to be friendly. He did this through closed lips, to hide his bad front teeth.
Once I was in our sergeants mess soccer team playing on a field near our mess against a sergeants mess team from another base. Highly was our goalkeeper but he wasn’t on the pitch as were due to kick off.
“He’ll be hungover from drinking last night and sleeping it off,” I shouted. “I’ll see if I can bring him down.”
I opened the door of his bunk (bedroom) cautiously, knowing of his legendary hungover anger.
“Highly,” I called, quickly slamming the door shut as the alarm clock he hurled clashed on the other side.
I managed to urge him quickly into his soccer kit and on the pitch.
There he stood groaning, head on his arms against a goal post, but quickly taking up goalkeeper position to make saves, before returning head to the goal post. I don’t recall who won.
He once persuaded me to walk with him through a sort of farmers’ market with stall under a marquee where we approached by a smiling young German wearing a summery straw hat. Highly grunted at him and pushed back the hat. I grabbed Highly’s arm saying, “Come on, Highly, he’s just being friendly,” and dragged him away.
I recall a funnier incident involving a long marquee, that time covering a dance for everyone from German civilians, German staff from tax house, and us British soldiers. As the evening progressed, I could not detect a toilet, so went outside to urinate in the grass. As I did so and swaying from too much alcohol, I reached above to steady myself on a cable. Immediately there was a flash on the ground near me – and all the lights went off in the marquee.
I then nonchalantly re-entered the marquee, saying: “Oh, what’s happened to the lights?”
That was probably the dance where a German secretary from a Tax House department took a fancy to me and the next day, I received a phone call from a sergeant in her department trying, with male laughter in the background, to imitate her saying lovey-dovey things. Subsequently she and I went out together a couple of times, once when she treated me to a meal at a restaurant in the nearby hills. But I didn’t like her enough to continue the relationship.
I am very conscious in recounting these light-hearted memories how lucky I was compared with all those national servicemen before me who suffered in combat in the likes of Korea and Malaysia.
