Lessons learnt at Arsy-Tarsy

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Former RAF pilot Graham White, of Allestree, has written a book about his experiences during the Second World War. The Long Road to the Sky – Night Fighter over Germany is full of amusing, evocative and poignant tales of Graham’s service as an NCO pilot flying Beaufighters and Mosquitoes. Here is the first extract from his book.

IT’S odd how casually you can make decisions that are going to totally alter your life. I was crossing Derby Market Place one Saturday afternoon, in early July 1941, and I noticed that the Assembly Rooms had become a recruiting centre for the RAF.

This didn’t take any great powers of deduction on my part because there was a notice outside that said: “Join the Royal Air Force”. It didn’t say “please” but, on the other hand, it didn’t say “or else”.

On the spur of the moment, I decided to drop in and see what they had to offer. I wasn’t all that serious. I was just browsing, really. For one thing, I was in a reserved occupation, which meant that I couldn’t be called up because my work was designated as vital for the war effort.

Mind you, even for me that took a bit of believing. Fresh out of school a few weeks before the start of the war, I was a newly-hired dogsbody in the drawing office of a large engineering company where I was kept busy sharpening pencils, fetching and filing drawings and taking messages.

I was an apprentice draughtsman. While Britain’s armed forces fought desperate rearguard battles on the continent to stem the steamroller onslaught of an all-conquering enemy, I was fated to wield nothing more lethal than a sharpened HB at a drawing-board. The prospect didn’t exactly thrill me.

The only way that I could get out of my present job was by climbing into an aeroplane. Just joining the Brylcreem Boys in any other capacity wouldn’t do: you had specifically to be a member of aircrew.

For some reason, if you volunteered to fly, no matter how vital your civilian work, they would happily clap you on the shoulder and say: “Well done, lad. Off you go and get yourself up into that there sky and shoot things down, or drop bombs on things.”

I should have realised that if they were that desperate for people to fly, then the life expectancy of a birdman elect left something greatly to be desired. Most aircrew started their wartime service in London. Reporting to Lord’s Cricket Ground, you sat in the empty main stand, in your civilian clothes, waiting to be led away to your new life.

The place was called ACRC – Air Crew Receiving Centre – but usually referred to as “Arsy-Tarsy”. A drill corporal sorted out a group of you, demanded to know from some anonymous but vengeful God why he should be lumbered with such a shower, then led you away to one of a group of empty high-rise flats at St John’s Wood, close to Regent’s Park Zoo.

In fact, three times a day we were marched along to eat at the zoo restaurant, giving the animals the chance of watching somebody else being fed for a change. The days that followed were spent drawing kitbags full of uniform and flying gear from the stores, getting jabbed full of unknown antedotes to unheard of diseases and pounding the streets of London.

But the nights made up for it. This was November, 1941; there was no bombing at that time and, for all the black-out, the city was alive with people from all corners of the globe. There were a number of service clubs, like the Beaver Club for the Canadians and the Fern Leaf Club for New Zealanders, which we were allowed to use.

You could buy a red, white and blue Services’ travel ticket, costing 1s6d, that you stuck in your hat and would get you anywhere on London transport over the weekend. And there would be plenty of shows and cinemas open.

Meanwhile, the corporals bullied us into shape and took us for the greenhorns we undoubtedly were. One day, our own two-striper stood us at ease and spoke to us in a sad and troubled voice. He was ashamed to tell us, he confessed, that a cadet in the next block of flats, Stockleigh Hall, had had all his money stolen by some unknown and despicable thief.

It was a slur on the honour of the RAF and all the corporals were chipping in to help compensate the victim. He was sure we would all wish to contribute, say a shilling each, so that nobody would feel embarrassed. We rushed to dig into our pockets.

Months later, after we had moved on, we met up with a cadet from Stockleigh Hall, scene of the Great Training Robbery, and asked if our contribution fully repaid what had been lost?

No, no! he said, earnestly, that wasn’t in Stockleigh Hall. They, too, had given generously – to the victim in St James’ Court. We didn’t tell him that we had been in St James’ Court and the only light-fingered human around there must have been the one with two stripes on his arm.

With a constant flow of new recruits, ACRC must have held the richest bunch of drill corporals in the RAF. We had paid a shilling to learn a salutary lesson.

I didn’t move on with the rest when we were due to be posted. It was a time when the importance of the Rhesus factor in the blood supply was just beginning to be recognised and one or two of us were discovered to be Group A positive.

The medics’ eyes lit up with joy. It was my first experience of a well-known command in the services: “You, you and you will volunteer to give a pint of blood apiece. And that’s an order!”

So, as the others moved on, we few were held back as they attempted to empty my abnormally tiny veins with an enormous syringe that felt like a petrol pump nozzle. But, like Hancock in later years, I seemed grimly determined to hang on to every drop.

Finally, before the frustrated quacks could get their quota, I was moved on to Brighton.

But that delay was the first little nudge of fate to ensure that Dagwood and I would meet up because, unbeknown to me, a certain John David Wooding was just arriving at ACRC from Manchester University to begin his RAF career.

Dagwood’s story... “At 18, I was at Manchester University when I volunteered for aircrew in the RAF and was ordered to report to Arsy-Tarsy in London. Most of the new cadets arrived in their civilian clothes and were sent for kitting out but I had already drawn my uniform at the University Air Squadron, leaving me with little to do, so I was allowed to slope off for the afternoon.

“I rang my girlfriend, Joy, and we went to a cinema for the evening, parting at around 11.15pm, when I went to catch the underground back to St John’s Wood. There were not many trains running at that late hour and, by the time I wandered unhurriedly into camp, it was a minute or two past midnight. My reception surprised me.

“A corporal shook me warmly by the throat. I thought it was nice of him to wait up but why was he screaming with fury? ‘What time do you call this? You should have been back here by 23.59 hours!’

“This seemed a bit hair-splitting to me. What, I implied, was five minutes between friends? In fact, I was considering a warning hint that I still hadn’t actually turned down a very good offer from the Navy when the corporal yelled: ‘You’re absent without leave and I’m putting you on a charge’.

“What, on my first day! And absent from what? I’d not been anywhere yet to be absent from, apart from the main stand at Lord’s Cricket Ground. On that basis, they could have charged the whole England cricket team with desertion.

“But it was no good. Next day, paraded before the duty officer, I was found guilty as charged, awarded three days’ confined to camp and presented with a large pile of spuds to peel. Not exactly a hero’s welcome!

“I wasn’t the only one to fall foul of the corporal. On the first morning he attempted to get us all out on parade in the half darkness of 7am but, what with stiff new buttons on shiny new uniforms and tight new boots, it wasn’t an easy task.

“And someone was missing. As the corporal turned in frustration to seek him out, a splendid vision of brilliant colour appeared in the doorway. It was a scarlet silk dressing gown with a large jade green dragon motif, and it was wrapped round the sleepy form of the missing cadet.

“‘I say, corporal,’ he called affably, ‘where’s the jolly old bathroom?’ Why he wasn’t skewered on a broom handle on the spot and fed to the lions as we marched past for breakfast, I shall never know.”

Graham’s story continued: within a couple of weeks, looking a little more like airmen and a little less like members of the Typhoo chimps tea party, we climbed aboard the train for our new destination – the Grand Hotel on the seafront at Brighton.

There, three of us shared a room on the top floor. But it was a hotel stripped bare of any of its pre-war comforts. Not that the place was allowed to go to wrack and ruin. When we weren’t marching through the streets of Brighton, we were kept busy cleaning the rooms and, especially, polishing all the brassware.

The light fittings, door handles and plates, taps, even the drain pipes under the sink were inspected each day with a powerful torch to see that they stayed highly polished.

The supervising staff seemed to be a special breed of homo sapiens – heavily muscled, especially between the ears, with loud voices, shiny black boots and knife-edge creased trousers, an effect obtained by rubbing the inside with soap before pressing. You could have shaved with the resulting edge.

What really got up our noses was the fact that we had to buy the metal polish out of our own meagre pay.

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