Places like Padgate were purgatorial rather than hellish and the suffering was temporary. Sam Pritchard’s grim memories were soon blotted out in the summer of 1940 by the far more agreeable experience of No. 2 Initial Training Wing, based in Cambridge University. Pay parades took place on the lawn in front of King’s College Chapel and in the evenings he and his fellow trainee pilots and navigators toured the pubs. They were a superior crowd to the reception centre clientele. The majority were grammar school boys like himself but there was also ‘a goodly proportion from Public schools, and some even who had completed a university course’, as well as Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians.19 For the first time he ‘met other young men in their early twenties who were smarter, richer, better-looking, better-educated and more amusing than I considered myself to be’.
In the RAF you tended not to linger anywhere for too long. Specialized requirements and constant technological advances meant long training periods at a variety of establishments. It took Ted Mace, who signed on as an aircraft electrician, a full year of more or less continuous instruction at various technical schools before he was posted to a squadron.20
Aircrew training was more intensive. Pilots went through nine phases of instruction before they flew their first operation, and when bottlenecks in the system developed early in the war, periods of ‘deferred service’ at home extended the process. Even training for a relatively uncomplicated trade such as air gunner was a protracted business. Norman Lee volunteered in November 1940 but did not take to the air with 428 Squadron until the summer of 1943.21
The RAF’s geographical reach spread enormously in the course of the war. The empire had greatly helped its training needs by agreeing to flying training schools in the wide skies of Canada, Australia, Rhodesia, South Africa and elsewhere. With expansion, new bases sprang up all over each new theatre of war and old ones were enlarged. Air Force life could thus be amazingly peripatetic, with constant moves from training course to training course, from station to station, from one end of the country to the other and to every corner of the globe. An airman might find himself shivering in Iceland, hard up against the Arctic Circle, cursing the flies in the Nile Delta, or sweating in the sultry humidity of Takoradi on the Gold Coast (Ghana) of Africa.
However grim your current circumstances there was always the prospect of change. ‘It is like living in a cross between a public school and a concentration camp,’ wrote John Sommerfield, in 1941 shortly after arriving at Silloth, a remote station in Cumberland.22 ‘The town of Silloth is hideous, small and unpleasant … Cumberland has the highest average rainfall in Great Britain …’ Before long, though, he was writing notes on the nature of the Western Desert (‘the sinister shadows of stones at sunrise, the purplish sunset shadows that dramatize sand ripples into mountain ranges …’) that he would put to good use when he resumed his career as a novelist and short story writer after the war.23
Wherever they went, the airmen carried with them a comforting, familiar ethos to sustain them. In its short life, the RAF had developed its own way of speech, some of it the legacy of its Army and Navy origins, much of it new. Like Sommerfield, Roderic Papineau was a writer who served in the ranks. Both acted as field reporters for Tom Harrisson, one of the founders of Mass Observation, set up in 1937 to study the lives of ordinary people and which continued its work into wartime. In May 1941, while with 256 Squadron in Blackpool, he compiled an ‘Airman’s Vocabulary’ recording the usages he heard around him in workshop, NAAFI and pub.24
He and his comrades were ‘erks’, a term that applied to all other-ranks ground staff. Its origin would never be satisfactorily explained. Even Eric Partridge failed to nail it and his theory, proposed in his 1945 Dictionary of RAF Slang, that it was a corrupted abbreviation of ‘air mechanic’, does not convince.25 ‘Type’ was a handy alternative to ‘bloke’. Aeroplanes were ‘kites’ or ‘crates’. The rumours that hung like ground mist over base and depot (as they did over all military establishments) could be graded for reliability as ‘the real griff’ – almost certainly true, through ‘pukka gen’ – quite possible – to ‘duff’ or ‘shithouse gen’ – almost certainly bollocks. An expression that seems unique to the RAF was ‘by the centre!’, usually with an expletive inserted, to indicate ‘amazed and outraged disgust or surprise’. It does not appear to have lingered long in use after the war though Sam Pritchard chose it as the title for his memoir.
Some phrases had a different meaning for ground staff than for fliers. According to Papineau, when an erk was ‘shooting a line’ he was ‘pretending to unwarranted expert knowledge’. When a pilot did the same he was making some exaggerated boast, usually in the bar, and his utterance might well be recorded in the squadron ‘line book’. The 9 Squadron book reports Pilot Officer Arnold announcing loftily one night: ‘No I’m not keeping a diary, but I have the press cuttings of my flights …’26 A ‘shaky do’ on the ground was a ‘disappointing or unsatisfactory affair’. In the air, it meant a terrifying near-death experience, and was all the more eloquent for its understatement. A word that meant the same to all was ‘wizard’ – ‘superb’, according to Papineau.
Life in the RAF may not have been uniformly ‘wizard’ and, as in all branches of the military, the hours passed against a background buzz of moaning about the incompetence, laziness and stupidity of those in authority. Yet the overwhelming impression received from contemporaneous diaries and letters and subsequent fictional and factual accounts of the experience was that it was, by and large, positive, even enjoyable at times, and that if there had to be a war and you had to be in it, then the Royal Air Force was the place to be. The strong desire not to end up in the Army – still regarded as a stronghold of bovine generals and ovine troops – is often cited as a motivation, particularly in ground staff memoirs (which are far less numerous than those left behind by aircrew). But there was more to it than that. The RAF seemed modern, dashing and somehow less formal. Like the Navy, it also seemed to actually be doing something. According to Papineau, the Air Force nickname for sailors was affectionate and respectful – ‘tars’ or ‘matelots’. The Army, however, were ‘brown jobs’ or ‘the unemployed’. They themselves were ‘The Firm’, a term that indicates pride, purpose and efficiency.
Naturally this ebullience could easily be interpreted as cockiness and there were some, not just among their military peers, who found the high spirits of the junior service irritating. The avalanche of admiring mail published in the innovatory illustrated news magazine Picture Post in the early months of the war, following a letter from an anonymous erk complaining that ‘no decent girl seems to look at an airman’, contained a few caveats. ‘I must say it’s not true that no decent and respectable girls look at airmen,’ wrote A. M. ‘I know several … (I for one). But some of them are so sure of themselves, always talking about drink etc.’27 ‘I have come to the conclusion that foul manners are the badge of the Air Force,’ wrote a middle-aged woman who had served with the Army in France in the First World War, after being subjected to rough or ribald comments from RAF men in Kensington Gardens on two occasions. The bulk of the postbag, though, was gushingly, blushingly positive. ‘I was very surprised at your letter as I always imagined airmen were considered heroes’ ran one from a nurse. ‘I envied my girlfriend whose heart is in the sky and who is now knitting air-force blue socks! The fact that it’s such a stiff