Clearout Nostalgia

I've been clearing out a lot of my old stuff from my bedroom. Here at home there are cupboards which are not opened, long forgotten things under the bed, and the occasional smile-inducing relic of some long distant phase of lightning-bright enthusiasm.

I've just thrown most of them away.

In my early teens I longed to fly. On the bus to school each morning I imagined taking the same route in the air, how different things would look from the sky as the bus rattled along narrow roads nestling between open fields, and how happy I would feel up there, floating above the land. So desperate was I to fly that when I heard you got to go flying in real aeroplanes for free, I surprised my parents by joining the Air Cadets, or, rather grandiosely, the Air Training Corps.

It still amuses me to think how readily and enthusiastically I took to that atmosphere of halfhearted military pretence. The whole thing was a recruiting exercise for the Royal Air Force, and I went for it hook, line and sinker - so much so that for a long time, that was what I had my sights set on - joining the military. It was all suddenly very important, and I became obsessed with my promotion through the cadet ranks. Because the local Ventnor 'Flight' was so small, I acquired a corporal's stripe very quickly (age 13, I think). It shut down and I moved to the Sandown Flight where there were a staggering twenty-odd cadets and I was thrust into competition to become a cadet sergeant.

So I planned and schemed. I drew up plans for weekend mini-camps or 'exercises', where there would be map reading, hiking, shooting, and night exercises. None of my plans were ever accepted, but I got the impression they still counted towards that third stripe. Ah, naivété.

Night exercises were my favourite. After trawling my way through my first Tom Clancy doorstopper-cum-blockbuster, I was all up for opportunities for stealth and ninja-esque activity. They were rudimentary playground games adapted for the open downs and forests, but in the dark, daubed with camouflage cream and sporting small branches from every spare buttonhole, no one really cared.

I even made some of these.

This little beauty is currently residing in a bin bag outside in the rain.

I am a little sad to be letting it go, but I am pretty confident I won't be needing it in the next month or so before leaving for the USA, so I decided to blog about it.

It is a stake and an empty tin, filled with a few stones, connected by string which has been darkened by being soaked in mud. A tripwire sound mine. In the dark all cats are grey, or so it is said. I thought this would come in handy in letting a defending team know when they were under attack. You peg out the stake, wind out the string, and stash the tin in a bush on one side of a path, sit back, and wait for someone to walk through it, alerting you.
At least, that's the idea.

One evening on Ventnor Downs I managed to wrangle a place on the team which were defending the ramparted and flinty car park against an attacking team, who, in designing the exercise, I had given an eight-foot-long tube loaded with sandbags to place underneath the squadron minibus. That was their objective. My team had to try and stop them. I placed a few sound mines on the more obvious approaches.

Did I mention that I was 15 at this time?

I was 15 at this time.

Nothing ever went to plan on these things. I mean ever. The attacking team unwittingly lost all the sandbags climbing up the Downs in the dark, and didn't think that the fact that the smallest team member could carry their 'bomb' unaided was any kind of problem, and one chap, a 19 year old overtly racist Afrikaaner who I'm unafraid to say no one really liked...well, he nearly lost some teeth.

In the dark all cats are grey.

A few cadets rambled amiably through the car park, loitered near the bus and rambled away. The 'bomb' had found it's target. A cry went up, and the attacking team fled. In the confusion a sharp hash of stone on tin was heard. Then another, and another, getting rapidly faster as the string shortened. Then there was a sharp cry.

A sound mine had claimed the Afrikaaner as its victim.

Shortly afterwards, I got promoted.
Can't imagine why.

At the age of seventeen I realised the truth - out of all the people I knew, I was probably the least suited to joining the armed forces, and I stopped going.

Still. I can't help grinning about it sometimes.