Quite, and not at Deepcut either from what we learn..... Times change....
If there was one thing the army really liked it was a bit of pomp and ceremony. Every now and again a circumstance would crop up where the Regiment got an excuse to get everyone on the square in best BD with the band playing and march us round like silly buggers. Not only this but they made us practice for weeks beforehand. I remember once when we were paraded at Spandau and after several men had collapsed with the cold, the MO sent word out that the parade had to be cancelled. That was the day when Tara demonstrated to us that if we dug our iron shod heels in we could march perfectly safely on sheet ice. There was one small problem, he went flat on his back, a sweet moment! These occasions were private ones like the Queens Birthday and Regimental Anniversaries of famous battles. The QB parade was a Brigade affair and took place at the Olympic Stadium, we used to call it the Nuremberg Rally. I enjoyed the band and the marches but hated all the crap that went with it. I know they were instilling a sense of pride in the Regiment etc. but it didn’t cut any ice with me. My Australian genes poking through I suspect.
We did have one big public parade in the French Sector, I think some general was going home or something and all four powers paraded for him. It was funny seeing the different troops on parade. The Russians were plain and deadly serious, the Yanks all had chrome plated helmets and did a lot of fancy rifle drill, we were relatively drably dressed but fairly smart on parade, the French were an undisciplined shower. Their drill was only so so and when they were stood easy they all leaned their rifles against the nearest object and lit up! All childish stuff but we talked about it afterwards and came to the conclusion that on the day’s showing, the Russkies were the ones we’d least like to be up against in a fight.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Shortly after we settled in at Gatow we all got permanent passes, any time we were off duty we could go off the camp, all we had to do was get back before 02:00hrs, I have an idea we were allowed to wear civvies later as well. A truck ran a shuttle service down to Brooke Barracks and all we had to do was climb on board, book out at the main gate and we were free. I should mention Ginger here. He was the German Security guard on the main gate and was always on in the evenings, he was a good bloke, he’d wave you through with a legless mate or give a hand with any minor wounds so we could go back to Support Co looking respectable. He was another old Wehrmacht man and just the sort of bloke I would have shared a slit trench with.
Ginger the ex-Wehrmacht security guard on the main gate. A good man who looked after us well.
[A word about the term ‘slit trench’. Many years later I was in a position where I was writing a supporting letter for a friend of mine who had applied for the position of Dean at Carleton College in Northfield MN. I used the phrase slit trench and it was pointed out to me that in the American Army this had an entirely different connotation, it was a latrine trench! I took advice and did a quick edit, it became ‘share a fox-hole’.]
The first place we explored was Spandau. Most of the bars sold either Barenbier or Schultheiss. The Schultheiss sign was a fat burgher with a stein surrounded by a red neon ring. We used to call it ‘The Sign of the Flaming Arsehole’ because that was the nickname for the BIB shoulder flash, a red circle denoting our situation of being permanently surrounded by Russians. It took a while to get used to the small glasses, the sticks they used to wipe the froth off the beer and the fact they didn’t take money off you but put a pencil mark on the beer mat and charged you when you were going or when they thought you’d had
enough. This was to get us into serious trouble later! We found out about bock bier and became addicted to bockwurst. Give the Germans their due, they understand sausages!
We also learned that if you were in a bar late at night and the barman wanted to get rid of you for any reason he would give you a free drink, a good slug of Escorial Green. This was a very potent herbal schnapps, up to 120 proof spirit which tasted nice and slipped down easily but had devastating effects if you were already tanked up on beer. I looked into this recently and the green colour is due to natural chlorophyll in the drink and this is why it was in stone bottles because exposure to the light beached it. It isn’t a true Absinthe but is very closely related to it. If you want a nice after dinner liqueur by all means try it, it’s a very pleasant drink but on no account mix it with other drinks! It was the barman’s version of a Mickey Finn. There is also the possibility that in Berlin in those days it was home-made like the bathtub brandy and even more dangerous.
Spandau was interesting at first but as the novelty of being in a foreign environment started to wear thin, we started looking further afield. There was a good public transport system in Berlin and we used it. We soon discovered the delights of the Reichskanzler Platz or ‘Gobblers Gulch’ as we knew it. Evidently it got this name because German ladies would give you oral sex for 50 pfennig, I hasten to say I have no personal knowledge of this. If I remember rightly this was where the main NAAFI club was (‘Navy Army and Air Force Institute). Many years later while waiting for a flight in an American Airport I fell into conversation with a lady who was a cashier at the NAAFI club and we decided that we must have met each other there all those years ago and only the other day while talking to Kath Brown, wife of my butcher, I found that later on she had served in Berlin and also knew about the club. It’s a small world! Berlin at this time was a desperately poor city and there was a shortage of almost everything, I used to ask mother to send me the small two ounce tins of Nescafe, you could get a watch or a bottle of brandy for one of these. The camera I used in Berlin was a swap for two tins of Nescafe and later when I got home I was told what a good lens it had. There were hundreds of night clubs and our favourite drink was beer or rum and coke, we were one of the main sources of income for these places and were welcomed everywhere. There were floor shows and novelty acts, some of them bordering on risqué but none, at least in the high class joints, pornographic or explicit.
Having said this, I had a memorable experience in one of the clubs one night. We were sat at a table right on the ring side, all the acts took place on the dance floor. I had my back to the floor and we’d settled in to the first or second beer when I noticed that nobody was listening to what I was saying. I swivelled round and got the surprise of my life, there was a naked woman on a white horse right behind me! The horse had felt boots on its feet, I suppose to give it a grip on the polished floor, so it was dead silent when it walked. The look on my face must have been a picture and the lady evidently recognised a virgin when she saw one because she slipped down off the horse, gave me a peck on the cheek, murmured “Liebchen” and ran off the floor. I had seen my first naked woman and liked it. They had to restrain me, I was certain she had fallen madly in love with me but after a couple of what the Germans called ‘cognac’ but had never seen brandy, I recovered my poise. Every young lad should have experiences like this, very formative!
I’d heard about Berlin in the 1930’s and there was a lot of that feeling around. I got the impression that there were different strata of population, one of them kept normal hours and worked to keep the city going. Another operated at night and was dedicated to either servicing the night life or participating in it. There was a flourishing black market and we were constantly being touted by men and women who wanted to know what we did. They were looking for the people who had access to stores because this was the biggest source of black market goods. Remember the city was virtually under siege. The underworld was very close to the surface.
