PINS - Rule Forty-seven: On Leave / RnR

(I’ll do you the big grill, the summer special, all the meats.)

Maybe things were too busy to work out the rules for giving your units some leave and recreation time, but you’d expect the C.O. (the Commanding Officer, Chank Opsomaniac, Chopper Orchid, Cingulum Obelus, Clicket Optophone, Cowlstaff Oat, or however you want to name them) to sort something out on the hoof; like that ride out to Beamish when that daft old powder blue Vauxhall Viva somehow got down Split Crow Road before giving up the ghost, and we had to get the Metro and then a bus out. Ended up in Whickham an’ ah. Anyway, the whole point of a day out is to get there, get bored, have a drink somewhere crap, and come back. The fun is in being back, and saying how crap it was. Holidays are for the likes of those on the telly in soaps, or in the papers. 

But I wouldn’t listen to your C.O. that much, you learn to enjoy yourselves. I remember being on Crete in the early 1960s after demob, and there were some German fellows there, the same age as us or a bit younger, and all the waiters laughed and spat and shouted ‘Nazi pig’ at them. They were far too young to have even been in the war, it wasn’t their fault, those poor lads, we thought; you weren’t sure what they’d had to put up with in their pasts. There are too many naysayers in this world. Enjoy yourselves.

RnR can be found at a stately home, looking at the gardens. Hours and hours of your mother looking at rose bushes. We never go in the houses, they are expensive to enter and we are not to be trusted, as we may break something. Just to sneak in with your father to find a toilet near the entrance before we drive back, with no-one looking. Don’t embarrass yourself. “It’s the only time I can get myself away from endlessly serving boys and men,” mother says. She walks deliberately slowly through the sunken gardens and around the various displays and we drag ourselves after her. Everyone is old and wearing dark suits, they look shrivelled or as if they are made of paper. They must be Victorians? “Let's go back round the corner we just came, I just want to look at those borders again,” she says. 

After your grandad died, your grandmother, my mother, went on holiday behind the Iron Curtain!

On leave also means leaving the boat for a crafty drink in a deserted taverna in a village square, when all the others are looking at ruins, and you and Conky have a thousand lire note between you. You buy a bottle of the local hooch and pull out the note, and the whole village comes out to look at it! It gets taken round by the old proprietor - bent double he is - to see if anyone can get change, eeh, you’ve never seen such a kerfuffle! You have to buy another bottle to get some notes back!

The police come to check the hundred pound note the Norwegian lads put behind the club bar. “We buy everything for you,” they said, oh aye, sounds like gangster talk, best be careful, given those dodgy fivers doing the rounds, says the manager. The riots are just over, half of Shields went up, burnt the tarmac. The pair get locked up in the stockroom where the brooms and empty crates are, until the Polis turn up. They are on holiday, we found them near the Monument, sat on the steps with a can and their rucksacks. They are let out to cheers. One gets a taxi to go a hundred yards up the street to get some chips. 

The two Finnish girls are jumping on your bed to dance music. For no reason as far as you can see. And who said they could? They are on holiday. In Gateshead. Your landlord has invited them to stay, met them in town while he was buying seafood in the Grainger Market. What are they doing here anyway? Your landlord is sixty odd and has one eye and suffers from PTSD after his time in Malaya with the DLI. Laid on the road looking at his eye for a day, while being shot at, so he says.

On leave means sneaking out of the Baroque church that escaped destruction in the war and where Bach had played, and going with the popular lad you secretly think is a bit of a dick to a local sports shop, to look at trainers. You have no interest in German trainers. He pretends he’s going to steal them to wind you up. You only realise later, maybe twenty years or so later, that you are really only interested in hanging out with this lad as a test; he’s a kind of person who lives easily in the world, and takes what he wants with ease and with no shame in the taking, a human being wholly unlike you. It’s a memory you hold from this school trip.  

I nearly died on holiday, twice, when I put my foot in the quicksand in a Norwegian bog, and when that artery opened up in Germany. Oh, you would never have seen me again.

You go to Rossendale for some RnR with a girl you like, who you took to the match, away, twice (once Hillsborough, once Ewood), and didn’t moan either time, but even consented to giving you a tonguing when that last minute winner went in. The only other time was with that nice girl from Luton who went on the Gallowgate with black suede ankle boots on and a bow in her hair. She never spoke to you again. Anyway, you go round to hers after a long bus ride to the top end of Rossy, and after spending some time alone with her, she asks, “My brother, he’s only 14, he’s in his room taking acid. What shall we do?”

When he stayed for a bit, he kept pissing in the sock drawer; nearly ended our marriage.

Enjoy yourselves! We would go to the football at Craven Cottage when I was off duty and we once watched Newcastle play Fulham in their end and we beat them, but we had a chinwag and a bit of a to-and-fro with their lot, lovely fellows, we all went out for a Chinese meal afterwards in Soho, that was in the late nineteen-fifties; those were the days!

An accompanying post to this Rule, with relevant illustrations, can be found in the Museum of Photocopies.