Action Replay by Jeffrey Hamm

Author:Jeffrey Hamm [Jeffrey Hamm]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Auto Biography
Publisher: F.O.M.
Published: 2004-07-07T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE When I left the Army, London was being subjected to the first attacks from flying-bombs and rockets. In the isolated areas where tanks were stationed the war had largely passed us by. The brunt of the enemy's onslaught had been borne by London and other great cities, as I was now to witness at close range. However, I had had a glimpse of enemy action while in the Army and stationed at Hythe. German planes would come over of an evening, skimming over the waves from France in the deepening dusk, so that they were scarcely visible. As the sirens sounded we were supposed to run up to the roof of the house in which we were billetted and man an anti-aircraft gun. By the time we reached the gun the Luftwaffe had dashed over Hythe and shot-up the marshalling yards in the railway sidings at Ashford, and then turned tail and headed back to France. Occasionally we were in time to spot the enemy disappearing over the Channel, in the direction of the French coast, clearly visible from Hythe in good weather. In fact, the view was often so clear that we could pick out German army vehicles moving up and down the coast. But I saw and heard much more of the war after reaching London.

Wartime conscription had produced an acute shortage of teachers, and I was invited to attend the Ministry of Education for an interview, with a view to re-entering the profession. The invitation stipulated that I must be prepared to undergo a medical examination, and "a written examination in English"; but on my document the latter requirement had been crossed out. As I sat in the waiting-room I watched two Central European refugees struggling to write an essay, no doubt in order to satisfy the Ministry that they had sufficient command of our language to teach in an English school. When I overheard one candidate ask the other how to spell "skintillating", I thought my chances of selection must be good, and so it proved. My interviewer was impressed by my teaching record in State and private schools, and in the Falkland Islands, and he asked me if I would be prepared to attend a twelve-month refresher course at a teachers' training college. I readily agreed, and I was assured that I would receive confirmation of my acceptance within a few days. Instead, I received a curt postcard telling me that I had "not been considered suitable". The Ministry of Education also had its political boffin.

A friend in London rented me a room, and I started to look for work. The employment exchange in the area, Willes-den, had a vacancy for an assistant to the Personnel Manager of Park Royal Coachworks, lately part of the tottering British Leyland empire. The most apt of all cliches is surely the saying that truth is stranger than fiction. In that factory I witnessed scenes that would have been dismissed as too fantastic if they had been included in such a film as I'm All Right, Jack.

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