Malta & West Germany - Memories of an RAF Childhood Abroad (461)

32:04I don't know what happened to it. I've got a feeling it was given to the house owner. yeah we do that was that was quite often a weekend activity we had would have been 1973 i had the opportunity to go we as a family had the opportunity to go with my dad on a dive expedition they went to elba the labrook sub aqua club went en masse to elba i've sent you a link to the you did you have a look at the youtube video yeah i did i'm going to add that to the episode information when this goes out so people yeah basically um there are some wrecks off the north coast of alba that were found in the late 60s and my larbrook sabaccu club were given the right to to dive one of the more significant ones in 1973 so we went down there as a an expedition they dived these rocks we were down there for three weeks they dived these wrecks as a professional archaeological it was an archaeological dive really we're pulling up all kinds of amphora tiles stuff from i think i think it's the first or second century ad i'll send you a link i found a reference to it a couple of weeks ago which gives a little bit more information about it but that was quite fascinating.

33:35There was an Italian guy called Gina Brambilla, who was the liaison. He'd been a wrestler, and he'd become an archaeologist, and he spent his life, because I've checked, he spent his entire working life post-wrestling going through looking at Etruscan smelting and all kinds of stuff. Very interesting guy. He died for the last five, six years. He must have been very old, but he was kind of renowned in the area for his archaeological work on Etruscan and early Roman archaeology. And I understand that the West German police would occasionally call out the Sub-Aqua Club. Yeah, they were called out on at least a couple of occasions to search for bodies.

34:38I don't think they ever found anything. Certainly he didn't tell me if he did. But yeah, they were called out by the police who were looking for missing persons and suspected that somebody might have fallen into a river or canal. They were a decent diving club. quite... I was about to say they didn't mess around, but they really did mess around. I remember one guy had a dry suit. It was essentially one of the old diving suits with the big bell helmets. I used to have an action man with one of them, I think. No, I didn't. I had an action man with a rubber suit. He had one of these things that were sealed around the neck and he would go out into a quarry, wherever they happened to be diving, sink himself to the bottom.

35:34Hopefully he didn't go down too deep. He would crack open an air canister and fill his suit up, rush into the top of the water surface, burst through it, and be bobbing around on top of the water like Michelin man. So yeah, they did fall around a bit. I'm sure there'll be people listening to this who were part of that. Yeah. Yeah. So was Larbrook a phantom station? To my knowledge, it was a phantom station. I don't know what else there would have been there. I was probably 10 when we left, so still fairly young. I knew about the phantoms on the basis. I tended to know about the planes my dad worked on.

36:21It had been, as I say that, when we went to school, it was one of the few schools I ever went to that had the house system. And the houses were named after British military aircraft from the previous generation. So there was Lightning House, Buccaneer, Javelin, and Canberra. And it amazes me that I remember little things like this, given I was so young. But yeah, they were the four schoolhouses. When we were at Bruggen, we ended up at a new school, which was the birth of the comprehensive system. But Larbrook was the tail end of the old imperial system. And I remember being taught about 19th century British heroes like Elizabeth Fry and Cadbury's and all kinds of things that kids these days would not...

37:28My son doesn't know who Elizabeth Fry is, or Scott of the Antarctic, but that was the kind of imperial age education. We got the tail end of that and the early part of the comprehensive system. In Malta and in Waddington, I've been fairly cut off in civilisation with you. So I knew nothing about pop music or anything. And I remember going to, when we went to Larbrook, kids in the class were much more worldly than I was. I remember being asked who my favourite group was. And I didn't have a favourite group because I didn't have anything about music. And that was the year, it was the start of the year.

38:11This would have been 1972 when Slade were at their heyday. so Slade became my favourite group at that time I can still sing goodbye to Jane I won't You weren't a T-Rex fan then? No, I was later but that was now Slade but certainly all the time I was Slade at Larbrook the Osmonds were a big thing Well Noddy Holder's a regular listener to this podcast No, I'm joking, I don't know maybe he is if you are thank you Noddy it was great fun yeah so we moved halfway from the tour we moved to Bruggan and I was on camp for some reason all the other kids in my class were off camp but the Ashwin family lived above us moved with us and my dad was on the flight simulator at Bruggan so we had we were all on camp so we had friends so is Bruggan a bigger base than Larbrook I couldn't tell you.

39:17I couldn't tell you. At Larbrook, wherever I went on Larbrook, I was in my dad's car at Bruggen. I was that little bit older, which makes quite a difference when you're a kid. I had a bicycle and I used to just roam everywhere, really. We'd roam the camp. Living on camp was very self-contained. There was a massive naffy for getting everything that we wanted. There was a cinema. It was a mixed base. There were a number of, there wasn't a huge amount of, but there were American kids there. And there must have been American forces there because they had a PX. And they used to be able to get hold of stuff that we couldn't get hold of.

40:03I can't remember what, but I do remember being very jealous and having a really strong desire to be able to go shopping in the PX, which I wasn't allowed. We weren't allowed to. So did you mix much with the American kids or not? There weren't that many about. They didn't go to our school. So I lived in a little row of six or seven. It's a little terrace. I lived at one end of it. The other end, we were an American family. We didn't mix, certainly for most of the time I was there. But I did get to know them. They were the Haynes family. The lad was called Bobo Haynes. We didn't mix a great deal.

40:43But yeah, we did pull down the wall that was between us. Just kids, you just stick to your own, really. I think that was the problem. And of course, we went to different schools, shopped in different shops. So did you see much of Germany while you were there? Did mum and dad take you out in the car and, you know, you see other towns and cities? I think they were, one of the reasons they went, he wanted the postage of Germany. I had a younger brother, I've got a brother three years younger than me, was that he wanted us to tour and travel and see something of the world, which I'm incredibly grateful for.

41:22Because over the three years we were there, we travelled over all of Western Europe, really. As far north as Denmark, trips down to Italy and holiday all over the place. In terms of week to week, we gravitated more towards Holland because the bases that we were on were quite close to the Dutch border. So when we went shopping, we'd go to Venlo or Nijmegen in Holland and do our shopping there. I don't remember. I remember going to the Ruhr Dam, which is the one that got knocked out. Yeah, the Mona, the Mona Dam. Yeah, I remember going to see that. We travelled a lot. We would have explored Germany on our trips when we were going through to Austria and Italy and down to the Alps and stuff like that.

42:19We'd have explored Germany. But normally when we went out on a sort of weekend jaunt and that, we tended to go to Holland. My main memory, my takeaway from Holland, is the fricadellen sausage. Have you ever had a fricadelle? No, I don't think I have.

42:37It's, I suppose it's a Dutch equivalent of a bratwurst, but it's not really a bratwurst. It's quite a long, wrinkly thing, probably made of similar meats. They're equivalent of fish and chips, really, but we lived on those. We delighted in fricadelle and chips for years. The other thing I picked up from the Dutch, brought back to this country, was the love of mayonnaise. I was going to ask you about that, because, yeah, I'm still a hardcore vinegar on my chips. Oh, my gosh. Maybe a bit of salt. I'm not a mayonnaise fan. Oh, you heathen. I developed a real – I don't think I'd ever had mayonnaise before we went out there.

43:16So your ketchup was – chips with ketchup was obviously what we'd have as British kids and going out there and, yeah, find chips, frickin' down and chips with mayonnaise. It was a habit I've never got out of. I'm currently trying to lose a load of weight. probably two years of abusing the mayonnaise what was the schooling like in Germany? as I said in Laarbrook we got the tail end of what I would call the imperial age of education we learned about Elizabeth Fry and Scott of the Antarctic yeah Scott of the Antarctic who else would we have learned about probably John Peel, not John Peel, Robert Peel.

44:03You might have been listening to John Peel, but not learning about him, maybe. Yeah. And then we went to Bruggan, and they were building a new school while I was there, and it got opened while I was there. And it was the Leonard Cheshire School. Leonard Cheshire came to open it. They built two schools, one next to each other. One was primary school. Must have been primary. They were for different age groups. They were essentially part of the same complex, but different schools. One was the Douglas Bader School, and one was the Leonard Cheshire School. Leonard Cheshire came to open our school, and I assumed Douglas Bader went to open what would have been my brother's school.

44:51And that was the start of comprehensive education for us. so you're on camp I think the one regret or one failing I think of the education that I had in Germany was we didn't learn any German bits, just little bits and pieces I think

45:13we fail as a nation with language education but I didn't come away with any, after three years in Germany with any significant command of the German language which I think is a failing. We had this comprehensive system, brand new school. It was lovely. It was lovely. You go out and play football in the playgrounds. Was there a cinema on site? There was a cinema at Larbrook and there was a cinema at Bruggan. At Larbrook, I remember we used to go to a Saturday matinee. So we'd get dropped off. The kids would get dropped off us. Man, all the parents, we're chopping their kids off. And we'd all go into the cinema and we'd watch two films and we'd be out of our parents' hair for two or three hours on a Saturday morning.

46:07And I just remember it being absolute chaos and their kids running around. So what were they showing to you on a Saturday morning? I seem to remember things like Flash Gordon and things like that. Just sort of 1950s and 1960s horror stuff. I remember some film about I remember some film about ants taking over the world Kind of You might have seen Sci-fi, sort of sci-fi stuff Yeah, all kinds of stuff It was all kind of B-movie stuff really It might have been Lauren Hardy Anything just to try and keep us occupied For a couple of hours really Television wasn't massive We hadn't had massive We hadn't had big access to television in Waddington before we came out.

46:54We had a black and white telly and watched Star Trek, Blue Peter, and Gunsmoke. And Garrison's Gorillas is something that I remember that nobody else seems to remember. No, I don't remember that. Was that a British Forces broadcasting channel? No, this would have been... That was in Waddington. When you're out in Germany, and certainly in Holland, as I said, we live next to the Dutch border, The Dutch are brilliant with languages. They speak English better than we do. But they would broadcast a lot of more American TV. So that would be on Dutch channels. We got to see Columbo, Kojak, the Partridge family.

47:40All right. So these were subtitled in Dutch so you could hear the English, yeah? Yeah, we got the English version of it. So, yeah, Saturday night we'd all go around to the Ashwings House and watch whatever detective drama was on. Must have been films and things like that as well. I certainly remember Columbo, Kojak and the Partridge family. I don't remember any British television particularly. Determined to make the rest of summer the best of summer? L.L. Bean has clothing and gear designed to do it all, like sun-washed apparel that feels broken in from the start, rainwear for every surprise rainstorm, hand-sewn boat shoes, And of course, the iconic Boat & Tote.

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49:18I don't remember. I don't know what I think that was when we got to Laarbruch. So that was right on it early on in my German tour. In fact, I'm sure it was. And I was a bit confused by it. I would have been eight. I couldn't really make sense of what was going on. The first film I remember war film I remember comprehending. What was the one with the Clint Eastwood, where they fired paint. So what were they, stole all the gold out of the... Oh, Kelly's Heroes. Kelly's Heroes. Yeah, with Donald Sutherland, and they buy the tiger tanks off the Germans or something. That made sense to me. But the Battle of Breton was...

50:04I couldn't really comprehend it. Something I... I've not mentioned that a lot when I wrote to you, which I think is worth mentioning. First black lad I knew, the first black lad I'd ever met, actually, was a lad called Michael Watson. and he came on to Bruggen, really getting towards the end of our tour. So I hadn't knew him for a few months, but we became friends. He lived off camp. There certainly was no... He was just a kid in our class, no racism or anything like that. The reason I mention it is because he lived off camp at Elm, I believe it was called, which is a small settlement about half a mile outside the camp.

50:49And there were a lot of RF personnel in part of Elms. And I met him on camp one weekend, and we sort of wandered off camp and up to Elms. And he was, I just remember being slightly puzzled because his family had a much nicer place than everybody else, but they were housed separately. And I wondered, I've always wondered whether that was a... Because he would have been one of the early members, black members of the RAF. Yeah, they were sort of housed separately from everybody else. Nicer accommodation is my recollection. but separate. I just thought that was worth it. I observed, I kind of noted it in my head.

51:49Hello, Michael Watson, if you're listening. And yeah, I mean, anybody who's listening to this episode, we will be posting information in the episode notes, but also join our Facebook group, which is a great location to discuss your Cold War experiences. And if you know Mark, then he'd love to hear from you um as well i do go ahead and check that out mark i one of the questions i wanted to ask you was you know you're on an active or you're on active ref basis so you must have experienced the tachyval yeah i i i found out later in life that tachyval was um an attack evaluation. It was a simulation of war.

52:39For many, many years, I thought it was a tacky, T-A-C-K-Y, C-K-Y, Val, and never quite understood what a tacky Val was. But yeah, it's an attack evaluation where the penny finally dropped. Basically, the camp was put on full alert and had to pretend that a war had been declared. So my dad would disappeared for days on end and come back in a an NBC paper suits basically NBC micro yeah nuclear biological chemical NBC so he'd be wearing that all the time he'd be doing long long hours and the bases are protected by the RAF regiments I remember one particular incident during one of these attacking evals, we were out playing in the playground at playtime these guys in full fully arms, rifled up camoed faces came cycling across the road towards the school, climbed over the wall when we were in the playground and it was kind of a little bit like the intro to Dad's army Yeah, yeah I can see it now Yeah, so they had from one end of the playground to the other looking from side to side for Russians and disappeared.

54:09We all just did gogolite staring at all that. It was good fun. Brilliant. Yeah. Were you told by your parents what to do if the balloon actually went up? Because there were allegedly plans for evacuation of civilian or non-military personnel. now no i don't think there was any plans to evacuate us i know later on in life when when when the collapse of the soviet empire and the um soviet archives were opened up i remember reading an article probably it must have been in in the london evening standard when i worked in london there was a a graphic of all the places where the russians had nuclear weapons pointed and essentially it was everywhere I ever lived.

55:02So I don't think there was much charge of evacuation, but it was never mentioned to us, no. Yeah, yeah. So where was your, because your dad's last posting is back to his homeland, really? Yeah, we moved in 75. So Germany was 72 to 75 and then my dad was posted to Lucas, RF Lucas. Again, I think still working on, certainly in simulation, I think it was still Phantoms at that time, but they were being phased out and replaced with the Jaguar, I think, by that time. And we lived off camp. Again, I lived in Cooper and went to the local primary school for the last of my, or middle school, Castle Hill School I went to.

55:57I never went to the local senior school. And, yeah, my dad did his last year there. But it's not a year, year and a half, something like that. And then he was given the opportunity to take voluntary redundancy, which he did. And because he'd done so many years, they gave him a decent amount of money as redundancy pay. And he was able to buy a house. or not outright, but Ableton. We bought our first house down in Buckinghamshire. Not a lot I can tell you about Lucas. Well, I didn't go on to base at Lucas very much. I lived in Cooper, mixed with local kids, picked up a Scottish accent within about three days.

56:46Well, you want to fit in as a kid, don't you? Oh, I went out. I remember going out to the local sort of woodland area with an English accent, meeting a lad, making friends with him. His name is Craig and going home for my tea. Going home for my tea with a broad Scottish accent that I didn't lose until we moved back down south a year later. And I can tell you've got the Buckinghamshire accent now. or certainly southern England. Yeah, yeah, I'm a southern boy. It's been a long time since I lived up north. When, Mark, when you look back on your time as a, you know, an RAF brat moving around all these different locations, what is your most favourite experience or time that you had?

57:47Early on, Califrana. even though I nearly drowned. Califrana was a wonder to me as a young kid. I'd never been back to Malta. My brother went back on a cruise a couple of years ago. He was born there, but I don't think he has a great deal of association because he doesn't remember it. But Califrana, all the things I've said, really. I mean, the Vulcan bombers flying over the school and having to hold on to the desks. It was in Lincolnshire. Me and my friend Pete Mullinger going out into the fields behind his house and sitting in the middle of the field chewing on sugar beet, being in Germany and going out and seeing the boars in the fields just below, in the woodlands just behind our house, the wild boar.

58:33They're all great memories, really. Hi, this is Rhonda in Virginia, and I support Cold War Conversations because I think the work that Ian is doing is critically important. I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can. So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast and I look forward to it every week. To be like Rhonda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the Cold War. as a monthly or annual supporter. You'll be able to listen ad-free, you'll become one of our community, get the sought-after Cold War Conversations drinks coaster as a thank you, and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing that you're helping to preserve Cold War history.

59:25Just go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate to find out more. What is your sort of worst memory of your time following your dad around the world? Do I have any bad ones? That's fine if you don't. I don't think there's any bad memories. Even though I didn't realise it at the time, it was a fascinating world to be in. I suppose one regret, I didn't join the forces. I was born in 64. My adolescence was through the punk era. So I became quite rebellious and there was no way I was going to join the forces. And I think I'd have, I kind of regret that a little bit. I think I'd have had a good life in a different way.

1:00:22It's what I've had. I've not become such a rebel and joined it. I've shed enough of that rebelliousness to have recommended it to my son, although he hasn't gone down that path. Can you remember where you were when the Berlin Wall opened and how you heard about it? Yeah, I was living in Peckham.

1:00:48Del Boy country. It was Del Boy country, yeah. I was a member at that time. I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party. This sounds like the start of a whole new episode, Mark. Yeah, I was a foaming commie at the time. Yeah, I remember all that happening at that time. It was generally considered to be a good thing.

1:01:16I've been over to Berlin since then. I've got my friend Dave who spent many years living in Berlin. Yeah, that's what I was doing. I was working in IT, living in Peckham, being a pain in the ass Trotskyite. Right. So were you on all the C &D demos and things like that? Yeah, all that stuff. All that stuff, yeah. For years, for many years. Maybe we need a part two about that. Were you involved in any of the direct action? No, I stayed up at Hayford Peace Camp briefly. I was on a couple of demos down there because that was just down the road from Aylesbury where I grew up when we left the RAF. I don't think I'd get an episode out of that.

1:02:05I mean, I was just, just used to go on demos, really, for years. I got very political. I'm far too political for too long. And I don't think it really enhanced my life that much. I'm still fairly political, but, you know, I've mellowed out a lot at my older age. As we all do, Mark, as we all do. Yeah, yeah. I never went to Greenham, although I had friends went down there. Upper Hayford was close to us, which was an American base. They had a long-term peace camp down the side of there. I stayed there a couple of times. Yeah, because there were some really big demos at Upper Hayford, I seem to remember.

1:02:50I think there was one where hundreds got arrested, or a significant number. Yeah, I never got arrested for anything like that. Well, they breached a fence at Greenham Common, I don't know if they ever did that up at Hayford. I don't know. I'd have to look it up. I would say, one thing I was going to say, I haven't said, is that after my dad left the RAF, he stayed in defence. He first worked for region fusion, did all kinds of things. He's best known for televisions, I believe. But they also did the flight simulators. So he was constantly back and forth to Bruggen and Larbrook for years as a civvy working on the sims that he'd worked on while he was in the RAF.

1:03:44And then he left, worked for other, he worked for Marconi, he worked for Hunting Avionics. And I think at one point he was managing simulators, a collection of simulators for the Royal Air Force and employed, I believe, Michael Ashwin, the kid who lived above us when we were at Larbrook, I believe ended up working for my dad on The Sims. I think he was in the rap himself. So what goes around comes around. Yeah. Wow. Wow. It's been a good chat. Your podcast excellent. We tend to dwell on the Second World War and the great conflagrations of history when we're looking at history but as you spotted yourself a real niche for talking about that long cold dark nukes pointing at each other period of history that that we all live through absolutely and there's so many different stories even people talking about the same subject have a different view or they see different things or different angles but Mark, it's been great chatting with you.

1:04:55Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your time and showing an interest. Don't miss the episode extras such as videos, photos and other content. Just look for the link in the episode information. The podcast wouldn't exist without the generous efforts of our financial supporters. And I'd like to thank one and all of them for keeping the podcast on the road. If you'd like to help, go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate. The Cold War conversation continues in our Facebook discussion group. Just search for Cold War Conversations on Facebook. Thanks very much for listening and see you next week.

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