England

I left LA hung over.  At this time in my life it seemed all my new chapters started with a hangover.  I flew to Philadelphia and took a shuttle to McGuire Air Force Base.  We waited in a cavernous hangar/terminal all day, all night and part of the next day.  Our charter flight required new tires before it could be cleared for takeoff.  Finally after enough time to lose track of time we had new tires or at least adequate used tires and we were off to England.  

We arrived some time in the afternoon to Mildenhall Air Force Base in England.  No one knew what day it was.  A few of us were going to RAF Chicksands.  We stood around lost until an Englishman gathered us up and took us there in his van.  He called us “Mates.”  I think he said, “Welcome to England, Mates.”  It was hard to tell what anyone said in those first days.  England was wonderfully foreign.  I was in Europe, not reading about it, but there.  Everything was smaller, greener, old and modern jumbled together, everything looked English, even on an American Air Force Base and the highway from Mildenhall to Bedfordshire was as though we were driving through a fairyland.  I couldn’t peel my eyes from the window of the bus and I’m sure my mouth was open the whole trip.    

We reached RAF Chicksands and the duty sergeant asked if any of us were football players.  None of us were and he lost interest.  We were assigned rooms and the next morning began processing to go to our units.  Our security clearances had to be confirmed.  We had some sort of military duties in the meantime, picking up trash or running CQ, charge of quarters, for a week or so.  And then we went to work.

Royal Air Force Chicksands was an Air Force Security Service Base.  The 6950^th Security Squadron shared the base with an Air Force Communications Service Unit.  The base sat in the middle of Osborne Farm called Chicksands Priory, a former Gilbertine Priory, with its own ghost in the Officer’s Club.  It seemed to me there were more gardeners than guards.  The base couldn’t be seen from the highway and the road in had ominous warning signs prohibiting the casual visitor.  At the center of the Osborne Farm was a FLR-9 antenna, a multi-story antenna array from a design by the Germans from World War II.  We listened to Eastern Europe and Western Russia. 

The base itself was newly built dormitories, an administrative building, a BX, a store with American goods tax free, an officers’ club, an NCO club, an Airman’s club, a library, a bowling alley and the motor pool.  On the west side of the base there was on base family housing and an elementary school.  There were no flight line and no airplanes.  All together we were about 2,000 GIs, mostly Security Service, Morse code, teletype, and Russian speaking intercept operators. 

I was assigned to Dog (Delta) Flight and given a green baseball cap.  There were Able, Baker, and Charlie Flights, blue, red and yellow baseball caps.  Between us we listened to the Russians and others 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year.  As ditty bops, Morse Code Intercept Operators, we listened to trains, planes, army units, and anyone else we could find and copied it live on Smith Corona manual typewriters.  We used 7 ply computer paper on continuous sheets with carbon between them and all of that was sent to Fort Meade, Maryland.

The messages were in code, five letter groups of gibberish, but we were more concerned with who sent it and where it was from.  Maybe at Fort Meade they could read the body of the message.  At the beginning of the transmission there was a lot of information exchanged between  radio operators and we came to know them individually, their moods and personality, which we could hear in the code just as if they were speaking.  It was apparent they were Russian GIs just like us, doing a boring job with the same enthusiasm with which we did ours.  Sometimes it was interesting, most of the time it wasn't.   

The operations building was at the top of the hill separated from the rest of the base.  The antenna was further out in the woods.  I never saw it except for the bit of construction that poked over the trees.  We wore security badges and had to pass through a gate.  During the day when an armed Air Policeman manned the booth, it was pretty serious stuff, but at night one of us manned the booth.  I liked guard duty, it was an excuse to read a novel.  Of course, anyone other than us anywhere near the building would have been a remarkable event and they would have been quickly caught.  It never happened.  

In pretty quick order I found a flat, an English apartment, the second story of a row house on a street of row houses and shops.  Mr. and Mrs. Collins owned the house at 78 Castle Road and rented both floors to American GIs and their wives.  Castle Road went by a small  hill nearby that had once been Bedford Castle.  The Collins came to adopt Cathy and me and were our friends for the three years we were in England.  They were an older couple, probably older than my parents.  They owned a little shop on Kempston Road.  It was a small shop with barely enough room to stand in next to a counter.  Behind the counter were drawers and cabinets from floor to ceiling and if you told them what you wanted, they pulled it out of a cabinet and there it was.  I remember it was mostly soft goods, knitted things, baby clothes. 

They lived in a large comfortable house on the north side of town with a ragged hedge in front and a ramshackle garden in back.  They invited us to their home a couple of times, once to tea and once when Cathy’s parents came to visit.  They were wonderful warm people and particularly took care of us.  When we talked about moving into a nicer flat after a couple of years, they talked about buying a place we would like that they could rent to us. 

The day I went to town looking for a flat I saw a newspaper in a news rack with a screaming headline.  That’s how I learned Robert Kennedy had been shot.  I had cast my first vote ever in the California primary by absentee ballot that month.  I voted for Robert Kennedy.  Celebrating his victory in California he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan.  It was a miserable day.  Unimaginably life just went on after that, but assassination  had become a part of American politics.  In five short years Kennedy, King, and then Robert Kennedy were all cut down.  A few years later George Wallace was crippled by an assassin.  

Cathy arrived from Southern California.  We moved into 78 Castle Road, the upstairs flat, and we made love and nothing was said about that last night in California.  We went out shopping in the afternoon and Cathy bought a set of crystal water glasses.  They cost 60 schillings.  She thought she had a bargain, schillings and cents, but schillings were 12 pence and 12 schillings was a pound.  A pound was worth about $2.50 in 1968.  Sixty schillings was 5 pounds, about $14, more than a day’s pay for me at the time.  Things were inexpensive in England for our dollars but not crystal glasses.  Our flat was £23 a month.  It was built in 1870 and was uninsulated brick and sat low in the ground.  Bedford was in the Fens.  We learned Fens meant swamp.  The ground was always damp and our flat was always cold. 

We learned to speak English.  There were gas fires in our flat (apartment).  We paid for the gas in a meter downstairs that took schillings.  It was a cold night when we ran out of schillings.  Later we bought paraffin (kerosene) heaters.  They were dangerous and hard to use.  If I didn’t trim the wick just right it could fill the flat with thick greasy smoke before I could turn it off.  We bought kerosene at the base and stored it in 5 gallon jugs in the back of the flat.  

Our flat was four blocks from the center of town.  Bedford was a market town, the center of manufacturing and commerce for the area around us.  Only a few blocks from us and across the Ouse River was farmland, and a path to walk to Cardington, a village nearby, about a half hour away.  Two blocks east on Castle Road was the pub, the Gordon Arms.  Castle Road around us was flats and shops, a  bakery, a news agent, an off-license, a butcher, a barber, and a couple of green grocers.  High Street in the opposite direction was crowded with shops and restaurants. 

In college I was an English major and Cathy was a history major.  We were ecstatic to be in England.  It seemed too good to be true.  Our situation was as good as anything we could imagine.  I was making $250 a month which in 1968 was the same as a teacher in England was making.  A pint of beer was less than 2 schillings or 25 cents.  The first year it seemed like times were tight but by the time we left I was making over $500 a month and we were saving money for college.  I had money in my pocket.  It took a long time to ever be that rich again.     

I worked at the base, an eight hours and then back home.  I hitchhiked into the base.  Another GI going to work would pick me up.  It was shift work.  We worked four day shifts, had 24 hours off, and then four swing shifts, 24 hours off and then four midnight shifts and 72 hours off, 3 days off at the end of each shift.   The constant change was hard on the body but the days off were wonderful.  When I went home to our flat in Bedford I almost felt like a civilian. The Air Force and America seemed very far away.  

We took buses or trains to London, to Cambridge.  We visited all the villages around us.  We loved Bedford.  Neither one of us had ever lived in a small town and in Bedford we got to know people and exchanged greetings with people on the streets, shopkeepers and neighbors.  Once we drove to Stratford on Avon and saw two plays.  We joined the film society and borrowed books at the library.  We were living in England.  It was a dream come true for us. 

After I had been at the base for awhile, I signed up to take college classes.  In Europe the University of Maryland ran an Extension program with college classes right on the base.  The first class I took was Economics.  The professor was an Englishman from the London School of Economics making a few quid on the side.  He was a good professor and it was a good class.  The next class I took was Shakespeare, two semesters of it, taught by an American professor on sabbatical in Europe.  I took four semesters of German taught by a newly minted Lieutenant who had taught as a graduate student at the University of Michigan.  I took a class in Folklore and one in American Literature.  

All together I took 60 units of college classes.  I got A's in every class except for German and then I got B's.  If we worked the night of a class they let us leave to go to class.  One night I was driving to work and there was a German quiz that night.  I wasn’t prepared and I prayed there would be some event to postpone the test.  There was a power outage.  Since then I’ve learned my powers of prayer aren’t all that great, but at the time it was a nice coincidence. 

There was a woman, Betty, who worked at the base education office,  She was English.  During the War she had worked at General Eisenhower’s headquarters.  She and a lot of Brits liked Yanks.  They seemed to be amused by our friendliness and naiveté.  They enjoyed our sincerity.  Betty liked helping the kids going to college on the Base.  There were a lot of us.  You can’t be an American GI in Britain very long before you hear the refrain from World War II, “The problem with the Yanks is they’re oversexed, overpaid, overfed and over here.”  It was Betty who told me the American response to that,  “The problem with the Brits is they’re undersexed underpaid, underfed, and under Eisenhower.” 

The English called the Americans Yanks and when they weren’t around most of the GIs called the Brits Blokes.  Overall the British were very friendly to American GIs.  The older people had a wealth of good feelings left from the War.  They knew and liked our fathers.  People our own age didn’t appreciate us much, we were still overpaid and oversexed and still in England, but the girls seemed to like the GIs.  As GIs we were treated better in England than we were in the United States.  In the US GIs were held responsible Vietnam.     

And while the sentiment in England was against Americans in Vietnam, we weren’t sneered at by anyone in England as we were at home. I wasn’t there, but from a distance in that time, it felt like we were the enemy in our own country.  In England we were respected for serving our country.   In the pub where I drank, there was a Scotsman who had served in Korea and East Africa.  He asked me how it felt to be fighting a policy war? 

I learned to act like a guest in England.  I was eager to learn everything British and enjoy it as much as I could.  Cathy and I lived in town.  We made friends in England and we did as much as we could to be a part of life there.  We even learned to speak English.  I could understand people in Bedford most of the time and many people in London, though one time we drove to Northhampton, a few miles away, and we had to ask everyone to repeat themselves a couple of times before we got anything they were saying.  Accents and dialects could vary in England in only a few miles.           

The last summer I was in England I was drinking at a pub across the street from the Bedford Times.  A gentleman from the newspaper was fascinated by my speech.  He said, “ I know you’re not from England but let me guess where you’re from.”  He went through every country in the Commonwealth and finally was frustrated to be left only with the United States as his last choice.  He said, “Well I don’t know anything about it, but you must be from New England.”

“No,”  I told him. “I’m from Los Angeles.”  He was incredulous.  In three years in England I changed to an English vocabulary and syntax.  I cleaned up my accent and stopped using  Americanisms.  People who knew called it a mid-Atlantic accent.  A local on the base who worked with Americans said he spoke half, like off, and half, like hat.  It was more than just speech, it was also clothing, haircut, and body language.  I even ate kippers (smoked herring) and rollmops (pickled herring) and liked them.  As a 21 year old in Britain when I arrived, in three years I became Hoff and Haf.  It was a great experience. 

Years later in the San Fernando Valley where I grew up I was asked where I was from.   When I went to UCLA I was downgraded on a paper because the paper size was British standard not 8 ½ by 11 as required by the university and my spellings, colour, honour, and centre were all British.  I cited the Times in a class discussion one time and had to explain that I didn’t mean the LA Times or the New York Times.   I wasn’t even conscious of it, most of the time.  Our two year old son Sean learned quickly to call lorries trucks and to make siren sounds that suited Americans instead of the wigwagging sound of British panda cars. We began to fit back into the United States but never as completely as before.  

Thirty years later I was still brewing a pot of strong English tea and drinking it with milk and sugar in the morning.