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You might be wondering what life was like on an operational RAF base. Well, RAF Marham was, and still, is situated in west Norfolk, on a slight hill on the edge of the northern tip of Thetford Forest. It is near to Swaffham and Kings Lynn. but is really a self contained community, with only the noisy and smelly jets circling around that gives any hint to the fact there is a base there.

Once through the village of (Lower) Marham, you take the lane up the hill to the base, on the left hand side you could see the red brick barrack blocks, and on the other side, rows of red brick terrace houses, the married accommodation. There is a row of shops, and behind that the family club where we would get banned from frequently. On the left there is the turning down to the main gate, also on the left is the guardroom where you would have to sign in and register your car to be taken onto base. Once onto base, on the left there is the old parade square, now a car park, and you have to go and look for a space.

At the guardroom you will have been allocated a room, just temporary until your flight or squadron found you a room in their block. So you take your kit bags cases and whatever to your new home, open the door and struggle up to your room. Almost all members of the RAF have single rooms, your first might be small, but it is yours. There is a metal bed frame with a thin mattress on it. You could go to stores to draw some fresh bedding, or you might have brought your own. There is plug sockets, and aerial socket for your TV, if you had one.

It is half four, dinner time, so you walk over the car park to the junior ranks mess where you can have a three course meal. It isn't fancy, but it is yours, along with breakfast and lunch, both cooked too, all for just over a pound a day. You select your meal, maybe fried chicken or lasagne, some chips and vegetables, and you go to find an empty table as you know no one on the base at all. You might have been posted in with someone from your trade course, I was, so we sat together, and once dinner was over, we wandered around before going to the NAAFI to look round the shop and later, to have a beer.

The next morning you dress in your uniform, admire your new rank slides in the mirror, then go back over to the mess to have breakfast before making your way to your new section's admin office. Mine was Armament Engineering Flight, AEF, there you would be introduced to the senior staff of the flight, then you would be told where you were going to work. For me it was bomb dump, so the duty driver from the dump was summoned to collect me, then drive round the ring road to the bomb dump, where I could be spending the next five years of my life.

Once in the dump, I was taken to the offices, and so began the first task of the day; read and sign for having read Station Standing Orders. So if you did something wrong, this was the proof that you knew, so they could charge you. SSOs were a huge binder of A4 sheets, and if you were to read them properly, would take the best part of a week to plough through, if you could stay awake. A friendly SNEC would come by every now and again to ask how you were getting on, until you felt, usually after nearly two days, you had read enough, so were ready for work.

To get to this point you had spent six weeks in basic training, at lease seven months in trade training, all this costing a fair amount of money on the Government's behalf; now it was payback time. There were many sections in which to work in the dump; weapon prep, missiles, issues and receipts or the outside gang. But for me, it was down the road to the Outer ESA for bomb maintenance.

The Outer was through the bomb dump, out the east gate over the main road and half a mile down a farmer's track, and there in revetment lined bays were hundreds of bombs. There were dutch barns also full of bombs, and there were covered buildings, igloos, also full of bombs. It was going to be my job, our job, to ensure that when or if used, the bombs would go bang.

I was introduced to my new SNEC, SNCO, Sgt Cusdin: call me Dave when there's no one else around. And then to the others in the dump; Martin, another Dave, John, and a few others. This would be my new family.

So Dave says to the others, take Ian out and show him how to apply lutin. Lutin was a bright green gloop, that is placed around the fuze pockets and other areas of the bomb that might rust, to prevent moisture getting in. We were supposed to use little. But we knew that by the time the bombs would be next serviced, we would be long gone, so we smothered everywhere we could. The other thing about lutin is that it sticks to everything, and to stop it sticking to a Mk 1 airman, the airman needs to smother his hands with linseed oil. Only the others "forgot" to tell me that. I plunged my hands into the tuin, got a handful of lutin out, and I was buggered. Not able to get the stuff off, I transferred it from one hand to both. The others laughed thinking it hilarious.

At the end of the day I used thinners to get the stuff off, thus removing all oils from my skin. Lovely.

And so began not five years in the dump, but just over two. We would go into work and be assigned the task for the day; heavy bomb servicing was a summer job, out in the open bays, but in winter we changed the cartridges in some of the other weapons. It was a technical job, and after changing the two carts the five nuts would be lockwired. The challenge was to try and lockwire all five together without Dave failing the job and snipping the wire. Four was the best that could be done, as the fifth was never tight enough.

Fridays we did paperwork, so after lunch Dave could send us home early. Life even in 1991 was a weekday thing mostly, and we were free until Monday morning, to go home, stay on base, drinking ourselves silly. So I would go home to Lowestoft, a 90 minute, or so drive, where I tried to pick up the bits of my civilian life. But it was gone.

Scarecrow was in jail and had been booted out of his parent's house due to drugs; explained a lot, but my friend James used to come home from Homington and we used to go out, drinking and challenging each other by repeating lines from the early series of Red Dwarf.

So, two days a week we were overpaid civilians, drinking in the pubs, laughing at how two freaks like us had made it into the RAF, then on Sundays we used to drive back to our bases and pick up our lives. There was a social life on base too. Oh yes.

Weekly beer calls, to celebrate people being posted in or out, other promoted or retiring. This demanded lots of beer and silly games, and sadly, picking on people. Usually the ones who had just been posted in. Beer was already cheap in places like the family club. But people put money behind the bar to pay for twofers, two for one, so you could get twice the amount for the same money. My first birthday at Marham was spent in the local pub where my friends laced my snakebite with scrumpy and double vodkas. I woke up the next morning in my bed, no idea how I got back either. Wouldn't be the last time either.

About once a year, we would be selected for Station Live Armed Guard, SLAG, where we would do a day's training with a rifle, then be on guard for a week at the various entry points onto the base. It was during this we dumpies got to meet people from other parts of the base, as in our world of the dump, especially us down the Outer, no one really came to us, just other dumpies. We didn't mix.

There was also piquet post duty, where for a week we controlled entry to and from the dumps. West Gate was near to the end of the runway, so the jets, Tornadoes and Victors used to fire up their engines so close that the ground used to shake and you couldn't hear the phone ring. We had no protective equipment for our ears, we just went a little more deaf each time.

Down in the Outer, we had a week's tasks to complete, once we had done that, we used to make mischief. We built a model of the Bismark, coated it in highly expensive Flexane. Took weeks to do, which we then set alight like some Viking longboat. There was a model shop in Kings Lynn that sold little single use rocket motors, so we began to Norfolk Space Program. From the bomb dump. Sending Bodge 1, 2 and 3 into low orbit, 200m up, next to the flight path of incoming jets. We also continued when the security state went up after an IRA attack somewhere. How we were not reported by pilots of the RAF police I don't know.

It was all so great, so unlike life in the chicken factory, I couldn't be happier. Here I was, with a trade, earning more than double what I did back at Buxted, and was happy, had great friends and my own room where I had a TV and now a video recorder. It was the life of Riley.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, oddly enough, love was in the air, and there would soon be wedding bells. But more of that next time.