4815

RAF Germany

(RAFG)

Once you had done the exciting stuff in basic training and then the dull, but sometimes interesting stuff in trade training, you got posted to that much fabled "real" Air Force.

For us all out of training was a heck of an experience, as we were the greenest of the green, and ripe for bulying. The RAF wasn't as bad as some, but at beer calls, it could get nasty, and one time a guy nearly died.

But I digress.

All the way through, each yer at your annual assessment you would be asked where you would like to be posted, and in theory, the RAF would try to get you where you wanted. There were two areas with a lot of bases: Norfolka nd Scotland, the rest were rarer. From trade training I requested and got RAF Marham, in west Norfolk, as my first posting, working in the bomb dump.

My friend Paul and I were posted together off our course to the bomb dump, he worked on receipts and I worked in the "Outer". The Outer was the remote part of the dump, filled with bombs and components, that we had to maintain so when the call came, they would work.

My days and weeks and months were filled with either painting the iron 1000l bombs, or doing cluster bomb servicing. I know what they do, and believe you me I don't approve of them either and am glad that they are now banned.

Anyway.

I lived on base, at first in a shared room, then moved onto a fomrer married quarter with two of my friends from work, as our SNCO ran these houses, he got us to the top of the waiting list. So I shared the house with Dave and Martin, we were good friends, through Martin would steal your food and drink out of the fridge if you were stupid enough to leave it in there over the weekend.

Once a month we made a half hearted attempt to clean it, our SNCO came to inspect it, never made much of an issue, and we carried on with our low pressure work in the dump.

Work was done, but we did other stuff too.

We were bored.

One was HMS Bodge, a model of a battleship we floated on one of the emergency water supply (EWS) tanks. It took us two weeks to built it, paint it and made it watertight. We used loads of stuff from stores. We then filled it with MEK and set light to it, it went up like a roman candle.

Another time we found there was a model shop in Kings Lynn, the nearby only big town, and they sold rocket motors. Rather than buy a kit, we bought the motors and built our own Apollo program, launched from one of the bomb bays, justing missing the final approach flightpath for the station's jets.

Not even the aprt state being increased stopped us from launching, had we been seen letting off explosives in a bomb dump there would have been hell to pay, or one of the rockets, Bodge 1 to 5 hitting a jet or worse.

We made a kite out of tarpaulins and scaffolding poles, and we tried to fly it in a storm. We each had a rope at each corner, and once in the air the kite dragged us from one end of the dump to the other.

That was fun.

In the evenings there was one of the two village pubs down the hill, or the Family's Cumb just outside the base fence, where we could go and ruin our health.

Which we did.

Often.

I had my 26th birthday there, and my drinks, snakebite, were made with Special Brew and Scrumpy laced with double vodkas.

I woke up the next morning in my bed with a hangver you won't believe. Or maybe you do?

Postings came round every three to five years, but you could request a posting, to RAF German and this would come through in about a year.

Life at Marham was OK, but we were poor. By August 1992 I was married and living in quaters with my first wife.

Don't ask.

But she was not British, she was from Yugoslavia, so could not work, meaning we had to survive on my poor wages. We survived, but only just. A posting to Germany would mean the same wages, but you got additional pay, Local Overseas Allowance (LOA) subsidised heating, rations and cheap food and booze.

My wife should also be able to work.

I applied and by July 1993 it came through.

My then best friend was at the same base, RAF Laarbruch, so it would be a jolly fine old time.

There was one cloud on the horizon: there was a great shortage of married quarters, and there would be a wait until your family could join you.

So, the day came, I had a ticket on a plane that flew into a different base, a coach would take us to our new posting, and rooms allocated once we got there.

I remeber the journey to Luton Airport, the only time I flew from there, everything looked so dirty and dull, it was raining. When we landed in Dusseldorf, the sun was shining, there was no litter, everyting neat and tidy. We drove along autobahns with Mercs and Beamers hammering by at 3 million miles per hour...

This wasn't Norfolk.

At work there were some folks we knew, many we didn't. I was in a 12 man room with a load of cooks, who took us out several nights a week to their bar where we could get drunk of 5DM, or two quid.

Each Tuesday the waiting list for quarters was published, and you would look for your name. Placings depended on rank, time served, whether you had children or had served unacompanied before. All this meant that for us with a year or two's service, we might not move up the list in a week, sometimes our name would go down. And all those waiting would then have to phone their wives and families back home to relay the bad news.

All the time, my wife would be in our old quarter at Marham, waiting for me to get one in Germany.

After four months my name had risen just 40 places, and had 80 to go.

It seemed that I would never reach the top and we would live in different countries for the three years of my posting.

I returned for a long weekend in October, thinking this is how it would be for years; an overnight ferry on a Thursday night, two days at home before travelling back on Sunday to be at work on Monday.

Work was fine though, if anything, even easier than at Marham.

For the first four months we did little work, played cards most of the day, changing games at ten for tea break and the arrival of the Mally Wagon where we would buy a slice of cake or a sausage or bacon butty.

Then one day it was announced that the base had taken on a block of Army barracks in Duisburg, dozens were allocated. Next week I was up to 16th, and a week later was allocated a one bedroom house on base, where most people lived in the nearby local town of Weeze in an anrea called Little City.

Andrea was Yugoslavian, and had a visa to stay in the UK, but had no right to live in Germany, or even travel. So in order to get her through immigration, I went back to Norfolk to collect her, so we could travel back on the train/ferry/train.

The start of a new life, one filled with possibilities. Maybe we could get all the things we thought we needed, that we thought would stop us arguing.

If only.

We travelled on Wednesday, 17th November 1993. I know this as England were playing San Morino that night for a place in the 1994 World Cup in the USA, if Holland lost their game.

We travelled to Harwich by train, caught the night ferry while our possessions travelled over in a removal lorry that the RAF paid for.

The next morning we left the ferry, and I showed by passport; no issue. Andrea showed hers, she had no visa, they should not have let her enter. They knew we were going to Germany, and we in violation of some law, but saw my RAF ID and let us through, but she would have to register at the local aulanderampt, immigration office.

We had a week to wait for our quarter to become available, so we stayed with my friend and his wife. James and I got on fine, we had been at the chicken factory together, had the same interests and humour. I thought Andera and his wife were friends too. But it became clear that under the same roof there was going to be trouble.

We used to go out in the evenings, one time watching Norwich lay AC Milan in the Little City grill, before walking back to their flat and its frosty atmosphere.

We got through it, and come the day moved into the house, or possessions, mainly my records and hifi, arrived. The house might have only had one bedroom, but had an attic and cellar, so lots of room and had high ceilings.

We were able to save and buy the things we thought we needed: an oak bed, a sofa and chair, a multi-region video player, as we could go to a nearby US base and buy videos before they were in the cinema on base. We also bought a car.

Back at Marham, we had a T reg Skoda Estelle, which got us around, though was a skip on wheels. We could go to Tesco once a week and shop, sometimes go further afield, but it was unreliable, and sometimes stood for weeks as I saved to buy a part to fix it.

So, buying an 18 month old Golf was luxury. I bought it from an officer on base for less than five thousand pounds, with a loan from the local banks, though my boss had to sign it off so he could lecture me on being financially responsible.

Oh, those were the days.

So, we were mobile too, we could go to the supermarket in Emmerich, or into Hooland down to Venlo to the shop there, which had an Ikea next door. We could also buy tax free furniture, which we did and in a year our house was full of fine new furniture, all paid for as she had a job cleaning in one of the on-base schools.

We had everything we wanted, so we lived happily ever after?

Sadly not. We argued all the time, never resolving issues, so they would explode agan days or weeks later.

On top of that, she hated that everything had to be in my name, as the working Airman. Nothing in her name at all, like she didn't matter. I understood.

But things got worse and worse.

And in little more than two years later we split up, I moved back into the block with all the other single and divorced guys, partied every night and generally ruined my health.

Once I left Andrea, a few other married guys left their partners too, and so three of us, Benny, Lee and myself, along with a single guy, Dave, we went out each weekend in one of our cars, had a meal out and then went drinking.

Those were the salad days. Easy weeks at work, then weekends filled with booze, culture, travel and friendship. Sunday mornings one of us would go to the NAAFI to buy the Sunday Times and we would sit in my room, reading, listening to music and drinking fresh coffee.

My tour was going to end after three years, but came crashing to an end four months early as one evening in April 1996, two officers stood at my door to tell me that Dad had died that evening.

Everything changed at that point.