Free How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On by Anton Rippon

training in a personnel carrier. When you were driving downhill, you had reverse steering. In other words, when you pulled the
right stick you turned left. We had an instructor who chewed tobacco. We were sailing merrily along, downhill, doing a fair speed. The instructor shouted that there was a steep drop ahead and we
had to turn quickly. Too late! We shot off into space, then landed with an almighty bump! The instructor swallowed his baccy, went blue in the face and began to choke. We saved him, although he
didn’t seem too pleased.
    Roy Barker, Thornton-Cleveleys

    A few months after infantry training at Brancepeth Castle, we joined our Durham Light Infantry battalions and departed for Scotland, where we took part in a large-scale
exercise. Sometimes in these types of operations, live ammunition was used and the powers that be had to allow for errors and accidents taking place. Officers acting as umpires, wearing white
armbands and dashing all over the place, would come up and say: ‘You’ve been wounded. He’s been killed. They’ve been taken prisoner by the enemy.’
    If you were ‘wounded’ you would have a label tied on you with details of the wounds. If you were a so-called ‘morphine case’, or had a wound that forbade any drinking,
then sometimes you would lie there for days, depending on how long the exercise was supposed to take. The idea was to be as realistic as possible. During the exercise, we had to make a five-mile
march followed by an attack. At the end of the attack an umpire told us that our ration truck had been captured and, as the make-believe should be as real as possible, we should wait fourteen hours
for our food. When the umpire finally arrived with our rations, we were told that our platoon would soon be reported ‘missing or wiped out’. Well, none of us wanted to be
‘missing’, so we duly walked away in various directions to the nearest town or village. We were supposed to return to camp within a reasonable time of the end of the exercise. Some of
the lads certainly made the most of being ‘missing’, visiting cinemas and so on. A few were taken into motherly homes. A very small number simply disappeared for good.
    W. D. Donkin, Sunderland

    About halfway through the war, I was on loan to another unit as a driver with a Morris truck and Bofors gun in a town, somewhere in the south-west of England. During the middle
of one bitterly cold January night we were in convoy. I had a crew of eight in the back of my truck and by my side was the sergeant in charge. He had replaced an officer who had been taken ill. The
exercise was called Spartan, which was a good name as there was about a foot of snow on the ground. Although it was against regulations, we had all removed our boots, but were travelling in
silence, as per our orders. We stopped while the other officers checked our location when all of a sudden, the sergeant yelled, looked down at his feet and in his cockney voice cried out:
‘Bloody hell, rigor mortis has set in!’
    Leslie C. Skinner, Polegate, Sussex
    At times there were so many troops staying in Catterick Camp that it was impossible to keep them all employed. I’ve never drunk so much tea in my life. We spent all
     day wandering from café to café. At pay parade the men would mill around ‘baa-ing’ like sheep. They were bored to the back teeth and almost out of control. To get the
     men out of bed, one corporal would urinate in a bucket and throw it on the fire. The stench . . .
    Roy Barker, Thornton-Cleveleys
    Pioneer Corps sergeant to a private, presumably in need of a haircut:
    ‘Are you married, Athorne?’
    ‘Yes, sir!’
    ‘Have you any furniture?’
    ‘Yes, sir!’
    ‘Well get rid of those bloody sideboards!’
    LESLIE RANDALL, LAMBETH
    I served from start to finish of the war. A cockney sergeant had a squad drilling and he had one awkward recruit that he could make nothing of.
    The sergeant decided to get some background information and