Clark, Dr David Findlay - Stand By Your Beds!

11:09am Thursday 19th April 2007

"WHERE are you from?" is a standard remark to make on chance acquaintance and over the years when I have replied "Padgate" to anyone now aged 65-plus, I have so often been regarded rather like someone who had uttered the word "Transylvania".

For Padgate, to thousands of young men in the years immediately after the Second World War, meant what Dr David Findlay Clark unhesitatingly describes as a "concentration camp" in his wry look at conscripted service life in Stand By Your Beds! (Cuallan Press, Dunferline) which is available from Warrington Book Loft.

RAF Padgate, situated on land to the west of Station Road, long occupied by housing, served as the introduction to what was called National Service for thousands of recruits considered mature enough to fight but who mostly were not old enough to vote.

Clark's own initiation to Warrington came before the crack of dawn one wet October morning in 1951 - "I was amazed at the perkiness of the early shift workers who shared our bus. They were animated Lowry manikins with headscarves over curlers and flat caps, metal boots and wooden clogs."

A culture shock for a lad from the north of Scotland - but worse was to come within the confines of the "Padgate sieve" where a gallant 600 were assessed each week to determine their future.

"It is impossible in the hazy retrospect of 50-plus years to unjumble the sequence of events of that week," says Clark - but he paints some graphic pen pictures of a first breakfast, the kit distribution, the injections and the inevitable haircut "where four maniacs with power clippers grabbed us like Aussie sheep shearers".

From Padgate, Clark was sent to "the even more miserable" RAF Kirkham which, he reminds the reader, was later "upgraded" to become one of the toughest borstals in England.

Yet again, much worse was to follow - Clark would ultimately find himself in Germany billeted in a camp that had clearly formerly served as an extermination centre. Truly the boy who had entered Padgate would return to civilian life as a man - as did thousands of others.