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Cooking For The Royal Berk’s Wasn’t
Always Fun!
by
Sgt. Bertram King 14254119
Page 2
.....In Colaba Barracks
where the battalion was held, and had just got onto a war footing, at Colaba
Barracks on the first Saturday morning the parade went on, there was the Colonel-in-Chief
on his white horse, and a full mustered band, playing up and down, and doing
the marches, the same as you get for the Queens birthday, right there in Bombay.
.....After that we went up to a holding camp, which was in Deolali, the place
we called, ‘Doolally Tap’, where you awaited to go into India,
or waiting to go home. We were doing six weeks training to acclimatise the
bodies to the heat. We lost two blokes with heatstroke, were dead within twenty-four-hours
of arriving, we were doing marching and one thing or another, in that extreme
heat.
.....Also at that time we were designated to do internal security. Gandhi,
Mahatma Gandhi was a bit strong and they were worried about him getting too
much strength up, to form a fifth column in India, but anyway we got called
on to do a security march. They got us all formed up with our rifles, bayonets,
and ammunition. We were formed into sections, in eights, as the army used to
be in those days, eight across; you got four eights, which are thirty-two,
to a platoon. Then we marched round Nasik City, which was Gandhi’s stronghold
and we had the magistrate there, for this Easter rally, for Gandhi, a freedom
march. We marched around Nasik City four times to give the impression that
there were more troops than there was.
.....The magistrate was there to say if and when you could shoot anybody, and
who it could be. They set us up in ranks, with the front row lying down, the
next row on one knee, and the back row standing, so there’s three like
a British square, and we were the last troops to do that in India, that’s
something isn’t it. The Raj, as it was then, would then know that we
had joined it.
In India we were stationed in a place called Attur, which was about eighty-miles
south of Bangalore, where all the people going to do their call stations were
held. That was a lovely place that was, right smack bang in the middle of the
edge of the jungle, and that’s where we did all our jungle warfare training.
It was absolutely magnificent; we didn’t get any pictures of it as we
were not allowed cameras or nothing like that, you wasn’t supposed to
keep a diary.
My company-sergeant-major was George Goodenough, (D Coy), and when he got my
pay book; private King, he said, ‘you’re a baker’, I said
yea; he said, ‘well you can get in the kitchen and make me some sausage
rolls.’ I’d gone in what served as the kitchen there; we were in
the jungle, and I made these sausage rolls up, on the tailboard of a truck.
.....We got, what you call Soya links, which were made from American Soya,
a savoury mix, in a sausage, in a tin, with fat, and that went with the bacon
that was also in a tin with fat, so you not only got the meat content, you
got the fat to do your frying and everything. I made no end of pastries and
sausage rolls.
.....Of course then the quartermaster turned up, Montague Sumray, and he said, ‘you’re
the only bloody bloke in the battalion that’s got any experience of catering’,
so he sent me on a Master Cooks course to Poona, and I came out top, of eighty
who went there.
.....A beautiful place Poona, you’ve heard the expression, ‘when
I was in Poona’, well that’s where I’d been. When I got back
to the battalion, I was rapidly promoted to lance-corporal, corporal and then
sergeant, and made to cook for the company and the battalion, and that is how
I started out the carrier as it was.
P 1 :: P
2 :: P 3 :: P
4 :: P 5 :: P
6 :: P 7
Sgt. Bertram King