Chocolates on the Pillow

Two Silences

Tomorrow, at eleven o’clock, a good chunk of Britain will stop what it’s doing and go quiet for two minutes. Cars pull over, tills pause mid-beep, and somewhere a bugler who has been practising in the garage all week will get through the Last Post with only a slight wobble on the high note. It’s a silence asked for gently and offered willingly, and I’ve never once found it anything other than moving.

I’ve been ordered into silence of a very different kind. Standing on an aircraft, rows of young faces in the seats, I watched a Warrant Officer demand absolute quiet… and then, once he had it, fill the space with five words bellowed at full parade-ground volume. “You Are All Going To Die.” No preamble, no softening, just that, hanging in the air while nobody dared look at anybody else.

I’ve carried those two silences around for most of my adult life, and they’ve never sat comfortably together. One is for remembering. The other was for preparing people to be remembered. This year, with the poppies out and the wreaths being straightened, I want to talk about what sat between them for me… and it isn’t what you’d expect. It’s chocolates. Little foil-wrapped chocolates, left on a hotel pillow every single night, while not very far away the world was coming apart.

The Privileged Service

If you’ve ever spent time around the Army, you’ll know the RAF has a reputation. We were the Crabs, the Brylcreem Boys, the ones who knocked off at five, slept in proper beds and wouldn’t know a muddy ditch if one crawled up and introduced itself. The Army’s view, delivered with varying degrees of affection, was that the Royal Air Force was the privileged service… the one that went to war and still expected clean sheets.

I spent years bristling at that. I wore the white cap of the RAF Police, I did a job that was rarely glamorous and often thankless, and I took a certain pride in not being anybody’s pampered anything. I joined late, at 26, surrounded by recruits who were barely old enough to shave, and I didn’t feel privileged in the slightest. I felt like a man who’d been turned away by the civilian police for not having a degree and had found another door.

But I’m 66 now, and somewhere along the way I’ve lost the energy for defending positions that don’t deserve it. So let me say it plainly, on the eve of Remembrance Day, to every squaddie who ever took the mickey: you had a point. Not entirely, not about everything, and certainly not about the people. But about the resources? About who got what, and where, and how comfortable they were while they got it? Yes. You had a point, and I saw it with my own eyes.

Jazz in the Foyer

When the Iraq business kicked off and the build-up began, a number of us found ourselves billeted not in tents, not in hardened shelters, not in anything resembling the barrack blocks my father would have recognised, but in five-star hotels. I kid you not. The kind of place with marble underfoot and a man in the foyer playing jazz piano in the evenings, gently noodling his way through the standards while people in uniform walked past him carrying kit.

And every night, without fail, someone came into the room, turned down the bed and left a chocolate on the pillow. A decadent little thing, wrapped in foil, placed just so. You’d come back from a shift that had involved things I’ll get to shortly, and there it would be, waiting for you like a small, sweet insult.

Here’s the honest bit… you appreciate it. Of course you do. Anyone who tells you they’d turn down a proper mattress and a hot shower in favour of a camp bed and a jerrycan is either lying or has never been offered the choice. But luxury in that setting doesn’t sit still. It plays with your mind. You lie there under expensive sheets, the air conditioning purring away, and you know, somewhere in the back of your head, that young men not so far off are digging in, sweating, waiting, and writing letters home they hope will never need to be read. The comfort becomes a kind of noise you can’t switch off. You’re grateful, and you feel faintly ridiculous for being grateful, and you can’t work out which of those feelings you’re supposed to keep.

The White Cap

My job, in the middle of all that, was not the stuff of recruitment posters. Troops were being moved towards what everyone called the front line, and the RAF Police had a hand in managing that movement… the flow of bodies, the order, the discipline, the paperwork. It meant I saw people at the precise moment the abstract became real, when the war stopped being something on the news and became a seat heading somewhere they might not come back from.

You see everything in that moment. You see the gung-ho types, loud and swaggering, full of a bravado that sounded convincing right up until you caught their eyes. You see the quiet ones, who’d gone somewhere inside themselves and weren’t planning to come out until it was over. And you see the frightened. Soldiers and airmen alike… because fear, I can tell you, doesn’t check your cap badge before it moves in.

Some of them tried to get out. Not in any organised way, not with a plan, just the raw instinct of a person who has suddenly understood what they’ve signed up for and wants, more than anything in the world, to be somewhere else. It fell to me, my white cap and a couple of other RAFP to manage that. In some cases, to go and bring them back.

I’m not going to dress that up. None of it was pleasant. You do the job because it’s the job, because the system needs everybody to be where they’re supposed to be, and because if one goes, others might follow. I understood the logic then and I understand it now. But I also remember the faces, and I remember that at the end of those shifts I went back to a hotel with a jazz pianist in the foyer and a chocolate on my pillow. I’ve never found a comfortable way to hold both of those things at once, and I’m not convinced there is one.

What Percy and Dad Might Have Said

I come from Army stock, which makes all of this land a little harder. My grandfather, Percy, served in both world wars and was decorated for pulling his sergeant to safety under fire in the trenches. He was the softest, kindest man I’ve ever known, and he’d earned that softness in places that make my five-star hotel look like a sick joke. My father rose to Warrant Officer Class One in the Royal Signals and spent five years away from home in Sudan, facing warfare a very long way from his family. And then there’s me… the one who went into a different service and ended up having his bed turned down every night by a stranger bearing chocolate.

I often wonder what they’d make of it. Percy, who knew what a trench smelled like in winter. Dad, who spent half a decade with his wife and children a continent away. Would they have laughed? Shaken their heads? Called me a Crab and meant every letter of it? I’d like to think Percy would simply have been glad I was safe, because that’s the sort of man he was. Dad, I honestly don’t know. He was a Warrant Officer himself, and I’ve thought more than once about that other Warrant Officer on the aircraft, bellowing at young men about their deaths, and wondered whether my father ever did the same. Whether he’d have called it cruelty or kindness. Whether, in his experience, there was much of a difference.

As for the man on the aircraft, I found it harsh. Brutal, even. But I wasn’t sitting in one of those seats with my stomach in my boots, about to be flown towards whatever was waiting. Maybe, for them, it was the most honest thing anyone had said in weeks. Maybe it cut through the bravado and the denial and gave them something solid to stand on. I can make a fair guess at it from where I stood, but I can’t claim to know.

Why Us?

So why were we favoured? The honest answer is that I have no idea. I’ve heard the theories over the years… that aircrew and the people around them were expensive assets who needed proper rest, that the hotels were simply what was available, that the RAF has always looked after its own in a slightly different way since the days of the Brylcreem Boys. Some of that may be true. Possibly all of it. None of it changes what it felt like to come back from returning a terrified young man to the line and find a foil-wrapped chocolate waiting on starched cotton.

What I do know is that war doesn’t distribute its burdens fairly, and it never has. It doesn’t share out fear fairly, or comfort, or risk, or who gets remembered and who just quietly gets on with it afterwards. The Army lads who took the mickey out of us weren’t really talking about hotels. They were talking about that unfairness, and using us as the nearest available target. Fair enough. In their boots, I’d have done exactly the same.

Tomorrow at eleven, I’ll stop for two minutes, as I always do. Out here in the Spanish hills, silence isn’t hard to come by. I’ll think about Percy and his sergeant, about Dad in Sudan, about the faces of the ones who tried to run and the ones who didn’t. And somewhere in there, uninvited as ever, I’ll hear a Warrant Officer shouting into a hushed aircraft, and taste a chocolate I didn’t ask for and never quite felt I’d earned.

I still don’t know which silence I’ll be keeping. I’m not sure I ever will.

Until Next Time