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Cooking For The Royal Berk’s Wasn’t
Always Fun!
by
Sgt. Bertram King 14254119
Page 7
We had to fight as
well, ‘Admin box’, we went into an admin box. In an admin box situation,
everybody was at ‘stand too’, your admin, which consisted of all
the sections to do with catering, signals, radio, wireless, runners and company
runners, and everything like that. When the battalion goes forward to fight,
we form a fighting unit of our own, with our admin, bren, and machine-guns.
It was a ring, so every few yards you’ve got a trench, with a defended
point or a point to do recce in, and all the rest of it, a defensive, fortified
position, well forward.
I was sent down to Rangoon at the end of the war, to start a bakery up at the
Army School of Cookery in Rangoon, and we feed all those poor bxxxxxxx coming
of the Burma Railway, that was some sight, I can tell you. A lot of them had
problems and couldn’t eat anything.
.....Have you ever seen an Army Aerograph, I replied, ‘no’. Well
what you did you wrote your not on a piece of paper, and it was photographed
off and put onto a microdot and flown home in Mosquito bombers, and the microdot
record of what you wanted to say to the family, was blown up and given to your
relatives.
.....I got an Aerograph sent off to my mother; she sent me a recipe for ice
cream from one of my books. I’ve still got it, and I had to make ice
cream for these poor bxxxxxxx who couldn’t eat nothing, and I made it
with evaporated milk, and plenty of fresh eggs of course, we had ton’s
of eggs, and then the sugar and everything like that, and the ice cream that
was made up was churned up in churns, that we got flow in from Calcutta, and
ton’s of it was made.
I had Japanese prisoners working for me after the war, I got a Japanese plumber
there and he made all my kitchens up with plumbing, to do that oil and water,
so we run pip-lines in made out of copper tubing, which we acquired, and if
you had seen that bloke, you would never have thought he would ever even contemplate
the things that happened. Of course these blokes came back and they were just
like a bag of bones.
I finished up, when I was eighty at the Army Bakery School in Aldershot, and
was highly recommended. The bloke who was in charge, and whenever he brought
visitors around, he used to say, ‘this man was here in the Crimean War’.
.....The last job I had there, I made a ton of
Christmas cake, they wanted a twelve-inch slab, twelve by four inches thick,
and they all went out to Bosnia for the British Armies dinner, to go with their
take, and I made the whole bloody lot of it on my own, I’ve been an instructor
there. I was taken off their strength, because I was not supposed to work there
after I was eighty.
I still worked for them after I left the army, so I was still doing the catering
course. It wasn’t dull because I done fifty years on my own, well of
course I was still a civilian instructor, I went back as that. Made all sorts
of cakes, bread and stuff for them, because all the goods were made there for
the British Army, between Aldershot and London, you were talking about thirty-thousand
mince pies at a time. That is why to this day I have suffered from muscular
trouble, for it did do my hands and arms no good doing all that, it buggered
up my grip and everything you know.
P 1 :: P
2 :: P 3 :: P
4 :: P 5 :: P
6 :: P 7
Sgt. Bertram King