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this country who can’t fit in. But perhaps the creation of this new
Nepali ‘middle class’ comes at the cost of reduced knowledge of their
homeland and culture.
Field Marshal Sir John Chapple [1954 – 94] adds to the National
Service Chronicles of the last edition:
Towards the end of my last term at school, I received an invitation
from King George VI suggesting that I might like to join his army.
Actually it was more of a summons than an invitation. In those days,
everyone was required to do two full-time years’ National Service,
followed by three and a half years in the Territorial Army. Thus we
were all setting out on two gap years after leaving school.
I had asked to join the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and reported for duty
as a Rifleman at Bushfield Barracks, Winchester on 19 October 1949.
Our training at Bushfield Barracks at Winchester in the King’s Royal
Rifle Corps (The 60th Rifles) was largely supervised by Corporals and
Sergeants. Somewhere in the background there was a Major called
’Dwin Bramall, who was in charge of the whole training wing. He
later became Lord Bramall of Bushfield.
We lived in the wartime single storey wooden barrack blocks called
‘Spiders’ in Bushfield Barracks.
There were many others in our squad. At least half of them came from
the traditional Green Jacket recruiting area near where we lived in
Islington. They were real Londoners, very much more streetwise than
we who had been to boarding school. We, on the other hand, were
much more inured to living the barrack room life. We had spent ten
years or so at boarding school and had been brought up on school food
during the time of wartime rationing. None of these other young
recruits who had come from London had ever had a day away from
home. They were all used to Mum’s cooking. Although they took a
while to get used to the idea of living away from home, they were
much quicker and slicker than we were in the other areas of life. It
made quite a good combination.