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A215 – Life Writing – Working in the Dark

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From the two pieces I’ve already posted, Early Memories & Initiative at Night and another I drafted this piece as part of the life writing tutorial for A215 Creative Writing. It has summarised the original freewrites and linked them with a through-line.

Working in the Dark

“How many civil servants does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“None, they prefer to work in the dark!”

As a small child I play with lego by candlelight, a power cut. I sit beside the glass door to the balcony, the rest of the room is dark and impenetrable. The multicolour swirl pattern on the carpet is vivid. The thick green base tile and the red and white lego bricks forming into a house. In the dim Scottish winter night I can’t play for long before it is too dark.

Almost twenty I spend a night navigating between bases on the Pentlands to solve puzzles with a group of fellow officer cadets. After a day at university we are flung unexpectedly onto the hills. A psychological trick when we expected to spend the evening drinking in the mess. In the dark we find inventive solutions, much to the chagrin of the Directing Staff. A land rover rolled to change the wheel without a jack. We run a stretcher casualty through a minefield. This carries on all night. We are disqualified, the solutions we found in the dark aren’t approved.

Almost thirty I set up the Climate Change Levy Administration. My first day is greeted by a dark, empty office, no furniture, just a carpet. My new boss thinks the task is impossible in the time. No-one in our Department has ever run an operational case-working team, so there are no ideas about how to set one up. Less than a fortnight later I have begged, borrowed and scrounged facilities for twenty-two people, and recruited twenty people, built an IT system and got the process going. We finish two weeks early.

By forty I understand that I am at my best when working in the dark, improvising and adapting to overcome issues.

 

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A215 – Life Writing – Initiative at Night

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Here’s the second of the pieces I wrote for the A215 Creative Writing online tutorial on life writing.

Saturday 13th December 1991

It’s 3am on a Saturday before Christmas 1991, I’ve only been awake for 21 hours. After a day of lectures I went with the UOTC to Redford Barracks in Edinburgh for a training camp. Since 1830 I have been on the Pentland Hills doing orienteering and solving problems with a team of third year cadets. We’ve not been good at following the approved DS solutions. To change the tire on a land rover without a jack we ignored the planks and mik crates and instead rolled the vehicle onto its side before righting it after we’d changed the tire. Our time was the fastest, but the officer wasn’t pleased. To take a casualty across a minefield (laid with dummy mines that emit smoke if you tread on them) we simply picked up the stretcher and ran across the minefield to the designated helicopter landing site. We got a lecture about that, although some Paras did the exact same thing in Helmand almost twenty years later, and that was with real mines and a real casualty.

About eleven it starts to snow, and when we cross the Pentland Hills as a gaggle with a bunch of other teams it is several inches deep and we have a snowball fight across the line of march. My team are all pretty fit and taking this in our stride, we range up and down the column, encouraging some of the newer recruits who are obviously struggling with this unexpected night exercise. We start some singing to raise morale, and a few minutes after we do we bump into the Colonel, who joins us for ten minutes as we march over the summit. Some snowballs follow the other column with whom we are exchanging places. The Colonel finds this amusing, but carefully avoids joining in.

Over the other side we need to spot some vehicles using night vision equipment and then re-assemble some weapons. This is followed by an indoor stint where we are asked a whole bunch of military knowledge questions. I ruin the graph showing that scores decline with sleep deprivation by scoring 100%, although the rest of the teams manage to keep to the theory.

After this, we go next door to a room with a pile of cables, headsets, batteries and some unfamiliar radio equipment. Jimmy, the Royal Signals sergeant major running the stand, briefs us that we need to assemble an automatic re-broadcast station using the pieces given. The rest of the team turn and look at me expectantly. The bounce is wearing off, but I am still very much awake.

‘Joe, you know about radios, what do we do?’ asks Ian, who’s in the engineer troop. I look around and a couple of the others have sat down.

‘Why don’t you guys get a brew on and I’ll have a look at it’ I reply, unstrapping the webbing that I’ve been carrying all evening. ‘There’s a flask of hot water on the top, and a burner in that pouch’ I say, handing it over to Ian. ‘Chocolate in the ammo pouches, share it round.’

Over the last two and a half years I’ve become an expert at looking after myself, and by extension others, when out and about. I never go anywhere without a brew kit, chocolate to share and food for 24 hours. Weighs me down, but well worth it for unexpected jaunts like tonights.

I take control of the assorted bits of signals equipment. I’ve never seen this particular type of radio before, but the principles are the same as the ones I have used. Looking round the main transmitter box I find several labelled ports for leads to be attached, including a coax style connector for sending signals in and out. By the time I’m done attaching wires and plugging in cables and headsets Ian has made a brew, passed it round with the chocolate and boiled water to re-fill the flask. It’s been about ten minutes and I tell Jimmy that it’s done. I drink the remnants of the very strong sweet coffee Ian made and chew on a mars bar. Jimmy gives it a quick once over and then confirms that it works by sending a message between two other similar sets on different frequencies.

We set off into the dark for our next map reference, which turns out to be a group of four ton trucks to take us back to the barracks. We can sleep, but it’s only two and a half hours until breakfast!

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