POSTINGS (tongue in cheek) by Bob Price

There came a moment the other day, over the marmalade and toast don’t you know, when I pondered postings. You might naturally recommend that I get out more, but bear with me. Stop to recollect this process, that which shaped many of our memories of service. Postings are sometimes how we catalogue the remembered career. We had good postings and bad postings. There were better places to be posted and terrible places to be sent. Taken quite literally it can make you feel as if you’re something passed inelegantly through the Royal Mail entrails. It started with the posting order, probably handed over to you with a smile or a look of grim determination. I remember after qualifying as a nurse (yes, a product of our own system) in 1975, I was sent off to the Military Wing Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast and for two years. Initially, that seemed like an invite to the trenches. I arrived there as a wet behind the ears staff nurse cynically received by an established team who weren’t sure that they needed me thank you very much. I wonder if you ever harboured the thought that postings were sometimes handed over with a sense of glee?

Your next memory might relate to the MFO box. Nearly everything you owned went into that. It sounds like a joke about remembered poverty, doesn’t it? ‘When I was young, I lived in a two up two down hovel’. ‘Oh, that’s nothing, I lived in a bed sit’. Trump it all with the MFO box. I (or at least all my worldly possessions) existed in an MFO box. There came the day in BMH Rinteln where colleagues had to pack their MFO boxes to go off to the war in Iraq. As you weren’t allowed to include opened bottles of alcohol within the box, we had a goodbye drinks party. There was this bottle of Tequila (truly vile stuff), ‘fat wallet’ the civilian hospital accounts manager, my future wife and I who made the final of the slamming competition. The next morning it felt as though my head had Moved Forward Overseas.

I suspect something happens when you live and work within a system where you can be readily posted. There is a perverse mix of eager anticipation and horror as you anticipate imminent change. Here’s how I think it works. On the upside you think of the new posting in terms of locale. Clearly, Hong Kong (back then), Cyprus and exotica places like Brunei had much to commend them. You flick through the holiday brochures that link to the favoured new locale. But then, inevitably, you realise that postings were never just about locations, they were about people. Someone in MOD was playing a crazy game of reassemble the village community. It was as if you were injected into a long running series of the Archers, and whether you liked it or not you would live with Peggy, Jazzer, Dan and the rest. For goodness sake, when I was posted to one of our hospitals, no one advertised it as a Pyjama Dash exercises resort, that designed to counter the IRA, everyone drawn up on the car park at midnight, in your pyjamas, with your teddy bear in hand. Postings were about people, and you landed amongst the joys, suspicions and tensions that existed there. Was there really a witch in the attic, and if so, did you really wish to be posted there?

This is the point, isn’t it? Really, we were all victims, subjects in a social mix experiment. You were probably a victim weren’t you- just think about it. How many others, in different walks of life, get ‘posted’. In sharp contrasts to battalions (who were sometimes posted together, with the familiar comrades, as a family) we were posted individually. You might as well have been issued with a gas mask, a label describing your name rank and number, a consoling bar of chocolate and sent off to the countryside whilst the war carried on. No one explained the slightly bizarre family that you were about to be inserted into, the one that had a dozen grates to clean.

If you were lucky though, if you were very fortunate, you landed in a wonderful place and amidst some astonishing people. One such was the Army Medical Services School of Nursing. Oddly, it wasn’t one location (though the brochures about Woolwich on Thames were entirely beguiling). 

The school comprised a group of people, with significant talent and a clear commitment to training some of the very best nurses, those who went on to forge considerable careers in the Corps, and civilian life. People who worked here offered the most astonishing humour (‘Price, there is only one problem you face, you suffer from delusions of adequacy’).  

Gestetner machine for producing
 copies of handouts

They helped the neophyte teacher to plan education that was not only professionally sound and workable, but which seemed enjoyable to learn as well. For goodness sake, they taught me how to work the gestetner handout machine and the overhead projector. I won’t name names, you know who you are, and many others knew who you were. Of all the mats that a package could land upon, after traversing the system, this was surely a great one.

Bob Price served in the AMS between 1972 and 1990. He taught nurses in the Cambridge Military Hospital, Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital and in BAOR. The habit persisted afterwards, at the Royal Marsden Hospital, the RCN and the Open University. He is now making more toast, the last went cold.