It was years and years ago and actually it snowed and it snowed.
Were there Privates, then? Oh yes there were privates and privates first class and I was one of them, an 18 or 19 year old impressionable lad doing his national service in the RDAF, doing more harm and representing more of a danger to myself than to the potential enemy.
It was during the war, the cold war that is, so most of the time was spent waiting in boredom, then to be commanded somewhere else, quickly, on the double, to coontinue the waiting and the boredom in a new location.
I don't really want to talk about it, not because I don't want to bring back old memories but more because I probably can't remember them. But if you insist, then so be it.
It snowed and it snowed and we actually set a new cold record at minus 26 degrees celsius 2 m above ground. At ground level the mercury registed a staggering minus 30. Any decent meteorologist will tell you that snow is a perfect insulator so that the little warmth continously seeping from Earth was not able to trickle through to the surface, and what little warmth the sun might have brought throught the very short and cold day would be reflected back into space instantaneously.
It was the coldest of the cold war and we were living in wooden huts bulit by the Boche as he and his friends had made their way north in the April days of 1940, opening what was to be known among the soldiers of the Wehrmacht as the "Schlagsahne-front"; The Whipped Cream Front; due to the comfortable nature of the posting where the gravest dangers faced were injuries sustaiined from building concrete bunkers in the sand, laying Autobahns, constructing and living in wooden huts.
It was in these surroundings that I found myself presented with a vague offer of hitching a free joyride in an old green-bodied Gooney-bird with a beak as orange as day-glo.
As offers of free treats in those days usally meant having to do something in return, the lads and I were a bit cautious.
We'd typically be offered a free tour of the Control tower only to learn that we would have to show our gratitude and thankfulness by shoveling snow off the runways and accessways. To hurt our feelings when back-achingly we'd finsihed shovelling, a Sikrosky Sea King would hover right over the area we'd cleaned from snow.
"That's it", we said. Stuff the silly buggers we're off to a warmm mess and a hot brew, unless someone's manged to smuggle some beer onto the Station.
No one had manged to get beer past the gates, at least not until Christmas Eve, but that is another story not entirely unrelated to the great volumes of snow that fell that evening and which saw the lads once more occupied shovelling yet more snow to fight the white enemy in order to be ready to fight the red one.
A chap and I had some official business bringing some stuff to where the Gooney-bird was sitting, or we had to collect some boxes it had flown in, it was doing duty as a sort of postman between the different RDAF stations, all three or four of them, the details are no longer readily available to me, so we saw the legend from closest quarters and were even inside the bird, which on reflection is a phrase I think it wise not to quote out-of-context.
Naturally the subject of hitching a ride in the thing surfaced, and after some debate and much careful considering, that going on a station-hopping cross-country tour would mean sitting on uncomfortable webbing in a terrible racket and being away for at least a day or two thus ruining what potentially looked to be a great week-end, we decided against it. And after a last look-around inside the old dame, we went for the ladder and stepped down to the ground.
It snowed and it snowed, and that evening I went to bed and I slept.
