From Thomas Paine’s Corner
By Ivor Hughes

It was 50 years ago and for most of the working class youth, Military Conscription was the norm in the United Kingdom. The brown envelope arrives with its free post officious stamp, the black printed Imperial Crown and beneath it O.H.M.S. .. meaning, On her Majesties Service.

So off I went to be a soldier of the British Queen, this in the dying days of Empire. We rarely questioned, no room for questions in a young head with balls between his ears .. in the place where his brains ought to be. We were promised adventure and foreign travel, endless beaches of white sand and nubile dusky skinned maidens with sloe eyes by a palm fringed shore, ah those posters on the dreary Victorian barrack room walls. Nothing more than lying propaganda, but I fell for it and enlisted for 9 years.

You may consider me naïve, but as a son of working class under privilege, narrow choices and exploitation, I know that I was not alone in wanting to escape the grey factory walls and the time clock bell. So I donned the Khaki and picked up the gun and blindfolded myself with the Union Jack .. drank deeply of the Hemlock cup of Patriotism and shipped out to serve my Country and my Queen.

The first active service posting was in Northern Ireland, that festering cancerous ulcer of bigotry and discontent on the British Parliamentary rump, a situation of political and clandestine chicanery. So I played the patriot game with the lives and dreams of Ulster’s under privilege. The bloody red hand of Ulster nailed on a cross held high in the name of patriotism, religion and empire. And all the time the desk top soldiers, the politicians and the religious bigots decided who shall live and who shall die to fulfill the Bankers economic agenda.

In was in South Yemen, Aden was the name, with the military camp nestled against the oil refinery .. that we first paraded our grief on the journey to the British Military Cemetery

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