We were newly married, with a young baby, and we were very poor. A year before, instead of presenting myself to the draft board, I’d gone and married my childhood sweetheart, and we’d spent four days in the big city, sleeping on my mother-in-law’s couch. Then the Royal Air Force had hauled me away, and it was a year before my wife and I were able to live together.

National Service was for two years, but the RAF bureaucracy insisted for several months that I was single, so to avoid starvation for the family, I signed on for an extra year. At that time, the pay of a married airman, first class, as opposed to that of a draftee (no class at all), was just about enough to live on.

Unfortunately, the Air Force kept forgetting that I was married, and we would stagger to our financial feet, only to be sideswiped again as my pay was mysteriously halved, and I’d have to explain again to blank-faced clerical workers that I really was married, with a growing, hungry, family.

Image by abbamouse via Flickr

During a happy period when the Air Force actually paid us the going rate, we had accumulated a baby, a few bits of furniture, a mongrel dog, and a TV set on the payment plan – credit, as it’s now called. Shortly afterwards, the Air Force again decided I was single.

The rent wasn’t yet a problem. The gypsies kept the landlord at bay, and the police hadn’t yet appeared to storm the ground floor flat. The dog could fend for himself, and the wife and baby were tougher than I, and were, anyway, well used to hardship. The TV was another matter. We had made no payment on it for a couple of months, we ignored the letters from the store, and the phone had long since been disconnected. And, one evening, unknown to us, the repo man, probably almost as poor and desperate as we were, was peering at some scribbled directions to our house, preparatory to snatching back the television set.

It was Friday, and my wife’s birthday. The day before, I had talked to the Sergeant clerk and threatened to personally strangle him if we didn’t get some of our money. He’d lent me a few pounds from his own wallet. We hadn’t been out for weeks, and we spent a happy hour planning the excursion; fish and chips followed by a movie.