while the parade of half a dozen Airmen formed up outside. I asked the single prisoner in the cell if he had any complaints and inspected his kit layout. I then inspected the Key Register, initialled it, and waited a moment for the Orderly Sergeant to tell me that the parade was ready for inspection. Standing up straight and tall, possibly with my peaked cap slightly towards the back of my head, I marched out through the Guardroom door to carry out the inspection. At least that was my intention. On going through the door my cap caught the top of the door frame and fell to the ground behind me. The duty SPs saw the funny side of it, as did I, and we started to laugh. The whole darned parade started to laugh. So much for the disciplining of miscreants that night! The entire camp knew the following morning that Flying Officer Pod had created a funny. It took some living down.
On another occasion, as Orderly Officer, I was detailed to supervise a family 'Marching Out' of a married quarter. This procedure involved the checking of the inventory of the house, the condition of the house, and its cleanliness. The procedure would then be officially recorded and the records taken back to the Station Adjutant who, at that time was Flt.Lt. Sam Weller, a sometimes prickly individual. It was usually a fairly quick routine. Not so on this occasion. The inventory was checked, everything having been laid out for examination in each room beforehand as required. The general condition of the decoration left something to be desired, but was nothing that couldn't be taken care of as a matter of routine. When it came to cleanliness, I had to get the woman properly to clean the bath, toilets, and washbasins while I watched. There was no way she would have done it otherwise because the fact that she and her two children were due to catch the afternoon train to the UK was uppermost in her mind. Then I came to the kitchen. It was a disaster. The cupboards were dirty and the stove and oven were disgusting in the extreme. They were in a wholly unacceptable condition, with layers of fat, grease, and food spillages stuck to everything. The woman, now on tenterhooks because it was nearing her scheduled departure time, was getting edgy. I told her that the kitchen was unacceptable and she must, as was laid down in the regulations, clean it before leaving. Clearly she could not in the time available. I therefore went to the nearby NAAFI Shop to use their phone. I told Sam, and he told me, in no uncertain terms, that the woman was not to leave that day and to wait for the Marching Out process to be done again on the next available departure date, which he would fix. I had to tell her this at least three times before she understood what I was saying. I then left. The woman had to unpack and stay where she was with her children until Sam decided she could leave. In the meantime she had to get her house sparklingly clean because he was going to do the Marching Out himself next time. This was an object lesson to other less-than-careful housewives. Sam had made a point.
There was another, much later (after the creation of 210 SU), event on the married patch which, yet again as Orderly Officer, I was told to attend to. This was after the number of houses had doubled and more new Officers and other ranks had been posted in.
There was a row in the NAAFI shop among the customers (all servicemen's wives), with much pushing and shoving. The NAAFI Manageress, in desperation, phoned Sam Weller for help. That's how I was brought in to sort things out.
When I arrived the Manageress had shut the shop because she couldn't handle the situation. In front of the shuttered counter were a dozen or more women arguing and screaming at each other and threatening each other with all sorts. On their seeing me the cat-fight subsided and, inevitably, I asked what the problem was, telling them also that the shop would stay shut until the matter was cleared up. This immediately gave me the upper hand. The cause of the problem, it transpired, was that the wife of a newly arrived Squadron Leader had taken on her husband's rank
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