The first man said, “No”. The second man said, “Yes.” Unfortunately, the first was a corporal, and the second, Tim, was a private who had been asked by one of his billet-mates, to pick up a letter for him from the office.

“But he asked me to get it for him on the way back.”
“Well he may have asked you, but it’s against the rules.”
“To collect a friend’s belongings?!”
“When they’re not yours, yes.”
Tim felt that there was something more to this. Although hardly likeable, the corporal had no reason to pick on him, he was sure. Piqued now, he took the leap, plucking the letter from Arthur’s cubby hole. “This is Arthur’s,” he announced.

Corporal Hannings stood. He was smiling. “You’re on a charge,” he said. As an afterthought, he added: “Disobeying orders.”
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The adjutant delivered the verdict. Fatigues? Cook-house duty? Jankers? A ten-mile run? No.

28 days’ DETENTION !!!

Flabbergasted, he was whisked away to an otherwise anonymous little burgh somewhere in the north. By the time he got there, he was resigned to the idea of being classified as a criminal. What most bothered him was how the devil he was going to last out for a whole month.

However, later, the detention camp didn’t really seem any different to his own except that what he would be doing there was even more senseless than his normal daily activities at his own base. For instance, painting coal white, and then re-painting it black was one of the chores: cutting grass with a fork and knife was another. There wasn't much difference food-wise except that the ‘cobs’, (white square loaves), flung daily onto the canteen’s tables, clanked as they landed. The kitchens smelt of fairly new corpses.

He wrote a full account on toilet paper - which he managed to smuggle out of the camp at the end of it all. (He was really writing it to his girl, Julie, although he wasn’t quite sure he’d show it to her). Yet it did help him to forget how four weeks could seem like five years.

When asked what he was ‘in for’, his “28 days for saying ‘no’ to a corporal” mostly evoked laughter. Tim was the first they’d ever heard of, to get such a disproportionate sentence. “Somebody’s got it in for you mate” one said: it was chorused by a few hefty nods and grunts.
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And there she was, waiting near the ticket barrier. “My little hero!” she beamed, arms outstretched. She was in one of her prettiest frocks; (“no uniform for me, unless absolutely necessary”).

She had been, (was still!), the most sought after enlisted woman in the whole of his camp - if not beyond it, perhaps. She had been stalked, courted, and sometimes even harassed by the enlisted men but mostly, (it was said), by officers. As for Tim, he’d seen her from time to time during meals, but had avoided, (being spotted), looking at her.

A few months after he had first caught sight of her, he was just leaving the canteen when he heard a voice behind him: “Tell me, why do you mash your peas?”

“Mash my -?! “. He turned. Seeing that it was (impossibly!) her, he unclenched his teeth, and responded with a quivering nonchalance. “They keep falling off my fork.”

She laughed. He too. Here SHE was; the station’s ‘top target’, consorting with a short, skinny private with big ears and no prospects whatsoever, who had ended up as her hero!

He later reflected that he might have been her ‘hero’ because she liked how he hadn’t even considered the possibility of having any enemies.

Well; it looked as though he was going to have plenty of opportunity to ask her about that.
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