Made in Myrtle Street (Prequel) Read Online Free PDF Page A

afford to get killed.’
    ‘Aye. It’s a bit of a sod that is,’ said Big Charlie ponderously.
    The three soldiers walked on up Cross Lane accompanied by many greetings from friends and neighbours, some of whom applauded them as they passed. Salford was getting caught up in the fever of excitement as the country went to war. There was to be a big meeting that evening at which the citizens of the town were to be exhorted by grey flecked local dignitaries to register for the new Salford Battalions. The hate against the Germans was being stoked daily by the newspaper accounts of atrocities. The outrage grew as ever more lurid details were added when the stories were recounted in the Salford streets. The savagery of the Huns dominated the conversations in the pubs and factories, and on the corners of Trafford Road.
    There was a consensus amongst both the men and the women that these brutes needed to be dealt a sharp lesson, that they must be stopped before they took it into their heads to invade Britain and to defile their wives and daughters. This was an honourable cause for any red-blooded male and the government’s pleas for the security of freedoms and the defence of the realm and the British Empire added a noble and nationalistic veneer.
    Nearing the castellated and imposing structure of the Victorian barracks their hearts started to pound. In a moment of passion, they had made a commitment that would change their lives. They would be introduced to experiences that they had only dreamt about as young boys when they had seen the soldiers marching down Cross Lane.
    Heading towards the entrance, they joined other men from the Territorial Army that they had befriended over the last few years. Edward felt the pain and remorse of separation from his young family and yet the strange thrill of transferring into the secure and familiar, regimented life of the Army and the promise of adventure that it held. He stepped through the Drill Hall gates and he was a soldier – Private 2789 Edward Craigie of the Lancashire Fusiliers.
    The transition as he walked through the majestic gates was almost brutally fast. It was only a short time before this that he had been a Terrier – a member of the Territorial Army – along with many of his friends, neighbours and workmates. They were known locally as the ‘Saturday Night Soldiers’ because that was when they did their training.
    Joining the Terriers and having the chance to go away to annual camp had been a bit of an adventure prompted, also, by an honourable determination to stand up for their families and for Salford if they were called upon to do so. When they had enlisted in the Territorial Army the concept of it was simply as a home defence force and with no obligation to serve overseas. The possibility of fighting for King and Country in a previously unheard of part of the World, or even of dying in some foreign field, had been merely the hyperbole of the bored upper classes.
    Now the three friends were waiting to put their signaturesto the documents that would bind them to become regulars in the 1/8 Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers, the ‘1’ indicating the first line formations that had been created from the Territorial Forces. Soon they would be leaving for foreign fields with alien cultures and strange languages.
    Long queues stretched out in front of the registration desks in the huge Training Hall. The hubbub of noisy chattering drifted off into the lofty, white-girdered roof space but to their right they could hear the strident, barking commands of the Sergeant Major as he ordered the new arrivals into their appropriate lines. They sheepishly joined the queue indicated and put their equipment on the floor; shuffling it along as they slowly progressed towards the form-filling officer.
    They smiled uncomfortably as the officer in the adjacent desk yelled at an embarrassed youth who had replied ‘my street’ when questioned as to where he lived. The officer appeared