'I says, "Paid!" I says. "I'm not acting Unpaid Lance Corporal, I want paying!"

"Oh, yes, you'll be paid."

"Put my name down!"

'Acting Unpaid Lance Corporal: they weren't getting paid for it. But I got paid straight away. And then I got the other one. I got the second one when I came back from a course at Warminister. I think I was on about 7/6 a day then. Oh aye, it was canny. You could get a pint of beer for about 7d or 8d. Cigarettes was only about a shilling for 20. I had about £2 odds a week and I used to get a pound a week off my mother. My mother used to send me a pound every Monday.'

Warminister was the School of Infantry NCO Wing, a course which lasted from 11th January until the 22nd February 1946.

What do you remember about Warminister?

'There was one little Scotch lad. When I went down on this NCOs' course me and him mated up. He was in the Royal Scots, you know with the chequered tail on? Me and him mated up. Why, Warminister, it's only a little town and there was like different things on every night, like quizzes. These women's organisations used to run them and they used to have prizes, cigarettes, chocolate and that. And me and him used to go and do these quizzes and we used to win more stuff than enough! I was down at Warminister about six weeks and then I had to go back up to Scotland.'

What were you doing up there?

'Oh, we were just training the young 'uns. They were National Service lads, only about 18. We went up before Christmas at first. We went up about September, October. We finished our course about Christmas time and then we got our tapes about January. And then I went down to Warminster. We came back and then I was up on CO's orders.

'You used to have to go and see CO Orders every night in the Company Office. It was a notice board: everything was one, your programme, what you were doing next day, everything was on it. But if you were on CO's orders you had to go in front of the CO and my name was on so I had to go in front of him. And I'd just come back off leave. I'd had seven days leave. I'd come back on the Monday I think and I went and looked at the orders on the night and it was up: in front of the CO about 10 o'clock the next morning.

'He says, "I've got a Class B Release come through for you, Tunney." He says, "If you stay in, I can guarantee another tape for you, very shortly." I was browned off, I'd just come back off leave, so I says, "I'll go out, Sir." I was bloody demobbed on the Friday down at York.'

The Class B Release was a scheme to demobolise essential workers such as bricklayers and joiners early to speed the process of postwar reconstruction.

What if you hadn't have got the Class B?

'I'd have had to wait. Everybody had a number, a demob number and as the numbers came up you got demobbed. If you wanted to stay in you could stay in. I think my demob number was 28 or something like that--why, I didn't go in until December 1941. Why some of them was called up in 1939 and had a smaller number. That's the way it went.'

Why York?

'You got demobbed there. That was the depot. You got your suit and your trilby hat.'

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