the twynam fan dance

The Twynam Fan Dance

Not really as exotic as it sounds. This is just a short story about how to keep your cool.

In “Thing Remembered” Bob mentions “Flash table-lamps and electric fans in your bed space.”

How true. As with the Cinema hat, having just a simple lamp or fan wasn’t enough.

The lights came in various sizes, shapes capabilities and degrees of safety. However, this tale isn’t about lights, it’s about fans and the very memorable Fan Dance.

If I recall correctly there were five of us in our Twynham. Yorkie, Geoff the Baker, Tom Dimond and an RE (name forgotten) who’s claim to fame was his ability to repair watches, and myself.

The fans generously supplied by HM Government that dangled precariously from the ceilings were as much use as a one legged man at a bum kicking contest.

So it was everyone’s aim to get themselves a fan. Not just any old fan, but one that was superior to your mates.

Mine was a medium sized affair with rubber blades. Bit noisy but because the blades were rubber no wire frame was required to protect you from decapitation.

I did try to make this fan a bit more decorative (into “Prof” mode once more) by painting each of the 3 blades.

Multicoloured stripes, this sounded good, it looked good. Wonder how it’ll look in motion. I switch on the fan and whoosh, paint everywhere. Up the walls across the ceiling, on lockers, floors, sleeping bodies, this stuff got where even Heineken was scared to go.

I now had a fan with not a sign off paint anywhere, but I must say the Room looked amazing.

At one stage I’d even mounted my little “treasure” in the wall above my bed. Wall, that’s using the term very loosely, I think it was some form of compressed cardboard. It wasn’t long before I was attacked in the middle of the night by fan pulling loose from its mounting and dropping about 18 inches right onto my head. Back to the drawing board.

The best part of the Fan story comes at about 1am in the morning. The fan in question belongs to our watch repairer friend. It was a huge affair; it oscillated and must have weighed in the region of 6-7 pounds minimum. It ran from morning to night, rumbling away relentlessly on top of the locker next to his bed.

We’d all come back from a heavy session at the NAAFI. We flop onto our beds, sweat poring from our bodies in a vain attempt to get rid of some of the evenings intake. Idle chat goes on while we all try to cool off a bit. Fans are switched on and we all start to relax.

Suddenly a voice pipes up, “anyone got a light”. Mumbles from all round the billet. Then, as from nowhere there’s this sound like a 2 stroke moped going round the billet. Brrr, Brrr, Brrr. This was accompanied by a screech of agony.

Lights go on above all the beds. Leaping around the room doing a very reasonable imitation of Fred Astaire and yodelling like a Swiss is our watchmaker friend. His head, from hairline to nose is scored like a piece of Pork ready for the oven. Blood everywhere.

In his haste to find his lighter he had leaned head first into his fan, steel blades, no wire cover. In this case smoking did damage your health.

I’m glad to say the wounds were only super“facial” and soon healed to leave only a series of thin white lines to decorate his face.