RAF Brampton is situated very near Huntingdon, now in Cambridgeshire. Again, it was within reasonable walking distance. It was a mixture of the old and the new. Some of the barrack blocks were very recently built, as was the NAAFI and the Airmens' Mess. Scattered amongst the trees, though, were some ancient nissen huts. I was in one of these at first. It was extremely basic. I was woken one night by a rustling sound from just beside me, and discovered a mouse nibbling a bar of chocolate on the bedside locker. 

Thankfully I was soon moved into a proper barrack block; not one of the very new ones but this, having been originally intended for airwomen, had single rooms. They were reminiscent of cabins in a ship, a long corridor down the centre of the building with tiny rooms opening off. The rooms were just deep enough for a standard service iron bed. The other wall was lined with a built-in wardrobe, cupboards and small desk, and there was just enough room between the furniture, stretching from door to window,  to sit on the hard chair provided. There was no lock on the door, but it was luxurious compared with the accommodation I had been in so far in my career, and indeed would encounter in the future.

I was to work at the Joint Air Reconnaissance Centre, then part of Bomber Command, which was in its own guarded enclosure in a far corner of RAF Brampton. The working environment was luxurious, too, the extensive laboratory also being newly built. And, needless to say, little of the equipment was the same as that at Wellesbourne. I started in the Contact Print Section. The prints we produced, from aerial reconnaissance negatives measuring in the region of 8 inches by 6 inches or 9 inches square, were largely destined to be joined together to make large mosaics of the terrain in question. This meant that the prints, which were made individually by hand, needed to be extremely even all over and to match each other perfectly. The negatives were rarely so; the contact printing machines were fitted with 5 bulbs, each on a rheostat, to help even out the unevenness of the negatives caused by cloud shadows and inaccurate roller blind shutters on the cameras. But this was not enough, so each machine was also equipped with a roll of toilet paper. Not the soft coloured stuff we have now, but RAF issue, more like tracing paper in texture and colour. This was torn to shape and placed on one of several levels of opal glass between the lamps and the glass plate on to which the negative was pressed. The sergeant in charge of the department had an eagle eye for quality and newcomers quickly learned that nothing but perfection would get past him.

Later in the year that I spent at JARIC (UK) I was involved in experiments with contact printers which used cathode ray tubes to make the exposures and which produced evenly exposed prints automatically.

As a separate unit JARIC personnel were not involved in the usual round of guard and fire duties at Brampton itself. We had our own guard system. In turn several of us would spend the night in the laboratory building for two purposes. One was to guard against both intruders and fire, which involved walking around the premises both inside and out. We were not armed. There was also a service policeman on duty at the gatehouse. While not doing this we cleaned the public areas, the cleaning of each department being the daily responsibility of those working there. The cleaning largely consisted of applying polish to the endless expanses of brown linoleum in the corridors, then polishing it with industrial rotary polishers. The following day was free, except for one more duty first thing in the morning, that of burning in an incinerator all the previous day's secret waste.

Apart from these occasional extra duties it was strictly 9 to 5. On Wednesday afternoons only those seriously involved with sport had the time off. For the rest it was work as usual.

Domestic chores were done in the evenings. Uniform items and bedding were laundered for us, but we had to wash and iron our own clothes. We were expected to keep our rooms and the public areas reasonably clean, with a full 'bull night' once a week, followed by an inspection.

The NAAFI was the focal point of our weekday recreation. This provided food and drink, though strictly no spirits. There were facilities for games such as darts and table tennis and an innovation, a television room. Few seemed to watch this. I never did, despite my interest in things cinematic. Radio was still king for most of us, especially 'The Goon Show', which one of our more affluent colleagues recorded on to his new-fangled Grundig tape recorder.

At weekends we usually went off the station, on a daily basis, not for the whole weekend. Huntingdon was nearby. There was little to do there, but we were easily pleased in those days. The group of people I went around with were mostly keen amateur photographers, so we photographed anything and everything. The cinema, coffee shops and just wandering around were our simple pleasures. Sometimes we caught a bus to Cambridge, which was rather more interesting, and to Bedford.

Barry Porter at Huntingdon

We also, on occasion, thumbed a lift to London on the nearby A1. This was very easy to do at that time. Servicemen were still well regarded by the general public, and almost anyone would stop to pick us up, even when we were a group of three or four. We still couldn't afford to do much except wander around and take photographs when we got there, but it made a change. We could stay overnight at the Union Jack Club near Waterloo Station if we wished for very little money.

We were not allowed to use the JARIC darkrooms for processing our own films, but the station provided a darkroom as part of the recreational facilities, so we were able to use that. I had left school before taking my GCE exams, so I took a course at the station education section for a GCE in English Language, which I passed. I and a couple of my friends also began a course at Bedford College of Further Education in GCE Physics, but our subsequent postings put an end to that.