"Eight-Four!" - A lost wartime language
Around 2012 I was chatting with my late father, Arthur Carpenter. He'd have been about ninety at the time. I can't remember exactly what we were talking about, I wasn't really paying attention. But it might have been something like the urgent need for road repairs in his locality. Anyway, as the conversation proceeded, he said something like, "Well, if they're going to fix it by the end of the month they'd better get someone down there eight-four!" At this point I properly woke up because I'd never previously heard this expression 'eight-four'. In the context, eight-four was obviously an adjective and sounded like it meant pretty damn quick. While I was trying to work this out, my dad had paused in a bit of a puzzle. Like me, he wasn't sure what this 'eight-four' was all about, nor where it had come from. But after a few seconds he'd worked it out.
In WWII my dad was called up to the RAF, a nineteen-year old conscript. Over his three years of war service at numerous air bases across Wales, Shropshire and East Anglia he eventually became an armourer of both bombers and fighter aircraft (a 'plumber', in RAF slang). He was always ground-crew, never remotely a pilot (or 'flyboy', in the general begrudging slang) and certainly never wanted to be one - Ordinary life in WWII was easily dangerous enough without looking for trouble!
My dad explained that when a Spitfire or Hurricane limped back to the airfield, shot-up or otherwise malfunctioning, the base sergeant would suddenly appear at the mess hall door and bark"EIGHT FOUR!!" This meant he wanted twelve men now [like, immediately and without delay] to sprint out to the runway and physically wheel the stricken fighter off the tarmac to one of the safe bays - eight men pushing on the wings and four on the tailplane. Hence 'eight-four', and in practice it meant that guys like my dad had to stop drinking tea, writing home to sweethearts, salivating over the Daily Mirror's Jane cartoon, or whatever else they were doing, and just get out there sharpish! Pretty soon ground crews on airfields across the land co-opted the expression, applying it to any situation that demanded immediate or at least a very rapid response. It became part of ordinary, everyday parlance amongst RAF guys. Seventy years later, and to his wonderment, my dad had casually dredged out from his memory's deepest recesses an expression that he hadn't used for decades and had even forgotten existed.
Does any of this matter? Probably not. But with my dad and virtually every other WWII RAF serviceman now gone, I might now be the only person on the planet who knows what 'eight-four' meant, the purpose of its bellowing out, and the way it found its way into everyday conversation - amongst a few thousand young men a long time ago, at least.
But now you all know too. I kind of hope you might spread it around a little, even use it yourselves and perhaps finally convince your children and grandkids that they were right and you really are losing it. I don't suppose you will (why should you?), but it doesn't matter too much. Eight-four is now immortalised in publication, this very project in fact, for future historians, sociologists, or even just bored researchers to read and hopefully not completely ignore.
I think that's why I've written this piece. When I die I don't want eight-four to die with me, like it would have died with my dad if it hadn't randomly surfaced in conversation with me a few years ago. I'd like to keep that particular little pond of meaning from completely drying up.
