Eye of the Storm (5 page)

True to his word, the recruiting sergeant contacted me three days later. He had fixed an appointment for me to have a medical and said that he had talked the police into dropping the charges, since, if I had a criminal record, I couldn’t go into the army. He told the police that I would send the price of the ticket I’d dodged, plus 10 shillings for the bus fare home, and they had accepted the deal. I was in the clear.

I packed in my job as an apprentice and signed on at the Labour Exchange, where I was sent off to numerous jobs by my mates who worked there. The jobs ranged from labouring on building sites to working in a dairy, hooking crates of milk from a conveyor belt on to milk trucks. The job wasn’t particularly interesting but it paid well, and there was plenty of milk to drink.

There I was, four months short of my eighteenth birthday, and fed up with Preston, fed up with my work, fed up with the way I lived. And now that I was off the police hook, I was damned if I was going to go into the army. Even I knew, however, that escaping the military once they had their hooks into you was no easy matter. I therefore decided to emigrate to Australia, on a £10 assisted passage which the government there was advertising in order to attract people to the life Down Under. The recruiting sergeant was very nice about it, all things considered, when I telephoned to tell him the good news. No doubt he thought the army had had a lucky escape.

A few days later I presented myself at Australia House in Manchester, where I filled in a load of forms, one of which asked whether I was willing to serve in Vietnam if I was called up by the Australian Army. I signed it; indeed, I’d have signed anything to get out of Preston. The city’s slogan in those days was ‘Proud, Pretty Preston’. ‘Pissing-down Preston’ would have been more like it. I kept thinking about all that Australian sunshine, and about Bondi Beach, and then I ran out of things to think about because I knew little about Australia, except that it had kangaroos and aborigines and was a hell of a long way away.

I must have been acceptable to the Australian immigration authorities – or at least the forms I’d filled in must have been – for in due course Australia House telephoned to say that I was to stand by to fly out on the following Friday. I had elected to fly out because I couldn’t afford to go by ship. In fact, the £10 emigrants’ fare was the same for either mode of travel, but by sea you had on-board expenses for several weeks as you sailed to the other side of the world. Then the blow fell. They phoned again to say that as I was under twenty-one years of age I needed written parental approval.

Getting my mother to sign the papers proved easy enough, but I still needed my father’s signature. I hadn’t seen him in years, but I knew that he was still living in the same house and I remembered the phone number. So I called him.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

‘Peter.’

‘Peter who?’

‘Peter, your son.’

There was a long pause. Then he said, ‘What do you want?’ Clearly things had not changed much.

I explained that I needed to talk to him, and he grudgingly invited me to his house on the following Saturday. He was pleasant enough when I turned up, especially as we hadn’t seen each other for about four years. We went to watch the speedway at Belle Vue in Manchester and afterwards had a few drinks. It was then that I told him that I was emigrating to Australia. He thought it was a good idea until I mentioned that he’d have to sign a paper giving his consent. Then he stopped thinking it was a good idea. In fact, it became a very bad idea. If I got into debt, he said he’d be held legally responsible for the money owed. So he wasn’t going to sign, and that, as far as he was concerned, was that.

I wasn’t done yet, however. Back in Preston I forged his signature on the document and took it to Australia House. Luckily, before I could pull the papers out of my pocket a woman clerk told me that my father had telephoned to say that he refused to sign the paper, and had made it clear that he was not prepared to argue the toss about it.

As I stood there, feeling shattered, with all my dreams about Australia going down the drain, the woman patiently explained once again that without both my father’s and mother’s consent I would have to wait until I was twenty-one. My father had well and truly queered my pitch. Cunning as ever, he had been at least one jump ahead of me, for he must have guessed that I would forge his signature after he’d refused to endorse my application.

Now I was really depressed. Although I had the job in the dairy, I knew that my life was going nowhere. As I sat slumped miserably on the top deck of a bus one morning, with another exciting day of hooking crates of milk to look forward to, I saw a massive billboard bearing a famous British Army recruiting poster of the time: ‘Join the Professionals and become a Soldier of the Seventies.’ I jumped off at the next stop.

In my desperation, I simply thought I’d give the recruiting office another try, hoping they didn’t remember me – the guy whom they had got off a police charge, and who’d then more or less told them to get stuffed. Clad in the sort of reefer jacket made popular by the Beatles and a hat not unlike a Russian admiral’s, I shoved open the door. With my long hair hanging scruffily well over my collar, I must have been a recruiting sergeant’s vision of hell.

As it happened, they didn’t remember me. So I filled in all the papers again and completed all the tests. I sat, hands in pockets, on a hard chair and heard one sergeant say to another, ‘Come and have a look at this.’ I guessed that he was talking about me, and immediately assumed that they were going to kick me out.

But it was the test papers they were interested in. Apparently I was the only would-be recruit they had ever seen who had answered all the questions correctly. They gave me that ‘What do you want here?’ look, but were obviously keen to get me to sign on. They told me what a wonderful life it was in the army, then tried to talk me into joining one of the army’s technical corps. ‘With these results you could become a technician, maybe join the Royal Corps of Signals,’ one of them said. To me, however, it was the Parachute Regiment or nothing. So I sat there, periodically repeating, ‘No, I want to join the Paras.’

I was aiming for the top, I knew that. But I didn’t want to waste my time in some unglamorous, technically minded, mostly non-combatant corps like the Engineers, the Signals or the REME. Eventually they gave up arguing because by then they knew that if I didn’t get a shot at the Paras, I’d walk straight out of the door. Although I had not the slightest idea what I would have done then …

They sent me for a medical, which in due course I attended. I must have passed, for in November 1969 I received notice telling me that I was going into the army the following week. I was determined to spend Christmas with my mates, however, and therefore asked them to postpone the date I was due to join. The recruiting office agreed and I was ordered to report back there on 5 January 1970. That Monday morning I borrowed 2 shillings (10 pence) off the Labour Exchange guys I was sharing the house with and, with my kit stuffed into a supermarket plastic bag, made my way to the recruiting office. This time I’d left my Russian admiral’s outfit back at the house and was wearing a sports jacket and grey trousers, so I looked a bit more respectable, or at least conventional.

I was taken upstairs to a room where a middle-aged officer who looked like a relic from the Second World War sat me down and lectured me about how boring it would be for me in the Paras, rushing about the place doing forward and backward rolls. As it quickly became obvious that he didn’t know what he was talking about, the conversation sort of tailed off after a bit. Eventually he stopped talking about the Paras and swore me in on the Bible. After that brief ceremony he gave me a day’s pay – about 23 shillings (£1.15), which was a fortune in those days for me to have as spending money – and an army clerk then issued me with a rail-travel warrant to Aldershot. The money even paid for breakfast in the first-class dining car on the train.

At about four o’clock that afternoon I arrived in Aldershot, the sprawling garrison town which is the traditional home of the British Army. Outside the railway station I asked someone how to get to Browning Barracks, the Parachute Regiment’s depot, and he pointed to a double-decker bus. I climbed aboard and the bus eventually got going, only to meander all around Aldershot. There seemed to be soldiers everywhere – marching, running with packs on their backs, trotting in track suits, hanging out of the backs of canvas-topped trucks that were painted a dull olive green, drilling on barrack squares, stamping up and down on guard duty. I’d never seen so many soldiers in my life.

But it was when I began seeing my first Paras that my heart started racing. I was getting really excited about becoming one of these guys in their red berets and parachute smocks when the bus driver shouted ‘Browning Barracks.’

The place differed dramatically from the yellow-brick barrack blocks that the bus had passed, clusters of buildings with names like Badajos commemorating ancient victories. For a start, Browning Barracks had an old Douglas C-47 transport aircraft – the famous Dakota, which had ferried so many Paras to battle during the Second World War – parked on the lawn outside the gates. The building blocks that flanked the two large parade grounds were modern, with lots of glass, making them light and airy, and the whole barracks immediately had a good feel to it.

Having left the bus and gone through the gates, I realized I had no idea where to report. I spotted an office and was looking for the door when a woman came to the window and asked if I was lost. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I’ve joined the army.’ I gave her my name and, after she had looked it up on a list attached to a clipboard, she told me that I was expected and asked where my kit was. Wordlessly I held up my plastic bag. She must have felt sorry for me, because she invited me in and gave me a cup of tea. Then she pointed me in the direction of another building, which she said was the Transit Block.

By now it was about 4.45 and the last grey light of a winter’s afternoon was fading fast. I made my way over to the building and was directed to a small room where I found two other recruits, both Welsh, and both later to join the SAS. Apart from them, there were four grey-painted metal beds with steel springs and no mattresses, blankets or pillows; there was precious little other furniture either. We sat there and waited for somebody to come. But nobody did, so at about seven o’clock we set off to find something to eat, shambling around the barracks in our civvy clothes and non-military haircuts.

We finally located the NAAFI, where we each bought a meat pie and a cup of tea. Then we made our way back to the Transit Block, resignedly concluding that we were expected to sleep that night on the bare metal springs, without mattresses or blankets. Yet, even though it was cold and uncomfortable on that metal bed, I was dog tired and went out like a light. When we woke in the morning and took off our shirts to have a wash, our backs were covered with diamond-shaped indents from the metal springs. We looked as though we’d been lashed with a cat-o’-nine-tails.

At around nine o’clock the door opened and a soldier in uniform entered. He told us his name was Corporal Palmer and asked when we had arrived. I said, ‘About a quarter to five, sir. Last night.’

‘Don’t call me “sir”,’ he snapped, furious that nobody had told him that we three had been due to arrive. Then he asked where we had slept. He looked mildly incredulous when we pointed to the metal springs, remarking, ‘What, there? That’s a good start. Come with me and get the mattress and bedding you should have collected last night.’

As it happened, we had missed the intake for the Parachute Regiment, which was held every month. More recruits began arriving that morning but, like us, were all too late. We would therefore have to wait until the following month’s intake to be formally drafted into the regiment, although we were to remain at the barracks for the time being. Having drawn bedding and a certain amount of army clothing, though not proper uniform, we were given tests and interviews and put through an assault course, before undergoing an assessment and meeting the officer who would be in charge of us, who spoke briefly about the Paras and what would be expected of us.

One of the tests involved being taken to a trinasium, which is where the directing staff (DS) work out whether you have the confidence to make a parachute jump. The test itself required us to walk along a length of scaffolding tubing fixed about thirty feet in the air. Having shuffled along this to the middle, we had to stop, bend over and touch our toes, before making our way to the far end.

I was terrified – literally shaking – because I can’t stand heights. Nevertheless, when my turn came I obediently climbed up and inched my way through the routine. Having succeeded once I dreaded doing the test again, but I had to. Several times. Somehow I managed not to fall off, and, either by luck or good acting, the instructors didn’t notice that I was scared to death.

After four days of tests, trips to the assault course and other more or less mindless activities, Friday came and with it pay parade. When I reached the head of the line I was given a paybook to sign, after which the Pay Corps corporal handed me about £29 and a few shillings. The supervising officer then said, to my considerable surprise, ‘Off you go. You’ve got three weeks’ leave.’ Bloody hell, I thought, on leave already and I’ve only just arrived. What was more, I hadn’t had so much money in my pocket since, aged fourteen, I had run that newspaper stand. We got ready to go, though first we had to hand in the gear they’d given us to wear while we were in the barracks. Suddenly we were back in civvies.

I reported back to Browning Barracks on the first Monday in February. With my fellow recruits we were finally kitted out with uniform, boots, and all the other paraphernalia of the newly joined recruit, then put into our sections, each under a section corporal, and assigned to another four-man room in the Transit Block. I’d had my collar-length hair cut in January, but it still wasn’t short enough for the British Army. Now they gave me a haircut that left me looking like a convict just beginning his sentence.