Firebird (38 page)
Authors: Michael Asher
As the bugler sounded ‘lights out’, I clambered into my bunk. I slipped gratefully between the abrasively starched sheets.
‘I hope tha doesn’t snore!’ chuckled Walker with a hint of intimacy both warm and repellent at once.
‘What do you make of this chap Jekyll?’ I asked him.
‘A reet bloody bastard!’ he replied.
I closed my eyes and pictured my parents’ house, only a few hours’ journey away in rural Lincolnshire. It seemed impossible that I had left it only that morning. I had been away before, on camps and holidays, but this was different. There was something final in today’s journey, some final cutting of the umbilicus. My childhood and youth were gone for ever. I was in the army, sharing a room with three faintly menacing characters from places I had scarcely heard of. I was gripped by the same mixture of fear and excitement which had come and gone all day. I had become the hero of one of the adventure books I read so avidly. I was afraid, yet I had no wish to return to my dull town and its dull grammar school. I had finally broken out of the prison of my humdrum childhood. For better or for worse, I had taken my destiny in my own hands. What the army represented most to me at that moment was escape.
*
Walking home from school every day, I used to pass a Territorial Army drill-hall. For several years a glossy poster was displayed outside. It showed a close-up of a handsome soldier in combat uniform. He had gleaming white teeth, and a black beret was perked rakishly on his head. Behind him a troop of armoured personnel carriers was poised for action. Several more soldiers emerged from their battle-hatches, wearing peaked combat-caps and toting sub-machine-guns. Above the picture in large red letters was written JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS and along the bottom IT’S A MAN’S LIFE IN THE MODERN ARMY.
As a teenager, the men on those posters seemed to represent everything I wanted to be. The romantic side of me had always been attracted to the idea of soldiers and armies since I had first heard my grandfather’s stories of Kitchener’s army and the Dardanelles.
‘It was just after we advanced from the beach-head,’ he would begin, ‘when I got it in the leg. We got the order to fix bayonets. The Turks were dug in across the fields with machine-guns. Some fool gave us the order to charge. You were so carried away with the noise and the screaming that you hardly knew what was happening. Next thing I knew I went down like a skittle. I’d copped two rounds in the leg. There was blood and bodies all over the shop down there. I saw one bloke, I remember clear as daylight, trying to get up and shouting, “Mum, help me!” with half his head shot away. Then they were all retreating. What a cock-up it was! I tried to crawl back towards the beach. “Leave your rifle, mate!” somebody shouted. “Never!” I said. “They’ve set the goss on fire!” they said. “You’ll get roasted!” You could smell the smoke on the wind. I kept on crawling till I fell into a shell-hole. Then I went out like a light. When I came round, I had another wound in the back. The Turks must have advanced and stuck a bayonet in me to finish me off. No one thought much of the Turks, you see. That was the big mistake. They were tough as old leather. Anyway, they didn’t finish Tommy Kew. The stretcher-men arrived and carried me off to the beach. They winched me aboard the hospital-ship. Then the doctors said I had gas gangrene, and the leg would have to come off. I was only eighteen years old. I’ve been a cripple ever since.’
My grandfather remained disabled all his life, but to me he was a hero. I was enthralled by his stories. I can recall the exact words he used, the smell of his tobacco lingering in the room, which in itself seemed to evoke the reek of fear and cordite and burning gorse. I remember the polished brass cartridge-cases he kept on his mantelpiece. I imagined they were the very bullets cut out of his leg in that hospital-ship off the Golden Horn. It seems curious to me now that it was not the fact of his being crippled that struck me so forcibly. It was not the fact that the war had left him scarcely employable, a forgotten, half-helpless peg-leg of a man whose life was constant pain. I hardly thought about the incompetent surgeons who had sawed off his leg. I never wondered why he hadn’t won a medal for his bravery, when all the decorations had gone to those upper-class idiots who had ordered the attack. Or gone to those aristocratic generals whose imperial arrogance had dismissed the Turkish army as ineffective, when it was plain that the Turks were amongst the finest soldiers in the world. No, it was the glory, the thrill, the romance of it all that remained with me long after my grandfather was gone.
But then, most boys think like that. If they didn’t, they would be less willing to offer themselves for the testing-ground of war, year after year, generation after generation. The same must have been true of my father. Tom Kew’s tales did nothing to prevent him from volunteering for the army when the war broke out again in 1939. As a trainee-surveyor, it was natural that he should be posted to the Royal Engineers. It was a Territorial unit, which shows that he was a volunteer, not a conscript. He could have gained a commission in the infantry, but he remained a sergeant in the Sappers. He fought his way through the North African campaign and the invasion of Italy, and returned with a ‘Mention in Dispatches’. That citation hung on our lavatory wall through my childhood. My eyes would linger over it proudly as I sat there, awfully impressed by ‘His Majesty’s High Appreciation’. Dad wore his old battle-dress blouse for gardening until it finally disintegrated.
My father’s war, like my grandfather’s, was a patriotic duty which involved the entire nation. Things had changed since then. In the early sixties the army had become a professional organization again. Without an empire to hold up, it had become slimmer and more streamlined. The excess baggage of the upper-class twits had been shorn off. In a world which seemed to be getting smaller, more uniform and drearier every day, the army seemed the last bastion of adventure. At sixteen I was attracted to the idea of becoming a journalist. Opportunities were few and at the time it seemed to offer no more than a lifetime of drudgery on the local paper. And drudgery was what I wanted most to avoid. I had only one life to live, and I had no intention, even then, of living it in an office or a factory. I was a romantic. The army seemed to be my avenue of escape.
My parents were adamant that I should join the army as an officer. Otherwise it would be a waste of my education, my father said. At school, a class-mate called Geoffrey Deacon applied for a commission and passed. He described his experiences at the Regular Commissions Board in detail, and I listened avidly. He was already the man in the JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS poster. He was the same tall, athletic type, with the same gleaming white teeth. He was a school prefect, a rugby player and the winner of the coveted victor ludorum shield for athletics. He was also senior cadet in the school corps, while I was a lowly sergeant. Deacon persuaded me to take the RCB. ‘If you fail, you’ll know it’s not for you!’ he told me.
My reputation at school was saved only by my relatively enthusiastic performance in the corps and by my success as captain of the school fencing-team. Otherwise I was an incorrigible hooligan who dodged lessons, ignored prefects and behaved as though the school were Colditz and I the ‘escape king’. I had my own escape routes and emergency procedures. Once, I was caught climbing out of a first-floor library window during a study period by a prefect whom I particularly disliked. I made my feelings clear with a crisp expletive idiom, of which the last part was ‘off’. My reaction was duly reported to both my housemaster and the headmaster. I was very soon waiting nervously outside the headmaster’s study. I should have realized it was serious when I saw them there together. ‘Do you expect me to underwrite you for Sandhurst when you behave like this?’ the headmaster asked me. I suppose I did. I was bitterly disappointed when I took the RCB and failed.
I had come to the inevitable fork in the road at which I should perhaps have taken the path of least resistance. I should have admitted that the army wasn’t for me, and that I was never cut out to be a soldier. But this rejection got my hackles up. I dug my heels in and refused to admit defeat. If the army wouldn’t take me as an officer, then I would show them anyway. I would join the ranks of the hardest, toughest, most elite unit open to me: the Parachute Regiment.
Of course, my parents were disappointed that I hadn’t made Sandhurst. They advised me to give it up as a bad job. ‘And do what?’ was a question they couldn’t answer. I took a temporary job as a labourer on a vast arable farm belonging to my girlfriend’s family. During the mornings I picked daffodil bulbs. I shuffled after the harrow with the other labourers, scooping the golden bulbs into a basket until my back ached. In the long afternoons there would be hay-making. We collected the great bales with pitch-forks and built them up into a vast monolith on the back of a wagon. At weekends she chose a mount for me from the eleven horses in her stable, and we cantered for miles through the wheat-field stubble. Evenings found me in the local pub, the Bull, listening to tales of wagons and horses and sipping my first pints of bitter with the old hands. I remember how they sat on the wooden plank-benches, transfixed by the last piercing beams of sunlight. Their carven granite faces under their flat caps seemed a thousand years old.
The army schools liaison officer was a retired colonel. He visited me one afternoon to tell me that if I wanted to join the ranks, there was a special arrangement called an ‘S-type’ engagement. ‘You serve as a potential officer until you feel it’s time to have another bash at RCB,’ he told me. I agreed, but only on the condition that I could serve in the Parachute Regiment. ‘The Paras is very demanding,’ the colonel said. ‘They accept only one in four applicants. You’ll have to take your chances with no special treatment. If you fail the Paras’ selection course, it would end your chances of becoming an officer.’ He suggested the Royal Green Jackets instead. ‘It’s very fashionable now,’ he said. ‘They have a special potential officers’ wing, in which you’d be specially prepared for RCB. In the Paras you’d be just another recruit.’
‘That suits me,’ I told him.
He said he would make inquiries and returned a week later. ‘It’s fixed up,’ he told me. ‘You can bypass the Other Ranks Selection Centre. You can swear the loyal oath and leave for Aldershot.’
The regimental sergeant-major was wearing his best parade uniform. He was a chunky Royal Signals man, evidently pleased with his sinecure job in the Army Careers Office.
‘Are you sure you want to join the Paras?’ he asked me dubiously.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I want to be sure,’ he said, ‘because I don’t want you coming back here in a month and complaining it’s too tough.’
‘I won’t be back,’ I said.
‘Do your parents agree with you?’ he asked me.
‘Yes, they do,’ I lied.
He wrote ‘Parachute Regiment’ on the form, and I signed on the bottom line. Then I held my hand up and swore an oath to protect the Queen and all her ministers. I had my doubts about the ministers. The RSM presented me with a cheap little Bible with my name and the date inscribed inside. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘Let us know how you get on!’ I dashed for the bus and arrived home in time for dinner. ‘I’ve joined the army!’ I announced. My parents were furious, but there was nothing they could do. I was over eighteen and I had signed upon the dotted line.
