and batoned by the ‘B’ Specials, who I had never heard of, and started to send me copies of the Derry Journal so I could read about it for myself.
On 1 July 1969 I asked the Colonel for permission to marry. As a soldier in the British Army, his permission was needed and a document had to be provided to give to the priest. Put simply, I was a number, a soldier, whose life belonged to the Ministry of Defence and, being under twenty-one, they had to be sure that I knew what I was doing and had thought things through. After a little grilling on both sides, permission was granted and I travelled home with my brother Robert and Nelson Bennett. Nelson was a Protestant and the Colonel’s staff-car driver. He and I had become friendly as he waited around the orderly room to pick up the Colonel. I had asked him, as he was going on leave as well, if he fancied coming to Derry and being my groomsman. He agreed and all three of us set off for Derry, equipped with our ceremonial uniforms.
In Derry things were quite tense, but I visited Mary every night as we prepared for our wedding. Although we had saved enough money, there were still things that we made ourselves – like flowers for the guests. We had real flowers for our parents, our immediate family and the bridesmaids but for the rest of the guests we made paper flowers, which was quite common in Derry in the 60s. We would spend an hour or so each night making paper flowers using two toilet rolls, white for the men and pink for the ladies. Four pieces of toilet roll were folded into eight, bound around a pipe-cleaner, opened up layer by layer and then pared off with scissors to form the shape of a flower. A piece of real fern was attached to the rear, and silver paper was wrapped around the pipe-cleaner. The flower itself was sprayed with perfume.
On the morning of Saturday 19 July, Robert, Nelson and I, fully dressed in our ‘blues’ with lanyards, chainmail and spurs, posed for photographs at the back of our house in Creggan. All of the neighbours wished us well as we boarded the wedding car and headed off, down through the city centre and over to St Columb’s Chapel on the Waterside. I remember travelling through the Guildhall Square and seeing all the RUC Land Rovers and a large crowd shouting at them. Soon I was waiting at the altar with Mary, her bridesmaid Ria and her flower girls, Linda and Elaine, by my side. Father Jimmy Doherty, a trendy young priest, performed the marriage ceremony.
Our wedding reception was held in the Woodleigh Hotel on the Derry side. As we celebrated at our reception, only a few hundred yards away the RUC and the ‘B’ Specials were attacking a small civil rights march. There were rumours amongst our guests that the army might have to be brought in to save the Catholics from the bigoted and sectarian ‘B’ Specials. Mary and I left the reception for our honeymoon just before 4pm. Her cousin Anthony, who had a car, drove us to Butlins in Mosney, County Meath. One night during the honeymoon there was a report on the news that a rioter had been shot dead by the RUC in Belfast. It was being said that he was possibly a terrorist because he had been aiming a rifle at an RUC patrol near a block of flats. Sadly, this turned out not to be the case; the victim was none other than Trooper Hughie McCabe, the young soldier who had defended the German border with me on the banks of the River Elbe. He was mistaken for a gunman whilst home on leave and had been shot by an RUC man who said he was on the roof of a block of flats brandishing a rifle. Sometime later, the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars held an internal board of inquiry which found that Trooper McCabe had been mistaken for a gunman and his death was possibly an ‘error of judgement’ at the height of intense rioting. His family was later paid compensation for the mistake, but the RUC man who killed Hughie was never cautioned, admonished or punished for his ‘error of judgement’.
After our honeymoon I returned to Bovington, where a Colonel Biddy advised me of a house that I could have for £2.10s a week. It was twenty minutes from the camp in a town called Wareham in Dorset, and by September Mary and I had moved into our first new home at Tarrant’s Lodge in Wareham. It was one of the nicest places we had ever seen; the neighbours were kind, there was a supermarket on the corner, and the mini-bus picked me up at the door every morning. The problem was, it arrived at 6.30am and I didn’t get home again until 7.30 each night. Thinking back, it must have been terrible for Mary. She usually had the housework completed by 10am and must have been terribly bored for the rest of the day. We spent only a short time in Wareham, and by the end of October Mary and I had moved to a married quarters in Dorchester. By the spring, Mary was heavily pregnant and was booked into a private clinic in Dorchester – all paid for by the army. To show how naive we both were, our local GP, Doctor Burns, visited us one evening with diagrams on how the baby would be born; Mary didn’t know and I had no idea either. He was amazed at our innocence and was very sympathetic. Towards the end of March he called in to see Mary nearly every other day. The regiment broke up for Easter leave on Holy Thursday, and I had sensibly booked two weeks’ leave because our baby was due any day. On 28 March 1970, at 5.40pm on Easter Saturday, our son, Mark William Carlin, was born weighing 8 lb 7 oz.
By September 1971, the regiment had served its time in Bovington and we were posted to the city of Paderborn. Mary and I were allocated a married quarters on Von Stauffenberg Strasse near Elsen, about five miles from the camp. It was during this posting that the Troubles in Northern Ireland was becoming clear in our minds. By now the situation in Derry was getting very, very serious. The IRA was becoming active and youths were being beaten and shot at by the British Army. Gunmen were on the streets and law and order was breaking down. It was at this time that we learned the very sad news that 14-year-old Annette McGavigan, a distant cousin of mine who we had met back home a few weeks earlier, had been shot dead by the British Army.
We didn’t have a TV in the flat because it was all in German, though we did have BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service) radio, and it was reported that Annette had been rioting. I was shocked and outraged at first, then very confused when my brother phoned to say Annette had been deliberately shot whilst collecting pebbles for a montage she was putting together as part of a school project. I thought that the army had been sent to Northern Ireland to bring about law and order. Most of us assumed this meant sorting out the ‘B’ Specials and bringing them to book for some of their atrocities. There were now fights in the camp between the Irish and the English, but these were mostly drunken rows and never really amounted to anything.
***
On arriving home one evening, Mary informed me that she was pregnant again. We had been trying for another baby for a while and we celebrated with a party on the Saturday night. In the early 1970s, parties in Germany were a way of releasing energy as most of the exercises were by now fairly low-key and we weren’t away from home as often. The estate we lived in had been built for the army by the West German government, almost to order, and had been taken over, equipped and furnished by the quartermaster’s office. It was a mini ‘land of plenty’ in those days; a married soldier was given everything from the bed and bedding, all furniture, fixtures and fittings, right down to an egg timer.
At the end of January 1972, the reality of the events back home shook us to the core. It was reported on the BFBS network that some rioters and several gunmen had been shot dead by the army in Derry. I didn’t know what to think until I learned more about what was increasingly becoming known as Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot twenty-eight unarmed civilians during a protest march against internment by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). Thirteen people were killed on the day and another man died four months later as a result of his injuries. Many were shot while running from the soldiers and some while trying to help the wounded. Later, in the summer of 1972, on 8 June to be precise, Mary gave birth to our daughter Sharon at the British Military Hospital in Rinteln.
Two weeks later, Mary, Mark, Sharon and I left Germany for the last time. I had volunteered and applied for a posting at Bovington Camp in Dorset. That meant a Sergeant’s pay with the acting rank of Sergeant, only this time to the Junior Leader’s Regiment Royal Armoured Corps. Though the posting didn’t commence until September, I had to take six weeks’ leave prior to it – something I wasn’t prepared to give up. Of course, Mary was delighted and she looked forward to going home with Sharon and Mark; because in those days Germany felt like the other side of the world. After a two-day drive all the way from Germany, we arrived in
