the soft-spoken West Country instructors. They were replaced by fierce, shiny-red-faced, immaculate NCOs and staff sergeants from the Brigade of Guards and top cavalry regiments. Happily, in this large intake of unknown cadets, some familiar faces had made it through – Fraser, Douglas-Home, De Rougement and one or two of the others. The vast majority, however, had come straight from school or university, with the exception of a few young NCOs who had successfully passed the RCB.
So it was back to basics and back to the drill square, where I met a man I shall never forget. He was slightly bow-legged, only 5 foot 9 inches tall, with a voice that could strike you rigid at 400 yards, and he clenched a highly polished pace stick. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, in his magnificent cockney accent, ‘my name is Corporal of Horse Clark. You will address me as Staff. I will address you as sir, simply because that is the tradition of the British Army, not because I have any respect for any one of you. Gentlemen, nobody calls me Nobby to my face or behind my back. I am known as the “Black Mamba” because I strike so fast. There is no room on this course for slackness, laziness or scruffiness.’ With that he sprang from his position and poked his pace stick into the chest of a tall, blond cadet, with his nose pushed into his face, and said, ‘You, sir, are already a scruffy disgrace! Report to the company barber immediately after this parade.’ He almost goose-stepped backwards and continued. There is no room on this course for mummies’ boys, because you are in the Army now and I am your mother.’ He paused and drew himself up to his full height and screamed out, ‘Is that perfectly clear, gentlemen?’ We all gazed steadfastly ahead as if hypnotised by the real Black Mamba. ‘I don’t hear you, gentlemen!’ he said. ‘Is that perfectly clear?’ Yes, Staff!’ we shouted in unison.
Drill parades, kit inspections, lectures and weapons training filled our days. Our nights were filled with study and kit cleaning. The pace was relentless. We were dragged out of bed with no notice at midnight and sent crawling across the muddy training grounds of Aldershot. You never knew how long anything would last. After one long night in the pouring rain we were eventually sent, wet and weary, back to the barracks in three-ton trucks. Exhausted, we crashed into bed. An hour later our instructor burst into the ‘Spider’, immaculate in his drill instructor’s uniform, and announced a rifle inspection. Needless to say, no one had cleaned his weapon before going to bed. We had all assumed we would have time to do that before Reveille in the morning. The whole room was given an extra drill parade as a consequence, and I, considering myself one step ahead of the pack, thought long and hard how to prevent this catch-22 situation from happening again. The thing was, every time they made you fall flat in the sand and the mud, the breech of your SLR got filled with the same. So I acquired a pair of ladies’ tights and cut out a tube which would cover the breech and with the appropriate slits to clip the magazine in. Prior to a scheduled, impending night exercise (which would surely be followed by an unscheduled, out-of-hours weapons inspection), we were issued with two magazines, one containing rounds of blanks and one empty. Unfortunately for me, the platoon sergeant was a wretched little man from an ordinary infantry regiment who carried a huge chip on his shoulder because, unlike the rest of the instructors, i.e. the Black Mamba and others, he was not a Guardsman. He also resented the privileges that we officer cadets would eventually enjoy.
In order to test the efficacy of my anti-sand-and-mud device, aiming my rifle at my bed, I clipped what I thought was the empty magazine onto my weapon, cocked it and pulled the trigger. The consequent explosion of a .76 shell in the confined space of our Spider was shattering. I had also blown a hole an inch wide straight through the blanks on my bed and my mattress! Sergeant Gibbon came roaring in. ‘You, that man there, Floyd, you are on a charge, you moron! Company commander’s orders, tomorrow morning at 0830 hours!’ Until that moment, I know I had irritated the good sergeant of infantry because I had been succeeding at everything that was asked of me and he was delighted that I had fallen so heavily and so disastrously from grace. He turned on his heels and strutted, like a crowing cockerel, from the room.
The following morning, in best kit, I was marched at the double for the awful confrontation with our company commander, a blotchy-faced Major Edwards of the elite 22nd Cheshire Regiment. I was made to mark time on the spot in front of his desk while he languidly regarded me with cold, narrow eyes filled with contempt, disgust and loathing. The charge I was guilty of was read out before him, and he said, ‘And you hope to become an officer and lead men, yet you appear to have the brains of a child and the intelligence of a baboon!’ Corporal of Horse Clark flanked me on one side and our platoon sergeant on the other. Although I could not look left or right because I was at rigid attention, I know he smirked when I was awarded twenty-eight days’ restriction of privileges.
Restriction of privileges meant, amongst other things, punishment drill parades before and after the normal working day, regular reporting to the guard room in whatever uniform they elected you should wear, and, of course, you were confined to camp twenty-four hours a day for twenty-eight days, plus you had, as the Army euphemistically put it, ‘lost your name’. This was a severe blow: not only might it jeopardise my chances of being commissioned, it also scotched my weekly dining club meetings and the odd late night and illicit trip to London to attend the Embassy parties and nightclubs that Fraser, De Rougement and Douglas-Home had open access to.
As a penniless kid in Somerset, I used to make Christmas gifts because I could not afford to buy them. With rubber moulds I would make sets of three flying ducks from plaster of Paris, paint and varnish them, or, using the inner tray of a box of household matches, I would, with watercolours, lichen from the apple tree and balsa wood, create miniature glass cases of stuffed fish with cellophane for the glass held to the tray by black passe-partout. These I would glue onto a card upon which I had written with a copperplate nib the Angler’s Prayer, which was – indeed is:
O Lord, give me grace to catch a fish so large that even I, when talking of it afterwards, may never need to lie.
I now decided to do a similar thing with a matchbox tray and, using little corners of serge blankets and sheets from my bed, I mounted a miniature bed inside a miniature glass case and stuck it on a piece of card cut into the form of a shield such as you see bearing studded heads over the fireplaces of regal halls, and inscribed briefly on the card shield: ‘A rare bed, shot by Officer Cadet Floyd, Kohima Company, Mons O.C.S., Friday 13th June 196—’ and hung it over the head of my bed.
At the following morning’s inspection, the Black Mamba, crablike, marched in front of us, tweaking berets, straightening ties and belts. Every day at our platoon morning parade, there would always be one cadet who failed to meet the approval of Staff. It was usually a tall, lanky aristocrat called De Villiers. Day after day he was bawled out for dirty brasses, a crooked tie or an incorrectly placed cap or beret. On this particular morning I think the good corporal of horse was suffering from a mighty hangover and was not in a good mood. He snapped to attention in front of De Villiers and looked at him from toe to head, stared into his eyes and thrust his pace stick into De Villiers, who, unbelievably after all this time, had his belt on upside down.
‘Mr De Villiers,’ he snapped, ‘there is a cunt at the end of this stick,’ and before he could amplify his feelings of utter contempt for De Villiers, the cadet replied, ‘Not at this end, Staff!’ Unfortunately, apart from Corporal of Horse Clark, I was the only person who heard him say it. I dropped my rifle and collapsed into hysterical, uncontrollable laughter. I was rewarded with ten laps round the square with the rifle held high over the head, and while the corporal continued to drill the remainder of the platoon, like the Duke of York marching them up the top of the hill and down again, my forage cap fell off my head. Without his instructions I could not stop running, so I had to leave it where it was, right in the path of the advancing platoon, who trampled it flat! After my ten laps I rejoined the platoon, hatless, and took my place at attention, waiting for the command ‘Platoon dismissed!’ Nobby Clark stood before us, took a deep breath and screamed, ‘With the exception of Mr Floyyyddd…who is improperly dressed on parade, Platooooon! Platooooon! Dismiss!’
The rest of the platoon ran off to the morning’s first lecture while I stood to attention, anticipating
