your bed, you’ll be all right, sir.’ Then he raised his voice and shouted, ‘Now, dismiss and rejoin the platoon at the double!’
One cold and wet morning after breakfast, we were back at the Spider collecting notebooks and textbooks for the scheduled morning’s lecture when Sergeant Gibbon strutted in unexpectedly, dressed in fatigues and rubber-soled boots. ‘Change of plan, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘In fifteen minutes you will be embussing for a map-reading exercise on the Aldershot plains. So all you will need are your denims and pouches, a picnic lunch will be provided and we shall return at fifteen hundred hours.’ I didn’t like the man. I didn’t trust the man and something told me he had given us too much unnecessary information. Something made me smell a rat. When he had left the room I pulled the trunk I had kept from under my bed, which contained my secret food supply – Mars bars, apples, biscuits, other objects including a sheath knife, torch, Zippo lighter, blocks of paraffin fire-lighters, hip flask containing brandy and a small but immensely powerful collapsible Primus stove. All of this, along with shaving kit, handkerchiefs, toothbrush and paste, I packed into the pouches and pockets of my kit, along with sixty Piccadilly filter cigarettes! No one saw what I was doing and if we did end up on a routine run or a map-reading exercise for an hour or two, what the hell! The excess weight wouldn’t worry me. I was fit!
I knew I was right the second we got into the three-tonners. Instead of turning left to the training areas, it turned right and headed for Aldershot station, where we were rapidly marched onto a waiting train. Everyone was confused and desperate to know what was going on. The train pulled out of the station and neither the officers nor the NCOs who were with us would tell us anything. After a couple of hours we were issued with ration packs. A pork pie, a Scotch egg, an apple, a chocolate bar and a packet of crisps. Only then did Sergeant Gibbon gleefully announce that we were headed for Dartmoor. Most of the lads only had briefs and T-shirts under their denims; no one had any cigarettes or anything. (I have to say that this is a totally true story that I am about to recount, but it did take place over thirty years ago, and to be honest, I am not entirely sure if the ultimate destination was Dartmoor or the Brecon Beacons.) One thing I do know was that when we arrived in what I think was Tavistock in the late afternoon, we route-marched for several miles to a desolate army camp on the moors, where we were divided into teams of three or four, given maps, a radio, a machine gun, a roll of barbed wire, compass and Chinagraph pencils and told to rendezvous at a grid reference as soon as we could make it. By now it was dark. I can remember two members of my team. One was a hugely overweight, terribly jolly fellow called Brooking-Thomas and the other a tall, crinkly-haired blond fellow called Simon Hicks, who was hoping to get into the 21st Lancers.
I don’t know how long the hike was. It might have been twenty-four miles, it might have been eight. But after a briefing and a big mug of vegetable soup laced with rum, we were dispatched on our ‘mission’. The radio didn’t work, the machine gun had no ammunition and the barbed wire served no purpose except to encumber us with unwieldy burdens. I know it was winter or late autumn. What started as a clear, starlit night ended in an icy downpour. Brooking-Thomas, who was fleet of foot on the dance floors of certain London nightclubs (Les Ambassadeurs springs to mind) and who kept bottles of whisky and port with his name on them at Danny La Rue’s club, was having great difficulty with his feet and soon developed blisters. But, although he was in terrific pain, he was resolutely cheerful throughout this appalling escapade. Hicks and I took it in turns to carry his radio, because we reckoned that the faster we could press on the sooner we would be in some kind of bed. We arrived at our destination around seven o’clock in the morning to be greeted by an immaculate, well-rested and sadistically cheerful Major Edwards of the 22nd Cheshire Regiment and our own platoon officer, Captain Kitchen. To our delight, we were the first group home. No one said ‘Well done’ and, bidding us ‘Wait here until the arrival of the others’ when the ration truck would bring us breakfast, the officers jumped into a staff car and sped off.
Over the next two or three hours the other teams straggled in, tired, cold, hungry and seriously pissed off. The euphoria that my team experienced at arriving first was heightened by the fact that we were enjoying brandy, Mars bars and Piccadilly No. 1 cigarettes. Everyone was, to use army parlance, ‘ticking like meters’. But they all cheered up when someone spotted a three-tonner grinding across the heather. Captain Kitchen had returned. The three-tonner stopped and left us with an issue of rashers, sausages, and, I think, eggs and bread, and departed to its next drop-off zone. When we had unpacked the rations we realised that we had been left no means of cooking them! It’s like the old Ancient Mariner – ‘Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink!’ Even Captain Kitchen was clearly crestfallen.
I don’t how to explain my feelings at that moment, but I would like you to know, I in no way gloated or crowed or enjoyed, in any shape or form, the position I knew I was in. The bloody little Primus stove and its little frying pan had rubbed my thighs sore on the marathon across the moors, but I did manage, in a six- or eight-inch frying pan, to cook breakfast for sixteen desperately hungry men. Later that day, we were issued with picks and spades and told to ‘dig in’. We were to spend the next two or three days playing war games, and although I was still under restriction of privileges, I was made company commander for the day and ordered to attack and take an ‘enemy’ position. We had not been prepared for this exercise, nor for the presence of the camp commandant and his staff. In the hurly-burly of the mock battle, I can remember Kim Fraser leading the attack and playing his bagpipes as we advanced up the hill, and I can also remember pushing a very senior member of the observing staff out of the way of a misfired mortar which was otherwise certain to have landed on him.
As usual there was no indication of how well you had done, but some days later when we had returned to Aldershot, Fraser and I were invited to have dinner with the General! Once this became known, rumours were running rife that he and I were certainly in the running for the Sword of Honour, or at least Junior Under Officer for the last few weeks before our passing out parade! Heady stuff! But I knew in my heart of hearts that Kim and I had been both too good and too bad to be awarded that honour. As it was, the great event of the dinner took place. During the grand and pompous evening of generals, colonels, brigadiers, resplendent in their mess kit, with their elegant wives, both Fraser and I were too shy to start a conversation and too insignificant to be included in one. But we were at the same table and after the dinner and the toast to the Queen, after the port and cigars we adjourned to the anteroom where white-coated mess staff were rolling out a narrow green baize strip some 25 feet long on the floor. The strip was divided and numbered into segments from one to twenty-five, and like an indoor race track, it had plywood cutout fences and jumps. Six brightly painted plywood cutout horses were placed at one end of the carpet. The officers and their wives threw dice and if, for example, you threw a six, your horse could be advanced six places towards the winning post. Fraser and I, in our best mess kit, knelt on either side of the course and moved the wooden horses along the track. That was our reward!
I am someone who has never kept a diary, made notes, collected press cuttings or retained photographs, so it is likely that I will get many of the events in this chronicle out of sync. But fresh in my mind on this blustery, Irish, December day in 1996 is the recent visit which my wife Tess and I made to Bosnia, as guests of the British Army and the 26th Regiment, Royal Artillery, where, in a bombed-out abattoir, we were invited to throw the dice for the selfsame horse-racing game and to back a horse called ‘Floyd’s Fancy’, which romped home after several successful throws of the dice, at 30 to 1, and won us enough money to buy drinks for the entire team. At that moment of the evening, after a week in Bosnia with IFOR, having seen the good and dangerous work that they were doing in the most appalling conditions, I experienced a frisson of déjà vu, and I realised that in both instances I was, and had been, quite privileged.
After the excitement of that evening, which, even though Fraser and I had been mere jockeys, was and still is a special time of my life, we came back to reality with a bump. The course was coming rapidly to a close and shortly we would take the final tests and examinations for our commissions. The pace was hotting up. We were at the stage of being interviewed for our suitability for our chosen regiments. I was still ‘badged’ for the 11th Hussars
