One of Our Boys Is Missing - Chapter 2, Hero in the Neighbourhood: Part 3

One of our main tormentors was a Corporal called Baldwin. He'd usually be the bad half of a bad cop/even worse cop double act with one of the Sergeants. He was apparently resentful of the fact that he'd failed both SAS and 53 Assault Reconnaisance Squadron selection, and also been passed over for promotion, and was stuck trying to nail groups of recruit tossers into shape rather than doing something more exciting. I had already popped up on Baldwin's viewfinder within the first few weeks at Thrushingfold:

'you're a fucking idiot'...'who told you to move?'...'what kind of a surname is Moraine anyway?'

..this was all part of the mind games that recruits have to play of course - the staff would have all been through the same thing themselves when they were recruits- though I thought he probably gone to far when he stuffed an old rag in my mouth when I yawned slightly whilst doing a river crossing during an exercise.

Once he made us all parade outside in the rain in order of ugliness. I'd had myself down as being passable, not quite up with some of the smoothest guys in the troop, but way ahead of some of the mingers in the pre-occurrence period of my life. I was therefore a bit distraught when Baldwin, who was not the best looking guy in the world himself, even by NCO standards, relegated me right to second from bottom, only ahead of a guy who looked like Salvador Dali and the guy that did the Lewis Carroll illustrations had been fighting over him.

Baldwin and all the staff went to a different town, Banbury, for their kicks. So we'd all leave the barrack gates and turn left, they'd turn right.

'Have a good night out girls'...'have a milkshake for me'

were the kind of brickbats we'd have hurled in our direction as they were leaving. They were a real sight too, with their Ben Sherman shirts, gold chains and stinking of bad cologne. We really had to struggle to conceal our amusement when a story was leaked that Baldwin,had been poked in the eye by a woman he was trying to pull in some nightclub. The evidence was there for all to see, one of those really nasty psychedelic 'black' eyes that scare small children. So when a few days later he announced that 'I've got my eye on you, Moraine' it was just too much to bear; we all had to stifle it any way we could, chewing on spent cartridge cases if necessary, until we were safely back in our rooms and we dissolved into hysterics.

Normally those Friday nights out would be good fun; eventful. There was a choice of two nightclubs, Liaisons, which had a happy two hours every Friday, and the Crocodile Bar, which was a bit classier. Not only were there no jeans or doc martens but they also had a separate place where the locals could leave their sheep, cows and other livestock rather than taking them into the club with them. That said, looking about at some of the women in there it appeared that policy hadn't been perfectly adhered to.

I met Natalie in the Crocodile Bar. Natalie was small, blonde and pretty. She was in the corner with a couple of friends, and one of the guys from the Calthrops, Phil 'eyebrows' Beaumont was trying to chat her up. Phil was in my section at Fedioukine. He was a good-looking bastard, even with the cam-cream on, good at all sports and always a hit with the women. This time the treatment didn't seem to be working on Natalie though, which impressed me, so I had to go up and try to chat her up. We got on well, and just as time was approaching for cinderella to leave the ball I got her phone number and we agreed to meet up next Friday. The day soon came and we met at Natalie's local, and soon after that started going steady. She was still living at home, working as a hairdresser. Her old man didn't approve of her going out with a squaddy - 'it's not a settled life' he reasoned.

Fieldcraft was the real bread and butter aspect of foot soldiering. We learnt to 'husband' our ration packs, a particularly poor assembly of dried food or dubious nutritional value. It was rumoured that the geraniums in the adjutant's office were better fed than us. These were only just rendered edible with the additions of curry powder, tabasco sauce, mustard etc that we took with us. Packs contained further sundries such as tinned, dried cheese, usually past its use-by date by the matter of a few decades, really piss-poor quality chocolate, a selection of powdered drinks which could be made either hot or cold (at least if you made them scalding hot it diguised the 'taste' and fooled your stomach into thinking it was getting a proper cup of hot tea or coffee) and, rather bizzarely, chewing gum. There were four varieties of rat pack, denoted as 'menu A', 'menu B' etc. Menu! What a joke! If you ever eat in a restaurant which is serving meat and potato dumplings with caramelised pears for dessert, walk out very quickly or at least ask for some tabasco sauce.

I never used to enjoy drill. I hated the pin-point precision of it; the fact that we had to do it at all. Calthrops have a particularly distinctive way of marching, which makes it difficult when parading with other units. Whereas the Royal Marines march with a relatively slow and easy gait, and Green Jackets march with a much quicker, almost staccato mince, Calthrops drill is characterised by a fairly stealthy, cat-like march, going back to the days when we had to stalk around setting up our traps for horses and men. The boast was that the entire regiment could form up and march down the road behind an unsuspecting individual, and he'd never know we were there until it was too late.

Our drill leader (DL) was straight out of the nineteenth century. You could easily imagine him giving the 'independence fire at will' command as the enemy tribe came down the hill. He had those kind of mutton chops which meet on the top lip. I don't think that in the whole time we were in training, anyone ever saw his eyes, his cap was that tightly pulled down over his forehead. He could spot an unuttoned pocket at 500 metres, and the terror which caught us as he surveyed our ranks whilst on god's golden square as he called it was one of th emost demoralizing things we ever experienced. If you caught his attention it was the full treatment for you - eyeball to eyeball (well, I guess you had to imagine his eyes were there somehow), under an enfilade of spittle particles as he inquired as to the extent you 'called' these boots 'clean'.

I managed to avoid his attention most of the time, with one exception. I was next to Kev, we were about the same height, and we'd had a bet on how much the DL would use his pet word, 'yesteryear'. He'd always say this as he liked to reminisce about the glory days of the regiment when they were second to none in the world of military drill. We thought it was hilarious. He'd been on yesteryear overdrive that morning and as we got into treble figures I could sense Kev cracking up, and I caught it and started giggling. I was on line for getting the very essence screamed out of me but someone took the fire for me at the last instant. This was one of the real biffs in our troop, who was already under srutiny for loafing, not being popular, being thick, slightly overweight and having a silly name (Pute, for God's sake!) actually arrived at Fedioukine with some candles instead of a torch. The guys in his bunk were just getting their heads down when they saw wee willie winkie coming towards them, the flickering flame guiding his way as he went for a slash.

The ultimate in Pute’s fuck ups saved me from the DLs wrath though. He’d turned to with his trousers ironed nicely enough, but unfortunately the daft bastard had ironed them inside out – so the crease was actually inverted. You could see the'no information what to do here' error message in mind of the DL, who then had to grab a whole load of staff to come and see as well, to check it wasn’t all a dream and to add to Pute’s misery. It was the last straw with Pute in fact. He'd taken a lot of flack from the Staff, some of whom had taken such a delight in picking on him that it was almost starting to look like bullying- for instance making him run naked past the WRAC barracks just down the road, all the girls laughing at him.

He was a friendly enough guy, but perhaps tried a bit too hard to be your mate. So noone really wanted to get close to him. After this latest episode, long after we'd spent what remained of the night cleaning the mud and shit off our matresses and other kit, only to have to fall in without getting any more sleep, we formulated a plan of action. Ideas mooted included locking him in a cupboard for the night, or simply shooting him whilst doing a live firing exercise. My idea of resurrecting the chicken run was well received but then Phil the eyebrows came up with a marvellous plan. Why not sneak into his bunkroom at night - hey, where did he get this inspiration from? - with a petition from the whole of the troop, in which each person anonymously stated what they thought of him. It was bold, it was brave, it was cruel, but it was necessary. It took a couple of days to procure the necessaries, some of which were illicit - a pen, some paper, some blue tack; we gathered round in Phil's bunk at 02.00 hours, it was really exciting, and had the aura of a midnight feast (but a couple of hours later). Of course the other guys in Pute's bunk had to be particularly careful in sneaking out, whilst he snored like a great hippo. Everyone filed in and wrote down their message in turn, some of them were just brilliant:

'Pute is a noo nee noo nar'… 'Pute go home'… and 'Pute smells of wee'..then came my turn. Shit, I couldn't think of anything. I've never been much of a wordsmith as you've probably noticed. I'm hopeless when people pass round a birthday or leaving card round, particularly if they're one of those, really very funny cards you get in shops with a humorous message about getting drunk, a reference to your age, or some penguins or other animals doing something involving sexual innuendo. I usually clam up when put on the spot like that, and just write something really lame whilst other, often quite reticent folks rise to the occasion and pen something worthy of Dorothy Parker, just off the top of their heads.

'Come on Moraine, there's no time' - ok ok, I'd just put the first thing that came into my head and be done with it...

'Why don't you 'Pute' a gun to your head and pull the trigger?' I scribbled down, feeling a bit guilty that he might actually heed the advice. With the petition complete, we all crept into Pute's bunk for the final act of posting the message. He was really gonna suffer when he read it, and it'd make him think twice about being last on the assault course again. As we were leaving the room, he seemed to stir - had we woken him? A low groan emanated from the direction of his bunk and we all froze in the same way actors on an American TV show used to do at the end of an episode. Suddenly he sat bolt upright - we must have disturbed him - and reached forward and pulled the note from the end of his bunk where we'd left it. Reading it slowly, and with difficulty in the half-light of dusk, he started to sob, first barely perceptibly, then building up to a crescendo of wailing and howling - bugger, I didn't think we were going to cause that much of a reaction. We all legged it from the room sharpish, slamming the door behind us. We could hear his crying halfway down the corridor, and dare I say it, even felt a tinge of remorse (a quality I was going to have to work on eliminating as my career progressed).

According to his bunkmates he sobbed uncontrollably for a whole hour, and from then on he was on a decided downward spiral. He no longer tried to be your mate in the dinner queue or cracked lame gags which fell flat. He didn't even seem to cock up any more, but just spent his time brooding to himself, not talking to anyone. It was really worrying, I almost wanted the old Pute back. As we were drawing near to passing out, the end of recruit training, he finally flipped. He'd lain in wait in the quartermaster's stores, where he knew Baldwin was going to go to return some blank firing attachments we'd been using that day. And he'd be on his own. Noone knows exactly what happened next, but it appears that Baldwin had flung the door of the stores open to be confronted with Pute, or what looked like Pute. He hadn't had a shower after the day's activity, a few day's growth of stubble was starting to show. Worse than that, he'd desecrated the regimental badge on his beret, folding it into four sections to make it look more like a Guide's badge and had pulled his beret down right over his eyes a la Benny Hill. Worst of all, he'd taken that month's copy of 'Army Weekly', Baldwin's favourite publication, and gone through all the pages with pictures of NCOs on them, and tippexed out the moustaches and tatoos, making them look far less scary, almost human. Baldwin never recovered from the attack. He was pensioned off on the grounds of ill health soon afterwards. Needless to say Pute was removed too. We never heard what happened to him. It wasn't a happy way to round off our training but, hell, the Army's a tough place, and some people just don't have what it takes. Fortunately for me I was loving every minute of it, and no more Baldwin to dog my career, either.

TBC

Previous installment here.