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I'm getting bored of this already. You can check out the previous part here.
The
apprehension I felt as I drew nearer and nearer to the epicenter that
was Thrushingfold cannot be put into words. I felt my heart beating
like a volcano, and sweat was literally pouring down my face in
torrents as I imagined what would greet me. Would it be like a
monsoon hitting me from the moment the gates of Fedioukine Barracks
opened, a landslide of shouts and screams, the occasional kick?
Would there be a Tsunami of information and rules, and an avalanche
of kit to get abreast of? Would the barracks look like a sort of
giant cumulo-nimbus cloud, with some smaller clouds dotted around it?
Would the staff go through our bunks like tornados during kit
inspection, or explode like geysers at the slightest faux pas?
In fact it was surprisingly relaxed and informal, the eye of the
hurricane perhaps. We were taken on a brief tour of the place on
foot, given a welcome address from the adjutant, introduced to the
training team and given the rest of the afternoon off to get
acquainted, go into town, and get settled in. Glancing around I
noticed that most of the others seemed as scared as me, if not more
so, and that if push literally came to shove, I reckoned I could take
most of them. I got chatting to two of the guys immediately. One of
them, Gareth, like me came from an unbroken home. Gareth's life and
mine were to become inextricably linked from now, though we’d have
long periods when we’d be doing different things, we’d always be
reunited later on (like in a Dance to the Music of Time – ed.).
We
had a few drinks in one of the local pubs but didn't fancy a big piss
up at this stage, we were all too scared. I felt sick after about two
pints. Another guy, Kevin WAS sick after about two pints, he was
something of a bantamweight when it came to the old sherberts. We
headed back to the depot to check out the NAAFI canteen, which was
great. fried food and more fried food at knock down prices. I was
starting to like the place.
‘So
how long you gonna stay in for?’ I asked Gareth, my voice still
pitching slightly higher than I’d have liked, and my absence of a
strong regional accent (Gareth was a cockney) was a huge source of
self-consciousness.
‘Couple
of years, I reckon. It’ll be a laugh, then I’ll ge back to civvy
street to earn some money’.
‘Yeah,
me an’ all’ I said, trying to sound streetwise and dismissive of
the whole thing – if only we knew.
The
next day came and things began for real. After the regulation haircut
we were off to the quartermaster's stores for the issuing of kit. The
Calthrops' beret was in fact a very, very dark blue, which to all
intents and purposes looked black. This was out of deference to an
action during the War of the Spanish Succession, where the Calthrops
had taken an entire brigade of enemy horse by surprise, attacking at
night, and slotted them in their entirety. We were to spend many
hours wetting, shaping and reshaping the berets in the quest for the
perfect fit. It was common to see recruits sitting with a towel
around their shoulders to catch the drips from their still-wet beret
whilst they watched telly or did some admin.
I
know I need to give the blaggers amongst my readership a lot of
information about kit, and if your name is Geoff and you have a
beard, are a member of CAMRA and still live in the house you were
born in, you’ll want the information to be scrupulously accurate to
the minutest detail – was it the ’58 or ’74 pattern of webbing
we were using? Did we keep two water bottles in our pouches or just
the one? Had we started using yellow blank firing attachments by then
or the old brown ones? Etc etc However I suggest you head for the
Osprey military section of a bookshop, just in case there are any of
theirs you haven’t bought. I don’t want this to turn into a dull
narrative of what kit we used and where; all I’ll say is that
looking after your kit (called ‘admin) is of the utmost importance,
and extremely difficult especially in the field. Much of a man's kit
is a personal thing. With experience, you soon learn to augment it
with bits and pieces of your own, non-standard kit that you've been
bought, borrowed, inherited (literally), nicked or found lying around
in the most unlikely of places. If you come into contact with US
armed forces, they offer a very abundant hunting-ground for
kit-hungry squaddies, as there is so much of it, and they dispose of
it at an astonishing rate. There was a rumour that in Iraq a few
years ago, some lads from the REME managed to assemble an entire M1
Abrams tank, A-team style, with the detritus that surrounded a USMC
encampment. In any event, some items that come as standard issue do
the job well, others are about as useful as the 'white' you used to
find in those sets of pencil crayons when you were a kid. It's an
accept, reject, modify process, getting to grips with your kit. It’s
also possible to go to far in this direction. I remember one guy in
the Calthrops actually marrying his kit, with a formal service with
best man, vicar etc. I was never in any danger of going too far down
that road, though I have to confess that I feel a surge of excitement
in all sorts of ways when this year's army and navy supplies
catalogue comes ripping through the letterbox.
I
came to grief once again with kit, or lack of it. This concerned the
rifle cleaning kit. Everyone had been issued with one, a little
selection of metal rods, brushes, oil and pieces of cloth, except me.
It looked like mine might have been snaffled. I raised this with the
NCO overseeing the distribution of our kit, a textbook ‘chuckle
brothers’ lookalike.
'D'you
think I give a f*ck? Tough luck. Just borrow one of your mates'.
I
sensed that the shelves in the Corporal's room weren't too densely
crowded with, for example, books on cognitive therapy, or some of
Bowlby's work on bereavement. But there again, is that such a bad
thing?
I
was confused; we were to strip and clean our weapons at the next
detail, and I wasn't confident that other people would surrender bits
of their kit willingly. Later on he then changed his tack;
'who's got a rifle cleaning kit for Moraine?' he shouted.
'if
Moraine hasn't got a complete kit by 15.00 hours we're all going for
a little run'. This was part of the military way that I grew to like.
We all had to pull together, if one person was out of shape, the
whole section got it, so it encouraged a kind of cameraderie in the
face of abject panic. Believe me, groups of young lads are every bit
as bitchy and conniving as women, and his approach was the only way
were going to get some sort of cohesion, rather than the me-first
approach you get on civvy street.
Our
first period of Physical Training came soon enough. I was peversely
looking forward to this. I'd enjoyed school sports and I'd done some
cross-country running at school, though it had always taken a back
seat to rugby due to its somewhat geeky reputation. The cross-country
team were in fact referred to humorously as the 'Cambodian rugby
team', to which one of the wittier runners riposted that the rugby
team were nothing but the 'Tongan cross country squad', shortly
before suffering for his art in a most vexatious way by being put in
the chicken run, a small alleyway in between two labs, walled off at
one end, which would be lined on either side by the punishment squad,
leaving the condemned man to make his way out as best he could whilst
kicks and punches rained from all sides .
But I'd kept reasonably fit on the sly, and my impending army career
had motivated me to continue after I left school. I found myself
amongst the front-runners. Those early-morning jogs had started to
pay dividends, and actually found myself enjoying it. The sensation
of pushing yourself, if not to your limits then at least to within
chundering sight of them, the smug satisfaction when it was all over,
at the pathetic sight of one of your contemporaries lurching across
the finish line in uncoordinated, unself-conscious humiliation, by
which time my pulse rate had returned almost to its resting level,
the smell of wet grass, mud, stagnant water, swear and damp made for
a cocktail that was to prove one of my main vices in the coming
years.
This
success came at a price though. I was ceasing to be the ‘grey man’
already, meaning I was attracting the attention of the training team
rather than keeping my head below the parapet. In fact I
subsequently got hauled up for not trying hard enough by Sergeant
McGrain, a tall, balding , imposing and fucking hard Scot:
‘Ah’ve
seen some loafing in mah time but this is takin’ the pish’; he
was eyeball to eyeball with me out near the perimeter fence, we’d
been doing ‘grunjays’, a particularly knackering form of exercise
which seems to reduce every muscle in your body to a kind of napalm
jelly by about the fourth repetition.
‘There’s
the four tonner’ he pointed a couple of hundred yards along the
peri track. Some of the lads had already started running back to it,
the session was nearly over.
‘If
you’re no’ the first back the whole squad’s gonna do this phys
session again’. I could tell by the all-seeing all-knowing meaness
in his eyes that he meant it too.
I
was off like a greyhound; the front runners amongst my
contemporaries were already getting close to the truck. I was
steaming past people right left and centre, elbowing them out of the
way; ‘what the fu…?’ ‘Moraine’s…lost….it’ they
gasped, I tried to offer up an explanation but it would have utilized
energy that was better used elsewhere. I could see the first bloke,
about to reach up to the rope hanging out of the back of the truck,
used to aid climbing aboard. I leapt up, naturally everything from
this point went into slow-mo…
‘NOOOOOO-OOOOOOO-OOOOOO-OOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH’
I howled, flying through the air, legs akimbo, the other guy turning
his head slowly ‘WHAAAAAAAAAAA?’ he replied in the same choked
foghorn tones.
‘DDDOOO-OOOOO-OOONNNN’TTT’
and something else garbled before smacking my nose right into the
tailgate of the four tonner then hitting the deck.
‘Fucking
hell Charlie you only had to ask’ came Kevin’s Geordie Lilt
through the haze. ‘I didn’t realize it meant that much to you’.
I
got a proper ribbing off the lads on the way back but I’d avoided
getting them in the shit, though the ungrateful bastards didn’t
know it. And was sure that, in amongst the menacing stare McGrain
gave me afterwards there was a flicker of respect.
I
was settling in quite well in other ways, though. I'd got together a
good group of mates, and we'd go out and get wasted at weekends. On
Friday evenings we were allowed out of the depot to go out on the
town. There was a curfew at 23.00 hours. This meant that you'd
suddenly see the town emptying of squaddies, easy to spot at the best
of times, at about twenty to eleven. It was only a short bus or taxi
ride back to the barracks, but you didn't want to be even one minute
late. It happened once with my troop, a couple of guys missed to
curfew by a few minutes and as a result we were up at three in the
morning for a run around the perimeter fence...carrying our
mattresses, followed by a dip in the dunk tank on the assault course.
Nothing like making the punishment fit the crime. Life was tough,
but with a good dollop of fun as well. For example, once the colour
sergeant let us have some extra biscuit rations after a 15 mile load
carry, and there was a basketball competition between sections
biannually.
Another time a live band came and played at our bar - everyone was
clapping their hands and really getting into it. We then started
throwing ashtrays at the band and exhorted them to play our
regimental march, 'the crippled palomino’, and then booed them off
as they didn't know it.
To be furthered.
