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.
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