by Jan Needle
He came into my room like a bloody tank at six o’clock or so, in full combats and full of piss and vinegar. He snapped the light on, and as I lay there blinking he pulled the covers off and started yelling, his idea of humour.
“Jesus, Tiny! I can see where you got your name, la’! Is that a lazy lob or have you had a hysterectomy?”
That’s what he said, straight up. Even half unconscious and hungover I marvelled at his grasp of gynaecology, or at least his English. It didn’t make me smile though.
“Come on!” he went. “Out, out, out! Hands off cocks, on socks, there’s work to do! Sleep on your own again did you, sad bastard? Jesus, what a stink of booze and old fags! Are you a secret drinker, or was it company?”
Someone started banging on the wall then, yelling for silence, and it must have clicked with him.
“Fucking hell!” he said. “Old Ken Rogers was it? Serenade by moonlight? You want to watch it, la’, he’s broken lots of fucking hearts. More hearts than you’ve had hot fucking dinners!”
He’ll break the wall down if he goes on like this, never mind hearts, I thought. If it was Ken he was in a right old rage, but his shouts and swears were muffled, like he had his head jammed in a pillow.
“Shut it, Ken, or you’re on a charge!” Williams roared back at him, but he didn’t seem too bothered, really.
“He’s a good bloke, Ken,” he told me. “Likes his brandy though, which explains the bleeding pong. He don’t normally talk to twats like you, but he’s off his trike now, did it show? He’s been everywhere, Balkans, Iraq, the ’Stan, and ended up in Deutschland cause they don’t count as an enemy no more. If even that wa’ too much for the poor bastard, well fuck. It’s an ’oliday camp, innit?”
I wasn’t really listening, but I’d picked up on the broken hearts, if nothing else.
“What you on about, Sarge?” I said. “You saying he’s gay?”
He looked at me as if I’d gone insane.
“Gay? Ken Rogers? Where the fuck d’you get that from? We don’t have poofs in the army, mate, ain’t no one told you yet, and they weren’t even invented when Ken joined up. Nah, Ken fucks women. Lots of ’em. Piles of ’em. His last wife buggered off three months ago. He went mad in Germany. Got banged up. He tried to kill the bastard that was fucking her.”
“What, some Kraut?”
“Fuck no! Even Maureen wouldn’t sink that low! Nah, sergeant in the Fusiliers. Famous for it. He’s got four kids round here, all with different women, all faithful army wives. Got Ken down apparently. It really got to him.”
I was out of bed now, three quarters dressed. My combats weren’t that smart, I hadn’t really bothered much the night before, but I hoped Williams would be too wrapped up in his chat to notice.
“Yeah, well I spose it would,” I mumbled. “He never mentioned it, last night, though. He just sung, mainly. Sung and played. Brilliant.”
“Load of folkie shite,” said the sergeant. “He wouldn’t know good music if you paid him. Good soldier, though. He’s killed more blokes than anyone I know. Dozens of ’em, he’s got nerves of steel. Well, except he’s started getting weird about it, which is why they sent him off to Krautland in the first place, according to Charlie Spencer.” He laughed. “Pain in the arse, really – he’ll be liking Moslems next! Siding with Osama in Helmand!” He laughed again, another shout. “Pain in the arse like Charlie! D’you get it? He’s got piles! Pain in the fucking arse! Now fucking hurry up. The new boys need their bleeding breakfast.”
When you’re in training, breakfast is the first meal that you drop, for two good reasons. One, it’s followed by PT, which does your stomach in, and two, because it’s crap. The rumour is they fry the eggs and sossies and the bacon up before they go out on the piss at knock-off, and leave them soaking in the oil overnight. What we don’t eat (which is nearly all of it) they sell on to the local farms to give the pigs a treat.
But the very new boys, crap-hats, trogs – well they go to breakfast every day, and the kitchens put a special effort on for a week or two. Sometimes the egg whites are even chewable, sometimes the yolks are only hard, not concrete. Sadly that don’t last, nor does the crap-hats’ interest – and the more left over, the more cash-back from the farmer or the nearest prison. That’s a rumour. I lost two stone in my first three months. That’s a fact.
So job one today, was to wander through the ranks, Sarnt Williams on one side, me on the other, and ask them how the scoff was, and how they were, and tell them how lucky they were they wouldn’t have PT today, the idle buggers. Lots of them were still smiling – on Day Three! – and some of them were probably realising that life without a hangover wasn’t necessarily the end of the world. My own eyes were closed up and glued with crap, and my mouth tasted like a nun’s gusset after a shag-in at the Vatican, so maybe it was a point of view. I talked the talk, but I was dreaming of a shower, nothing else.
Later, it was a case of playing escort as they traipsed from place to place, with the sergeant using me as his whipping post to show how hard he was “but fair,” the twat. The idea was I’d been a naughty boy, and this is what I got for it. If any of them had had a brain at all they’d’ve seen that he was just a bully and a fool, and in fact I spent a lot of time making faces behind his back, eye-rolling and so on, to make the point. It occurred to me that if I tried I might get some of them to quit maybe, to go back to their mothers like they was entitled to. By fuck, that would be a stunt to work on Williams! That’d show the bastard.
The first few days are pretty weird when you join up, I could see it much more clearer now I was helping these poor sods. They’d been sorted into their lines, they’d been tipped into their companies, they’d collected their bedding and been shown a few times how to make their bed. These were the days the corporals came into their own, no answers back, right little Hitlers, and they enjoyed it. If you were lucky you got one who would show you things and didn’t take the piss, but mostly you got blokes who liked to make you look a total wally. The main way to do that was to say that your company was the only ones that ever did it right, and if you didn’t get your arsehole into gear you’d end up in C Coy, the biggest pile of shit in history. Or D Coy, or A Coy, it didn’t matter – any Coy except the one you’d been ended up in, they were all the bleeding same in actual fact.
They also, all the NCOs right up to sergeant major, trained you up to hate somebody else. It wasn’t personal, you just had to realise you was best and all the other bastards were inferiors – especially the Jocks. They were easy targets because they were like the Scousers in a way – there was something wrong with them. They always turned up drunk at every new intake, they snorted coke, and they attacked anyone and everyone, including each other, for no reason at all. Their drugs problem was mega. Massive.
Some corporals used to make us chant against the Jocks. They’d get us into groups when no officers were about and sing sort of football choruses about what poofs they were, and how they all wore skirts. In fact, in our division, anyone was a target who wasn’t from the North of England, and that included Liverpudlians. The best thing we could think to say about the Scousers was that when they nicked the tracks off of the tanks it stopped us training.
As for blacks and Paks and gays, of course – hardly worth mentioning, is it? In all my training time I only knew one camp lad, one lad who actually looked camp, like, and he went nearly crazy trying to be macho, to look and sound well hard. He was keen as mustard (not keen as buggery, don’t even go there!), and pretty fit and pretty strong and always up for anything, no problem there at all. But everywhere he went they all made kissing noises, and the sound of plungers sucking out of blocked up sewage pipes, and spat at him and called him fag and poof and queer and fudge packer and the rest of it. On the range one day Sarnt Williams was thrashing another bloke and told him to do fifty push-ups. Then, before he’d started, he told this gay lad to lie face downwards under him to “keep him hard at work!” We all laughed like drains, but not lo
ng after he went unit, then got out. Depression.
That’s how Jamal went, come to think of it. When Shahid was with him he got on fine, ’cause no one dared with Sha, but on his own he got the Paki this and Paki that treatment, and it seemed to get him down. The NCOs were just as bad as usual, and one day he went for one of them, a skinny dim lancejack from Huddersfield, and they had a little scuffle before some lads pulled Jamal off and booted him about a bit, but it was Jam that got the book thrown at him. According to Shahid, the OC said he had to try harder to fit in, and if he thought the lance corporal had made a racist remark he was wrong, it was a “misinterpretation.” Then he gave him a little lecture on equality, and said it was Jamal who’d been picking on the lance in fact, because he had a “vulnerable position” and could lose his stripe! I.e., Jam had done it on purpose to get the poor lad busted! Jamal held on three weeks after that. Then it was unit. Depression. Out.
And everyone was happy. A result.
The most boring part of helping new recruits, for my money, was teaching them how to wash and clean their teeth, and iron shirts and do up buttons and so on. When I hit Catterick, I thought the piss was being taken, big style, when my sergeant asked how many of us had a toothbrush. But it was Big Knob, who I’d already worked out on Day Two was not so bad, and you could tell he meant it. Everyone said they had, but you could also tell that lots of them were lying, they looked at everybody else to see what the question meant and what the answer ought to be. I went in with about sixty other kids – I was the oldest, on account of university – and a good six of them had never cleaned their teeth. They got issued with a toothbrush (and charged later, I expect), and we had a lickle demonstration. Today, with Sarnt Williams, that was my job. Wet the fucking brush, put on the toothpaste from the tube, wiggle up and down, and spit. Yeah, Dumbo! Spit! Don’t swallow it. Then rinse and spit again. Then wash the brush and screw the cap back on the tube. Do that every day and your Ma might want to kiss you, for the first time in your life.
You think I’m joking, don’t you – go on, admit it, my mum did. No joke. Some of these poor bastards, judging by the smell, didn’t even know you had to wipe your arse. So maybe that’s the good bit, then. Look at some of these poor fuckers twelve months later, and they’re fit, and proud, and civilised enough to get blown to pieces by an IED. Look out you terrorists, here we come. England’s finest.
Ironing a shirt, shaving properly, blowing your nose, washing, having a shower. All this I went through, all this I played the sergeant’s guinea pig to show. I was from Blackburn, he told everyone, where we didn’t have running water yet, or flushing toilets, and you used your sleeve to wipe your nose on, and your girlfriend’s knickers after intercourse, if she was posh enough to wear ’em (and know the meaning of that word). Even the lads from Blackburn fell about, especially when he asked if there were any Muslims in, despite the fact that everyone in the room was white.
“We’re completely racially tolerant in the army,” he said, “so I’ve got to ask. Just ’cause you ain’t Paki-coloured don’t mean you ain’t a Moslem, and Moslems gob on the ground a lot, which squaddies, believe you me, do not.” Pause. “Not unless you want your bollocks nailing to the floor, d’you get me?”
After dinner, towards the end of the afternoon, I was feeling really knackered. It was probably the last night’s booze, but my mum had always told me “brainwork,” as she called what she did, was just as hard or harder than “honest labour.” I might have given her the benefit of the doubt, except it would’ve meant that officers did real work too, and that was bollocks, obviously. All the officers in the training unit were so nice, so absolutely bleeding useless, so desperate to be fair, and “normal” and be liked. But they weren’t, of course, it was the sergeants who ran the show, and their opinion of the flathats was diabolical. They were toffs, they were rich stuck-up bastards who earned a fortune and knew fuck all, and lots of ’em had stupid toffy accents, to put the lid on it. Figures of fun, that was the most respect they got. Figures of fun and hatred. No respect at all.
Case in point – on the last session of the afternoon an officer was in, all beaming smiles and encouragement. This bloke was a lieutenant, bit old, bit podgy, bit useless or he’d’ve got promotion, wouldn’t he? He give a little talk about the history of the army, how we were there to help these people (he didn’t say exactly who, but let’s guess the Afghans shall we, except the Taliban, ho ho) and “the goal for every soldier is to bring the gift of peace.” I felt Ken’s brandy rising in my throat, and my eyes were flashing in the sunshine and the heat, and I’m like – Jesus, did I get this bullshit shot at me last year? Did I hear it all and not throw up? It must be brainwashing. It must be something in the tea. We must be idiots.
Then after he’d spoke, and the CSM had had a go, Sarnt Williams hit me with his masterstroke. I was sitting in a total daze, head banging, and he must have said my name a dozen times before it sunk into my skull.
“Hassan!” he was going. “Hassan! Are you receiving me? Earth to Tiny Hassan! I’m sorry, sir, I warned everyone he was from Blackburn, but this is... We call him Tiny because he ain’t too bright. Soft-lad!! Hassan!!!”
The whole room was falling about, and the officer, thank God, was joining in the fun. But then I felt a bit pissed off, I got resentful. Everyone was laughing, the day outside was fine and sweet, and my mates were in the country in the south, not long till knockoff time, beer, curry, river, girls. And here was I, Williams’s whipping post, his bitch. So bollocks to the lot of them.
“Well, I’m not sure if you’ve chosen the right man, Sergeant,” the lieutenant was wittering, “but at least the new boys’ll get the true authentic voice of squaddie-dom! Lads, I give you Private ‘Tiny’ Hassan. He’ll tell you how we live here day-to-day. Thank you, Hassan. Continue.”
Continue? What, continue blinking? I looked at Williams and his face was a picture of contented spite.
“Go on, la’,” he said, after a short wait. “Cat get your tongue, did ’e? Give the lads a lecture. Tell it like it is!”
But without the swear words, naturally. Without the nasty bits, the truth. I looked at all the pasty bastards sitting there, the sweepings off the classroom floor, the kids who wouldn’t ever get a proper job, and I felt really sorry for them. Then I nearly laughed.
“Sir?” I said, to the officer. “Is that right, sir? Tell it like it is?”
I saw the sergeant’s gob open but the lieutenant got there first.
“Why not?” he said. “Just a normal day, for once. Just a flavour of our life here in the garrison. Catterick, men, is a really special place.”
I spose I bottled it in a way. I felt this great big surge inside me, and the first word that rose up was fuck. Well it would be in the army, wouldn’t it? It fucking would be. But something stopped me. I glanced at the lieutenant’s face again, smiling happily, and I felt sorry for him, an’ all. Now what’s that about? I felt sorry for a dickhead officer.
“Six thirty, half past six,” I said. I sounded like a speak-your-weight machine. “Get up, the crack of dawn, and do the block jobs. Well, have a shower first and get dressed. Yeah, some people shower every day, your skin don’t fall off, honest. Then after block jobs—”
A hand went up in the front row. Jesus, keen bastard, eh?
“Please, er... Mister... Mate...”
“Dickhead,” said Williams, absent-mindedly.
“Sergeant!” went the officer, eyebrows raised but still smiling. “Good question, though. Private? Block jobs?”
“You know,” I said. “Jobs on the block. It might be, like... washing the showers out. Er, sweeping up. Mopping floors.”
“General tidying,” said the lieutenant. “Is that it, Private? General clearing up.”
“Yeah, well,” I said. “I mean, yes, sir. Well, like everybody’s meant to clear their own crap up and take it to the skips but that don’t last for long. Most people just chuck it in the corridors, in bin bags if you’re lucky,
because they know someone’s got to do it. Sergeants are worst, and lancejacks next. Whatever Sarnt Williams here wants you to believe.”
That was a try-on, just to see what happened, and everybody laughed their socks off. Williams put on a laugh as well, but his eyes were after mine like heat-seeking missiles, which I avoided by grinning at the officer, who grinned back. Normally these talks are boring, pointless. Normally by now the recruits would be asleep. I suppose it made some sort of sense to him.
“Oh, I forgot,” I said. “Before the corridors you’ve got to do the bogs. You know, clean up the porno mags stuffed down behind the toilets and rub off the crystallised piss all round the bowls.” I nearly mentioned needles but I thought he’d only stand so much. I bet he’d never seen a squaddies’ bog, I bet he’d not believe it, stupid prat. Let alone the shit smeared on the walls.
“Hassan,” said Williams, struggling to keep his cool. “Don’t get too daft, will you, la’? Don’t tear the...bottom out of it.”
This got another laugh out of the crap-hats, because the word was “arse” and everybody knew it. Another laugh, another nail banged in my coffin. But the lieutenant still didn’t seem to be pissed off. Smiling like a fool, in fact. I blundered on.
“Anyway,” I said, “that’s the best part of the day over. Downhill all the way now – it’s breakfast time. The only good thing is that not many people bother going, because we have PT next, so what’s the point? The more you eat, the more there is to run off, ain’t there? And the fuller up your guts are, the worse it feels.” I grinned out at them. They were sitting there dead interested, probably wondering how much of it was true, and why I was allowed to say it, anyway. “Best reason not to go I’ve left till last,” I said. “It’s like eating shite. It’s diabolical.”
“That’s pretty cynical!” said the lieutenant, almost fucking giggling. “He’s ‘playing the old soldier,’ is what my colonel used to call it, but it’s a point of view so I won’t censor him!”
