First Man In

by Ant Middleton

  But at least being married meant I could stay in married quarters, away from the others. By this time I was doing everything possible by myself – working out, running, eating. My attitude became ‘Fuck you,’ and that was interpreted as cockiness. And maybe I was cocky. I really was beginning to look down on them. To me they were nothing more than a bunch of pub soldiers, thirty-year-old infants with their ballbags in a pool table. It was pathetic. Of course, they took every opportunity to throw my disrespect back at me. There was one day when I forgot to put a fire extinguisher back in its bracket and it went off in the back of a wagon. I was called to the office. The moment I walked in, someone jumped out from behind the door, grabbed me in a headlock and started digging me in the stomach. ‘You need to start switching on,’ they were saying. ‘You’re just going out there and doing your own thing. You’re going to get yourself in fucking trouble.’ He dropped me on the floor and I lay there, winded, thinking, ‘You fucking cowards, grabbing me from behind.’

  But at least it left me in no doubt. 9 Para. They weren’t gods. They were dicks. The army wasn’t what I thought it would be. They didn’t care about excellence. They actually resented it. You weren’t there to shine. You were there to know your place and stay in it. It came as no surprise to anyone when I finally knocked on the door of my sergeant and told him I wanted to leave.

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘I just want to pursue a career elsewhere,’ I said.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ he shrugged.

  The truth was, I had no idea what I was going to do. Hayley and I were arguing constantly. I was spending more and more time alone, consumed with rage. And I didn’t know whether I’d failed at the army or the army had failed me.

  LEADERSHIP LESSONS

  Stand apart from the crowd. You’re a leader, not a follower. That’s especially hard to remember when you first join any group, whether it be a military squadron or a corporation. There’s an expectation, especially when you’re new, that you’ll ‘join in’ and become one of the gang. You need to hit that balance. If you completely separate yourself, you won’t win trust. But never forget – if you have your sights set at the top, you need to resist coming across as just another dog in the pack.

  Crowds are egotistical. Every group you’ll ever belong to will tell themselves they’re the best. As a leader, you need to let that myth flourish, because it creates motivation. But you should also be constantly on guard not to believe it yourself. I’ve seen many leaders fail because arrogance breeds complacency.

  Humility means being open to inspiration. Keeping yourself humble also means you’re able to identify exceptional people around you, who are better models of what you might one day be. I know that many of the lads in 9 Para would have dismissed the men from the Deuxième Rep as being boring and stuffy. In doing so, they’d have blinded themselves, missing an opportunity to lift themselves into a superior world.

  LESSON 4

  MAKE FRIENDS WITH YOUR DEMONS

  Sometimes it’s only by looking back that you can spot the moments when you made your biggest, most life-changing decisions. At the time, you’re too much in the eye of the storm. The change seems too enormous. The unknown places that lie on the other side of it are too dark and frightening to contemplate. So you pretend it’s not happening. You push it away, think about something else. You quietly decide to deal, another day, with the sudden understanding that you’re so unhappy that, at some point soon, you’re going to have to grab the steering wheel and yank your life in a radically new direction.

  When I look back on it I realise it was in Macedonia that I first knew, deep down, that my days in the green army were numbered. In the civilised yet elite men of the Deuxième Rep I saw a different way of serving, a different way of fighting and a different way of achieving excellence. I glimpsed the possibility of a different future; a way of being me that was faithful to the truth of who, in my heart, I was. In the actual moment, though – as I joined in yet another round of merry, Kronenbourg-fuelled French singing – all I knew was that the respect I had for my tribe of paratroopers was dying.

  I’d love to tell you that, when I left 9 Para, I immediately transformed back into my cheery and gentle former self, but true stories are never that simple. Life makes you work harder than that. The fact is, I went the long way round. Not wanting to socialise with Bus and the others didn’t alter the fact that, slowly but surely, I had become one of their kind. No matter how much I might have missed aspects of my younger self, I simply wasn’t that innocent little boy any longer. I had been changed by my experiences. I was a man now. And, more than that, I was a paratrooper. I’d forgotten how to be anyone else. Getting back to the core of myself would be a long journey. Finally getting there would mean making friends with my demons. And before I could do that, I’d first have to find them and fight them.

  I’d meet those demons on the streets of Portsmouth. Separating myself from 9 Para, and avoiding the endless rows with Hayley, meant spending as much time as possible with Nan, which meant being in the town where I’d grown up. This had an unexpected effect on me. I found myself thinking more and more about my real dad. Vivid and detailed memories of him would pop into my head out of nowhere, as if someone had switched on a TV.

  He could hardly have been more different from my stepfather. His name was Peter Aaron and he’d been a software engineer at IBM. Not only did he never lay a finger on me or my brothers, he barely even told us off. One of the long-forgotten scenes that appeared in my mind – and kept playing and replaying – took place just before he died. A friend named Simon from down the road had come round to play. Simon and I were passing the time, bumping down the stairs on our arses. After doing it a few times, Simon sat on the top step and decided he didn’t want to go again. I didn’t care, but he was blocking me. In a fit of temper I pushed him with my foot. Simon tumbled down the stairs, burst into tears and grassed me up in a loud wail. I thought, ‘Uh oh, I’m in trouble here.’ But when Dad came to see what had happened he just smiled up at me and said, ‘Play nicely, lads.’

  We moved to Australia when I was one and lived there for three years. I started to get flashbacks of that former life, too – a place of warmth and fun and unconditional love that was soon to vanish completely. I could see him in a swimming pool under a perfect blue sky, holding these two white kittens. I could see him teaching me to ride my bike. I could see him putting the seats down in the back of the car and making a bed with pillows before we went on a long journey. I could see him holding my hand as we walked to the shop to get chocolate digestives. He loved chocolate digestives and would literally eat them by the pack.

  The more I thought about Dad, the angrier I became at the fact he’d been taken from me when I was so young. Following the strange and sudden events of his passing, our family gained a lot of money and lost everything that was important. It was only now I was a man that I realised how cruel it was that we hadn’t been allowed to mourn him. As a child, you just accept things. Now that I was old enough to understand, I was sick with fury. The day after he’d died, every photo of him disappeared from the house. His smiling face vanished from walls, shelves and the front of the fridge. Me and my brothers were forbidden from talking about him, by threat of beating. We weren’t even allowed to go to his funeral. His death was made absolute.

  Dad’s death might have caused the sky to rain money, but that didn’t mean life was easy. My new stepfather loved us and sincerely tried to do his best for us, but he was from a completely different background and his values were alien to the ones Dad had raised us with. My stepfather had been raised tough. We got used to him returning from the pub with cuts and bruises and black eyes from fighting, and that would lead to screaming arguments with Mum. He thought me and my brothers were soft. He was determined to toughen us up. He was incredibly competitive by nature and always insisted his stepchildren had to be the absolute best at everything. My thing was football. There might have been nothing to me, size-wis
e, but I could run fast and had stamina. I had a bit of talent, too. I’d been on Southampton’s books from the age of seven and also played in my local side. My stepfather was our coach. He’d turn up to games in a knee-length leather raincoat, cycling shorts and black boots, with a Rottweiler at the end of a leash.

  If he looked like a lunatic, he could act like one as well. Before every match he’d storm into the changing room with his dog and blare out ‘Simply the Best’ by Tina Turner at top volume on a ghetto blaster. He’d make us all play in shirts that he’d sent to the printers to have ‘SIMPLY THE BEST’ stamped across the back. The other parents were petrified of him. One goalkeeper who came to play with us was just brilliant, but his father ended up removing him after one season because our team was so ultra-competitive. I started hating going to football because of the pressure he put on me. I always had to be the best, to play at my very highest capacity. The only way I knew I’d be OK, and stay out of trouble, was by being out in front of everyone else. To win was to be safe.

  At home he ruled with an iron fist. When we moved to France he insisted that our big house was kept spotless at all times. I could never have friends round because I knew after dinner he’d make us spend literally an hour and a half cleaning up – scrubbing pots and mopping floors. I’d do everything in my power to keep him on his good side, because his bad side was frightening. He’d punish us physically, sometimes badly, with a belt or a wooden spoon or his open hands, with me curled up in the corner of the room. A part of me thinks I got the brunt of things because I looked so much like my real dad and, so I’m told, acted like him too.

  The only place I didn’t feel the need to excel was at school. It wasn’t that I was badly behaved. I was captain of the athletics team and the football team, and all the teachers liked me. I would never have dared be cheeky. The problem was, I just didn’t have much interest in learning and I could never seem to concentrate. I was at my happiest when I was reading my SAS Survival Book and playing with my brothers on our large patch of family land, which even had its own woodland. We had so much space, we were like little gypsy kids, hunting and scrambling around, playing with Rambo knives and bows and arrows.

  One summer, when I was ten, my stepfather bought us all air rifles. At the end of a long, fun day I was out with my elder brother Michael when I saw a grey squirrel running up the trunk of a tall pine tree. Without thinking, I aimed and fired. It fell out of the tree, making a horrible cracking sound as it hit the branches on its way down, and landed in a bed of dry pine needles at our feet.

  ‘You idiot,’ said Michael.

  ‘What shall we do?’ I asked. It was staring up at me with its little black eyes.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘Do you think it’ll be all right?’

  We stared at it for a moment. It was bleeding from its backside where I’d shot it. Its arms were twitching.

  ‘Yeah,’ said my brother. ‘Maybe.’

  When we got back to the house we told my stepfather what had happened. He was standing in the huge doorway of our house.

  ‘And it’s still alive?’ he said, looming over us. ‘That’s what you’re telling me?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘If you’re old enough to shoot it, you’re old enough to kill it,’ he said. ‘Get back there and finish it off.’

  We returned to the woodland as slowly as we could in the hope its heart would have given out by the time we reached it. It was in a terrible state when we found it. Blood was matted in its fur and its tiny pink mouth was moving. Michael didn’t say anything as I raised the barrel of the air rifle. My hands were trembling, which was making the rifle move. Worried I would miss again, I pushed the muzzle up against the squirrel’s little head, closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. There was a dull thud.

  ‘Shit,’ said Michael. ‘You did it.’

  Walking back towards the house, I was too dazed with guilt and remorse to really speak. Of course, I could never have imagined it would one day be my job to do the same thing to grown men. I’d sometimes think of that squirrel when I was raising my weapon to fire. I felt worse for that animal than I would for any of them.

  It was a retired major, whose house was being renovated by my stepdad, who first suggested I might have what it takes to succeed in the military. ‘You’re a good worker and you’re fit,’ he’d said. ‘You’d have a good career.’ By that stage I was sick of school. All I wanted to do was run around outside in the mud, making camps and shooting targets. The idea of being paid to do that sounded pretty good, and the fact that I’d get to leave home was a major bonus.

  And now, here I was, a fully-fledged member of 9 Parachute Squadron. And I’d come to hate it. One afternoon, a few weeks after my return from Macedonia, we were returning in a military wagon from an exercise when we passed a road sign that said Wood Green. I hadn’t seen or heard those two words in years. Sitting in the back of that noisy wagon, I felt swamped by a thousand long-lost childhood memories. I saw a row of smart brick semi-detached houses. I saw a sweet shop. I saw a park that I used to explore that had a massive, make-shift spiderweb that I used to love climbing. I saw a red postbox outside my granddad’s house. I saw myself standing beside it with my eyes squeezed tightly shut, counting to one hundred, during a game of hide and seek with my beloved Uncle Tony, who was only ten years older than me.

  ‘You all right?’ asked the guy sitting next to me, a decent Scottish lad named Greg.

  ‘Wood Green,’ I said. ‘It’s where my dad’s family lives. My real dad. I’ve got uncles and aunties there. Haven’t seen them in, like, years.’

  ‘Not seen them?’

  ‘Yeah, it was my mum,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t allow it, so we lost touch. Shame, really.’

  ‘You should go and visit,’ he said. ‘Your mam cannae stop you now.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have a clue how to find them,’ I said, as the military wagon sped further and further away. ‘It was a long time ago. Too long, really.’

  The following evening Greg and I went out for a couple of beers. I’d had yet another row with Hayley, and felt a sudden and overwhelming need to get drunk. Everything was going wrong. Anger was circling me like so many birds of prey. I was angry at the army, I was angry at Cranston and Bus, and I was angry at all the cowardly arseholes who’d jumped me the week before. I was angry at my wife. I was angry at my mum for stealing my dad’s memory from me. I was angry at the knowledge that I had family out there that I’d been forbidden from seeing and who were now completely lost. I was angry that the boy I’d once been had been changed into a man I didn’t like or even recognise.

  At somewhere near closing time I went for my final piss of the night. Staggering out of the bathroom, I saw that Greg had moved onto the dance floor. And it looked like someone was getting up in his face. As I pushed my way through the crowd towards him, the moving bodies seemed to part of their own volition. I was in a dark tunnel, and all I could see at the end of it was a twenty-year-old knobhead in a white Adidas top shoving my mate with the heels of his hands.

  All of the rage I’d felt over the last few months entered my fist and exited, explosively, into his chin. He flew back about six feet and fell sprawling onto the floor. The crowd opened up around him in horror. He didn’t move. I’d knocked him out with one punch. It felt good. It felt amazing. In that moment I decided the nice boy from Normandy was dead. If anybody gave me any shit from now on, they were going to get their jaw broken.

  When you leave the army you spend your final three months working on your ‘resettlement package’. This means you’re free to pursue the next phase of your life, whatever that might be. For the lack of any better idea I’d applied to join the Metropolitan Police Force and began a training course up at Hendon in north London. The most difficult thing about it was the culture shock. The rules of banter that operated in the social world of the Paras did not apply there. In my first week, at lunch, I sat down next to a guy who was wearing a tu
rban with a police cap badge on it. I’d never seen anything like it.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘I bet you get loads of shit for wearing that on your head.’

  I was expecting that to be the beginning of a conversation that would be interesting, honest and, most of all, bonding. In the army he would have come back with a joke about it, like, ‘Yeah, it’s the craphat of all craphats’ – something of that sort. But that wasn’t what happened. He reacted badly.

  ‘Well, no, I wear this because of my religion,’ he said.

  The guy sitting opposite me looked disgusted. ‘Ant, you just can’t say things like that.’ He picked up his tray and walked off.

  I ate alone, confused and angry. I was only trying to start a conversation but had been made to feel like a racist arsehole.

  On a day off from my course at Hendon I decided to drive to Wood Green. I thought I might bump into a member of my real dad’s family or spot a familiar landmark. I suspected it would be a pointless mission, and that’s exactly how it turned out. I spent two hours driving around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the red letter box that sat outside my granddad’s house. It was ridiculous. I was on the way back to the barracks in Aldershot when, stuck in a long queue at some roadworks, I glanced a little way down a side road and spotted a phone box. It gave me an idea.

  I pulled up beside it, slotted in a 20p and dialled my nan. She was my only hope, and a pretty desperate one – she was my mum’s mum, so I knew it was highly unlikely she’d give up an address, even if she had one. If my mother found out I was even looking for dad’s family, she’d go feral. I didn’t even want to think how my stepfather might react. But what else could I do?