Soldier Of The Queen

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  My father has not been seen since. Not by anyone. No-one knows where he went or what happened to him. He didn't take any clothes or personal effects. Rumours of his whereabouts came and went; some people on the estate even thought he'd been murdered. I don't know and I don't care. The less I think and know about him the better.

  5

  Full Blue Velvet Jacket

  That summer of 1976 was a turning point in other ways.

  I left school and was taken on as an apprentice toolmaker. Like all the other boys, I'd been brainwashed into believing that life was not worth living if I didn't have a trade. I had to attend a tool factory in Wolverhampton for four weeks' "familiarisation" training before starting a sponsored college course. I soon discovered that familiarisation meant familiarising myself with the drudgery I could now expect for the rest of my life. I had to work in the stores department humping boxes and crates for a sum of money that would just about have bought me a pair of dirty overalls. The unions were very powerful at this time. On my first day I was confronted by a picket line, advised not to cross it and sent

  home. In the factory the union shop-stewards were constantly telling us not to do other people's jobs - such as sweeping up if you dropped something or replacing dirty towels in the wash room. I found this tedious and childish, and said so, which annoyed my adult "brothers", whose reasons for being seemed to hinge on the existence of clear demarcation lines between them and other brothers.

  I was introduced to experienced toolmakers - men I was meant to admire and aspire to be - some of whom had worked on the same lathe in the same spot for twenty years. One old boy told me he had named "his" lathe Helen. "Oh, you're lucky! Helen's on good form today!" I began to feel as if I'd been given a life sentence with no chance of parole. I went to a Further Education college to start a toolmaking course and immediately got off to a bad start. A fat chain-smoking former sheet-metal-worker in stained clothes talked to me as if I were a dog and insisted I called him "Sir". I said I would only do so when Her Majesty had knighted him. Apart from criminal behaviour and Manchester United, my other passion was music. I admired the Beatles and I jumped at the chance to go to a concert in London by the former Beatle Paul McCartney, although it was going to mean I would have to take a Friday off. I told the sheet-metal slob of my plans and he wasn't happy. He said I didn't deserve the opportunity that had been bestowed upon me. At first I thought he was referring to the concert, but I soon realised he meant the prospect of being imprisoned in a factory on slave wages shackled to a lathe called Helen for the rest of my life. I said I was going to the concert and that I was telling him out of politeness, not asking his permission.

  I returned on Monday to a rant from the slob about my impertinence. We had an exchange of views in which I may have used the f-word. He stormed off to the nearest phone and rang my company. I had to return to the factory "as a matter of urgency" to see the personnel manager. I urgently caught a bus into town and urgently browsed through a few record stores before making my way to the company headquarters for my showdown with Mr Personnel. When I arrived I was directed to a plastic chair outside his office by his ferret-faced secretary who kept looking at me sternly over her glasses. She reminded me of the secretary at school who used to take my money from behind the hatch.

  After about half an hour an electronic box on her desk crackled: "Send O'Mahoney in." I walked towards his office under the now-you-are-in-for-it gaze of the secretary. On his door was an aluminium sign saying "Personnel Manager", probably produced on the lathe called Helen twenty years earlier. Inside, the floor was covered with a thick blue carpet embroidered with the company logo. A man in his fifties in a cheap blue nylon suit began telling me how lucky I was to have an apprenticeship, how 400 boys had applied for the ten jobs, how I had been set on the path towards life-long security and how I was now in serious danger of destroying that bright future. Then, relaxing a little, he began telling me how he himself had been a bit of a lad in his youth, but had then knuckled down to some hard work, which had brought him eventually to the position he now occupied. He looked at me firmly, eyes oozing sincerity, and said that with application anything was possible: "Who knows?" he said. "One day, in ten, twenty years' time, you could be sitting in this seat in this office." On the journey from the plastic chair past the aluminium sign I had made up my mind. Any lingering doubts had been quashed by the atmosphere of his crummy office: the sagging features of his miserable wife stared up at me from a photo. She seemed almost to be imploring me, "Please don't end up like the git I've married." For a few seconds I looked at him festering in his cheap suit, then I said that if I ever ended up like him I'd kill myself. In case he had not got the point I added: "You can poke your poxy job." I walked out, leaving him stumbling for words.

  I soon got another job working for a scrap-metal merchant underneath Wolverhampton's railway arches. The work was hard and tedious, but I liked the people I was working with -and I was earning about five times as much as before. However, my time there ended abruptly one afternoon when the hammers on the frag machine (so called because it would pulp metal into fragments) became jammed. A fitter climbed in to free them - without shutting down the machine. He freed the hammers, but the machine then started up, pulling him into its jaws. Someone managed to press the stop button quickly, but not before the fitter's legs had been mutilated: one was almost severed, the other shattered. The Health and Safety Executive immediately shut the yard; the management laid off the work force.

  I could not decide what to do with myself. I was tired of living in Codsall, tired of the same old faces haunting the same old places, saying and doing the same old things. I was living at home with my mother and my youngest brother, Michael. My oldest brother, Jerry, had moved into a house in Wolverhampton with the Hell's Angels, while the second oldest, Paul, was still in borstal serving what should have been a six-month sentence but which had been extended to two years for bad behaviour. I had made pregnant my girlfriend of three years. She gave birth to a boy, Adrian, but then dumped me. With hindsight, I know she made a wise decision, but at the time I was heart-broken. I decided to leave the area: I packed a holdall and said goodbye to my mother, not knowing where I was going or what I was going to do when I arrived there. Saying goodbye to my mother devastated me. I walked the five miles to the M6 motorway in tears. I decided to leave my final destination to fate: I would stick my thumb out and go wherever the first car to stop was going.

  That night I found myself trudging in a blizzard through a run-down area of Glasgow. I slept in a tin workman's hut near the Celtic football ground and in the morning I explored the city. I had heard unemployment was high in Glasgow, but I didn't think things could be that bad. Then I found a Job Centre that appeared not to have any jobs on its boards. When I enquired at the desk the clerk started laughing. He called over his colleagues to show them the Englishman who had come to Glasgow to find work. As he sent me away he said: "You're at the wrong end of the motorway, Dick Whittington." I lived rough in Glasgow for a few days before moving on and doing the same in Edinburgh and then Dundee. I started having breakfast every morning at a particular Dundee cafe where I got talking to another regular called Derek. He said he ran a cheap hotel and he asked me if I'd like to be its caretaker-cum-porter. I said yes, but soon discovered the hotel was little more than a brothel in a rough part of town. Prostitutes hired out his rooms by the day or the week. All I had to do was answer the door, let in the punters, make sure they left and collect "room rent" off the women on Fridays. Derek just needed someone there all the time. I spent most of my day playing cards with the women or watching TV with them. All the women, without exception, were trying to escape their own traumas, only to have plunged themselves into a worse existence. After a few months the human misery I was witnessing began to depress me and I left for home.

  In Codsall not much had changed. My brother Paul was home, having been released from borstal. He had worked briefly with some well-meaning nuns in London handi
ng out soup to the homeless, but had decided against making a career of it. For some reason known only to himself he then joined the Spanish Foreign Legion. He served as a paratrooper for two years, but spent most of his time in the guard house for breaking the rules. In the end he deserted. He sneaked himself on to a British cruise liner containing holidaymakers bound for England. When the ship docked at Tilbury in Essex he was arrested by police for being a stowaway. Local magistrates showed him mercy and gave him a non-custodial sentence. He had no money when he left the court, but a reporter paid for his ticket home to Codsall and even gave him some extra cash in return for a photograph of him which then appeared in our local evening paper. During this period my brother Jerry also moved back home, although he still maintained his links with the Hell's Angels. He became obsessed with catching a rat that sometimes appeared from under the garden shed. One day I was watching a film in the front room with my mother when there was an explosion outside. I ran to the window and saw that the shed had disintegrated. Jerry came down from his room and said he'd been waiting for the rat to poke its nose out and when it had done so he had fired both barrels of a twelve-bore shotgun at it. My mother, long acquainted with the bizarre and the violent, was most concerned about the shed. Her only reference to Jerry's shotgun was her suggestion that perhaps it would be easier in the future to let the cat deal with any rats.

  I stayed in Codsall for a while, but I kept getting into trouble with the police, who hated me. I was in a local pub one evening; a group of about nine men were singing rugby songs and generally being loud. They were nothing to do with me. A woman of mixed race came into the pub with her white boyfriend, who was about 30. The rugby group started singing a song which included a line about Zulu warriors. The woman's boyfriend must have assumed I was with the singers, because he came over to me and told me to tell the men to stop singing as his girlfriend was getting upset. I told him the singing was nothing to do with me. He became aggressive and said he would "do" me if the singing did not stop. I was not going to wait to get done by this man, so I hit him over the head with a cider bottle and ran out of the pub. He chased after me. I ran down someone's driveway and picked up two empty milk bottles from a step. The man lost his nerve and began walking away. I ran after him, but stopped after 100 yards. I thought the matter was closed, but the man called the police and moments later I was arrested. I was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm, threatening behaviour, possessing an offensive weapon and theft. "Theft? What the fuck did I steal?" I said. "Two milk bottles," said the jubilant policeman. The Codsall police had hit me with every possible offence, presumably in the cherished hope that I'd finally be sent to jail. I think they almost regarded that end as a performance-target. I was already under a two-year Supervision Order for the Birmingham mugging, so having breached that I thought there was now a good chance I'd be sent to jail at my next appearance before the magistrates. I had turned 18 some months earlier and I knew that the leniency usually extended to juvenile delinquents tended to cease sharply when they turned into adult delinquents. I was given bail and a date was set for my case to be heard.

  I decided to move to Telford in Shropshire where I stayed with a friend called Chris. I started selling eggs and potatoes door-to-door from an old Transit van and was earning a reasonably good living. Chris only worked sporadically, so I started paying the rent, leaving him the money every Friday. At weekends I would take him out and buy him drinks. This arrangement existed for months, but the more I did to help him, the less he did to help himself. On top of that I felt he was becoming almost resentful of me.

  One Sunday evening we went for a drink at a pub which we hadn't visited before. The locals of our own age made it clear that we were not welcome. They divided their time between glaring at us and mimicking us. I felt it was pointless waiting for the inevitable, so I punched one of them in the face. Others joined in, while Chris stood on the sidelines watching. I do not know why, and I have not seen him since to get the answer, but instead of coming to help me Chris started punching me as well. I knew I had not always been wise in my choice of company, but this was extraordinary. I got a good beating — my eye was split and someone smashed a bottle over my head. I staggered home, dazed with alcohol and violence, but through the haze I felt pure rage at Chris's treachery. I waited up all night for him, but sensibly he stayed away.

  He knew I had to go to work, so I assumed he would sneak back when I was out. I decided to forgo work in order to have a chance of catching the treacherous shitbag. I hid in the laundry room, having armed myself with a bread knife from the kitchen. I was not going to stab him: I just wanted to torture and terrorise him with it before giving him a good beating. Around 10 a.m. there was a banging on the front door. I thought that either he had forgotten his keys or he was checking to see whether I was at home. Either way I had him. I ran on tiptoes to the door, bread knife in hand, whisked the door open and ... It was the rent man. He said good morning and tried to act normally, but I could tell he was a little anxious. I put my knife-hand down and told him he had caught me in the middle of cooking. He said: "I'm glad I've caught you. You owe me nine months' rent." I said I didn't owe him anything: I had given my flatmate the rent. We chatted for a few minutes before I realised that Chris had been spending the rent money. My face must have contorted with rage, because I could see the rent man beginning to get anxious again. I said: "You better go, mate. Come back another day." He left rapidly.

  I think if Chris had turned up at that moment I would probably still now be serving a life sentence for his murder. Instead, I had to be content with taking out my anger on his property. I pulled his double-bed out of his room, dragged it into the back garden, piled everything he owned on top of it and set fire to the lot. I gathered up what was mine and left, leaving open the front and back doors for would-be burglars. The bonfire raged in the garden.

  It was the middle of winter. I spent a week sleeping rough in an old caravan at the side of a restaurant. A good friend called Jayne let me stay at her flat occasionally, but her boyfriend got the wrong idea, so I stuck to the caravan to save her any trouble. I have never been so cold in my life. The caravan was full of old beer crates, so there was barely room to sit down. I had no bed or blankets and had to sleep on the floor, huddled in a ball: I remember waking up one morning to find that the milk in the bottle had frozen and pushed its way out an inch to look like a red-top stalagmite. To make matters worse I lost my egg-and-potato round when my van broke down, and because I didn't have an address I couldn't get any other job.

  One Saturday I met up with a known thief in Wolverhampton. It was late 1978. I had been making an effort to stay out of trouble with the police, especially as I was still on bail, but I was about to find myself led astray by a dark blue velvet jacket with huge lapels, the sort of garment Marc Bolan might have worn. This one was hanging in a shop that we were browsing through. I told the thief that I liked it. He offered to steal it for me if I paid him half its value. I agreed and waited up the road while he went shopping. He arrived back 15 minutes later with a smile on his face and the jacket in his hand. Unfortunately, he had been spotted by store detectives who had followed him to see if he was planning to go anywhere else. When they pounced I had the jacket in my hand, so I was charged with theft. I didn't need my solicitor to warn me that I was almost certainly going to jail.

  The velvet-jacket case was given a date at the magistrates' court before the milk-bottle-and-assault case. Any slight hope I had of avoiding jail evaporated when I arrived at court and discovered my case was to be heard by a fearsome stipendiary magistrate with a reputation for harsh sentencing. He adjourned the case for reports, but said I had already been given every chance and warned that he had in mind to impose a custodial sentence. I walked out of court knowing my luck had run out. I was homeless, jobless and facing a prison sentence that was unlikely to enhance my future employment prospects. I walked aimlessly around Wolverhampton until, near the offices of the Express and Star
newspaper, I saw a sign in a window saying "Join the Professionals!" It was the army recruitment office. An idea bubbled up in my mind: I didn't want to become a soldier, but I thought that if I signed up I could go back to court, wave my recruitment papers at the magistrate, be let off the sentence and then before I got anywhere near a military base I could say I had changed my mind and resign.

  I congratulated myself on my cunning, then walked in to join the "Professionals". Inside the office was a shiny sergeant with a moustache. "Can I help you?" he said. I told him I was considering joining the army and wanted to know more about it. His uniformed fellow "Professionals" smiled out from posters on the walls. The sergeant had a spiel as polished as his boots: he outlined enthusiastically the exciting future that awaited me. For one demented moment I half thought that joining the army might be a good idea anyway, but I snapped out of it. He asked me if I had any criminal convictions. I said I hadn't. He said it would take six to eight weeks to process my application, but he could see no problem. Once the initial processing had been done I would be sent to St George's Barracks in nearby Sutton Coldfield. He said this was a selection centre where all recruits had to go through various written and physical tests before being chosen for a specific corps or regiment. After that I would be sent for basic training with my new regiment. I filled in some forms and asked him if he could put in writing that I had applied to join.

  A few weeks later I returned to court. The magistrate told me that after considering my appalling record he had contemplated sending me to crown court for sentencing, because he only had the power to give me six months' imprisonment. Before he went on to sentence me I played what I thought was my trump card: I told him I was joining the army. He had spent his life listening to the often pathetic gambits of criminals trying to avoid punishment and he tended to treat them with contempt. However, he had the air of a man who felt that most young people — certainly all young working-class men - ought to spend their youth in the army. He asked me if I could prove my intentions. I passed the army recruitment papers to the court usher who handed them to the magistrate. While he looked at them suspiciously I said that becoming a soldier was something I'd wanted to do for a long time. He said: "You might just be saying this." He spent another short while staring at the papers in front of him before turning to me with a slight smile, as if he had had a devious brainwave. He said he intended giving me a total of six months' imprisonment, a term which would take into account the most recent offence, my previous record and the breach of my current Supervision Order (thankfully, he didn't know I was also on bail for the earlier offence which had yet to be heard). However, in the light of my good intentions he was prepared to defer sentencing for a little while. What that meant, he said, was that if I was not in the army on the day he set aside for sentencing then I would be sent to jail. However, if I was a soldier by that date he would suspend my prison sentence for two years.