Going Commando

by Mark Time

  For the hierarchy it was, and always will be, a fine balancing act between maintaining a training regime harsh enough to separate the wheat from the chaff and the demands of the Treasury, who want value for money in their forces. Having fifty-two commence training, for only four to finish, could seem to a Saville Row suited bean counter sat comfortably at his leather trimmed desk in his plush Whitehall office a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money.

  With Easter upon us, the troop I’d just left invited me to their King’s Squad piss-up – a night out where the lads could see a more humane side to the training team and we could get absolutely rat-arsed with no civvies to offer complaint.

  For some odd reason, we decided to have our piss-up in Okehampton Battle Camp. The only reason I can imagine we’d do this would be to see the two women regarded as the world’s ugliest strippers. As my sexual experience up to now had been a bit rubbish, the sight of a naked, cellulite-ridden, middle-aged woman rubbing her crusty vagina near my face, wafting her scent and overused cheap perfume, was nearly enough to put me off women for life.

  * * *

  Returning home on leave, I was quite happy to tell friends of my injury. After all, it would only confirm how hard Royal Marines training really was. I would have liked to tell my mum something similar, but that proved problematic – I didn’t have a fucking clue where she was.

  I’d taken the chartered train like all the other nods to get us ‘up the line’, alighting at Leeds Central station as per normal. My mum and stepdad’s fish and chip shop had evidently just opened. The shop-front window was filled by a queue of those who had eaten chips for lunch and now hankered after something more substantial – maybe fish and chips. Not wanting to disturb their metronomic fish-frying system, I diverted my route via the rear garden and dog shit minefield, entering through the backdoor. I immediately smelled a rat and it wasn’t the battered variety new to the menu.

  All houses have a smell distinctive to the occupying family, an olfactory homing beacon of familiarity. I wasn’t responding to this one.

  As a child living with my grandparents, the kitchen smell in my early years would usually be of skinned rabbits. Once my grandfather had died, it was just my gran and I living there. The kitchen was no longer a slaughterhouse for bunnies, and so became a makeshift toilet. As she got older Gran struggled to walk two flights of stairs to the loo, so she decided to pee in a bucket. This bucket also became a makeshift ashtray for the Senior Service habit that left her with a shock of yellow nicotine in her grey hair.

  Having such a large urine collecting receptacle wouldn’t have been a problem - cooking and washing with a nicotine diffused piss bucket nearby was, I am sure, common in many kitchens. Probably not so many had a young lad, running around thinking he was Kevin Keegan, kicking a small football around. My skills were pretty good but on occasion, I would batter the ball and knock over the bucket. Once knocked over, a sea of brown piss and fag ends would wash all over the kitchen floor.

  If it was possible to make a floor covering that was perfect for catching, and holding urine, yet virtually impossible to clean, then the beaded linoleum mat that was stuck to the floor tiles in our kitchen would be it. Often my gran would squelch along the mat, tramping soggy fag butts underfoot to feed me my usual evening meal of coffee and bourbon biscuits.

  Now, when passing a tramp in a doorway my olfactory homing beacon kicks in. And people today panic about not sterilising their kitchen tops.

  So here, as I stood at the backdoor of the fish and chip shop, my senses were out of synch. The odour wasn’t familiar. Even with a topping of grease, fresh cod and batter, there was something different. The strange woman who came into the back hallway was as shocked as I. A Mexican stand-off between two puzzled strangers ensued.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked quite politely, considering the circumstances.

  ‘What am I doing? What are you doing here more like?’ I replied, not quite as politely.

  Once I’d prevented her husband from attacking me with a fish-filleting knife, it transpired that my mum and stepdad had not long moved house. They had upped sticks and gone, without so much as a carrier-pigeon message to tell me.

  The rather bemused couple allowed me to use their phone to ring an aunt who informed me my loving family had bought a café in Scarborough, but she didn’t know which one. It couldn’t be that hard, surely, to find a café in the largest seaside resort town in Northeast England?

  It was now 6.30pm (or 18.30 as I’d now say if someone asked, ‘Time check?’). I could either get on a train to Scarborough to try to find my errant parents, or I could stay the night in Leeds. Too tight to find an overpriced hotel, I thought sleeping rough an acceptable alternative. Having just spent ten days sleeping in the frost of Dartmoor, a night on a park bench with my bergan for an oversized pillow was luxury itself.

  A late spring morning in Scarborough is awash with sunburnt people promenading in silly hats, children sucking on teeth-melting confectionary for their breakfast and old people sunbathing in their cardigans talking about immigrants and the ungodly cost of a tin of beans. There is little more English than the smell of candyfloss, burgers and the North Sea, even at 10am (or 10 hundred hours as I’d say when again asked to ‘Time check?’ I would also tell them it was about time they bought a watch.)

  This seaside ambience would have been perfect if it wasn’t raining, if I didn’t have a fucked ankle and wasn’t limping around trying to find people who were apparently still legally responsible for me.

  To add insult to literal injury, I was humping a full bergan on my back and, in a moment of financial madness, had bought a diving suit complete with full weight belt. I was now carrying that as well, which encouraged me to sweat just a little.

  Although I’d been to Scarborough a few times I’d never previously noticed how hilly it was. Then again, I had never had to walk around with a house on my back. Looking around, it did dawn on me that with the plethora of bed and breakfast joints I really should have chosen this option over a freezing night in a drug-riddled park.

  Peering into every open café, I tramped frustratedly up Castle Road, a main thoroughfare in the town. As I trudged further up the hill towards the castle, there they stood behind the counter, laughing and joking with customers obviously partial to my mum’s French fancies and my stepdad’s tales of smashing up Paris in 1975 as a Leeds United football hooligan.

  Mum greeted me warmly, totally oblivious to my travails. ‘Ooh, hello love,’ she said without a care in the world, bless her.

  ‘So here you are. Is there any reason why you didn’t inform me you were moving?’ Under the circumstances I thought it a pretty understandable question.

  ‘Well, we were going to.’

  ‘Well you were going to… but…?’

  Your pen ran out? Aliens abducted you? You suddenly had a temporary bout of myotonic dystrophy?

  I should have just said, ‘You are the world’s shittest parents.’

  A more pathetic excuse I couldn’t have imagined. It would have resulted in a severe beasting if they’d been nods in the Corps. Unfortunately they weren’t, so I huffily retreated to my room full of unpacked boxes on a bed that was supposedly for me, dreaming of my mother doing star jumps and my stepdad running up a hill on Dartmoor with a café chair above his head.

  Despite only being there a short while, they had already built up a small band of regulars who’d come in each morning to have their arteries thickened by mum’s full English breakfast. One such customer was a guy called Kim. A rather large chap, he claimed to have been in the Paras with impressive military credentials.

  Kim took me under his wing when we met. I was a young, impressionable Royal Marines recruit, so wet behind the ears I had fungus, and therefore believed everything Kim would tell me. I was his mate, he kept repeating – in hindsight a little too often.

  He worked on the doors of a ‘fun pub’ in Scarborough, so I stuck with him. He would let me in without needing an
y ID, as I was his mate. I listened to his tales of derring-do, Falklands War heroics, and how he was generally the hardest man in NATO.

  His dad apparently owned a large army surplus store in hometown Newcastle, so he could get me lots of ‘Gucci’ military kit really cheap, as I was his mate. I had no hesitation in handing him £100 – a fortnight’s wages to me – so he could make me look like RoboMarine when I passed out and got drafted to a commando unit.

  He even invited me to a big party he had organised where loads of hot, military-loving chicks were going to be, as I was his mate. Great! A proper party with grownups!

  The party consisted of Kim, me, two girls from the fun pub and a cassette of Michael Jackson’s Bad album. I felt as uncomfortable as the two girls who were reluctant to dance with Kim, a very poor substitute for Jacko. He was more Peter Sutcliffe.

  The girls left quite quickly, and I began to wonder what sort of bloke Kim really was. A few days later I called in to see him. I’d tried to distance myself but had left my expensive watch there after the crap party.

  There was no answer at his apartment. I knocked on the next door; it belonged to a girl I’d met on occasion, so I expected a smiling welcome.

  ‘You fucking bastard!’ she screamed, at a volume you know others can hear. ‘If you don’t tell me where he is I swear I’ll call the coppers and get you done as well.’

  My conflict management skills not yet polished, I struggled to fathom her ire. Not the most eloquent of communicators, all I could come back with was, ‘What the fuck are you on about?’

  ‘Don’t protect him. You’re his brother. You know where he is, the fucking thieving bastard.’

  ‘Firstly, I’m not his brother. Secondly…’

  I didn’t have a ‘secondly’. My mouth was well and truly in front of my brain and didn’t really comprehend the situation. I calmed slightly.

  ‘I’ve just come to get my watch from him. I left it here the other day.’

  As I was believable, her anger subsided. Kim and I did have different accents and, unless I was the crappiest burglar ever, I’d hardly return to the scene of the crime within a few days.

  ‘So what’s happened?’

  ‘We must have all been at work when he came, ’cos when we all returned our flats had been broken into, including mine. He’s robbed everyone, turned over all our private stuff, went through me knicker drawer and he even broke open the gas and leccy meters.’

  ‘Frigging hell, that’s awful. But how do you know it was him?’

  ‘When the coppers came, they checked his flat. He’d cleared out all of his stuff and done a runner, so it was obviously him. That’s not the worst of it, though. The only thing left was his bed. Guess what they found underneath it?’

  ‘A watch and some military clothing?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘No, a claw hammer and a crow bar.’

  ‘Ah, the toolkit of any self-respecting serial killer,’ I replied, an attempt at levity.

  ‘It’s not fucking funny, he’s nicked all me vibrators.’

  Now that was funny.

  In the vain hope he may have left some stuff other than sex toys, I tracked down the two girls from the fun pub. Unsurprisingly, he’d left nothing for me but left them with tall tales of going on a secret mission in Angola.

  If Kim was ever in the military, it seemed he was the sort that the establishment probably wish they had never trained. He was a walking argument for the introduction of psychological profiling.

  Years later, a programme was screened documenting a group of ragtag mercenaries fighting in the Balkans, doing their utmost to become a laughing stock to anyone with even a week’s worth of military training. My jaw literally dropped when the main character turned out to be a big, fat Geordie called Kim. He even got a book deal out of it, so I hope a hundred quid from the royalties he earned is winging its way in the post to me. I’ve been waiting a while, so I’ll blame the Royal Mail.

  Despite getting matey with a maniac, being laid up at home was becoming a bore. So I did what any seventeen-year-old Royal Marines recruit would do to aid the recovery of his sore ankle: I ran eighteen miles with a bergan on my back.

  Initially, I only planned to run to Filey, some eight miles away. Yet as I passed the lines of caravan parks with impressionable teenage girls looking from afar, thinking I was some sort of super-marine or sweat-drenched imbecile, I felt good. So good, in fact, I carried on to the small coastal town of Flamborough.

  While I did see myself as a bit of a wimp on account of doing the route in trainers and not boots, finishing it with only a little ankle soreness was a fillip for my confidence. Of course, I still had the small matter of the forthcoming commando tests, but I’d be fit and refreshed. I was eager to return.

  * * *

  With no exercise to recover from, 523 Troop had a slight advantage over other troops. Their bodies, like mine, had recovered and we were upbeat for the test week ahead.

  First up was the endurance course. I was over the moon when I was pushed into a team with Charlie, as he was my morale crutch and we knew we’d spur each other on.

  I needed it. I always struggled on this test. My times were never spectacular. Seventy-one minutes was the time in which we had to complete the course, and I’d finished it in under seventy minutes just the once. I was never going to get a quick time, only a pass time.

  But for someone who only wanted to see light at the end of this very long (and wet) tunnel, another chink appeared as I fired the last successful round down the range knowing I had vanquished my greatest adversary. Where I had broken down on the Tarzan assault course three weeks before, I now flew over as if my arse was on fire. As my strongest test, I completed the pass-out in less than ten minutes, one of the quickest in the troop.

  On Saturday afternoon, I went ashore with Fred and Charlie a happy man. So happy, in fact, that I didn’t buy any green string. That morning, we had run the nine-miler and I’d even pulled someone along, encouraging them to keep up. All there was left to complete was the thirty-miler – again. Even though I’d already passed and didn’t need to repeat, finishing the march to be handed the green beret was the best way to receive it.

  The big man upstairs must have looked over us with sympathy, as the moor lay resplendent in spring sunshine, flowers swaying to the whispers of the breeze. Light greys of granite stood out proudly from the vivid greens that occasionally darkened under the shadow of a cloud passing across an azure sky.

  Navigation was simple, and many checkpoints could be seen from afar. Our syndicate was made up of some the biggest characters in the troop, and as the thirty-miler was, by definition, an endurance test, we made the time go quicker by joke-sharing, poor song choices and the odd comical fall.

  Ryder’s Hill was still a bitch, but we ascended in cruise control, high on expectation. In just over six hours, we double marched to Cross Furzes. My heart pounded, not just from exertion, but from excitement and pride. There once again stood a line of welcoming commandos, applauding their future brothers.

  This time I was to be one of their brethren. This time I had completed the tasks at hand. This time I stood to attention and saluted, before being handed my green beret.

  I placed it on my head for the first time. I was no longer 5’6” (and a bit). I was ten feet tall.

  * * *

  King’s Squad is all about promenading around camp wearing a peak cap, drill uniform, white lanyard and contented smile.

  We could march smartly around camp knowing recruits would look upon us with awe and wonderment. King’s Squad seemed to be even more respected than the green-bereted commandos around camp. Now I was one of them, I marched smarter than ever before and had an inner lust for life, knowing I’d never have to crawl through those fucking endurance course tunnels again.

  Another rite of passage in this last two weeks was to get that elusive tattoo. It wasn’t necessarily written in Corps lore that you had to be adorned with ink, but many thought it only right and pro
per to get something that would make them an obvious target, should they get naked on the streets of West Belfast. The most common, and admittedly the cheapest, option was to get a simple blood group tattoo on the shoulder. Fred had chosen this option.

  ‘I don’t want anything too bootneck,’ he explained.

  ‘So tell me Fred,’ Charlie asked. ‘What other groups outside of the military would need to know their blood groups and have them as a tattoo?’

  Fred pondered for a while. ‘Haemophiliacs.’

  This was a fair point, but Charlie was one of a few who thought ‘tats’ were a bit shit. ‘Okay, so why have a tattoo? You’ve got dog tags to wear around your neck for any medic needing to know your blood group. And what happens if you get your arm with the tattoo blown off?’

  ‘Well, what happens if your neck gets blown off?’ retorted Fred, a little quicker than he should have.

  My favourite was the classic British bulldog wearing a green beret. Bulldogs have a bad reputation. Noted as the poster dog for right wing nationalism, I couldn’t think of a more ridiculous choice to represent our country. Bulldogs, admittedly, are cute as puppies but the term ‘bulldog chewing a wasp’ wasn’t meant as a compliment.

  Aesthetics aside, bulldogs often have hip and respiratory problems, can’t run particularly quickly over distances longer than a school ruler, and rank seventy-eighth out of eighty breeds when tested for intelligence. Hardly the attributes that a nation aspires to, but as long as it’s got the word ‘British’ in front of it then it’s imperialism all the way.

  Often surrounded by the words ‘Royal Marines Commando’ (or ‘Pooyal’, as displayed on a good friend’s arm) the green-bereted bulldog actually looked rather swish, despite the pooch not earning the right to wear it. The tattooist in nearby Exmouth, through locality, had plenty of practice doing this particular piece, unlike the lad who thought his local tattooist in Middlesbrough could conjure up something just as impressive. Unfortunately, the tattooist didn’t really understand the difference between a British bulldog and a ferret, which isn’t quite so patriotic unless you come from my county.