The best of those friends, with whom I still remain in constant contact, was a six foot three giant who even at 18 was scared of no one.
Much of his never-take-a-step-backwards character came from his father, a former soldier from the parachute regiment and a British Army boxing champion.
His name was Peter but we all called him Pedro, initially just to wind him up. He was an old-fashioned racist and he viewed the Spanish nickname as an insult.
Whether he liked it or not, the name stuck.
I became a regular visitor to Lee’s home; and often stayed the night in their crowded home. His mum and dad became like second parents to me; and I much like their newest child.
Perhaps because of the number of scrapes we were getting into and the beneficial effects he knew the discipline of boxing has on adolescent boys, Pedro determined to teach us all how to box.
He took out his old leather boxing gloves; and turned the grassy backyard, normally occupied by the family’s geese and other poultry, into a makeshift boxing ring.
The geese beat a hasty retreat, while the male of the troop, the gander, was more territorial – until Pedro came out, grabbed it by the neck and swung it into the back of the garden. The gander knew it was beaten and would not come back while ever we were there.
To everyone’s amusement I volunteered to be the first up against Pedro.
The first punch was a left jab straight on my face.
The jab was like being kicked by a mule. It knocked me straight to the floor.
My friends suddenly became very silent, thinking about their turn.
To the delight of Pedro I got straight back up. He immediately hit me again with another left jab, putting me straight back on the ground.
Again I got up. Again I was knocked to the ground, my nose streaming blood.
I was getting angrier and angrier, but after the fifth knock down I was so furious I stood up and began throwing wild punches like a windmill.
Not one of them touched him.
Instead Pedro started to laugh. He then hit me with a short right upper-cut in the in the solar plexus just above the stomach, winding me so badly I was left lying on the ground grasping for breath.
But it was from this moment on, not that he actually said so, that Pedro began to show a certain admiration for my determination.
And from that point on he treated me like family.
Next up was Pedro’s own son, Lee, who got a beating even worse than mine.
Newly married and with a new baby, Tommo, the next door neighbor, was leaning over the fence he had just spent three days building, laughing hysterically at our sequential misfortunes.
He was particularly happy when the third boy up, a lad known as Bets who Tommo particularly disliked due to a long term dispute over a girl.
Tommo wasn’t laughing for much longer.
Pedro smashed Bets so hard he fell backwards through Tommo’s brand new fence.
It was the end of our first boxing lesson and the end of Tommo laughing at our efforts to learn how to box. It took him days and quite a bit money to fix his fence.
Tommo wasn’t brave enough to ask for money from Pedro.
Over the following months we spent many an afternoon shooing away the geese from our makeshift boxing ring before proceeding under Pedro’s guidance to learn how to stand tall and fight.
You could call it tough love, it was certainly tough schooling. Painful to boot.
While serving with the parachute regiment Pedro became a British army boxing champion.
He had been schooled to a very high standard and while he would never have said so, chiseling his boxing skills into us was no doubt one of his proudest achievements.
He knew he was passing on lessons that would serve us well for life.
Pedro was a very proud man. It was a personal pride which he took upon himself to pass on.
The last thing he wanted to see was for us to end up like the streets rats, or “hooligans” as Pedro called them, the smalltime drug dealers and wannabe gangsters of the nearby Oxmoor Estate.
He wanted to see the character formation which is associated with boxing clubs passed on to us.
Boxing brings out the best in many an unruly adolescent, helping keep many of them out of jail.
Funnily enough, his daughter married a young lad Mal from the Oxmoor Estate, a terrific young man serving with the Royal Navy.
Even Oxmoor churned out the odd good character, demonstrating my point that people can overcome their backgrounds, that tough upbringings can build character.
Rather than the normal inhabitants the estates produce, welfare dependent slobs who live their entire lives at the expense of the taxpayer and do nothing but complain the government is not giving them enough money, Mal demonstrated that with some ambition it is more than possible to make and create your own destiny, to fulfill your dreams.
Although physically a bit of a weed Pedro’s son-in-law more than proved himself during the Falkland War, serving on HMS Antrim, the British fleet’s flag ship during the conflict.
This skinny runt of a “Matlow” – the term Commandos use for sailors –stepped up as one of the volunteers to help winch overboard an unexploded bomb, a 1,000 pound Argentinean Exocet missile which had opened up a hole in the side of the ship.
The chances of the bomb going off were very high.
Any unexploded bomb is dangerous, but an unexploded Exocet missile which has just ripped through the side of a 6,850 ton ship, generating blistering heat, poses even more deadly risks.
Mal thus helped to save many lives while putting his own at risk.
It had been in my mind for the past two years that I was heading to the military.
Despite my short stature and the ridicule I faced at my unwavering certainty the Royal Marine Commandos would welcome me with open arms, I never experienced a single moment of doubt.
“What are you going to be? The pipe cleaner for the tanks?” my most persistent tormentor would ask, laughing hard as he belittled me in front of my friends; at that age when all one wants is to be accepted by one’s peers.
Blondie, the son of the local postman, as we used to call him, was a 21-year old bully with a big mouth. Tall and handsome, the girls always flocked around him. They weren’t flocking around me.
Unlike everyone else in the community, I hated his guts.
The reason for my dislike stemmed originally from the previous year when I was cresting 16, with hormones running wild and not much else but girls on my mind.
I was at a family wedding reception in Godmanchester, a small town set alongside the River Great Ouse.
Emboldened by my own relatively modest intake of alcohol, I latched on to a very very drunk older girl, all of about 22, who took no persuading at all to take a walk along the quiet river banks.
I didn’t bother to ask her name but I thought my luck was in. She was a good looker by anyone’s standards and I wouldn’t have had a chance if she hadn’t been so drunk.
We ducked out of the wedding reception and found a quiet little spot to lie down, on the embankment overlooking the Great Ouse River. No doubt thousands of other couples had done just what we were doing over the past millennium in which the river, the fourth largest in the United Kingdom, had served as a major transport route.
We had barely started fumbling when someone shouted out to my conquest: “Someone’s not going to be happy.”
She jumped up, straightened out her clothing and disappeared back towards the reception.
I couldn’t follow her immediately because of the embarrassing bulge in my chinos.
Soon enough I discovered exactly who would not be happy at the thought of me having my way: Blondie.
Ten minutes later, walking down a dark alley alongside the reception hall, I was grabbed from the side.
Utterly “jarred off”, frustrated as only a 16-year-old can be when imminent success and penetration turns into total failure and deflation, a sure thing into a non-ru
nner, I hadn’t noticed anyone standing in the dark and had not sensed any threat.
Strangled and pushed against the wall I came face to face for the first time with “Blondie”; who demanded to know where I had been and who I had been with.
“I been nowhere, I’ve been for fish and chips, don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied, struggling free.
One of his friends was saying: “Leave him, leave him, he’s only young.”
I ducked away quickly, back into the safety of the wedding reception, where, by this time of night, a disco was playing all the corny wedding records of eternal love and my own failed exploits went unnoticed.
This experience of being shoved around by yet another lot of pissants convinced me even more that I was destined for the military.
After losing out on having sex with a “hottie”, the oldest and hottest girl I’d ever had the chance to go with, I was more than sick of being bullied and pushed around. I was determined to fight back.
Nobody was going to steal girls off me.
Nobody was going to shove my face in the mud. No one was going to ridicule me. I was not putting up with any more shit from anybody.
I just didn’t have the skills and didn’t know how to fight back.
I was determined to learn and crude as it may seem, sex was another reason I was so keen to box.
That incident on the embankment of the Great River Ouse was the final straw in what had been a prolonged childhood of humiliation and exploitation.
I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to join the military.
Don’t ask me why; I just knew the Green Beret would be mine. There was no Plan B.
I already knew from my reading that out of the 5,000 applicants chosen countrywide to do a potential recruitment course, only 57 would be selected.
The training process was designed to break 50 of them, who had no option but to return to civilian life, their dream of becoming a Commando dashed.
I was never in doubt I would be amongst the seven survivors.
School was finished and I had started work building children’s playgrounds. The job bored me witless.
I didn’t tell anybody of my intentions, not mum, not friends, not even work.
Nobody knew what I was up to the day I decided to go to the recruitment centre, in reality a fairly humble office next to the Army Recruitment Centre.
It was summer, a season full of hope. England was at its best, fresh cold mornings and beautiful sunny days. Such times are dammed rare.
I didn’t turn the television on as was my usual morning ritual; instead showering and dressing a little better than normal, in a buttoned shirt
rather than a t-shirt.
Still having told no one, I got on the back of my silver Honda 100CC motorbike and headed off to Peterborough. With a population of over 100,000 it was the biggest city I had ever seen.
Throughout the 35-mile ride from Leighton Bromswold I wasn’t excited, I wasn’t tense as one might expect, I just wanted to get the dates organized.
Short or not, no uncertainty crossed my mind. I was going to sign up to become a Commando. Why wouldn’t they take me?
In my youthful imagination I thought the recruitment process would be an easy one and occur more or less overnight.
How much I had to learn.
The recruitment center was in the Hereward Cross shopping centre, then the largest development in Peterborough, long since superseded.
I walked through the shopping center door, ten-stone skinny.
I had done my hair with mum’s blow driver and resembled one of the Bay City Rollers, one of the biggest teen-screamer acts of the 1970s.
In hindsight, I probably didn’t look as cool as I then thought.
Immediate horror ran on the faces of the recruitment officers sitting behind their desks.
“You’re a bit of a runt,” one said. “But sit down and we’ll have a look at you.”
Most of the blokes lining up at the recruitment centre were monsters compared to me.
The officers began the interview process, asked a few questions about my schooling, and then did an aptitude test.
In one of the tests they showed me pictures of cogs, asking which one in the line would turn in which direction.
The recruitment officers appeared surprised by their own actions when they signed me up.
Perhaps what swayed them was the simple fact I was unquestionably determined, that being a Commando was my sole ambition.
They gave me a yellow card with an exercise routine and detailed the physical tests which potential recruits have to pass during the initial four day assessment course at the famous Lympstone Commando Training Centre in Devon.
They explained I would be sent a “Joiner’s Pack” and a train ticket through the post.
Their advice was: make sure I could pass the fitness tests as outlined on the yellow card and to not give up, no matter how difficult things got.
I left with the impression the old soldiers now stuck behind desks had been half on my side; had felt some sympathy for the ten-stone underdog.
I drove back to my mother’s house in Leighton Bromswold.
I still told no one what I had done.
Mum finally realized what I was up to several days later when she spotted a letter lying on in the damp linoleum tiled floor way of the bungalow hall.
The “Royal Marines Recruitment” logo was clearly printed on the back.
My mother had no intention of providing me any privacy while I opened the letter.She wasn’t going anywhere until she knew the full facts of the case.
I was yet to learn resistance to interrogation techniques.
Several weeks later, after many an uncomfortable hour squashed into the seats of the notoriously dilapidated British Rail, I arrived in London.
This was my first visit to one of the world’s greatest cities but I didn’t see much of it, spending most of the time on the underground from Kings Cross.
There were dozens of other recruits on the train and we spent much of the journey sizing each other up, knowing that we would soon be in direct competition and that only a few of us would actually pass the assessment process we were about to be put through.
It was late in the day when we arrived at the Commando Training Centers’ own railway station 20 miles outside of Exeter in Devon.
We were now in a military zone. No civilians disembarked.
As the centre overlooks the mud flats of the River Exe estuary, at first sight, colored by the evening light, the scene appeared almost romantic.
It would not be long before I came to regard those mud flats as being anything but romantic, symbolizing nothing but pain.
The Lympstone Commando Training Centre’s own railway station. Photograph by Owen Dunn.
The guards at the small rear gate told us cheerfully: “Wait there chaps. The instructors will be here soon to provide you with a warm welcome.”
Ten minutes later the bolt of the steel gate clanked loudly, screeching as it was pushed open.
There stood three monsters of men, a sergeant and a corporal in green fatigues and a physical training instructor (PTI) in white gym shorts and a vest decorated with crossed clubs.
The clubs looked like crossed baseball bats, hence the PTIs nickname “club swingers”.
They took our names, marked us off their list and very politely asked us inside the camp. That was the end of the politeness.
With their help we lined up in two ranks ready for our first attempt at marching.
In a softly spoken, well-mannered tone, the instructors explained that any of us at any time, night or day, could step forward and volunteer to leave. All we had to do was put our hand up and say: “Staff, I want to quit.”
All the recruits were relaxed, our bags at our feet, pleasantly surprised by the courtesy of our welcome.
And then the gate slammed shut, the loud clank of the bolt acting like a starting pistol for the instructors.
Th
eir race to break us was on and our previous sense of self, of independence, turned into a desperate struggle to survive.
It was as if hell had suddenly broken through to the earth’s surface.
We were instantly hit with a barrage of verbal abuse as we marched to our accommodation.
If you were black you were called a coon.
One of the instructors asked me where I was from and I replied “Cambridgeshire”.
“Your mum must have had you with the milkman,” he spat contemptuously.
If he had said anything like that outside of this circumstance there would have been a fight.
Everyone got some sort of ridicule.
The potential-recruits course lasted four days; and the trainers did their absolute best to smash us.
Our numbers more than halved within the first two days.
The extremity of the verbal aggression was a big enough shock to the
system. Combined with a barrage of other physical and psychological tests, we were pushed until we were almost at dropping point.
Four days after those gates clanged shut behind us and we entered hell we were sent home.
Amongst those of us who survived the four grueling days, none knew whether they had passed or failed.
Confirmation or a thank you but no thank you would, we were told, would come through the mail.
Nobody, including myself, was given any indication we might have been successful.
The only ones who knew their fate were the ones who had already failed.
Most of them just broke and volunteered to leave.
Others were dispatched by the instructors with no ceremony or consolation whatsoever after failing a physical or psychological test.
Some of the potential recruits broke into tears as they were ordered to leave, their dreams of becoming a commando shattered. It was hard not to feel some sympathy for them.
But the trainers themselves demonstrated no compassion, sympathy or encouragement towards the recruits whatsoever.
Their aim was to break us and they set out to do so with gusto.
When the trainers saw someone was on the edge of breaking they were right in their face: “You want to go home to mommy?”
CONFESSIONS OF A ROYAL MARINE COMMANDO (part one) Page 2
