I didn’t even mention it to the other boys, but I told my brother about it when I went home that night and he was almost as excited as me. That was all the encouragement I needed, and I told him I was going to nick it the following evening. And that’s exactly what I did. I had this fishtail parka, with arms down to my knees, but it was the perfect coat for concealing a shotgun. I made my escape on this little racing bike, and as I freewheeled downhill, the shotgun that was almost as long as me pressed against my body, I felt like a million dollars. I had no idea what I was going to do with the shotgun. I just had to have it.
As soon as I got home, I went to the stable, stuck the shotgun in a vice and sawed the stock off with a hacksaw. It was madness. This thing was absolutely beautiful and it must have cost a fortune, and here I was sawing it in half as if I was a bank robber about to do a job. A lot of people ask, ‘How the hell did you know how to saw a shotgun down?’ Because my dad had been working me so hard, getting me to cut wood, copper pipes and everything else, cutting down a shotgun was second nature to me. I even finished it perfectly, so that there were no sharp edges. They would have ruined my coat. I didn’t do any bank jobs, and for a while I just carried the shotgun about with me, under my parka. Even took it to school one day and hid it in my locker. Just doing that gave me a massive buzz.
I’d recently seen Rambo, and that’s who I wanted to be like. So I got my brother to buy a load of shotgun shells from the local hardware store, as well as a gun belt and a 15-inch knife. I hid the shotgun in my mum’s walk-in wardrobe and at night we’d go out on little missions. We’d go to a car park, sneak up on people necking in the back seat, chuck stones at the windows, wait for the guy to come out, point the shotgun at him and fire it over his head. There were flames coming out of the barrel and these big men would start shrieking, jump straight back into their cars and drive off at 100mph.
I thought it was brilliant, just harmless fun. I had no concept that what I was doing might get me into trouble or have psychological consequences for the poor people I was firing over. I had never handled a firearm and had no idea what I was doing. I could have quite easily killed the person I was firing it over, myself or the person standing next to me. I just didn’t care, it didn’t even enter my head. All I cared about was pushing and pushing to the absolute limit.
One day, I said to my mum, ‘A friend of mine’s got some duck, do you want some bringing back?’
‘Oh yes, Matt, that would be lovely.’
I went down to a pond near the house, started blazing away at these ducks and pumped one full of pellets. When I returned home that night, I tossed this duck on the kitchen table in triumph, as if I was some hardened hunter. She was expecting it to be plucked, gutted and dressed. She knew something fishy was going on, she just wasn’t sure what.
I always had a lot of friends who were older than me, including one boy called Johnny who lived down the street. We used to go to a barber shop owned by a guy we knew and sit drinking tea and chatting, a bit like that sitcom Desmond’s. But when I decided I needed money to buy some bullets, we broke in one night and nicked the cash box, which contained about 200 quid. And when you’re 14, 200 quid is an absolute fortune.
After we got the big haul from the hairdresser’s, I told my friends I was going to take them for a celebratory day out. I filled a duffle bag with all my Rambo gear, ordered a taxi and we went off to the country for a shooting trip. But as soon as we got out there, I fired one round off and every bird within miles flew out of the trees and scarpered. Suddenly, we had nothing to do.
While the other boys traipsed off home, I went to the playing fields and had a lie down in some long grass next to the river, cradling the shotgun as if it was a lover. It was a beautiful day. The sun was beating down, there was a nice breeze and the grass was blowing all around me. Then, all of a sudden, I heard someone coming. I looked up to see a girl standing over me and smirking. I knew that smug face. Every school has a ‘worst’ family, and in my school it was the Mitchells. While my family were considered to be snobs, because we lived in a big house and spoke funny, they were at the other end of the spectrum. Like us, the Mitchells consisted of two brothers and a sister, but they were weird as hell. There were stories about them sacrificing cats in a graveyard. But worse, as far as I was concerned, was that they used to pick on my sister. And it just so happened that the girl standing over me was the Mitchell sister.
She started taking the piss out of me, calling me a cowboy and asking me who the hell I thought I was. I wasn’t having any of that. I loaded the shotgun, swung it in her direction and squeezed off two rounds directly above her head. You won’t be surprised to learn that she shat herself. As she ran through the flood plain, her high heels flew off and she looked like Moses, parting the Red Sea. Apart from James Stafford after the chimpanzee attack, I’d never seen anyone move so fast.
After another couple of hours sunbathing with my beloved shotgun, I finally went home. I sneaked past my mum, who was pottering in the garden, slipped into the house and hid the shotgun in her wardrobe. A couple of hours later, I was messing about in the stables – probably up to no good – when I heard voices and my mum shouting my name. When I peered through this big gate with square openings at the top, I saw her talking to a couple of policemen. Poor Mum had been doing a nice spot of gardening on a Sunday afternoon, and now she was dealing with the long arm of the law.
When I finally showed myself, one of the policemen said to me, ‘Matt, we believe you’re in possession of a sawn-off shotgun.’
‘Nah, you’ve got it wrong, I haven’t got a shotgun.’
‘Matt, if you don’t tell us where it is, we’re going to have to arrest you.’
‘Arrest me? Really?’
At that point, I thought I should probably tell them where the shotgun was. I took them into the house, went up the stairs and into my mum’s bedroom. She, of course, was baffled. I brought the shotgun out, handed it to the police and thought that would be the end of it: ‘Oh, thanks Matt, cheers for being so cooperative, see you later.’ Instead, my mum fainted on the spot and I was put into the back of a police car and taken down to the station.
I didn’t understand what I’d done that was so serious. I just thought I’d been having a bit of fun. Hours and hours of interviews ensued, but I didn’t tell them everything, because that would have meant snitching on the other lads. I made up a story about finding the shotgun on some waste ground, where my dogs had sniffed it out. They believed me, why wouldn’t they? How else was a kid going to get his hands on a sawn-off shotgun? Plus, I’d done a great job at cutting it down. How would a kid know how to do that? It’s not as if I was known to associate with villains from London’s East End.
The police mistakenly connected the shotgun to a load of post office robberies that had taken place in the local area and everything was done and dusted. I’d bluffed the police, not got my mates in the shit and got away with it. The whole episode had been a buzz, a lot of fun. But the police aren’t that stupid.
A few weeks later, the mum of the kid who had got us into the house found a cheque from the doctor in his bedroom. She confronted him, told the doctor and it all started to unravel. The doctor told the police, an inventory was done, and they discovered the shotgun was missing from under the doctor’s bed. I’d been rumbled. Me and the other lads, including my brother, were taken in for questioning and the police soon pieced the picture together. It looked nothing like what I’d told them, so I had to admit what I’d done.
After a weekend in the cells I was let out on the Monday. By that time, the penny had finally dropped: I was deep in the shit. But while I waited for the wheels of justice to turn, I went about my normal business. I had a paper round and an Advertiser round on the biggest hill in town. I’d deliver both up the hill, switching between both sides of the road, before freewheeling all the way down. My bike had dodgy brakes, so normally when I got about 100 metres from the bottom, I’d start slowing down, so that by the time I r
eached the traffic lights, the bike would stop. The morning after being released by the police, I was bombing down this hill, thinking about all the horrible things I could do to the Mitchell girl as revenge for grassing on me and picking on my sister. And just as I started braking, someone stepped out from in front of a car and I slammed into them. This person was draped over my handlebars, staring straight at me, and I quickly realised it was the Mitchell girl. Both of us were screaming, I was looking at her thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s you!’, and she was looking at me thinking the same thing.
We must have travelled about 100 metres together, before we came to a halt and ended up in a heap all over the road. An ambulance came, whisked her off to hospital (she was okay, just a few cuts and bruises) and I was taken back in for questioning. The police thought it had been an assassination attempt, to silence her. What a way to try to get rid of someone! I said to the police, ‘Do you think I’m that stupid – or that accurate – to be sitting at the top of the hill, taking note of the distance and wind speed, muttering to myself, “As long as I maintain 31 miles per hour, I should hit the target bang on the money…”?’
I managed to persuade them, but even after all that, I still had to push things. A week later, I stole a motorbike before shoplifting a pair of jeans by putting them on under my trousers. The owner caught me, called the police, and the copper was the same one who had arrested me for nicking the shotgun. He walked through the door of the shop, saw me and said, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, not you again. I can’t believe you’re still doing this shit!’ It had got to the stage where my mum was on first-name terms with the policemen. One of them, Neil, would phone her at work and say, ‘Angela, we’ve got him again’, and she’d have to trudge down to the police station. She’d say to me, ‘For goodness’ sake, Matt, just stop it!’ But I didn’t know how.
At the police station, having been apprehended for attempting to nick the jeans, they were all calling me ‘Shotgun Willy’. The copper who arrested me took me down to the cells and said, ‘Look, I’m sure your father will pay bail. But the alternative is a remand home.’
Straightaway I replied, ‘I’d rather go to a remand home.’
I couldn’t face my father, I knew it would be a hideous scene. So off I went by choice to the remand home.
Not long before, my dad had made me watch the 1970s’ film Scum about the brutality of life in a British borstal, and said, ‘That’s where you’ll end up if you’re not careful.’ But I thought Scum was exaggerated. I wasn’t scared of remand home. I thought I’d be top dog, have the most charisma and the best clothes and that people would be bowing down to me.
It turned out that Scum was actually quite realistic. My remand home wasn’t quite a prison, but it felt like one to a 14-year-old kid. People from my background weren’t supposed to get into this kind of trouble and kids like me weren’t supposed to end up in a remand home. I was scared shitless.
5
SO NEAR, SO FAR
You have to have an operational tour under you belt and a couple of years’ experience in the military to be able to put yourself forward for Special Forces Selection. But the bosses can still say no if they don’t think you’re up to it. However, my boss wasn’t going to stand in my way, because he wanted to see me fail so much. God, that would have provided him with so much joy.
I had four weeks to go until SBS Selection in Poole, and I spent that time map-reading and training with packs on my back, so that I had whipped myself into pretty good shape by the time it came to joining up. The instructions were to meet at 06:00 hours at the boat store, with a length of rope and a tyre, which we had to source ourselves. When I rocked up, I was eyeing all these super-soldiers who looked the business – some of them huge, some of them ripped, some of them with cold, dead eyes – and I thought, ‘Fucking hell, did I get off the wrong bus? Maybe I won’t make it…’
It soon became apparent that we would be towing the tyre behind us wherever we went, through water, sand, mud and bushes. There were fitness tests and load marches, swimming assessments, map and compass skills. It was all about telling us exactly what would be expected of us, should we make it into Special Forces.
For two weeks, we got thrashed beyond belief, while getting hardly any sleep and never knowing what was going to happen next. There were marches across hills and a lot of boat work with collapsible canoes, often covering huge distances through tidal waters. It wasn’t uncommon for us to be woken up for a ‘beasting’, which meant being dragged from a state of sleep into a savage physical and psychological thrashing in a matter of seconds. One day, we were herded into an auditorium and told to grab a shower. When we filed back into the auditorium, the heating was cranked up to full blast and we were made to watch a forklift truck moving different coloured barrels from one stack to another. We were supposed to keep tabs on the order the barrels were placed in, to replicate being in an observation post in a hot Middle Eastern country. When you’ve been travelling for days, you’re tired and hungry, the sun is roaring and all you want to do is sleep, you still have to be switched on, because what appear to be mundane goings on can actually be vital intelligence for friendly forces. But as the minutes ticked by, all I could hear in the auditorium was heads smashing against desks as fatigue did its thing.
Any soldier that puts himself forward for Selection obviously thinks he’s fit enough, and they could smash the physical stuff all day long, if it wasn’t for the mental torture: taking away their sleep, making them hungry, messing with their norms.
Passing Selection is not about being the fittest or the strongest, it’s about who keeps going, no matter what you come up against. It’s not about being miles ahead on a march, it’s about plodding along in the pack and still being there at the end. The natural inclination for an alpha male – and you get a lot of alpha males in the military – is to want to shout about what you are made of. But wanting to be at the front of the pack is more about your ego than anything else. Why would you want to stand out? As soon as you start showing off, trying to let people know that you’re the fittest or the strongest, all eyes are on you. And those eyes will start looking for a whole range of potential weaknesses. Although, of course, you don’t want to be at the back either.
In the Special Forces, this ability to appear unremarkable so as not to draw attention to yourself is called being ‘the grey man’. The public perception of a Special Forces soldier and the reality are very different. You might walk into a bar full of soldiers, see a load of musclebound lads swilling beer and being loud and assume that they are Special Forces. But the Special Forces lads are more likely to be short and wiry and sitting quietly in the corner.
Another day, we had to march with our collapsible canoes on our backs for what seemed like an eternity. That night, they took us into camp and said, ‘Right, lads, get yourselves a shower and get your heads down.’ I’d just nodded off when I was woken by a loud bang. The lights were on and an envelope was lying in the middle of the room. Someone opened it up and announced that we all had to be at a certain rendezvous point (RV) in 15 minutes. We were all gathered around this map, trying to work out where we needed to go, and eventually we came to the reluctant conclusion that the coordinates corresponded to the middle of a lake. So at about 3am, we all got our gear on, located the lake and swam into the middle of it.
We were treading water, waiting for the next instruction and freezing our tits off, when a head breached the surface, with a scuba mask on. Whoever it was handed us the next grid, before disappearing below the surface again. I was so sleep-deprived, I thought I might have been dreaming. I’ve got no doubt the training team sit around laughing about the weird stuff they come up with to test us. Then again, war is unpredictable and the situations you find yourself in can be very surreal.
Being in the Marines was all about the red mist and roaring into things at 100mph. But this was different. Another night, as we were marching, a car drove past. Shortly afterwards, we were stopped and asked what the car’
s registration was. Nobody had a clue. We then got thrashed beyond any thrashing I’d had before. And the whole time, the directing staff (DS) were shouting, ‘You will pay attention to detail! This is fucking real, this is the thinking man’s world, wake the fuck up!’
It was being drummed into us remorselessly that we needed to pay attention to every little detail at all times. Even details that might seem totally irrelevant might fit into the bigger picture. It was about having 360-degree awareness of everything we were doing. After that, I made a point of memorising the number plate of every car that went past me. I still do. That’s how hard they hammer things into you during Selection.
In the Special Forces, we’re constantly testing ourselves across a range of harsh environments and operating in the jungle is soldiering to a tee. The jungle is hot and humid, and whenever the heavens open, it becomes hellish. It’s also very claustrophobic, because you’re operating under a canopy of trees and among dense foliage. It’s raw, the conditions are brutal, and it separates those who can function in incredibly difficult conditions from those who can’t. I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! it isn’t.
During jungle acclimatisation training, we were thrashed every morning on the beach, and only then were we helicoptered in to do our work. The only luxury we had was a toothbrush and some toothpaste, the rest was soldiering kit. Generally speaking, you don’t move in the jungle at night, that’s when you try to get some sleep. And before getting your head down, you build your hammock in the pitch black of the jungle, take off all your wet kit, put it in a stuff sack, pack the stuff sack away, and get into your dry kit. Putting on that dry kit is one of the best feelings imaginable, like slipping into a bespoke suit in a Savile Row tailors. In stark contrast, when you wake before dawn the following morning, you have to drag yourself out of your hammock, take off that beautiful, crisp, dry kit and dig out all that horrible, stinking wet kit. When you open the stuff sack, the smell of body odour and ammonia punches you in the face. It might sound melodramatic, given everything else a Special Forces hopeful has to go through, but putting it on again is one of the worst things I’ve ever done. I’d imagine I was putting on a freshly ironed shirt and a pair of Armani jeans, while saying to myself, ‘These are the nicest, most comfortable jeans you’ll ever wear. When you get these on you’ll feel a million dollars and look even better…’ That’s the only way I could get through it every morning, fooling myself it was a treat.
Break Point Page 5
