Читать книгу Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life - Keith Floyd - Страница 8

Had I got off at the correct station, I could have taken advantage of a ride in a three-ton truck to Catterick Camp, which the Army had thoughtfully provided to pick up the recruits. Unfortunately, after an awful ten-hour overnight journey from the West Country, just before my correct destination I fell asleep and, as a consequence, had to hitchhike with two heavy suitcases back from York to Richmond and then walk the last four miles to the camp itself. I reported to the guard room in a state of sweating and trembling anxiety, several hours late. The duty corporal noted my arrival in a ledger and courteously enough showed me to my room in the barracks. It had eight or ten tubular steel unmade beds, each with a plain wooden wardrobe and a bedside locker. Down the corridor there was a sort of common room, with Formica tables and chairs, a battered TV and a few dog-eared magazines and paperback novels. There was no one else there. It was Sunday, and I mooched around nervously for several hours, uncertain of what to do. Eventually a soldier turned up and took me to the store to collect some bedding, and then showed me to the cookhouse, where I devoured a mountainous plate of food, my first meal for almost twenty-four hours. When I returned to the dormitory, I found another five or six scruffy-looking lads who, with their duffel bags and suitcases dumped on the floor, were hesitantly introducing themselves to one another. I felt out of place in my suit. They were all wearing jeans and anoraks. None of us knew what to do; were we allowed out, should we stay in? Would someone tell us what to do? I elected to go to the guard room to clarify the situation. I reported back to the lads that we were free to go to the NAAFI and nothing would happen until we were woken the following morning, which was Monday.

The next morning dawned like Pearl Harbor. The day exploded into a frenzy of form-filling, kit-collecting, hair-cutting, medicals, quick-fire instructions which left us, at seven o’clock that night, exhausted and bewildered. No longer civilians, yet absolutely not soldiers, we were in some kind of institutionalised limbo. I had difficulty sleeping, worried that I would sleepwalk or talk in my sleep, worried that I would make a complete idiot of myself in front of my roommates. After a couple of days we had more or less got to know each other and settled into a frenzied routine of basic training. This involved endless marching, parades, weapons training, bulling kit, spit-and-polishing the toecaps of your boots, cross-country runs, all the while and at the double desperately trying to avoid any kind of mistake. Only at the end of the eight-week training period would we know if the Army would keep us or not. I had the incentive to work really hard: not only did I have to pass my basic training, I had to excel in order to be selected for the Potential Officer troop which would ultimately lead me to Officer Cadet School and a commission. Should I fail, I would be condemned to a minimum of three years as a squaddie, something which was unacceptable to me.

The eight weeks sped by like a hurricane. All the instructors knew I was headed for the PO troop, and consequently were tougher on me than on the others. That was no bad thing though. The challenge was essential and I took it head on and progressed without a hiccup into the PO troop, where I was assured I would find life very different. After our passing out parade, we had a farewell beer with our instructor, who assured us ‘we didn’t know nothing yet’ and now the real business of becoming a soldier would begin. ‘Except for Floyd, of course,’ he said, ‘who is leaving us to join the troop of potential gentlemen.’

Our main instructor was a man called Sergeant Linneker (RTR). He was an immensely fit thirty-year-old, always immaculate in his black denim tank suit, and had actually given us a fairly decent time, especially on the drill square because Tankies’ look upon the infantry with a certain scorn and don’t regard square-bashing as being of paramount importance. Also, in common with many other members of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, he was a West Countryman and consequently very slightly laid back. I had got on with him quite well, which, as it turned out, was quite fortuitous because I ultimately joined the 3rd RTR only to find he was my troop sergeant. But in these early days, still with the romanticism of Rourke’s Drift in my mind, I had requested to join the 11th Hussars, a cavalry regiment known as ‘the Cherry Pickers’ (during the Napoleonic wars they were attacked whilst bivouacked in a cherry orchard. One minute they were languidly munching cherries, the next they won a significant battle against all odds). Also, all ranks wore elegantly tailored maroon trousers, a dashing cut above the norm.

So, feeling fit, accomplished and proud of my Cherry Pickers trousers, I packed my kit and marched to the far side of the camp to my new ‘home’. I had thoroughly enjoyed the previous eight weeks and I was bursting with confidence and optimism. The PO troop was going to be great fun! Or so I thought. I had not yet met Lieutenant William Bale or Corporal Maclver Jones or Corporal of Horse Higgins, a six-foot-three, moustachioed psychopath from the Royal Horse Guards.

After weeks of sharing a dormitory with my motley mates, it was brilliant to have a room to myself. It was certainly a privilege, but a privilege that you had to work very hard to maintain. As instructed, I knocked on Corporal Maclver Jones’s office door and was summoned in for a quick lecture on the dos and don’ts of the PO troop. Looking back on it, although he was not, of course, so old, Maclver Jones was uncannily like Sergeant Wilson from ‘Dad’s Army’. He seemed to be too refined and well spoken for an NCO. He took me along to the common room to introduce me to the other members of the troop. The contrast from the previous eight weeks was staggering. There was Clive Smalldene de Rougement, Durant Hougham, Jamie Douglas-Home, Fergus Slattery, Heathcote Amory, and others I can no longer remember, all from Eton, Harrow, Stowe and Clifton; myself, from my minor public school, and two grammar school boys called Kirkham and Weir, who was rather cruelly known as ‘Weird’, and a larger-than-life character ‘Kim’ Fraser (AKA the Honourable, son of Lord Lovat). For a moment I felt a bit awkward, and very conscious of the differences in our backgrounds. But gentlemen are not snobs, and these guys were certainly gentlemen.

The PO block had not been occupied for some time and our first task was to bring it up to standard. This involved hours on your hands and knees, scraping years of urine sediment off the porcelain troughs with razor blades. Hours spent bulling the copper fittings and kit in our bedrooms. The tiled floors had to sparkle and especially the oxidised brass window fittings, which had to shine like highly polished gold. Our personal kit, which we had spent hours preparing for our squaddie passing out parade, was not good enough for Lieutenant Bale. The whole, not just the toecaps of our boots, had to be bulled until they resembled patent leather. Rooms were inspected every morning and there was always something at fault. Once a week Lieutenant Bale would come for a grand inspection and you learned very quickly that there was nowhere to hide. You thought you had everything right, and then he would demand to see your comb. Woe betide you if it had any hair between the teeth!

The day usually started with a three- or four-mile run, followed by gruelling sessions on the drill square, orchestrated by the good corporal of horse, who stood like a ramrod, the peak of his cap flat against his nose, barking high-pitched, clipped commands. Mistakes and errors would be rewarded with ‘That man there! Round the square, GO!’ and round the perimeter of the square you ran, your rifle held agonisingly above your head, until he saw fit to let you stop and rejoin the rest of your troop. There were lectures on tactics, military law, hygiene, current affairs, first aid, endless small-arms training and so on.

Everything was conducted at the double, you never walked between classes. Lieutenant Bale was the archetypal officer. Blond, blue-eyed, elegant, detached and hard as nails. He was an army pentathlon champion, a consummate horseman and had, at some stage, been attached to the SAS. As a consequence, our physical training was tough. Fully clad in combat kit, we would be divided into teams of four. We would then carry a telegraph pole between the four of us. You would have to race upstream in a little river that flowed at the edge of the camp which, of course, was booby-trapped. The only way you could win, and win you must, was to be the first team to reach a 30-foot-long concrete tube. You couldn’t stand up in this tube and the water flowed fiercely through it. There was usually a tripwire that you floundered into that detonated smoke bombs. Sometimes you might race three or four times, sometimes, soaking wet and exhausted, you would be sent straight onto the assault course, or perhaps, instead of a coffee break at the end of your ‘physical’ period, Mr Bale would demand that you paraded, within five minutes, in your number one kit. Of course, you were never anticipating that, therefore your kit was never up to scratch, so you paraded in full battle dress instead, not the ones you were wearing, however. If someone failed to meet standards in the second dress parade, you would have a third. Sometimes, after work we were cleaning our kit after a hard, wet day and he would announce that there would be a troop run. A cool seven miles before supper. And as Sergeant Linneker said, ‘If this is life, roll on death and let’s have a crack at the angels.’

But there were glorious moments too. Map-reading or escape-and-evasion programmes on the beautiful Yorkshire moors. We would often spend three or four days in two-man teams, sleeping in bivouacs at night, trying to snare rabbits or shoot partridge, or tickling trout in fast-flowing becks to augment our compo rations. I had no thoughts of the outside world and was totally engrossed in this frantically physical life of the PO troop. At weekends we would go into Richmond and have a drink in each pub in the square. This rendered you completely legless by the end of the evening. A few of us formed a dining club, and once a month we would dress up in our finest civilian clothes and eat pompously at some country club or nearby hotel. We must have appeared a self-satisfied bunch, eating, smoking cigars and behaving loudly, but boy, did we have fun.

The three-month course flew by and now it was time for us to be assessed to see if we were fit to attend the regular commissions board in Wiltshire. This was a three-day ‘trial’ where you were tested and scrutinised mentally and physically to see if you had that essential, magical quality of ‘leadership’. The only test I can still remember was the old chestnut of a ditch 20 feet wide filled with shark-infested water, which you had to cross with the aid of a 6-foot plank, a broom, a dustbin and a stepladder. Good lateral-thinking stuff. I completed my three days and returned to Bristol for two weeks’ leave, my first in six months, to await the verdict of the colonels and generals of Warminster. The crisp envelope from the Ministry of Defence popped onto the doormat. I could hardly bear to open it. The brief text curtly announced that I had won a place at Mons Officer Cadet School at Aldershot. I wondered how my fellow POs had fared. I hoped that they would be there too.

After a few days at Mons, I realised that my time in the PO troop at Catterick with the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment had been a brief military honeymoon. The honeymoon was over. The pressure on us now was three or four times greater. Gone were the soft-spoken West Country instructors. They were replaced by fierce, shiny-red-faced, immaculate NCOs and staff sergeants from the Brigade of Guards and top cavalry regiments. Happily, in this large intake of unknown cadets, some familiar faces had made it through – Fraser, Douglas-Home, De Rougement and one or two of the others. The vast majority, however, had come straight from school or university, with the exception of a few young NCOs who had successfully passed the RCB.

So it was back to basics and back to the drill square, where I met a man I shall never forget. He was slightly bow-legged, only 5 foot 9 inches tall, with a voice that could strike you rigid at 400 yards, and he clenched a highly polished pace stick. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, in his magnificent cockney accent, ‘my name is Corporal of Horse Clark. You will address me as Staff. I will address you as sir, simply because that is the tradition of the British Army, not because I have any respect for any one of you. Gentlemen, nobody calls me Nobby to my face or behind my back. I am known as the “Black Mamba” because I strike so fast. There is no room on this course for slackness, laziness or scruffiness.’ With that he sprang from his position and poked his pace stick into the chest of a tall, blond cadet, with his nose pushed into his face, and said, ‘You, sir, are already a scruffy disgrace! Report to the company barber immediately after this parade.’ He almost goose-stepped backwards and continued. There is no room on this course for mummies’ boys, because you are in the Army now and I am your mother.’ He paused and drew himself up to his full height and screamed out, ‘Is that perfectly clear, gentlemen?’ We all gazed steadfastly ahead as if hypnotised by the real Black Mamba. ‘I don’t hear you, gentlemen!’ he said. ‘Is that perfectly clear?’ Yes, Staff!’ we shouted in unison.

Drill parades, kit inspections, lectures and weapons training filled our days. Our nights were filled with study and kit cleaning. The pace was relentless. We were dragged out of bed with no notice at midnight and sent crawling across the muddy training grounds of Aldershot. You never knew how long anything would last. After one long night in the pouring rain we were eventually sent, wet and weary, back to the barracks in three-ton trucks. Exhausted, we crashed into bed. An hour later our instructor burst into the ‘Spider’, immaculate in his drill instructor’s uniform, and announced a rifle inspection. Needless to say, no one had cleaned his weapon before going to bed. We had all assumed we would have time to do that before Reveille in the morning. The whole room was given an extra drill parade as a consequence, and I, considering myself one step ahead of the pack, thought long and hard how to prevent this catch-22 situation from happening again. The thing was, every time they made you fall flat in the sand and the mud, the breech of your SLR got filled with the same. So I acquired a pair of ladies’ tights and cut out a tube which would cover the breech and with the appropriate slits to clip the magazine in. Prior to a scheduled, impending night exercise (which would surely be followed by an unscheduled, out-of-hours weapons inspection), we were issued with two magazines, one containing rounds of blanks and one empty. Unfortunately for me, the platoon sergeant was a wretched little man from an ordinary infantry regiment who carried a huge chip on his shoulder because, unlike the rest of the instructors, i.e. the Black Mamba and others, he was not a Guardsman. He also resented the privileges that we officer cadets would eventually enjoy.

In order to test the efficacy of my anti-sand-and-mud device, aiming my rifle at my bed, I clipped what I thought was the empty magazine onto my weapon, cocked it and pulled the trigger. The consequent explosion of a .76 shell in the confined space of our Spider was shattering. I had also blown a hole an inch wide straight through the blanks on my bed and my mattress! Sergeant Gibbon came roaring in. ‘You, that man there, Floyd, you are on a charge, you moron! Company commander’s orders, tomorrow morning at 0830 hours!’ Until that moment, I know I had irritated the good sergeant of infantry because I had been succeeding at everything that was asked of me and he was delighted that I had fallen so heavily and so disastrously from grace. He turned on his heels and strutted, like a crowing cockerel, from the room.

The following morning, in best kit, I was marched at the double for the awful confrontation with our company commander, a blotchy-faced Major Edwards of the elite 22nd Cheshire Regiment. I was made to mark time on the spot in front of his desk while he languidly regarded me with cold, narrow eyes filled with contempt, disgust and loathing. The charge I was guilty of was read out before him, and he said, ‘And you hope to become an officer and lead men, yet you appear to have the brains of a child and the intelligence of a baboon!’ Corporal of Horse Clark flanked me on one side and our platoon sergeant on the other. Although I could not look left or right because I was at rigid attention, I know he smirked when I was awarded twenty-eight days’ restriction of privileges.

Restriction of privileges meant, amongst other things, punishment drill parades before and after the normal working day, regular reporting to the guard room in whatever uniform they elected you should wear, and, of course, you were confined to camp twenty-four hours a day for twenty-eight days, plus you had, as the Army euphemistically put it, ‘lost your name’. This was a severe blow: not only might it jeopardise my chances of being commissioned, it also scotched my weekly dining club meetings and the odd late night and illicit trip to London to attend the Embassy parties and nightclubs that Fraser, De Rougement and Douglas-Home had open access to.

As a penniless kid in Somerset, I used to make Christmas gifts because I could not afford to buy them. With rubber moulds I would make sets of three flying ducks from plaster of Paris, paint and varnish them, or, using the inner tray of a box of household matches, I would, with watercolours, lichen from the apple tree and balsa wood, create miniature glass cases of stuffed fish with cellophane for the glass held to the tray by black passe-partout. These I would glue onto a card upon which I had written with a copperplate nib the Angler’s Prayer, which was – indeed is:

O Lord, give me grace to catch a fish so large that even I, when talking of it afterwards, may never need to lie.

I now decided to do a similar thing with a matchbox tray and, using little corners of serge blankets and sheets from my bed, I mounted a miniature bed inside a miniature glass case and stuck it on a piece of card cut into the form of a shield such as you see bearing studded heads over the fireplaces of regal halls, and inscribed briefly on the card shield: ‘A rare bed, shot by Officer Cadet Floyd, Kohima Company, Mons O.C.S., Friday 13th June 196—’ and hung it over the head of my bed.

At the following morning’s inspection, the Black Mamba, crablike, marched in front of us, tweaking berets, straightening ties and belts. Every day at our platoon morning parade, there would always be one cadet who failed to meet the approval of Staff. It was usually a tall, lanky aristocrat called De Villiers. Day after day he was bawled out for dirty brasses, a crooked tie or an incorrectly placed cap or beret. On this particular morning I think the good corporal of horse was suffering from a mighty hangover and was not in a good mood. He snapped to attention in front of De Villiers and looked at him from toe to head, stared into his eyes and thrust his pace stick into De Villiers, who, unbelievably after all this time, had his belt on upside down.

‘Mr De Villiers,’ he snapped, ‘there is a cunt at the end of this stick,’ and before he could amplify his feelings of utter contempt for De Villiers, the cadet replied, ‘Not at this end, Staff!’ Unfortunately, apart from Corporal of Horse Clark, I was the only person who heard him say it. I dropped my rifle and collapsed into hysterical, uncontrollable laughter. I was rewarded with ten laps round the square with the rifle held high over the head, and while the corporal continued to drill the remainder of the platoon, like the Duke of York marching them up the top of the hill and down again, my forage cap fell off my head. Without his instructions I could not stop running, so I had to leave it where it was, right in the path of the advancing platoon, who trampled it flat! After my ten laps I rejoined the platoon, hatless, and took my place at attention, waiting for the command ‘Platoon dismissed!’ Nobby Clark stood before us, took a deep breath and screamed, ‘With the exception of Mr Floyyyddd…who is improperly dressed on parade, Platooooon! Platooooon! Dismiss!’

The rest of the platoon ran off to the morning’s first lecture while I stood to attention, anticipating yet another charge. Clark marched up to me and said, ‘I saw your trophy above your bed, you’ll be all right, sir.’ Then he raised his voice and shouted, ‘Now, dismiss and rejoin the platoon at the double!’

One cold and wet morning after breakfast, we were back at the Spider collecting notebooks and textbooks for the scheduled morning’s lecture when Sergeant Gibbon strutted in unexpectedly, dressed in fatigues and rubber-soled boots. ‘Change of plan, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘In fifteen minutes you will be embussing for a map-reading exercise on the Aldershot plains. So all you will need are your denims and pouches, a picnic lunch will be provided and we shall return at fifteen hundred hours.’ I didn’t like the man. I didn’t trust the man and something told me he had given us too much unnecessary information. Something made me smell a rat. When he had left the room I pulled the trunk I had kept from under my bed, which contained my secret food supply – Mars bars, apples, biscuits, other objects including a sheath knife, torch, Zippo lighter, blocks of paraffin fire-lighters, hip flask containing brandy and a small but immensely powerful collapsible Primus stove. All of this, along with shaving kit, handkerchiefs, toothbrush and paste, I packed into the pouches and pockets of my kit, along with sixty Piccadilly filter cigarettes! No one saw what I was doing and if we did end up on a routine run or a map-reading exercise for an hour or two, what the hell! The excess weight wouldn’t worry me. I was fit!

I knew I was right the second we got into the three-tonners. Instead of turning left to the training areas, it turned right and headed for Aldershot station, where we were rapidly marched onto a waiting train. Everyone was confused and desperate to know what was going on. The train pulled out of the station and neither the officers nor the NCOs who were with us would tell us anything. After a couple of hours we were issued with ration packs. A pork pie, a Scotch egg, an apple, a chocolate bar and a packet of crisps. Only then did Sergeant Gibbon gleefully announce that we were headed for Dartmoor. Most of the lads only had briefs and T-shirts under their denims; no one had any cigarettes or anything. (I have to say that this is a totally true story that I am about to recount, but it did take place over thirty years ago, and to be honest, I am not entirely sure if the ultimate destination was Dartmoor or the Brecon Beacons.) One thing I do know was that when we arrived in what I think was Tavistock in the late afternoon, we route-marched for several miles to a desolate army camp on the moors, where we were divided into teams of three or four, given maps, a radio, a machine gun, a roll of barbed wire, compass and Chinagraph pencils and told to rendezvous at a grid reference as soon as we could make it. By now it was dark. I can remember two members of my team. One was a hugely overweight, terribly jolly fellow called Brooking-Thomas and the other a tall, crinkly-haired blond fellow called Simon Hicks, who was hoping to get into the 21st Lancers.

I don’t know how long the hike was. It might have been twenty-four miles, it might have been eight. But after a briefing and a big mug of vegetable soup laced with rum, we were dispatched on our ‘mission’. The radio didn’t work, the machine gun had no ammunition and the barbed wire served no purpose except to encumber us with unwieldy burdens. I know it was winter or late autumn. What started as a clear, starlit night ended in an icy downpour. Brooking-Thomas, who was fleet of foot on the dance floors of certain London nightclubs (Les Ambassadeurs springs to mind) and who kept bottles of whisky and port with his name on them at Danny La Rue’s club, was having great difficulty with his feet and soon developed blisters. But, although he was in terrific pain, he was resolutely cheerful throughout this appalling escapade. Hicks and I took it in turns to carry his radio, because we reckoned that the faster we could press on the sooner we would be in some kind of bed. We arrived at our destination around seven o’clock in the morning to be greeted by an immaculate, well-rested and sadistically cheerful Major Edwards of the 22nd Cheshire Regiment and our own platoon officer, Captain Kitchen. To our delight, we were the first group home. No one said ‘Well done’ and, bidding us ‘Wait here until the arrival of the others’ when the ration truck would bring us breakfast, the officers jumped into a staff car and sped off.

Over the next two or three hours the other teams straggled in, tired, cold, hungry and seriously pissed off. The euphoria that my team experienced at arriving first was heightened by the fact that we were enjoying brandy, Mars bars and Piccadilly No. 1 cigarettes. Everyone was, to use army parlance, ‘ticking like meters’. But they all cheered up when someone spotted a three-tonner grinding across the heather. Captain Kitchen had returned. The three-tonner stopped and left us with an issue of rashers, sausages, and, I think, eggs and bread, and departed to its next drop-off zone. When we had unpacked the rations we realised that we had been left no means of cooking them! It’s like the old Ancient Mariner – ‘Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink!’ Even Captain Kitchen was clearly crestfallen.

I don’t how to explain my feelings at that moment, but I would like you to know, I in no way gloated or crowed or enjoyed, in any shape or form, the position I knew I was in. The bloody little Primus stove and its little frying pan had rubbed my thighs sore on the marathon across the moors, but I did manage, in a six- or eight-inch frying pan, to cook breakfast for sixteen desperately hungry men. Later that day, we were issued with picks and spades and told to ‘dig in’. We were to spend the next two or three days playing war games, and although I was still under restriction of privileges, I was made company commander for the day and ordered to attack and take an ‘enemy’ position. We had not been prepared for this exercise, nor for the presence of the camp commandant and his staff. In the hurly-burly of the mock battle, I can remember Kim Fraser leading the attack and playing his bagpipes as we advanced up the hill, and I can also remember pushing a very senior member of the observing staff out of the way of a misfired mortar which was otherwise certain to have landed on him.

As usual there was no indication of how well you had done, but some days later when we had returned to Aldershot, Fraser and I were invited to have dinner with the General! Once this became known, rumours were running rife that he and I were certainly in the running for the Sword of Honour, or at least Junior Under Officer for the last few weeks before our passing out parade! Heady stuff! But I knew in my heart of hearts that Kim and I had been both too good and too bad to be awarded that honour. As it was, the great event of the dinner took place. During the grand and pompous evening of generals, colonels, brigadiers, resplendent in their mess kit, with their elegant wives, both Fraser and I were too shy to start a conversation and too insignificant to be included in one. But we were at the same table and after the dinner and the toast to the Queen, after the port and cigars we adjourned to the anteroom where white-coated mess staff were rolling out a narrow green baize strip some 25 feet long on the floor. The strip was divided and numbered into segments from one to twenty-five, and like an indoor race track, it had plywood cutout fences and jumps. Six brightly painted plywood cutout horses were placed at one end of the carpet. The officers and their wives threw dice and if, for example, you threw a six, your horse could be advanced six places towards the winning post. Fraser and I, in our best mess kit, knelt on either side of the course and moved the wooden horses along the track. That was our reward!

I am someone who has never kept a diary, made notes, collected press cuttings or retained photographs, so it is likely that I will get many of the events in this chronicle out of sync. But fresh in my mind on this blustery, Irish, December day in 1996 is the recent visit which my wife Tess and I made to Bosnia, as guests of the British Army and the 26th Regiment, Royal Artillery, where, in a bombed-out abattoir, we were invited to throw the dice for the selfsame horse-racing game and to back a horse called ‘Floyd’s Fancy’, which romped home after several successful throws of the dice, at 30 to 1, and won us enough money to buy drinks for the entire team. At that moment of the evening, after a week in Bosnia with IFOR, having seen the good and dangerous work that they were doing in the most appalling conditions, I experienced a frisson of déjà vu, and I realised that in both instances I was, and had been, quite privileged.

After the excitement of that evening, which, even though Fraser and I had been mere jockeys, was and still is a special time of my life, we came back to reality with a bump. The course was coming rapidly to a close and shortly we would take the final tests and examinations for our commissions. The pace was hotting up. We were at the stage of being interviewed for our suitability for our chosen regiments. I was still ‘badged’ for the 11th Hussars and I was summoned to an interview with Colonel Turnbull and asked to explain my reasons for choosing the Cherry Pickers.

I told him that I had studied military history from the Hundred Years War right through to the Great War of 1914. I had read Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, every word of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; I had read All Quiet on the Western Front, I had read Lions Led by Donkeys, Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade and seen Zulu and much, much more. But, through my association with Fraser, De Rougement and many other fellow cadets, whose names I can sadly no longer remember, I realised that I did not have what was required for the 11th Hussars, to wit the ability to ride, to play polo or, indeed, cover my mess bills. The Cherry Pickers were an elite regiment. Amongst others, Prince Michael of Kent was a serving officer at that time. It was implied to me that the regiment had a fund available to assist desirable young officers of limited means but, despite the blind romanticism that drove me on at this time of my life, I realised that I would be more comfortable in an ultra-professional, modern-day regiment; one which was steeped in history and glory, albeit only since 1916; a regiment which eschewed the values of the historic cavalry but was not encumbered by its tradition. I elected to join the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and serve with the likes of Lieutenant Bale and Corporal Maclver Jones.

Shortly before our commissioning parade, for some reason a few of us, including Douglas-Home, grandson of the former Prime Minister, found ourselves near Bristol and I took them all home to 50 Coombe Dale, where my mother cooked them homebaked bread, faggots and peas.

Years later, when I was running a bistro in Bristol, I had the uncanny feeling that Douglas-Home had left the Army and attended Bristol University and, as a student there, was a customer at the bistro. Or if that wasn’t the case, he had gone into horse-training and had just turned up one day.

Also at this time, on one of the final parade rehearsals, Major Edwards made a rare visit to the drill square. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘remove your hats. Last night, the greatest leader died. Winston Churchill is dead. It is possible that some of you will be selected to attend the state funeral.’ I know for certain that if I hadn’t shot my goddamned bed, not only would I have at least been a Junior Under Officer, I would have lined that funeral route. But curiously, there does exist a 35mm film that shows both Winston Churchill’s funeral and my commissioning parade. It was taken by David and Hillary Taft, who attended both ceremonies along with my mother and father, who once again caused me a wince of embarrassment when he, in his modest and courteous way, addressed my platoon officer, Captain Kitchen, as ‘sir’. That night, as blood brothers, my course comrades and I, at a celebratory dinner in the Hen and Chicken Inn (where we ate what we thought was a splendid dinner of corn on the cub, potted shrimp and roast duck with orange sauce, Stilton and port) ripped in half and signed pound notes which we swore, one day, we would match and commemorate this occasion. It never happened.

We were all granted commissioning leave prior to joining our regiments. I took the Dover to Calais ferry and hitchhiked down to the Loire valley. One evening as dusk was falling, a battered, grey deux cent trois Peugeot pickup truck stopped to give me a lift. A man of about forty, gnarled, tanned, with black wiry hair, wearing blue denim overalls, was in the car. He was drunk and had a raffia-covered bidon of coarse, red wine on the floor of the cab which he offered me, and I slurped it gratefully. After several stops at ill-lit, scruffy cafés, I was also drunk. I had no bed for the night and didn’t know where I was. His driving became more terrifying, but eventually we bounced into the drive of a small cottage surrounded by an unkempt garden full of manky dogs, squawking chickens, derelict farm vehicles and dirty, snotty-nosed children. He indicated to me that I could stay here for the night and ordered his fat, black-clad wife to throw the already sleeping young children off their urine-stained bed onto a tattered couch, to heat up some food in a chipped pale blue enamelled pot and remake the bed for me to sleep on after I had eaten a bowl of saucisson and lentils. When I awoke the following morning, he had gone. His dishevelled wife gave me some bread and apricot jam and a mug of bitter, grainy coffee. I washed under a pump outside the house, murmured my embarrassed goodbyes and set off down the road towards Blois, where, in an early-morning café, I breakfasted again on grilled river perch and a glass of red wine. I was twenty-one or twenty-two, I think, I held the Queen’s Commission and in four days I had to report to my regiment at Fallingbostel, the current headquarters of the 3RTR in between Hamburg and Hanover. I was brimming with confidence, feeling fit and full of pride, but, as they say, pride comes before a fall…

Aware that freshly commissioned second lieutenants are bumptious and full of themselves when they arrive at their regiment, a series of elaborate practical jokes is played on the unwitting victim; also nobody speaks to you unless it is absolutely essential for at least two or three weeks. I arrived just in time for dinner after a five-hour journey by Land Rover from the airport. It was some weeks before I realised the airport was only in fact about forty minutes away and that that had been the first of many practical jokes. I ate my dinner in silence because that evening the other six or seven subalterns at the long, highly polished table spent the entire meal reading books or doing the Telegraph crossword. This was practical joke number two. The next couple of days consisted of interviews with the Adjutant, the RSM and the Colonel and guided tours of the camp. Apart from that I was left much to my own devices, collecting odd bits of kit and moving into my rather splendid room in the Kommandantur. I was then introduced to my troop and my three tanks. To my absolute delight my troop sergeant turned out to be no less than Sergeant Linneker, which was doubly good because, as yet, I hadn’t even sat in a tank, never mind knowing anything about them. As things stood I was an infantry officer and had not attended the complex technical course at Bovington in Dorset which was scheduled to take place in two or three months’ time. In the meantime I attended morning parade, inspected ‘my’ men and wandered off back to the mess for coffee break. I would return to the tank park and chew the fat with Sergeant Linneker until lunchtime. After lunch we might play five a side football, go for a run, or, on Sergeant Linneker’s suggestion and using his notes, give the lads a lecture on the art of tank warfare, something which I knew absolutely nothing about. And, except for dinner, I spent most evenings in my room listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles and reading The Great Gatsby while I sipped chilled white German wine.

Occasionally the Colonel would decide to dine in, to entertain some high-ranking visitor. On these occasions we were required to wear mess kit as it was a very formal occasion. I took my place at the table and after Grace the mess stewards served dinner. It was, I recall, mulligatawny soup followed by poached grey fillet of fish in a lumpy parsley sauce followed by roast stuffed chicken, vegetables and roast potatoes. Not quite as disgusting as it might sound except that my own meal was served to me partly frozen! Practical joke number three. I had no choice but to eat it. The whole table was in on the blague and I reckoned any protest from me would result in some heinous retribution. After dinner the Colonel withdrew to the corner of the mess to play cards with his guests whilst the subalterns got drunk and played mess games. Well, actually I didn’t play any mess games, I was the mess game.

First of all they played ‘canoes’. This involved me sitting in a cut-down tea chest with two poles running through it, rather like a sedan chair, whilst the other officers ran the canoe and me around the mess in some kind of grotesque relay race. The object being to tip me out as many times as possible, and of course each time I fell out, I had to pay a penalty, which was to drink some disgusting cocktail devised by my boisterous ‘chums’. When they tired of this, it was decided to play ‘aeroplanes’. This involved piling up the leather cushions from the sofas some feet away from the highly polished mess table, which had now become the deck of an aircraft carrier. The object of this jolly jape was for me to be held spread-eagled by half a dozen of the pranksters and swung backwards and forwards until I had gathered sufficient momentum to be launched from the table and hopefully land on the cushions. The senior officers, engrossed in conversation, chess and cards, paid not the slightest attention.

Eventually the evening calmed down. Someone played the piano and sang, others played in a billiards tournament or a card school, none of which I was invited to join. By about midnight I was bored and not a little embarrassed at being so completely ignored so I decided to slide out of the mess and go to bed. Within seconds I was asleep. Suddenly I was woken by a heavy hammering on my bedroom door and the shouts of five or six subalterns demanding that I open the door, which I did. I was swiftly grabbed and dragged onto the mess lawn, where I was eventually overpowered and croquet-hooped to the lawn. The Adjutant, a captain, explained to me that officers never left the mess before the Colonel. After about half an hour I managed to struggle free and thoroughly angry, pissed off and furious at what I thought was their pathetic behaviour, I returned to bed. After the morning parade I was summoned to see the Adjutant, who with no reference to his own presence at the previous night’s fight on the lawn said, ‘I have been informed that you were on the mess lawn drunk and improperly dressed last night. This is unacceptable behaviour and you will do seven extra orderly officers.’ I saluted and left his office burning with a sense of outrageous injustice. Everybody took it in turns to be orderly officer: rather like a hotel duty manager, you inspected the camp guard throughout the night, visited any prisoners in the camp clink, did the fire rounds and toured the troopers’ mess at each mealtime. Seven on the trot is bloody miserable. The one consolation from the first few weeks of misery was that my fighting exploits had thoroughly impressed my troopers who, I discovered, had nicknamed me ‘Bomber’.

After my extra stint of orderly officer there was a marked change of attitude and the other officers started to include me ‘in’ and life became rather good fun. Sometimes we would go clubbing in Hamburg; other times we would go on gastronomic safaris in Hanover. A starter in one restaurant, a main course in another, dessert in a third and so on. The summer passed away happily enough on the shooting ranges or on tank manoeuvres, although there were few of these owing to defence cuts which resulted in a shortage of fuel and ammunition. I was given all sorts of responsibilities like being appointed the religious officer, basketball officer – duties which held no interest for me whatsoever. In reality I was bored and I found some aspects of the training quite absurd. Once on exercise on the vast expanse of the Liineburg Heath, we came under imaginary nuclear attack, which meant that you had to batten down all hatches and proceed as normal. The tiny glass observation prisms in the turret quickly became obscured with dust and there was no visibility. Much to the amusement of my troop but to the fury of our squadron leader, I managed to ram his tank broadside on, putting us both out of the exercise.

After a full season of training under the helpful guidance of Sergeant Linneker, I was finally sent to Bovington to attend my tank commanders’ course, which was quite absurd because I now knew all there was to know and consequently found the classroom instruction rather juvenile. I skipped as many of the lectures as I could and spent as much available time as possible in the casino and night club in Bournemouth. I returned to my regiment with an unflattering report. Phrases like ‘arrogant know-all’ and ‘too smart for his own good’ peppered the pages. Also they didn’t like me wearing bow ties with my civilian clothes and indeed my Colonel forbade me to wear them in the mess. Because of my interest in food and wine and also because I was the newest subaltern I was given the job of ‘messing member’. This meant I had to arrange the menus and functions for the officers’ mess with the assistance of the stewards and catering staff. For most officers it was the most unpopular chore; to me it was a godsend. My enthusiasm for hurtling around the Lüneburg Heath in noisy, uncomfortable and cramped Centurion tanks was waning fast and I threw myself into my new role with ostentatious vigour. With the aid of our mess cook Corporal Feast and Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking