Loe raamatut: «First Man In: Leading from the Front»

LESSON 1

DON’T LET ANYONE DEFINE WHO YOU ARE

It felt as if we’d been driving for days. I gazed out of the car window, watching motorways turn to A-roads turn to winding, hedge-crowded country lanes, with every mile we travelled bringing me closer and closer to the new life I’d chosen for myself and further away from the familiarity of the family home and everything I loved, hated and feared. The clouds hung above us like oily rags and the November wind battered on the roof of our Ford Sierra as it sputtered through the Surrey countryside. Neither me, my mum nor my stepfather spoke much. We let the English weather do the talking for us. As the wheels of the car pounded the tarmac, anxious thoughts span around my head. Had I made the right decision? Would I find myself and thrive in my new home? Or was I just swapping one unpredictable hellhole for another? Who was I going to be when this new journey ended? If I’d known the answer to that, I’d have opened the car door and jumped straight out.

The truth was, back in 1997 I didn’t have much of an idea who I was as a person. Who does when they’re seventeen? At that age we like to think we’re fully defined human beings, but the fact is we’re barely out of life’s starting blocks. We’ve spent our childhood being defined by teachers, parents, brothers, sisters, tinpot celebrities on the TV and, in the middle of all that, is a squishy lump of dough who’s constantly being shaped and reshaped. That’s why, especially when we’re young, it’s crucial that we’re surrounded by people whose influence is going to be positive and who are interested in building up our strengths, rather than drowning us in our weaknesses. I know that now. I wish I’d known it then.

Eventually, on the side of a narrow road, a red sign came into view. I couldn’t read what it said through the steam and raindrops on my window, so I rubbed the condensation away with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. MILITARY ROAD: ALL VEHICLES ARE LIABLE TO BE STOPPED. I sat up and took a deep breath. The car slowed down. There was another sign, a white notice that just said PIRBRIGHT CAMP. Beyond that was a guard room outside tall, black gates. And then, the sign I had been looking for: NEW RECRUITS REPORT HERE. ‘Here we go, Mum,’ I said, trying to disguise the nervousness in my voice. ‘This is it.’

She pulled up in a lay-by. I got out, lifted my heavy black bag from the boot and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. If she was sad to see me go, she did a good job of hiding it. My stepfather wound his window down, gave me the thumbs-up and said, ‘Good luck. See you later,’ then looked away. Before I had the chance to think, Mum was back in the car, closing her door and turning her key in the ignition. The engine fired up and I watched them vanish into the grey-green scenery. I took a moment to steady myself. This was it. From now on, everything was going to be different.

I took a deep breath, picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder and turned towards the domineering complex of red-brick buildings. It looked like a prison or maybe a large hospital. There were rolls of barbed wire on the tops of the walls and security cameras on tall poles facing this way and that. I couldn’t see anyone else or hear any voices. I felt completely alone. It was almost creepy.

I approached the guard room nervously, almost expecting there to be nobody behind the glass window. When I was two steps away it was pulled open with a crack and a skinny guy in his mid-twenties, wearing military greens and those round John Lennon-style glasses, peered out. I flashed him my best friendly, charming and disarming smile. ‘I’m reporting for Basic Training, sir,’ I told him.

The soldier gave me a look like a bird had crapped on his spectacles.

‘Sir? Don’t call me Sir. I work for a living. It’s “Corporal” to you. Name?’

‘Middleton, Corporal,’ I said. ‘Royal Engineers.’

He picked up a clipboard that had been lying on his desk and scanned it lazily. ‘Middleton … Middleton … Middleton …’

I shifted my bag onto my other shoulder and tried to squeeze some blood back into my hand. He turned the sheet over and carried on running his fingertip down it. Then, very slowly, he reached over, picked up a second clipboard and began examining that one instead. The winter wind whipped around my neck. Finally, his finger stopped.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Anthony. Is that it? Anthony Middleton?’

‘Yes, Corporal.’

He smiled at me warmly. ‘Found you!’

I felt a huge rush of relief. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.

‘You’re not due until next week,’ he said. And with that, his window slammed shut with another loud crack.

I was so stunned that all I could do was stand there, gazing at my reflection. Looking back at me in the glass I saw an immaculately presented, naive, skinny teenager with blue eyes and thick black eyebrows that met in the middle. A nice young lad with not a clue what to do. I walked back into the road with my head down but could only go so far before I had to put my bag down again.

What was I going to do? How the hell had I got the date wrong? I couldn’t believe it. My mum and stepdad would be a couple of miles away by now. I scanned the muddy landscape in the vague hope I might spot a telephone box so I could call someone. There were trees bare of leaves, some far-off horses in a field and a flock of anonymous birds careening in the distance. There was no telephone box. And who would I call anyway? Where could I sleep? I had no sleeping bag, nor enough money for a B&B. Maybe I could find a dry spot out of the way by the barracks wall. How was I going to last a week in the wet with no food? How could I begin my British Army basic training course starving, soaking and probably ill?

I had a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to get as far away from the army buildings as quickly as possible. Instead, I put my head down, gritted my jaw and paced up the road, back towards those imposing black gates. I’d have to find somewhere to camp out in the dry and my best bet, I thought, was to use some of that man-made infrastructure. Once I was settled somewhere I’d come up with a plan. I tried to think positively. There must be a town not far away. I could find a call box there and get hold of Mum. I wasn’t sure whether she’d come and get me, to be honest, but towns mean homeless people, and homeless people have shelters and maybe I could …

‘Oi!’ came a shout. ‘Where you going, mate?’

I stopped and turned. On my way I’d passed a smaller brick guard hut. It hadn’t looked occupied but a man in army fatigues was now hanging out of the door, barking at me.

‘You can’t go up there, mate.’

I stopped and turned back.

‘This is a military area,’ he said. ‘What you doing here? Who are you?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve got my dates wrong,’ I told him with an embarrassed shrug. ‘I have to come back next week, so …’ I smiled, as if the whole thing was no bother at all.

‘New recruit?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He shook his head and pointed with his chin back towards the large guard house. ‘Get over there and knock on his window,’ he said. ‘He’s fucking with you.’

Half an hour later I found myself standing in a large, spotless room in a line-up of new recruits. We’d come from across the length and breadth of the British Isles in all shapes and sizes, young, spotty, greasy and hairy, none of us comfortable in our own skin and yet all of us desperately acting like we were. A corporal was walking up and down the lines of bodies, silently examining us with an unimpressed eye. The sound of his clicking heels echoed around the shining walls and polished floors. He seemed to tower over us, his spine erect, his broad shoulders filling out his shirt so that the khaki material stretched tightly against his skin. I tried to stop my eyes following him around the room but it was impossible. As he approached closer and closer to me, I forced them forwards and raised my chin just a little bit higher and puffed out my skinny chest as far as I could. The corporal stopped. He stopped right in front of me. My eyes widened. My heart froze.

‘Name?’ he said.

‘Middleton, Corporal.’

He turned and bent down so that his face was barely an inch from mine.

‘Middleton,’ he growled. ‘In the British Army we prefer our men to have two eyebrows.’

‘Yes, Corporal.’

He walked on. My eyes didn’t follow. My cheeks burned. I was intimidated, I was disorientated and was wondering what the hell I’d got myself into.

After some brief words from the corporal, we were sent to our accommodation block to settle in. We were shown into a big room with a gleaming parquet wooden floor. There were rows and rows of identical beds with itchy blankets, and wooden lockers with their doors hanging open. Everything in there was immaculate. Spotless. For the first time I felt almost at home: this was exactly how my stepfather had always forced us to keep house. I found myself a bed – a bottom bunk in a far corner of the block – and took the opportunity to have a scan of all the others. There must have been about thirty lads in there, some teenagers like me, others in their early twenties. I guessed it probably wasn’t a coincidence that I’d been highlighted, like that, by the corporal. I looked different from the others. I wasn’t like them. You could just tell.

The truth is, most of the young men who’d turned up for Basic Training that day were tough working-class lads who’d grown up immersed in the British culture of drinking, bantering and bashing the shit out of each other.

My childhood hadn’t been anything like that. After my dad had died completely unexpectedly on 31 December 1985, my mother and stepfather had suddenly come into a lot of money. There was some confusion over my dad’s true cause of death, but it was eventually ruled that he’d had a heart attack. This official verdict meant his life insurance could pay out. My mum and her new boyfriend Dean, who’d been around from almost the precise moment my dad passed away, were suddenly awash with money. The family moved from a three-bed house in Portsmouth to an eight-bed mansion outside Southampton.

Suddenly, everything was different. Me and my brothers were decked out in designer clothes, driven about in expensive cars and educated in the better private schools. My mum really started spoiling us. One Christmas it took us about three days to open all our presents. Then, when I was nine, the whole family upped and moved to northern France. We had a large, rambling plot of land with a big house that was once a farm on the outskirts of a town called Saint-Lô, twenty miles from Bayeux. I attended a well-respected Catholic school and was always neatly presented, and extremely polite and respectful. Almost overly so. People would love it when I came to their house because they knew the dishes would get done. I was a product of that much more gentle and civilised French culture.

I’d experienced my first hint of difference between the two nations on a visit back to the UK to see my maternal grandparents. There’d been a guy about the same age as me walking down the street, strutting along, and he just started staring at me. In French culture, you tip your hat, you’re polite and respectful. When you pass someone in the street you say ‘Bonjour’ and ‘Ça va?’ So I said, ‘All right?’ He just glared at me like he wanted to kill me. I didn’t realise he was doing that stupid young-lad thing of who can stare the other one out. I found it so strange. I just thought, ‘What a weirdo.’

I couldn’t have been more different from these people. I’d grown up in a place where fourteen-year-olds visit bars to drink coffee, not to down jugs of vodka Red Bull until they beat each other senseless, then puke.

I opened my bag, commandeered a locker and squared away all my kit, folding it neatly and piling it up. And then, as quickly as I could, I took my wash-bag and a disposable Bic razor to the toilet block. I popped the orange cap off the blade and held it under cold water, then, with a firm hand, I placed it on the base of my forehead and pulled it down over the black fuzz that connected my eyebrows. As I bent down to rinse the blade under the tap, I heard the voice of the corporal echoing out of the nearby dormitory. ‘Right, get your fucking PT kit on, you lot,’ he barked. ‘I want you lined up out on the parade ground in sixty seconds.’

I glanced up at the mirror to examine my handiwork. I couldn’t believe it. I’d shaved off a wide rectangle of hair, the precise length of the razor, from above my eyes. The good news – I had two eyebrows. The bad news – I looked like I’d been run over by a tiny lawnmower. ‘Fuck,’ I muttered. I ran back into the dorm, dodging the squints and smirks, and got changed as quickly as possible into the physical training kit that had been left out for us, folded perfectly at the end of each narrow bed.

Out in the parade square we lined up in three rows in our green T-shirts and blue shorts. All I could do was pray the corporal didn’t spot what I’d done to my face and decide to humiliate me all over again. He took his place in front of us on the tarmac and stood legs apart, his hands behind his back.

‘I’ve got bad news for you lot,’ he said, scanning the lines of faces, each of which was trying hard not to show the cold, jaws clamped, nostrils flaring. ‘There’s been a minor cock-up. We’ve got too many of you here. We don’t have enough places. Not enough beds. “What does that mean?” I hear you ask. What it means is that some of you are going to have to stand back for two weeks and join the next intake.’

Was he being serious? Was this another wind-up? It was impossible to know.

‘So how are we going to choose between you?’ he continued. ‘How are we going to make this fair? We’re going to kick off this morning with a Basic Fitness test. We’ll begin with a mile-and-a-half run. You’ll have to complete that mile-and-a-half run in ten minutes or less, gentlemen. You’ll be competing. This will be a race. And the prize for the winner, and only the winner, is one guaranteed bed.’

With that we were marched off the parade ground and through the maze of gloomy brick buildings until we reached an airfield on the edge of the base. As soon as we were shown the starting line we began jostling for position. I already had a good sense of where I stood in this pecking order. I didn’t have much chance of beating some of these older, bigger, fitter lads. But I told myself I had to at least get into the front half of the pack.

Still jostling – elbows poking, shoulders barging, feet inching forwards – we watched the instructor take his stopwatch in one hand and a steel whistle in the other. The moment I heard that whistle scream, I pushed my way forwards in the pack as best as I could and launched into it with everything I had. I could feel the warmth of the bodies around me, hear the sound of pounding feet and the breathing, feel the muddy turf slip and yield beneath my boots. I pushed harder and harder, desperate to clear the mass, shoving this way and that, finding little routes through the bodies.

By the time I was halfway round the airfield I realised with a shock that there were only two men left in front of me. The sight of all the beautiful clear space in front of us spurred me on. I could feel myself surging with that angry competitive drive my stepfather had always instilled in me. I could practically see him there at the side of the field, with his big leather trench coat and his Rottweiler, shouting at me, telling me I wasn’t giving it enough, that I needed to push harder. I’d fucking show him. I picked the first man off and left him comfortably behind, as spots of cold mud flecked my legs and heat burned in my knees. Two hundred metres to go. I took the last bend, my legs pounding. The last man and I were neck and neck, sprinting with everything we had. From out of nowhere I was hit with a flash of the humiliation I’d felt earlier. I imagined my competitor laughing at me. A furious thought entered my head: these bastards think I’m nothing. They think I’m some skinny, monobrowed, nice middle-class boy. I found myself surging forward, faster and faster. By the time I got to the finish line I was a full twelve seconds in front of him. I couldn’t believe it. I’d won.

Following that race, I charged with everything I had into this brutal, confusing and sometimes thrilling new world. Every day of Basic Training that followed was painful. We’d have press-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, assault courses, cross-country running with heavy bergens on our back. With all that and the fieldcraft lessons, we’d hardly a minute to ourselves, and any minutes we did have were spent ironing our kit or making sure our lockers were immaculate. During our first proper inspection, I was waiting by mine and the corporal stopped in front of the lad next to me, a nineteen-year-old called Ivan.