The Regiment

by Rusty Firmin

  Around the age of ten I became dimly aware that there were problems at home. I think my dad had found it difficult to get a proper job after leaving the army and he was often away on short-term contracts doing what we’d now call logistics. Mum was spending increasingly long stretches in bed, and although I realised she wasn’t well I had no idea what the problem was. In fact she had cancer.

  Meanwhile, I was heading towards the all-important 11-plus exam which would determine whether I got to go to a grammar school or whether I’d be flushed down the crapper with all the other kids who got sent to a ‘secondary modern’. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was going to fail and had taken to bunking off school on a regular basis on the grounds that there wasn’t much point in showing up. Instead I was just farting around, taking advantage of the parental vacuum.

  One day, not long before my 11th birthday, I went to sit by Mum’s bedside and chat to her. She told me she was dying and that she loved me; she said that she would really like me to become a doctor so that I could help people like her in the future. I sat there crying, feeling completely and utterly helpless. Guilty too, knowing there was no possible way I would ever make it as a doctor. She died without ever having mentioned to me that I was adopted and she’d loved me and Hazel as much as she could have loved any ‘natural’ son or daughter.

  So, without wanting to sound too self-pitying, that seemed to be me pretty much fucked. With Mum gone, there was Dad who was in and out of work and often away from home; me, already a troublemaker and apparently turning into a genuine problem child; and my six-year-old sister who needed looking after.

  It was a sad time for everyone and, in the way of things, the family rallied round to support us. My Auntie Jo came over from America with her daughter June to look after us kids but it certainly didn’t change anything for me. I failed my 11-plus spectacularly and wound up going to the local secondary modern in Denton Holme.

  About this time, George was given an air-rifle and this became a big focus for us. I’d swipe Dad’s air-pistol and we would spend hours crawling through the undergrowth in the ‘Top Field’, as it was called locally, stalking cats, dogs, pigeons and anything else we could shoot at. With Mum gone and Dad away, I’d stay out late into the night, going home when I felt like it.

  One positive thing about this period was that there was organised sport at my new school. I was only five feet tall and weighed about six and a half stone dripping wet but I was good enough at football to get a place in the school team for my age. We got to wear a proper football strip – blue and white, the same as the old Blackburn Rovers colours – and we had to take it home to wash it after matches. I never wanted to return mine because I was worried someone else would get to wear it.

  As I’d got a little older, the big focus for 5 November became the bonfire itself, rather than fooling around with fireworks. In each street on the estate, the local kids would build a bonfire, determined that theirs was going to be the best in the neighbourhood. The downside of this was that the rival gangs of kids would be sniffing around to see whether they could set your bonfire off before Guy Fawkes’ Night, so each one would be zealously guarded. One evening, George and I, together with a couple of others, were guarding ours when a gang from a neighbouring street turned up to raid it. George and I opened fire with the air-guns, shooting three of them before they all ran off crying, and we managed to save it.

  Auntie Jo and June had been living with us for about a year when things began to go drastically wrong. Sunday evening was the weekly bath night at home, whether you needed one or not, but it began to get a bit weird. After Hazel and I had had our baths, and while Auntie Jo was having hers, June would come into my room and fondle my private parts and kiss me on the mouth. She was 15 and I was 11, going on 12, and I didn’t really comprehend what was happening. I wouldn’t have understood the term sexual abuse back then but I certainly knew it was wrong. My confusion was compounded by the fact that the next day she would behave as if nothing at all had happened.

  I didn’t tell anyone about this abuse and before long Hazel and I were told that we would be moving to stay with another aunt at Brampton, a small country town about ten miles east of Carlisle. Dad was really struggling to find work at this time, and even did a stint as a redcoat at a Butlin’s Holiday Camp. We saw very little of him.

  Brampton was a whole different kettle of fish. Hazel got on well with my auntie but she was quite a strict person and that didn’t suit me at all. Moving away from my mates in Carlisle to a new school had upset me and I cried a lot in the first few weeks. There was nobody to play football with and when the snow came that winter I would disappear out into the country with my sledge, playing alone for hours on end. I sort of struck up a friendship with a girl named Angela, from a village called Hallbankgate, who seemed to understand what I had been through but we could only ever see each other at school. The bottom line was that I was bored and miserable.

  Light relief came in the form of occasional trips to Northallerton, in North Yorkshire, to stay with another aunt called Heather. She was nice enough but for some reason her kids decided that I was the ideal subject for their game of ‘doctors and nurses’ and this turned into a painful and embarrassing probing of my private parts. I still wasn’t sure what this was all about but I still knew it was wrong. Back in Brampton, I asked my aunt about it and she said it was just a game and I shouldn’t talk about it, but I was never sent back to stay with Auntie Heather again.

  It seems odd in retrospect that I should have been sexually abused by two separate sets of cousins and I wonder now why it happened. Physically I was small for my age but I suspect that it was more to do with the fact that having lost my mum, and with my dad being away so much, they could sense that I was vulnerable, innocent and trusting. It didn’t happen again.

  We stayed in Brampton for less than a year before we were told that we would be moving back to Carlisle, this time to live with my grandma and granddad. This really cheered me up. We would be back in Harraby, where all my friends lived, and I would be attending Harraby Secondary Modern School, ten minutes’ walk from my grandparents’ house, which was the school that George Creighton and various other mates went to. Perfect: back to all my old mischief!

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. After several years of doing whatever I wanted, my grandparents turned out to be the strictest of the strict. Mealtimes were fixed, and if I was late, I didn’t get to eat; and every Friday it was fish and chips, whether you liked it or not. Even worse, I was restricted to playing outside the house within earshot of Granddad in case he should call me in. My mates all had far more freedom than I did, and I was really jealous and resentful. It was made worse by the fact that I rarely saw Dad at all. He would come by every now and again to visit, but he didn’t stay long and I had a feeling of being cast adrift, without an anchor to hold me in place.

  All I wanted to do at this time was play sport. In the winter we spent all our spare time on the school field playing football, and in the summer it was cricket. I was desperate to get into the school football team but as a 13-year-old I was still only five foot two and weighed not much more than seven stone, even though I was a pretty decent footballer. One of the boys at school was George McVitie, a towering six-footer who played for England Schoolboys, so what chance did I have?

  But as it turned out, things did change for the better. Some time after my 13th birthday, Hazel and I were told that we would be going to stay with another aunt, Betty, and her husband Andy, who also lived in Harraby. This turned out to be the happiest time of my childhood after the death of my mother.

  Betty and Andy had two children living with them, Brian and Julie, and another son John who would eventually join the Scots Guards, and we all lived happily together in their three-bedroomed, terraced council house. Andy was a real human dynamo: he never owned a car but would cycle the ten miles to and from work every day, and every weekend he used to turn out for the works’ football team. In fact, he us
ed to take me along as well and I would bring my boots and a couple of paperback books that I used to use as shin-pads in case one of the team was injured or didn’t turn up. As a result, I soon found myself playing in every position for them, including goalkeeper.

  Occasionally, Brian, George Creighton and I would cycle the 20 miles up to the Solway Firth to go birds’-nesting. It’s illegal now but was a big thing back then: you found a nest, took an egg from it, blew out the yolk and added it to your collection. Oddly enough, this hobby was what secured my one brush with fame as a teenager, and actually a brush with death too. One Sunday when Brian couldn’t go, George and I cycled to the Solway Firth together and, having hidden our bikes, set out into the marshes on the hunt. Usually, we used a big red barn as a reference point to get back to but on this day, the sea mist rolled in thick and fast and, very quickly, we had absolutely no idea where we were. We set off in what we thought was the right direction but soon found that we were walking over the mud flats where the tide had gone out. It was getting late by now and soon the sea-water was up to our knees and rising. Shit!

  We started shouting for help and, every now and again, we saw a light which we tried to head towards. It was beginning to get dark and we were starting to get very, very frightened. Before long, the water was around our chests and we knew enough about the tides in the firth to know that if it got much deeper, the currents were going to pick us up and carry us away. Double shit!

  By now it was twilight. We were both shouting as loudly as we could when, out of the blue, a small rowing boat with two blokes in it came straight towards us and pulled us out of the water. They took us back to the shore as the tide continued to sweep in. We might have had 20 or 30 minutes before the tide picked us up and swept us to our deaths; instead we got back to safety and our story made the national daily papers. Quite a contrast.

  It was while living with Andy and Betty that I got my first job, delivering newspapers around the Harraby Estate. I would be up and waiting at the newsagent’s before 5am, waiting for it to open, then get my round done before I arrived at school. After a spell of doing this, I even got a promotion: I became the boy who wrote the addresses on the papers for the other paperboys and I stuck with doing this for a couple of years. I found myself getting so hungry doing this that, when I had finished, I would buy a small box of cornflakes to take home and I would normally have scoffed the lot before anyone else in the house was even out of bed.

  The great thing about Andy and Betty’s house was that it was a loving, happy place and there was always something interesting going on. Betty would help us all get ready for school. Sometimes she would say, ‘Your hair’s sticking up,’ and she would slick it down with margarine: I hated it but we didn’t have hair gel back then.

  Dad was still travelling about a lot for work, so we didn’t see a lot of him, but he paid Andy and Betty for our keep and made sure that we were OK. Betty was a demon for bingo and when she won, you could be sure that she would come back laden with fish and chips for all of us. When it wasn’t going so well, she would send me off on my bicycle to deliver a note to a friend who lived around the corner, asking for a loan which she would repay when Andy got his wages at the end of the month. When I was a little older, I took a look at one of these notes and saw that she had told her friend that she needed money because Dad hadn’t paid her that month. I knew he had and that actually she’d blown the cash on bingo, which annoyed me a bit. Force of circumstances meant that Hazel and I weren’t close to Dad but I knew he’d grown up in a family of nine children and he knew he had to pay his way, even when times were tough.

  It was while Hazel and I were living with Andy and Betty that Dad met a widow called Dorothy who lived with her son Joe in a house about ten minutes’ walk from where we were living. They hit it off big time and soon became an item, and it was all change once again. By then, with less than two years before I was due to leave school, I was getting into the whole music scene of the ‘swinging sixties’: I was growing my hair long; I was wearing skin-tight powder-blue jeans and Cuban heeled boots; and I was a big-time Rolling Stones fan. At school I was in trouble as much as I was out of it and, in comparison to Dorothy’s goody-goody son Joe, I was a monster. I had an idea that I wanted to be a famous footballer but as I still couldn’t get into the Harraby Secondary Modern school team that probably seemed a little unrealistic to anyone other than me. Beyond that, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.

  In my last year at school someone – I no longer remember who – had the good idea of putting me in for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme. Academically, I was clearly going nowhere but this sowed the seeds of a change in my whole life. It was based on outdoor activities, which I loved and which were generally good fun, but it also gave me a chance to build up my self-esteem and develop a sense of achievement I’d never had before, and to get the award, I needed to be able to show some leadership and a sense of discipline in a rigorous and challenging environment. I wasn’t a complete loser – I knew, for example, that I was good at sport – but as a teenager I hadn’t had parents there for me to guide me, advise me or push me on and it got me thinking just a little bit more about where I wanted to go in life. Though not enough, at this stage, to come up with any answers.

  In the meantime, I was back in my old habits. Undeterred by our near death experience in the Solway Firth, George and I set off one weekend birds’-nesting in the countryside east of Carlisle, looking for sparrow and house martin eggs. We found a rundown farm complex consisting of a house and a few barns and began poking around to see what we could find. As we looked around one of the barns, I wasn’t sure if the place was derelict or not but I wasn’t much bothered. After a few minutes looking, we found some ducks’ nests and we swiped a couple of eggs each. We were both congratulating ourselves on our find when we heard the noise of someone approaching: time to do a runner!

  George took off and was soon clean away but I was a little slower off the mark, took a wrong turn and found myself confronted by a farmer who was shouting and waving at me angrily.

  ‘Have you been fucking stealing my duck eggs?’

  I was still holding on to them so there seemed little point in arguing.

  He asked me my name and where I lived, and then drove me home in a clapped out old van. When we got to our house, he knocked on the door and when Dad answered, he told him what had happened. Dad apologised to him and asked if he could deal with me, then he sent me up to my room while they continued to talk on the doorstep. A little while later, Dad came up to my room. Without any formalities, he unleashed six of the best on my backside with his belt, which really bloody hurt. Then he dropped his bombshell: the farmer was going to report me to the police; the only way I could avoid prosecution and a criminal record was by signing up with the army. I was shitting myself. I thought: I’m only 15, how can I join the army?

  The next morning, Dad took me to the army recruiting office in Carlisle.

  ‘Russell has come to join the army,’ he announced to the recruiter. I had my long hair, tight jeans and stacked heels on but I imagine the recruiting sergeant had seen it all before and sat me down to do the written test. A couple of days later I had to turn up at the local recreation ground to do the physical test, which was a cross-country run. Now I may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer academically but I was fit as a butcher’s dog and I beat the 20 or 30 other hopefuls by a mile.

  Not long afterwards, the result of the written test came back. I was to join the ‘Junior Leaders’ Regiment Royal Artillery’ (or JLRRA) to be trained as a potential Gunner NCO. Dad was over the moon. I was nowhere near as happy: I can’t join the army; they’ll make me cut my hair and wear a uniform!

  I still hadn’t twigged that he’d tricked me. As I fooled around in my last few weeks at school in the summer of 1965 a letter arrived for me. I was to report to the JLRRA at Bramcote, near Nuneaton in Warwickshire on 15 September. Shit!

  The only thing the army had
going for it was that you got paid. Other than that I couldn’t think of anything attractive about it. My mate Neville Jackson had joined a few months before and I’d seen him when he came back to Carlisle on leave. He told me he was enjoying it, which slightly softened the prospect – Neville didn’t strike me as the army type any more than I was – but I still couldn’t see where it was going to take me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  BOY SOLDIER

  At the beginning of September a brown envelope dropped through the letterbox ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’. It was addressed to Dad. It contained a pink army rail warrant, Carlisle–Nuneaton direct, second class, one way, and a brief list of the kit I would need to take with me: washing and shaving things, some civilian clothes but not much more than that.

  The 15th came around very quickly and, that morning, Dad and Dorothy gave me a lift to the station. Dorothy was a kind, easy-going woman and I was happy to have her as my new mum: I really didn’t want to leave them. The train pulled in to the station and we all had a quick hug to say goodbye. I got aboard with my cheap suitcase and as we pulled away from the platform, they waved me goodbye. I don’t know how they felt but I was trying and failing to hold back the tears.

  As the train chugged steadily south I managed to pull myself together enough to get chatting to a few of the other lads from Carlisle who were making the same journey. We were all deeply apprehensive about what was ahead of us but, funnily enough, the biggest thing worrying me at that particular moment was the fact that I hadn’t had a haircut. The other boys on the train all had short, neat haircuts whereas I was still sporting a shoulder length Mick Jagger mop. As it turned out I needn’t have worried.