by Rusty Firmin
One of the lads going to 44 Battery with me was Dennis Harrison, nicknamed ‘Chunky’, who I hadn’t known well in basic but was to become a great mate. When we moved our gear over to the 44 Battery block I had a bit of a surprise: one of the senior trainees there was the guy I’d twatted in the cookhouse and I had a few moments of anxiety that he was going to have a go but, as things turned out, he couldn’t be arsed. He’d finished Junior Leaders and was about to go and join an adult Gunner regiment. I don’t suppose he needed the hassle.
On the day that Christmas leave started, I got up good and early, got my kit packed and then had a big army breakfast before saying goodbye to my mates. I was heading back to Carlisle, of course, but the rest were going all over the country; Chunky was on his way home to Yorkshire. As I was heading for the bus, I was stopped by one of the sergeants:
‘Firmin? I’m Paddy O’Brien. I saw that game you played in the other day: great goal fella! Tell you what, I run the regimental football team here: when you get back after Christmas, would you like to come and train with the team?’
This slightly knocked me back, I suddenly felt like I was wanted.
‘I’d love to,’ I told him.
‘Great! Enjoy the break, keep yourself fit and I’ll see you in January.’
With that, it was onto the bus and down to the station for the journey home for three weeks’ paid leave.
Only three months had passed since I’d boarded the train in Carlisle, weeping at the separation from my family and the thought of what was to come, but in that short time I’d already changed. I felt fit and healthy, I’d grown a bit taller and I’d packed on a bit of muscle. I had a pocketful of cash and, after three months of hard graft, I was looking forward to a taste of freedom. All in all it was a pretty good feeling.
Back in Carlisle the first thing I did was look up my old mates. I went with George Creighton and Neville Jackson for a bit of a kickabout with a football but then it was time to exercise my new-found freedom and spend a bit of cash. Before we’d started block leave, all of us junior leaders had had warnings about the perils of the demon drink; now was the time to find out if it was true!
Did I dare to go to a pub for a pint of beer? I asked the lads. It turned out they were already regulars at a place by the bowling green which wasn’t too picky about serving underage drinkers so off we went. I had never touched a drop of alcohol in my life before this and although it tasted disgusting at first, it went straight to my head. I staggered home and promptly crashed straight out.
Over the next couple of days, I met up with several more of my mates from school and the story was always the same. They were amazed that I’d stuck it out in the army. They knew what an undisciplined wretch I’d been at school and couldn’t believe that I’d knuckled down: they thought it would drive me nuts.
Hmmm. With this in mind, I decided that it was time to talk with Dad about buying myself out. Straight away I could see he wasn’t going to play ball. The first question he asked was ‘What will you do?’
I didn’t have an answer for this and I could see the look of disappointment on his face.
‘Russell, you have no qualifications, no prospects and you won’t walk into any kind of job when they learn you’ve jacked in the army after three months. I spoke to your instructors and you’re doing all right; give it another six months and see how you feel then.’
He was dead right but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear and I was furious.
‘Fuck you!’ I shouted and stormed out.
I tracked down some mates and went and got blind, shit-faced drunk. Somehow I made it home where I slept for 36 hours before waking with a raging hangover to find I’d been sick all over the place. Dad hauled me out and made me clean it up, but the smell was enough to get me puking again.
I learned a hard lesson that day: if you can’t handle alcohol, don’t drink it. It didn’t stop me though and several more times over the course of that first leave I drank way more than I should have done and suffered the consequences.
With Christmas and New Year done with, it was time to head back to Bramcote. After I’d said my goodbyes I got the train once again from Carlisle to Nuneaton, but this time I had a duffle-bag full of beer. I was half-cut by the time I arrived at Nuneaton and needed to get a taxi to get me back to camp. There I got a bollocking from the provost staff at the guardroom who could smell the alcohol on my breath and my first conversation with my new troop sergeant turned out to be a lecture on the dangers of underage drinking and the rules I was expected to follow. As I got up to leave he told me, ‘By the way, Firmin, I’ve got a note from Sergeant O’Brien who runs the football team. Training is twice a week, starting Tuesday at 5pm. Matches are on Saturdays.’
It occurred to me then that sport would be a good outlet for my aggression. It would keep me fit and I would get paid for it. I was resigned by then to spending another six months in the army at least so I thought I might as well just get on and knuckle down to it. And try to keep out of trouble too, of course.
With basic training done, we had a little bit more freedom. We were allowed out into town provided we were smartly dressed at all times, and I had a good set of mates, with Chunky Harrison leading the pack. The training programme was still pretty full-on but the down-time we got meant that it was much easier to cope with.
Days would start with an inspection and muster parade, and then we would normally move on to some permutation of fitness training, gun drill on the 25-pounder howitzer, map reading, education and what have you. In the meantime, I was playing football for the JLRRA team, and was soon competing in cross-country running, cricket and anything else that would get me out of uniform and out of camp. In the evenings, Chunky and I would head down town, supposedly to play darts but actually to neck a couple of pints and have a good time.
Not long after my 16th birthday, I was asked if I wanted to go skiing in Norway. The answer was yes, it was something I’d always wanted to do but, coming from my background, I’d never had the opportunity. It was fantastic. A group of us drew skis and equipment from the stores and off we set, heading for a place called Geilo where we would be based.
For the first couple of days, the instructors taught us the basics and after that, once I’d learned to stand up and make some basic turns, I thought I was a ski god and I was off. Nothing frightened me. We were skiing all day and pissing it up every evening. And we were getting paid for it! Fantastic.
It all went horribly wrong for me on about the fourth or fifth day. I set off on the ski lift having had too much to drink the night before, and was a little behind the rest of the group as they set off. I lost touch with them and found myself skiing the instructors’ route rather than the novice route where everyone else was. I started to pick up speed and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Suddenly there were pine trees everywhere and no way I could make a turn, so I pinned back my ears and carried on down the hill in a straight line. I’d probably only gone a couple of hundred yards when BANG! I hit some pine branches, lost a ski and then piled straight into a tree. Ouch.
I was winded and I’d hurt an arm and a leg but there was nobody around to pick me up because they’d all gone a different way. When I’d got my breath back, I dusted myself down, found my skis, put them over my shoulder and hobbled down the hill. When I eventually met up with the rest of the group, there was no sympathy at all: they thought it was a huge joke, but they helped me back to the chalet and that was the end of my first ski adventure. For the rest of the trip, they had fun on the slopes while I would find myself a café or a bar and amuse myself there.
As time passed back at Bramcote, I increasingly realised that I was enjoying life in the army and my desire to buy my way out of it slowly faded away. I’d turned up there as a five foot two, skinny, undisciplined runt but by the time I reached my last term, I was five foot ten, weighed ten and a half stone, and was fit as fuck. I’d learned self-discipline, I’d learned self-motivation and the harder the chall
enge I faced, the better it was for me. From the military point of view I tried to be the best at everything but I’d also earned a reputation as the best footballer in the regiment and that really pleased me too. I didn’t ever earn a promotion there because I refused to play the expected arse-kissing game but that didn’t bother me: it didn’t carry over into adult service anyway.
In my last term at Bramcote I was a mustering gunner and got to wear a bayonet frog on my belt. And I took it as my due that I could now push in to the front of the food queue ahead of the Nigs. That was the way it was. In the last few weeks we spent most of our time preparing for our final parade – what was called the ‘Goshen Parade’ in regimental jargon. A few weeks before the end we were summoned to our troop officer’s office to be read our final reports and to give him our wish list of where we wanted to be posted. I asked for 49 Field Regiment, 16 Light Air Defence Regiment and, I think, 47 Field Regiment in that order. I’d invited Dad to come and see me muster out of JLRRA as an adult but he wasn’t sure if he would be able to make it as he was working away a lot at the time, partly in the Middle East.
Finally, the day arrived. I could hardly believe it but after two years at Bramcote, I was ready to move on. In the end, it was almost an anti-climax. By now we could get our kit prepped in no time flat and the inspection went off without a hitch. We marched out onto the square as we had done several hundred times before, we stamped our feet, marched around and were mustered out as adult soldiers. And that was it.
Back in the block, there was a list up on the notice-board with our postings on it. I got 49 Field Regiment, just as I’d asked for, and Chunky was coming with me. Outstanding!
All that remained now was to change, hand in kit and head back to join our families, if they were there. Sadly, mine wasn’t – Dad was away – but I wasn’t that bothered. I was looking forward to three weeks’ leave and then joining 49 Field in Barnard Castle, Northumberland which, as the observant amongst you will notice, is a little bit less than 60 miles from Carlisle.
CHAPTER THREE
GUNNER
Joining a ‘proper’ regiment was huge contrast to Junior Leaders. I was still only 171/2 – not legally old enough to buy a beer in a pub – but all of a sudden I was being treated as an adult and the atmosphere was relatively relaxed and informal compared to what I had become used to over the previous two years. Barnard Castle was a pleasant little market town full of great pubs and really nice people with broad Geordie accents. Once I got to know the locals I found I got on well with them and I managed to acquire a girlfriend called Janet, a hairdresser, who even continued to cut my hair for free after we’d stopped going out. Being close to Carlisle meant that I could get home pretty much whenever I wanted to and I found that my reputation as a footballer had preceded me, which turned out to be a good thing.
I was initially posted in to 143 Battery, along with Chunky, and the first task was to get to know my role on the guns. My gun ‘Number 1’ was Sergeant Chalky White, a man with a vast knowledge of field gunnery, who soon got me up to speed and working as a member of the crew; and I quickly got into the daily routine of care and maintenance of the guns and vehicles within the troop.
More important for me, at that time, was the football. 49 Field was a good all-round sports regiment with strong cricket, rugby and tug-of-war teams but the football team had some real talent to call on. Back then, there were still a few ex-National Servicemen knocking around the regiment, including Geordie Bellamy who’d played for Burnley when he was younger, but there were others too, most memorably our fullback, Derek Skinner, one of the regimental chefs, who used to drink two or three pints before every game in order to steady his nerves. I started playing with the battery team more or less straight away and was soon involved with the regimental team too, as well as playing for a civilian team back in Carlisle when I could get there.
Our normal daily routine was to spend the morning on the gun park doing maintenance and ‘first parading’ the vehicles and guns, then get on with any other tasks that came up. It was much less intense than Junior Leaders, where we worked to a fairly strict syllabus, and we were given a lot more freedom to do what we wanted to do.
We were in Barnard Castle for about a year before we were told that we would all be moving, lock, stock and barrel, down to Larkhill, on Salisbury Plain, to become the support regiment to the Royal School of Artillery which was based there. This sounded like it was going to be hard work and it was compounded by the fact that for the first six months we were there, we would be living in temporary accommodation at West Down Camp, a run-down, wooden-hutted World War II-era transit camp. As there was no married accommodation, all the married men would have to leave their wives at Barnard Castle, and to mitigate this it was the single guys like me who were sent on the advance party to get the place set up for the rest of the regiment. The only advantage to this was that I got to pick a good bed-space before the rest of the lads turned up.
Nowadays soldiers get their own single rooms in barracks but back then you might find yourself, as a supposedly grown up adult, living in a four-, eight-, 12- or even 16-man room like a bunch of kids in a dormitory. In my room was a lance bombardier called Dennis Calvert who was a bit of a boxer and also, as I discovered, a bit highly strung.
I was bored spending my days cleaning up accommodation and moving bedding around so, after work, I would generally head down to the pub in the village for a couple of pints and a chat with whoever was there, before heading back up to camp. For some reason Dennis always slept with his light on, which used to keep me awake, but when I asked him to switch it off, his response was invariably: ‘Fuck off, Rusty,’ in his broad Yorkshire accent.
After a couple of weeks of this I decided that enough was enough, got my air-pistol out of my locker and shot his light out. He went fucking ape, jumping out of bed and chasing after me, and we wound up having a bit of a scrap. Next morning he gave me a more formal bollocking – he was a lance bombardier and I was a mere gunner after all – and that would probably have been that. Except I was bored. So when I saw Dennis’s pushbike parked against the side of the block I felt an overwhelming and irresistible compulsion to remove his brake blocks.
Not long afterwards, Dennis came out of the block, swung his leg over the bike and set off pedalling towards the front gate. I began to feel a little uneasy about this because if he went out of camp, the road down into the village was on a really steep hill. Sure enough, that’s where he was heading. Christ almighty! Somewhere on the hill he came off the bike and hurt himself quite badly, and I took off and hid out for several hours in the woods out the back of the camp. Surprisingly he never put two and two together and blamed me, which was probably a good thing. I was lying in bed at night for the next few weeks expecting the iron bar treatment.
After about six weeks of tedium, the rest of the regiment arrived, along with most of my mates, and we could begin to get back into the swing of normal regimental life, working hard and playing harder.
In those days, as a young ‘adult soldier’ I was still learning the ropes and life was all about having fun and doing sometimes stupid things for the hell of it. With all the lads back, the weekend card schools started up and I got stuck into games which sometimes lasted from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening. I won a lot of money in these, but I lost just as much. I started doing boxing training, playing six-a-side football and doing anything else that would catch my attention. Some weekends we would head into Devizes, 12 miles away, for a piss-up and I lost count of the number of times I ended up walking back having missed the last bus, or even cadging a lift home with the milkman on his float.
The six months at West Down passed quickly and we moved into the nice, modern accommodation at Larkhill, with the single guys all living in the block and the married ‘pads’ scattered around various married quarter patches in the area. From the windows at the top of the block I lived in we could see Stonehenge but, at that age, I wasn’t interested: it might as well ha
ve been a quarry for all I cared. Just across the road from our accommodation was a good, modern gym and I started to spend a fair amount of time in there; I also took up badminton, of all things.
Because of our role as the support for the Royal School of Artillery we had a mixture of 25-pounder field guns and the new-ish 105mm Abbot tracked self-propelled guns and there was a huge gun park with a wash-down facility where we maintained them. Not long after we moved into Larkhill, I was offered a driving course and jumped at it. I was 19 years old now and desperate to own my own car. I was paired with one of the guys in the battery who would take me out in a Landrover and show me the ropes. My early problem was speeding and a profound ignorance of the Highway Code but I knuckled down and eventually got the hang of it.
My test soon came and it was conducted by Bill Head, who was in my battery but had just passed his ‘qualified testing officer’ course and was ‘Mister I’m in Charge’. We went out, did the test and he asked me a few Highway Code questions, which I got right. Then he asked me how I’d done.
‘I reckon I’ve passed,’ I told him.
‘You might have done if you hadn’t been doing 40 in a 20 miles per hour zone,’ was his response. I started arguing and he said ‘Let me show you.’
I got back in the driver’s seat and we headed off again through the officers’ married quarters. I was still doing 40 when I went past a 20 miles per hour sign.
‘You just failed again,’ he told me, laughing. I was silent for the rest of the drive back to camp.
I had another go the next week and this time I passed. Watch out Wiltshire! I was now officially an accident waiting to happen. A guy called Dave in 55 Battery told me that he had an old Austin Westminster he was trying to sell. It was a great big, lumbering thing but I managed to thrash it up to 100 miles an hour on the Larkhill to Rolleston Camp road and that was good enough for me. I bought it then and there.