by Rusty Firmin
The problem I then had was that nobody would insure it. Shit. I tried to sell it but nobody was interested. I tried giving it away, but still no takers. I took it up to a kind of travellers’ camp near the Bustard inn on Salisbury Plain but none of them wanted it either. With no insurance, I couldn’t take it back on camp and I was so naïve I didn’t even know how to go about registering it in my name. In the end, I took it to a copse on the edge of the Plain and left it there. A few weeks later we returned there, this time in a 17-ton Abbot which we drove over the car several times to crush it, then took the number plates off and abandoned it. It may still be there for all I know.
My next car was a Ford Anglia that I won in a card school. It wasn’t in the best of nick but it ran OK and I was able to get insurance for this one: now I was mobile.
But for all the fun and games, Larkhill was hard work too. The School of Artillery ran more or less continuous courses for British and foreign students and it was our job to get out and do the live firing that this normally entailed. Mostly this would be with the 25-pounders or Abbots, but occasionally we might be part of an M109 or M107 detachment too. We would get up early on live firing days, get breakfast and then either head down to Rolleston to collect the ammunition if we were on ammo detail, or get down to the gun park to get the vehicles and guns first paraded if we were firing. Then it was ‘get loaded up and out to the ranges’. We did this whatever the weather and on a daily basis we would be cold, wet and sometimes fucking hot too. With firing over, we would then head back to Larkhill to get the guns and vehicles cleaned up and ready for the next shoot.
On the other hand, supporting the School meant we didn’t have to train at weekends, as the courses invariably got the weekend off, and we also got a sports afternoon on a Wednesday. I was sport mad. I played rugby, hockey and cricket for the Regiment, but football was where I really excelled and I soon found myself playing inter-battery, regimental and corps level football, as well as playing for a civilian club; sometimes playing Saturday morning and afternoon for two different teams. If they’d had one, I would have been the captain and star performer on the regimental drinking team too.
But although I was enjoying what I did, as well as getting paid for it, there still seemed to be something missing from my life. I had girlfriends who came and went, although I had no intention of getting married at that stage in my life, but I rarely saw my family as my dad was working away in Saudi Arabia by now and the others who I regarded as my family had all moved away from Carlisle. The army had become my family instead, but I wasn’t quite getting enough from it. Leave periods were odd. Sometimes I would go and visit friends around the country; other times I would stay on camp and try to find ways of amusing myself while everyone else was away. Having a car was great, but it was dangerous too as I was stupid enough to drink and drive back then, as did many others. Fortunately I didn’t have any disasters.
One day, when I had to go over to regimental headquarters on some errand, Bill Bassett, one of the older soldiers in the battery, asked me to drop some papers in for him at the orderly room. I vaguely looked at them as I walked across and saw it was an application to attempt SAS selection. I had no idea what this was and asked Bill about it later. He told me a little bit about what he was applying for and it piqued my interest but I didn’t do anything concrete.
It was 1970 by now and the conflict in Northern Ireland was beginning to kick off in a big way. I knew we wouldn’t get involved because, as the support regiment, we were hard-wired to the School for the next two years and this, amongst other things, was leading to a growing sense of frustration which began to reflect in my behaviour. For our 10.30am NAAFI break, we used to head over to a café in Larkhill for a mug of coffee and something to eat, and one day a mate from 55 Battery called Ray Wyre picked up a piece of toast from my plate and started to eat it. I went mad and started scrapping with him round the café until some of the others pulled us apart. I mean, fighting over a piece of toast: how pathetic is that?
Not long afterwards, a bunch of us had gone down to the Packhorse, Larkhill’s only pub, and got a skinful. On the way back, one of the lads thought it would be a good idea to rip down one of the 49 Field Regiment badges from the side of the guardroom and throw it through the window. Pissed as I was, I thought this was a huge laugh and assumed that there were so many of us there that we couldn’t be identified. Wrong. I was hauled out of bed in the early hours by the Regimental Police (RP), still pissed, only to make the mistake of starting to throw punches. A few digs from the RPs soon calmed me down and I spent the rest of the night in the cells, with my mate Billy Gerrard in the cell next door.
The upshot of this was that we both got 14 days’ detention, which was a real pain in the arse. Billy was the best rugby player in the regiment and I was the best footballer, so we were allowed out to train and to take part in matches, but most of the rest of the time we had to do fatigues around camp, supervised by the Regimental Police. The real balls-ache about this didn’t emerge for years but this incident, which was extremely minor by the standards of the day, was enough to ensure that I didn’t get my Long Service and Good Conduct Medal. This is a medal you get after 15 years’ service in the ranks provided that your conduct sheet is reasonably clean. Mine was pretty good apart from this but the specific charge – and I no longer remember what it was, probably vandalism or offering violence to the Regimental Police when they dragged me out of my pit – and which I’d admitted without any legal advice at all, meant that I could never receive mine, whatever I did in the future. Not a big deal in the great scheme of things, but enough to piss me off quite a bit when I hit my 15-year point.
A couple of days after I was released, I was called into the battery sergeant major’s office. Ray Baum was a nice guy and he sat me down for a chat. The message was simple: I had a lot of potential but I was pissing it away; he’d talked about me with the regimental sergeant major and other senior NCOs and decided that the best place for me was on the Regimental Police staff for few months to calm me down. Poacher turned gamekeeper, so to speak.
This turned out to be a good idea. I knuckled down to the work and used my spare time to train for football, spending endless hours running up and down the tennis courts behind the nick, practising skills. After a couple of months as a Regimental Policeman, I went back to my own battery and also to promotion to lance bombardier.
I was fine with this new responsibility at work but socially I remained a hand grenade with the pin pulled out. I was involved in drunken car crashes – not me driving – pub fights, motorbike crashes and all the rest of it. At weekends, Chunky and I would saunter back to the block from the gun park, each carrying our army-issue suitcase, each of which contained a five-gallon petrol jerrycan – siphoned from the vehicles – which would be our fuel supply for the weekend. At that age I didn’t see it as stealing: more like one of the perks of the job.
Through all this time I was playing football and our team – I was the captain – was going from strength to strength. We won the Royal Artillery Cup as well as the army and our local civilian leagues. I was playing for the Royal Artillery as well and, although I didn’t know it at that time, several professional teams, including Swindon, Sheffield United, West Ham and Bristol Rovers had enquired with the army about signing me. Captain Byford, a lovely, kind-hearted guy, was the football officer for 49 Field at the time and he put them off for the time being: the regiment didn’t want to lose me.
When our two years at Larkhill were up, we were due to head out to Hohne in northern Germany. By then I’d spoken with Jock Taylor, a lance bombardier who had been serving with 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery. He had come to us under some kind of cloud but he seemed like a good bloke and I was interested to hear about serving with the Commandos and the challenge of getting my green beret and getting in there was growing on me. I wanted to travel and going to Germany was a start but I’d also heard bad things about it. Back then, alcoholism was rife in the army because
booze in Germany was ludicrously cheap and I was beginning to think that that might be a problem for me. I’d been told that once again I would be heading out early to Germany as a member of the advance party.
The next few weeks were pretty dull. The garrison in Hohne was housed in old German barracks that we had taken over at the end of the war. At the back of camp was a big training area known as Hohne Ranges and a couple of miles down the road was the site of the infamous Belsen concentration camp. This was a horrible place. The camp was torched after the war to kill off a typhus epidemic and all that was left was the sites of the mass graves, marked with numbers on stone plaques to show how many were buried in each: 10,000 ... 20,000 ... 5,000 …, and on it went. It was true what they said about it: it seemed ten degrees colder than the surrounding countryside and you seldom saw or heard a bird there.
I quickly realised that all the warnings I’d had about the dangers of drinking in Germany were true. Beer was cheap and the bars stayed open as long as you had money. After a few nights testing this to the limits I began to get sensible and switched back into training mode, taking myself off for five- or ten-mile runs on the training area every day. I didn’t stop drinking but I kept a lid on it.
Our football success carried on in Germany once the rest of the regiment had arrived. We were soon the best team in the garrison and in short order won the Rothmans six-a-side tournament at Rheindahlen with me as captain. After I was presented with the trophy by Bertie Vogts, the German international who was German Footballer of the Year at the time, the Arsenal manager Bertie Mee asked me whether I would consider turning pro. I said to him: ‘I must be the fittest alcoholic playing football in Germany,’ and he laughed. The BAOR* football manager was standing with us and gave me a filthy look but I wasn’t too bothered. If it had been the Liverpool manager who’d asked me I’d have bitten his arm off but the Gooners? Fuck ’em.
*BAOR = British Army on the Rhine.
Part of the prize for winning the tournament was a weekend in London to watch England get beaten 3–1 by Germany at Wembley. Oh well. At least it was followed by a night on the town with Rothmans paying for everything. We ended up at the Raymond Revuebar, getting smashed and watching naked girls dancing, which cheered us up.
Back in Germany we discovered that 49 Regiment was going on a four-month tour to Northern Ireland in the internal security role. Some of the lads were pissed off by this but I thought it was great. The build-up training took place in Germany at the Sennelager training area and it was tough and exhausting, but I enjoyed every minute of it. This was what I wanted to do in the army: not piss my life away hosing down muddy vehicles and getting shit-faced in the evenings.
With the training done we flew out to RAF Aldergrove where we were picked up and driven into central Belfast to occupy the Grand Central Hotel. Our role here was to control the ‘segments’ in the city centre and the Markets area – with the Markets being the more dangerous of the two.
It would wind up being a split job. Sometimes we were in the segments as static guards, searching people as they came through each check-point; sometimes we would be in the Markets on foot patrol; sometimes we would be in Landrovers doing mobile patrols round the city centre.
In the Grand Central Hotel, after we were all settled in, we were issued our ‘yellow cards’, the conditions for opening fire in Northern Ireland.
‘Why is it yellow?’ I’d asked when we were back doing our training in Germany.
‘Because the people you’re going to shoot are fucking cowards,’ was the response.
But the reality was that we weren’t even allowed to carry rounds in the breeches of our weapons, so if we did need to open fire we would be fumbling around having to think about cocking our rifles, shouting the required warning and taking the safety catch off. It seemed to me to be unlikely that a terrorist would hang around while we went through that rigmarole.
The most boring part of the job was doing the static guards in the segments but it did have its benefits. When a bomb went off, we were likely to be the first on the scene and, as a lot of shops were being hit back then, we were able to get our hands on all kinds of stuff. When the Paddy Hopkirk Motor Rallying shop was burned down, I came away with a set of rallying spotlights and a whole load of other accessories for my car, and other times I got shirts, ties and all sorts. Everyone was at it, including the police, but in our case we couldn’t take it home – at least not yet – and, for the most part, we stashed it under the floorboards in the rooms we were using in the Grand Central Hotel so we could move it either when we went home for rest and recreation (R & R), or at the end of the tour.
On the other hand the mobile patrols in Landrovers could be quite interesting not least because, as a lance bombardier, I would usually be in charge of my team of four and we were deployed to many incidents. On one occasion there had been a bomb at the Europa, one of the big hotels in the city centre, and the police were already there when we arrived. They tasked us to help them look for any victims and I remember coming across a man’s scalp on the awning over the main entrance and finding the ends of his fingers nearby. The rest of his body was nearly a hundred yards away.
I couldn’t believe the crude savagery of terrorists prepared to target these bombs at ordinary men and women going about their daily business. Deep inside I really wanted to catch someone planting a bomb: the yellow card would have been straight out of the window.
The foot patrols in the Markets were also interesting. Most of the time you might see kids around but they weren’t allowed to talk to us as this was a Catholic area. But sometimes there were no kids on the streets and that’s when we started feeling nervous. About mid-way through the tour I was leading a patrol when we suddenly came under machine gun fire from the area of the bakery. I returned one round from my self-loading rifle (SLR) and we did a follow-up but there was nobody to be seen, except for a few civilians coming out of their houses to see what had happened. The police arrived and did a quick search of the bakery, but they didn’t find anything, which was pretty much par for the course.
There wasn’t a lot of shooting in the Markets but we did often get bricks and bottles thrown at us, and a lot of shouting and verbal abuse, and of course there was a background level of car-jacking, bombing and arson going on the whole time. It struck me then that the people involved in terrorism in Belfast were the same sort of people who would be committing ‘ordinary’ crimes in a normal society and a lot of the terrorism really had a more criminal motive.
Even though it was quite a full-on experience, we did get some down-time and we were able to go out and go shopping, and visit some of the local pubs and a floating disco down in the docks. I even had a girlfriend out there for a while: a Protestant girl called Linda, who came from Dungannon, and we stayed in touch for a couple of months after I returned to Germany, although nothing serious came of it.
The four months in Belfast passed very quickly and we were soon packing to leave. With all the contraband I’d acquired I had a whole lot more luggage to take back than I’d brought out, but I was by no means the only one.
Back in Germany I was sent on a limber gunners course which I passed, and that qualified me for promotion which happened soon afterwards. With my second stripe as a bombardier, I finally got my own room in the block: no more sharing with snoring, farting gunners.
Not long after this we headed down to Grafenwoehr in southern Germany for a big exercise, with me acting as driver of Bill Head’s 105mm Abbot. Strictly speaking I wasn’t qualified for this but after two weeks driving around the ranges, Bill told me I’d effectively passed my test and put me forward for a Group H tracked vehicle licence.
Around this time, Jonathan Wheeler, who was a lieutenant in the battery, and Warrant Officer Class 2 Jock McEwan decided to organise an adventure training trip. Their plan was to attempt to walk from coast to coast through the Pyrenees, 400 miles from St Jean de Luz to Perpignan. As soon as I heard about this, I volunteered: what a great way
to get fit and have a good time was my reasoning.
It turned out to be a really good trip and seriously challenging too. There were about ten or twelve of us doing it and we would get up at 4am and then try to cover around 40 miles every day for ten days, which was hard going. At first we took it in turns to drive the admin vehicle but as members of the team began to pick up injuries we developed into two groups: an admin team of the sick, lame and lazy and a walking team which ended up being just Jonathan, Jock and me. It wasn’t lost on me that the guys in the admin team, who would meet us at the end of each day’s walk, were actually managing to spend most of their days sunbathing and drinking beer, but I was enjoying the physical exercise too much to want to join them.
Back in Germany after this it was the ‘same old, same old’. Gunnery exercises, football, drinking and fighting. We went to Wainwright in Canada but, while this was a different country, the training was pretty much the same as we did on Hohne Ranges: fire and movement throughout the exercise; moving to a grid reference, bringing fire down on targets we couldn’t see, then moving to another part of the area and doing the same thing. We did get some time off at the end and I visited Yellowstone Park and the Calgary stampede which was a laugh, but then it was back to Germany and the usual routine.
Trouble seemed to follow me everywhere I went and, looking back, I suspect it was because I was becoming bored and frustrated. A group of us decided to go to Amsterdam for the weekend and set off in a couple of cars. After we’d checked in to our hotel, we went to the Heineken brewery for the tour because we’d heard that after it, they sat you down at a long table and brought you as much free beer as you could drink. This turned out to be more or less true but a point came when we were asked to leave and we moved on and started bar-hopping round Amsterdam for the rest of the night. One of the lads called Billy thought it would be fun to kick a neon sign into a canal, which he did, but unbeknown to him someone saw him do it and reported us to the police. A couple of minutes later we were surrounded by big Dutch policemen who arrested three of us and took us to their station.