Firebird

by Michael Asher

  I told him my name. ‘I haven’t got a number,’ I said.

  ‘Everybody’s got a number!’ he replied. ‘Oh yes, here we are, Asher, private fourth class, 24246810, Asher, M. J. That number is yours till you die. Don’t ever forget it!’ Then, when I had put my suitcase down, he handed me a sweeping-brush and gave me my first order. ‘Get sweeping!’ he said.

  The Personnel Selection Officer was a crusty captain who had risen through the ranks. ‘Why did you volunteer for the Parachute Regiment?’ he asked me.

  ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I wanted to jump out of the sky.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have tried growing a pair of wings, then!’ he suggested drily. He studied the file on his desk. ‘I see you enlisted under an “S-type” engagement, as a potential officer,’ he commented.

  ‘Yes, sir. I failed the Regular Commissions Board, so I joined the ranks.’

  ‘Well, at least you haven’t given up. That’s one thing in your favour. But it’s not easy being an officer in this regiment. This regiment is the best there is. You’ve got to be the best. We’ll be watching you, private. Now go and see the clerk. He’ll assign you a billet.’

  The clerk with the moustache told me to wait outside the store. A floppy latex mattress came sailing out and almost knocked me over. ‘Get on the ball!’ the clerk said, grinning. Then he fixed me with a piercing stare. ‘Do you piss the bed?’ he demanded.

  ‘No!’ I answered, surprised and indignant.

  ‘If you stain the mattress, you pay for it!’ he said. ‘Now get that bugger up to your billet, last room on the left.’

  The room was on the second floor of a four-storey block of granite and glass: ‘the most up-to-date barracks in the country’, the recruitment literature had claimed. Modern it was, but its newness only emphasized the atmosphere of bleak austerity. Each room held four bunks of a scarred battleship grey. With each bunk came a wooden bedside locker and a large equipment locker. As I squeezed my mattress in through the door, the lockers creaked open ominously. Their innards were turbid with fluff and sprinkled liberally with fag-ends and empty contraceptive packets. A formica-topped table, much chipped and besmeared with boot-polish, had been pushed into a corner. Four stand-up chairs were piled against a plate-glass window. I dropped my mattress on the bare springs of a bed near the window. Then I went back to collect my bedding.

  Staggering in for a second time under a pile of sheets and blankets, I found someone else in the room. He was a young man of my own age, and he was fuming as he tried to insert his wobbly mattress into its canvas cover. ‘Bleedin’ thing!’ he cursed in a northern accent. ‘Give us a hand, will tha!’ I clutched the mattress in a vice-like grip, while he drew the tight-fitting cover over it, grunting and sweating. ‘You’d think they’d make ’em right size!’ he said when it was done. Then he grinned at me and stuck out a calloused hand. ‘Walker,’ he said. ‘Dave Walker. How’s tha do?’

  He offered me a Park Drive cigarette, and we stood smoking by the window. Directly below us a turtle of men in camouflaged smocks and helmets were tramping around the square. There were incomprehensible commands like cries of pain. The men moved in perfect unison, and the crash of their boots on the asphalt came up to us like thunder. ‘That’ll be us soon!’ Walker said. I could hear the awe in his voice. We looked down on those strange animals in wondering silence. We were eighteen years old. That window was the shore of the rest of our lives.

  ‘I wonder who else we’ll get in this room,’ Walker said. ‘I hope it’s not a coupla wankers as will get us back-squadded!’

  ‘What’s back-squadded?’

  ‘Weren’t tha at the Recruit Selection Centre? Don’t tha know how they do it?’

  ‘I came here straight from the Army Careers Office.’

  ‘They give us twelve weeks basic training. At the end of that they assess thee. If tha’s a dud, tha gets back-squadded to another platoon. That means tha’s to do it all over again. Most of them as is back-squadded leave.’

  A tingle of fear ran down my spine. What if I failed? I’d failed the Regular Commissions Board, and now I could never go home to my family and say I couldn’t even make it as a ranker. They had advised me strongly against joining the ranks. No, I told myself, I had to pass now I was here.

  Our faces dropped when we met our third room-mate. He was a tall bumbling man called Chapman who ambled about the room with an expression of complete imbecility. He kept on insisting that he came from somewhere called the ‘Dingle’. I wondered if he was quite right in the head. He had with him a moth-eaten cardboard suitcase held together by a leather belt. When he opened it, Walker and I saw a gigantic carving-knife lying on top of his clothes. Walker raised his eyes to heaven as if to say, ‘We’ve got a right one here!’

  Little Jock McGowan was the next to arrive. He had an apple-fresh face with an impudent look, and his hair had been honed to a fine stubble. His bomber jacket and baseball shoes reminded me of the local yobs I used to see hanging round Lambretta scooters in my home town. But McGowan had a genial manner. ‘Here!’ he said at once, when he saw me struggling with my mattress cover. ‘Lemme show ye how it’s done! I’m an old navy man. Four years in the merch, that’s me!’ He fitted the mattress with perfect alignment.

  Our room was divided from the one next door by a thin partition. The two rooms were connected with the corridor by a common entrance. Soon that room filled up with recruits. There was a lanky, emaciated youth from Oldham named Clark. He had a long, lascivious face and looked like the worst kind of street-corner layabout. He announced that he would be known as the ‘Oldham Stud’. There was a blond, rugby-playing Londoner called Smart. His father kept a tailor’s shop in Soho, he said. There was a seventeen-year-old Welshman, inevitably called Williams, who was bandy-legged and came from Merthyr Tydfil. Finally, there was a solemn farm-boy from Gloucestershire called Smith. His black hair was cut Elvis Presley style with a long fringe which he kept flicking out of his eyes. He wore a crinkled leather jacket with the words SATAN’S SLAVES stencilled on the back.

  I had just brushed out my locker and arranged my shirts and books on its shelves, when a voice screamed, ‘STAND BY YOUR BEDS!’ I turned to see the same squat corporal who had shouted at me on the way to the PSO. He advanced into the room menacingly. ‘STAND STILL!’ he yelled. We swayed by our beds with uncertain rigidity. He stood there for a long moment, hands on hips, regarding us with obvious contempt. He wore polished boots, puttees and immaculately pressed denims. His olive-green pullover was neatly punctuated by a maroon stable-belt. An inch and a half of starched khaki collar showed at his neck. His maroon-red beret with its silver parachute badge was tilted very slightly forward to accentuate the contemptuous look. His face was broad and dark and full of shadows. This was what a paratrooper looked like, I thought to myself. I wondered if any of us here would ever look like that.

  He sauntered forward, inspecting our faces and glancing at our lockers. He stopped in front of me, so near that I could see the red veins in his eyes. A nasty smile wavered on his lips. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘If it isn’t my mate! What’s your name, mate?’

  ‘Asher,’ I said.

  ‘Asher WHAT?’

  ‘Er, just Asher.’

  ‘ASHER, CORPORAL, you fucking TUBE!’ His eyes seemed to burn red with anger. He glanced at my locker again. ‘Who told you to put all this gunge in your locker?’

  ‘No one, corporal, I just assumed —’

  ‘DON’T FUCKING ASSUME ANYTHING! This locker is for military equipment only! I’ll teach you to put gash in it without orders!’ With a furious motion he swept my pathetic personal belongings out of the locker. They included a framed photograph of my fifteen-year-old girlfriend. She had given it to me the previous evening as a parting gesture. It crashed to the floor, and the glass shattered. ‘Oh dear!’ he said with heavy irony. ‘What a pity!’ He picked up the broken photo and examined it nosily. ‘All my love, darling Mick!’ he read. ‘How touching! You might break her he
art, Asher, but you won’t break mine! That’ll be twenty press-ups for filling your locker without orders. Come on, get pressing!’

  I fell on to my arms and began heaving myself upwards. The corporal rested a heavy boot on my back. ‘Two-three-four-five!’ he counted. The other recruits stood to attention, petrified. ‘Eight-nine-ten-eleven!’ My arms were already weakening. There was a burning sensation in my shoulders. ‘Thirteen-fourteen-fifteen.’ My arms were trembling now. I tried not to groan in pain. ‘Sixteen-seventeen … you’re going, Asher!’ the corporal jeered. Then I collapsed in a heap. ‘Pathetic!’ he said. ‘My darling Mick! You should have sent her instead! She’d have made a better Para than you!’

  I picked myself up, feeling shaky. He took a step closer, so that I could feel foul breath against my cheek. ‘You think you’re clever, don’t you, Asher?’ he said. ‘I’ve seen ’em all. I can tell by looking: you think you’re a clever sod. Well, let me tell you, there’s only one clever sod in this room, and that’s me!’ He moved back to the door. ‘I’m Corporal Jekyll, your section commander,’ he said. ‘You are very lucky you’ve got me. I am the best instructor in the Depot. I am not your mate. I am your god. Do as I say and we’ll get on dandy. Do so much as a fart out of place and I shall personally shit on you from a great height!’

  Thus spake Zarathustra, I thought.

  The army was chock-full of colonels, colonels-commandant, colonels-in-chief, major-generals, lieutenant-generals, full generals, field marshals and Supreme Allied Commanders Europe. But so low was I that a corporal was as far above me as God.

  The rest of the day was taken up with assemblies and disassemblies. Each time the order ‘GET FELL IN!’ rang along the corridor, we would line up outside. There were dozens of rooms along the corridor, and the line of recruits soon extended its full length. There were young men of all shapes and sizes, and from every corner of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. ‘FROM THE RIGHT, NUMBER OFF!’ the order would come. The first man would shout ‘ONE!’, the next man ‘TWO!’, and so on down the line, until the number reached the hundreds. It passed down the chain with such swiftness that it was difficult not to anticipate it and get your number wrong. If that happened, the nearest NCO would ‘shit on you from a great height’, and you’d do press-ups. Everyone would wait for you to finish, and then the entire process would begin again. We usually numbered off five or six times until we got it right. One or other of the corporals assigned to our platoon would bellow out some trivial orders and then dismiss us.

  Jekyll had us strip down our bunks, mattress covers and all, and remake them ‘the army way’. He said the mattress covers had to fit ‘like French letters’. ‘You will notice,’ he told us, ‘that sheets and blankets have three stripes down the centre. This does not mean that they have the rank of sergeant …’ He broke off for polite giggles. ‘The stripes will be exactly in the centre of the bed, and not a fraction out!’

  The sheets had to be turned down exactly twelve inches over the blankets. ‘How can you be sure it’s twelve inches, corporal?’ Chapman asked.

  ‘Use your fucking dick to measure it, Chapman!’ Jekyll answered. The blankets had to be smoothed out, tucked in and folded at the ends with hatchet-sharp ‘hospital corners’. ‘I want to see them like that every time I inspect them,’ Jekyll said. ‘Any bunk not up to scratch will end up on the floor!’ And to demonstrate how easily this could be arranged, he flicked my bed over with a deft twist of the hand. The iron frame separated easily into its three component parts, as it crashed to the floor in a mass of sheet and blanket. ‘Practice makes perfect!’ he said. ‘And it better be perfect when I get back. I want to see this room dug out and the floor gleaming like a mirror!’

  Five times Jekyll inspected the room that day and five times he found it wanting. Five times our bunks crashed over on to the floor or the blankets parachuted out of the window. Sweeping, bed-making and dusting (‘Underneath the lockers, not just on top!’) were interrupted by more assemblies, which seemed increasingly meaningless as fatigue crept up on us. The work was broken by trips over to the mess for meals. We queued up to collect egg and chips from bulky army cooks who wore silver chevrons on their white jackets. Even the cooks were corporals, it seemed. Huddled five to a table, we ate quickly. We kept our eyes downcast, lest we drew the attention of the recruits from senior squads who swanned about the mess like magical creatures. By ten o’clock that night I was dropping with exhaustion.

  As the bugler sounded ‘lights out’, I clambered into my bunk. I slipped gratefully between the abrasively starched sheets.

  ‘I hope tha doesn’t snore!’ chuckled Walker with a hint of intimacy both warm and repellent at once.

  ‘What do you make of this chap Jekyll?’ I asked him.

  ‘A reet bloody bastard!’ he replied.

  I closed my eyes and pictured my parents’ house, only a few hours’ journey away in rural Lincolnshire. It seemed impossible that I had left it only that morning. I had been away before, on camps and holidays, but this was different. There was something final in today’s journey, some final cutting of the umbilicus. My childhood and youth were gone for ever. I was in the army, sharing a room with three faintly menacing characters from places I had scarcely heard of. I was gripped by the same mixture of fear and excitement which had come and gone all day. I had become the hero of one of the adventure books I read so avidly. I was afraid, yet I had no wish to return to my dull town and its dull grammar school. I had finally broken out of the prison of my humdrum childhood. For better or for worse, I had taken my destiny in my own hands. What the army represented most to me at that moment was escape.

  *

  Walking home from school every day, I used to pass a Territorial Army drill-hall. For several years a glossy poster was displayed outside. It showed a close-up of a handsome soldier in combat uniform. He had gleaming white teeth, and a black beret was perked rakishly on his head. Behind him a troop of armoured personnel carriers was poised for action. Several more soldiers emerged from their battle-hatches, wearing peaked combat-caps and toting sub-machine-guns. Above the picture in large red letters was written JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS and along the bottom IT’S A MAN’S LIFE IN THE MODERN ARMY.

  As a teenager, the men on those posters seemed to represent everything I wanted to be. The romantic side of me had always been attracted to the idea of soldiers and armies since I had first heard my grandfather’s stories of Kitchener’s army and the Dardanelles.

  ‘It was just after we advanced from the beach-head,’ he would begin, ‘when I got it in the leg. We got the order to fix bayonets. The Turks were dug in across the fields with machine-guns. Some fool gave us the order to charge. You were so carried away with the noise and the screaming that you hardly knew what was happening. Next thing I knew I went down like a skittle. I’d copped two rounds in the leg. There was blood and bodies all over the shop down there. I saw one bloke, I remember clear as daylight, trying to get up and shouting, “Mum, help me!” with half his head shot away. Then they were all retreating. What a cock-up it was! I tried to crawl back towards the beach. “Leave your rifle, mate!” somebody shouted. “Never!” I said. “They’ve set the goss on fire!” they said. “You’ll get roasted!” You could smell the smoke on the wind. I kept on crawling till I fell into a shell-hole. Then I went out like a light. When I came round, I had another wound in the back. The Turks must have advanced and stuck a bayonet in me to finish me off. No one thought much of the Turks, you see. That was the big mistake. They were tough as old leather. Anyway, they didn’t finish Tommy Kew. The stretcher-men arrived and carried me off to the beach. They winched me aboard the hospital-ship. Then the doctors said I had gas gangrene, and the leg would have to come off. I was only eighteen years old. I’ve been a cripple ever since.’

  My grandfather remained disabled all his life, but to me he was a hero. I was enthralled by his stories. I can recall the exact words he used, the smell of his tobacco lingering in the room, which in itself seem
ed to evoke the reek of fear and cordite and burning gorse. I remember the polished brass cartridge-cases he kept on his mantelpiece. I imagined they were the very bullets cut out of his leg in that hospital-ship off the Golden Horn. It seems curious to me now that it was not the fact of his being crippled that struck me so forcibly. It was not the fact that the war had left him scarcely employable, a forgotten, half-helpless peg-leg of a man whose life was constant pain. I hardly thought about the incompetent surgeons who had sawed off his leg. I never wondered why he hadn’t won a medal for his bravery, when all the decorations had gone to those upper-class idiots who had ordered the attack. Or gone to those aristocratic generals whose imperial arrogance had dismissed the Turkish army as ineffective, when it was plain that the Turks were amongst the finest soldiers in the world. No, it was the glory, the thrill, the romance of it all that remained with me long after my grandfather was gone.

  But then, most boys think like that. If they didn’t, they would be less willing to offer themselves for the testing-ground of war, year after year, generation after generation. The same must have been true of my father. Tom Kew’s tales did nothing to prevent him from volunteering for the army when the war broke out again in 1939. As a trainee-surveyor, it was natural that he should be posted to the Royal Engineers. It was a Territorial unit, which shows that he was a volunteer, not a conscript. He could have gained a commission in the infantry, but he remained a sergeant in the Sappers. He fought his way through the North African campaign and the invasion of Italy, and returned with a ‘Mention in Dispatches’. That citation hung on our lavatory wall through my childhood. My eyes would linger over it proudly as I sat there, awfully impressed by ‘His Majesty’s High Appreciation’. Dad wore his old battle-dress blouse for gardening until it finally disintegrated.

  My father’s war, like my grandfather’s, was a patriotic duty which involved the entire nation. Things had changed since then. In the early sixties the army had become a professional organization again. Without an empire to hold up, it had become slimmer and more streamlined. The excess baggage of the upper-class twits had been shorn off. In a world which seemed to be getting smaller, more uniform and drearier every day, the army seemed the last bastion of adventure. At sixteen I was attracted to the idea of becoming a journalist. Opportunities were few and at the time it seemed to offer no more than a lifetime of drudgery on the local paper. And drudgery was what I wanted most to avoid. I had only one life to live, and I had no intention, even then, of living it in an office or a factory. I was a romantic. The army seemed to be my avenue of escape.