Down Among the Weeds

by Harry Beaves

  I was due to report for a Regimental Signals Officers’ Course at RSA Larkhill which assembled on a Monday afternoon. On the Saturday I played for Chester Fourths and during the game took an almighty whack on my left cheek in a collision with one of my own side. I felt pretty groggy after the match, but took a couple of paracetamol and drove our young family and the dog down to my father’s house in Alderbury, where we planned to spend the weekend before I reported to Larkhill and Barbara went on to stay with her parents in Folkestone. That evening in Alderbury I felt sick and dizzy and, as there was no doubt that I was concussed, I resolved to go to the Medical Centre at Larkhill the following morning.

  The next day my father woke us with a phone call from our neighbour in Chester. She had looked out of her window after breakfast and noticed the curtains flapping inside our house. When she entered, she discovered that we had been burgled, so instead of going to the Medical Centre we drove straight back to Chester to survey the damage. The thief had forced a window at the back of the house and taken most of my military uniforms, presumably because he could move them on through an Army Surplus store or something similar. We called the Police and checked the house, then hid the ‘valuable’ items that the military thief had passed over and cautiously locked up before returning to Alderbury. We had lost little of any value, but the burglar had been watching our movements and we never felt safe or comfortable in that house again.

  I finally made it to the Medical Centre on Monday morning and was told to continue with the paracetamol and to rest. I reported for the course as instructed and was allowed to continue. Those at Larkhill who were aware of my reputation probably thought there was little chance of me bothering to using my brain, concussed or not!

  * * *

  I had been away on a short exercise with the TA in the autumn of 1980 and expected to come home to the usual energetic welcome from my young family. Instead Barbara sat me down quietly and told me that Stella, my eldest sister had died. She had been suffering for some time from cancer, but we had not known that she was ill.

  Stella was a lovely, quiet, mild-mannered person. When she finished at college she had never questioned the need to come home and help my father to fulfil his promise to keep the family together. She was trapped in this role and it seemed impossible for her to escape, at least until Heather was grown up, but in 1971 she met Julian Bourgogne and they decided that they wanted to spend their lives together. My father was very unlikely to approve of any man who wanted to marry Stella as it would break up the family and took an instant dislike to Julian. He behaved very badly towards them, putting immense pressure on her to stay with the family.

  To their great credit, Stella and Julian married and settled in Wimborne where she took up another teaching post. Because of the distances from Wales and Chester we only saw them occasionally and had no inkling of her problems, so her death came as a terrible shock. They had chosen to keep Stella’s illness to themselves for their own private reasons and at the time I was angry that we had not been told. At the age of only forty, Stella had fallen victim of the cancer gene that had taken our mother, our aunt Stella (after whom she was named), our maternal grandmother and at least one of her sisters. Stella’s funeral in Wimborne was a very sad event.

  * * *

  When the Argentinians invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982 the conflict was tailor-made for the Royal Marines and our Amphibious Forces, though the size of the enemy meant that they would need considerable reinforcement to fight the war. As the Task Force was gradually assembled I felt a frustrated connection with the unfolding events as so many of my friends were involved.

  We watched the TV news with fascination right from the start. ‘An Argentinian force of 11,000 men has landed on the Falkland Islands which are defended by a detachment of forty Royal Marines under the command of Major Mike Norman.’ So said the newsreader. ‘That’s OK, then. It’ll take more than 11,000 to get the better of Norman,’ was my reply to Barbara. Mike Norman was a great friend from Malta.

  Each day the TV, radio and newspapers contained reports and pictures of many people I knew and had served with. Because of the problems of moving conventional artillery and ammunition over difficult terrain in the harsh Falklands weather Naval Gunfire became invaluable. This meant that the observation teams from 148 Battery were always in demand and the national press was full of remarkable accounts of actions that had involved them.

  In frustration I contacted HQ RA at Wilton, which was co-ordinating the Artillery units involved, pointing out that in eight weeks’ time I should be commanding 148 Battery and suggesting if they needed more specialist manpower (as they surely did) that they should involve me. The desk officer accepted my argument and said that he would take a look and call me back. I put the phone down and the seriousness of what I had done began to dawn on me. That afternoon I received his call and nervously listened to his message. He was grateful for my volunteering and had found a place for me in the Naval Gunfire Support Order of Battle. Details were ‘secret’ so could not be discussed on the phone, but the HQ would shortly receive a letter revealing all.

  Two days later a letter arrived containing the composition and role of each of the Artillery units deploying on Operation Corporate. I read carefully through looking for the part that affected me. It came in a few lines close to the end.

  Belize/Gibraltar Contingency Force. – 1 x NGS Party (1x officer 23 Arty Bde, 4 x other ranks 148 Bty Rear Party).

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. While Britain was involved in a war 8,000 miles away the Spanish had used the opportunity to raise the arguments again about the rights to Gibraltar while the Guatemalans had similarly renewed speculation about infiltration into Belize. I was part of the force stood by to sort those problems out, so while the men of 148 Battery were involved with derring-do in the South Atlantic I sat in an office in Chester, with a bag packed with tropical combat kit, poised and ready to go to the opposite side of the world. ‘Never volunteer’ is a military maxim that I never quite grasped.

  Chapter 30

  Back to the Weeds

  I packed my shiny-arsed trousers away just as soon as I could escape from Chester and rushed down to Poole to begin my next job with 148 Battery. In Poole we were given an excellent quarter just outside the camp gate, a stone’s throw from the sea, and began probably the best three years of our (note that pronoun again) military life.

  It was my great good fortune to take over 148 Battery on the high that followed their return from the Falklands where they had served with courage and distinction. If the future of the Battery had ever been in question, the Falklands War had provided the ideal theatre in which to prove its true value. Many lessons had been learnt and I grasped the golden opportunity to revise, reshape and prioritise the way we did things in 148 Battery. This would have been hard to achieve on our own, but units like the SBS and SAS, with whom we had worked at times but very much at arm’s length, were suddenly happy to offer help and assistance and involve us as full participants in certain aspects of their training and operations.

  In my previous tour as a Naval Gunfire Observer we had rarely practised deploying with all of the radios and equipment that we theoretically required for operations, and Battery training exercises tended to be ‘jollies’ that involved a lot of strenuous activity in pleasant places overseas. The Falklands War had shown that we could not operate in the way we thought; in particular, the loads we expected to carry were far too heavy. Building on the Falklands lessons I prioritised our equipment needs and our operating methods then let my imagination loose and wrote a series of Battery exercises that followed realistic narratives appropriate to our role, with tasks that were both militarily and physically challenging and, of course, in pleasant places overseas. I questioned some of the training we had traditionally done. For example, our parachute training was very sterile and invariably involved no more than jumping on to established drop zones (DZs) in the UK which kept us ‘in date’ and qualified for specialist
Para pay, but did not practise the associated drills that we would need on operations. On landing we bundled our ’chutes and either prepared for another drop or just got on the bus to go home. Almost all of my exercises began with a parachute jump and movement into the exercise from the DZ. Abseiling 200 feet from a helicopter was good fun, but I questioned why we needed to do it if we could either land in the aircraft or jump from it as it hovered four feet above soft ground? The only reason that I could think for abseiling from a helicopter was when trees or scrub prevented the chopper from landing, so on one exercise we abseiled the Battery out of helicopters through the tops of trees in a dense French forest. None of us had done it before and there were a number of wide-eyed stares, but even among the old ‘been there, seen it, done it’ sweats of 148 Battery it’s still talked about today – so probably is my sanity.

  The main role of 3 Commando Brigade at that time was the defence of the Northern flanks of NATO; in particular this involved an annual deployment to Norway for three months. The huge NATO exercise which concluded this deployment each year was one of the most physically demanding that we ever did. Our five-man Observation Teams would deploy five days ahead of the main landing into isolated positions in the snowy terrain, usually by helicopter. They would observe the ‘enemy’ and report by High Frequency radio direct to the UK. They would move on skis and live in tents, often in the most extreme weather conditions. Although there was always an evacuation plan in the event of a real casualty, safety margins were very slim indeed and it is a credit to the fitness and professionalism of those involved that there were never any mishaps. The exercises were always impressive as complex military plans were smoothly and efficiently executed, often because key personnel had done similar things for real in the Falklands. Naval helicopters were faultless, regularly flying over difficult snow-covered terrain in darkness using only night-vision goggles.

  It wasn’t just the Naval Gunfire Observer (NGFO) teams at the sharp end who achieved the remarkable; the support staff were also very special. I was running Battery winter training deep in the Romsdal Mountains of Norway. The teams were on skis but my Command Post was in a Volvo BV202 over-snow vehicle, with a second BV as exercise safety cover. When we moved location overnight one of the BVs had chugged and spluttered, and as the detachment set up and camouflaged the vehicles, L/Cpl Marty Cox, one of our REME vehicle mechanics, who had been driving, got under the bonnet to see what the problem was.

  He approached WOll (BSM) George Malcolm and me. ‘The head gasket’s blown,’ he said, with a look that suggested he knew the solution but was not going to provide it. It would be impossible to get a recovery vehicle out to the wild area that we were in and abandoning the BV until the spring melt was obviously unthinkable.

  George Malcolm had no doubt about the solution, looked him in the eye and said, ‘OK, if you give Des a list of the parts you need, he’ll radio back to camp and they can send them out for you.’ The unspoken words were, ‘… and you can change the head gasket out here in the bitter cold.’

  We were so far out that it took a couple of hours for a REME BV to bring the parts to us. In the meantime George had organised things so that I could continue to run the exercise in the CP with two signallers and the rest of the team could focus on helping L/Cpl Cox strip the engine. Fortunately it was a still, clear day, but it was bitterly cold, about minus ten degrees. In extreme cold fingers immediately freeze to metal so Cox had to do the job in light ‘contact gloves’. Dropping tools or components in the snow was a serious possibility, so two people helped him, while others kept up a non-stop supply of compo soup and drinking chocolate.

  Job done, the BV coughed into life and we looked at L/Cpl Cox in admiration. I don’t know how clean the surfaces had been or if tolerances were accurate, but it got us back to camp which was the first priority. Marty Cox changing a head gasket at minus ten is firmly embedded in Battery folklore and there can be few VMs who can boast the same.

  For my party from 148 Battery the NATO winter exercise ‘Teamwork 1984’ began in the north-west of Scotland, where for five days we directed live NGS from the NATO ships and live fighter-ground attack from NATO Air Forces, that made up the Task Force, at the range at Cape Wrath. We then embarked by helicopter on to the USS Nassau, a massive flat-topped carrier with more than three thousand US Marines and sailors on board. USS Nassau carried fixed-wing aircraft and various types of helicopters as well as having a dock from which landing craft could be launched, a 300-bed hospital and three operating theatres. The NATO Task Force sailed for three days to Northern Norway where we joined with the UK/Netherlands Amphibious Force and conducted a massive amphibious landing. We then transferred to HMS Fearless and onwards ashore to join HQ 3 Commando Brigade for five days of Arctic Warfare exercises, after which we got on an RAF Hercules and returned to UK. Now, that was a really good exercise!

  Commanding 148 Battery was hugely rewarding in a professional sense and living alongside the Royal Marines was as much fun as it had always been. I have always enjoyed military customs and traditions, especially around Christmas. One in particular is the annual visit of the Senior NCOs to the Officers’ Mess. It always begins very correctly and politely, but as it wears on it invariably becomes a cracking good back-slapping booze-up.

  Christmas 1982 was typical and events were proceeding in the established way. At midday the CO of Royal Marines Poole had welcomed the RSM at the door of the Officers’ Mess and the Battery Officers and I had set about filling BSM George Malcolm and our Sergeants full of beer. By 4.30 things were moving nicely until I made the mistake of so many married men on those occasions: I rang home.

  After a busy day with two children aged under three, Barbara was preparing tea. ‘… Just to let you know I’ll be home a bit late as it’s Sgts to the officers’ today,’ I said. I don’t know if it was my slurred speech or the sound of laughter and clinking of glasses in the background that gave the game away, but she said, ‘I don’t want the children to see you in that state, if you’ve been drinking.’ Since the children went to bed at 6.45 I assumed that I could stay out a bit longer. What else could she have meant?

  I bid the seniors a noisy farewell and got home a little after seven. From the depths of the sitting room came the noisy clickety-clack of knitting needles. I put my head round the door with a breezy ‘Hello’. Without moving her gaze from the TV she said, ‘You’re late. Your dinner’s in the bin.’ I went out to the kitchen and sure enough a once pleasant meal, now dried up, was among the rubbish along with a broken plate. I grabbed my coat and went back to the sitting room where the clickety-clack had intensified and was becoming deafening. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out to get a Chinese.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid. You can’t drive in that state.’

  ‘No, no. I’m going on my bike,’ I said, trying not to make it sound like a change of plan, and went outside to find the trusty machine. I pedalled off happily through the darkened streets of Hamworthy and quickly found the Chinese restaurant and ordered my take-away. I hung the carrier bag over the drop handlebars of my ‘old but sporty’ road bike and pedalled off. I felt pretty good, purring along nicely, so I got down over the handlebars and decided to give it a bit of ginger. I was revelling in the exhilaration when it happened. I looked up and in that second hit the back of a parked VW campervan. I went over the handlebars, my face smashed into the rear of the vehicle and my top lip hit something sharp.

  I lay in a heap on the ground trying to gather my senses. I shook my head and looked up at the campervan that I had hit as the military training kicked in. Hit a campervan? It might be damaged. I’m in trouble, run for it! I jumped on the bike only to discover that not only was the front wheel now oval and twisted, but the forks were also badly bent.

  I threw the bike over my shoulder and sort of limp-hobbled-ran round the corner where I stopped and assessed the situation.

  First priority. Chinese meal – OK.

  Head and neck moving – OK.r />
  Arms and legs moving – OK.

  Something was dripping through my post-Beatles, post Northern Ireland moustache. My top lip was bleeding from the collision with the catch on the rear door of the campervan, but I was safe and feeling no pain, so I hobbled back to the house and left the bike by the dustbin.

  The clickety-clack had now reached a thunderous roar. I tipped the Chinese meal on to a plate and came into the sitting room. Dishevelled, scuffed and dirty, I tried to adopt a casual air as I ate the meal in silence, but blood kept trickling down my lip into my mouth. I put my plate down and went out to find a mirror and saw that a large deep cut, on the left side below my nose, was bleeding heavily.

  I went back to the sitting room and tried to shout above the clickety-clack. ‘Erm… I think I’ve cut my face. Can you have a look?’

  Without averting her eyes from the TV or dropping a stitch, she said, ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘No, really, can you have a look?’

  ‘Good grief! That needs looking at properly. I suppose I’ll have to take you to the Med Centre in camp.’ She threw the knitting into the corner, with a sigh of self-righteous exasperation, phoned the neighbour to come and sit for the children and went out to the car. I followed sheepishly.

  The door of the Medical Centre was opened by the duty Medical Assistant (MA), who, it being Christmas, happened to be the most junior member of the medical team. Barbara explained that I had had come off my bike and cut my lip. The MA sat me down and took a look. ‘I think that needs stitching, sir.’

  He collected the necessary equipment and dabbed the wound with a stinging antiseptic. Then came the bombshell. ‘Right, sir, just a few stitches. I don’t think you’ll need a local anaesthetic the way you are. Will you?’