All things considered, this was not a bad armoury with which to equip an eighteen-year-old setting out to do battle with the world.
* Now Bedford High School for Girls.
* He committed suicide in 1979.
* While the events described in the following passage are accurate as far as I can remember them, I have completely altered all personal and professional details, to disguise the identity of the person involved.
CHAPTER 4
The Royal Marines and Commando Training
THE DATE WAS 5 MAY 1959. Out of the train window I could see the mudflats of the Exe estuary. The tide was out, and the great river, a spangled blue ribbon shining in the May sun, threaded its way through brown mudbanks and haphazard battalions of tufted salt grass. Here and there stout little boats painted in primary colours bobbed to their moorings, and some busy oystercatchers were probing for shellfish in the ooze, like tiny nodding donkeys in an oilfield. South, across the river, were verdant fields, small whitewashed cottages, a huddled fishing village and the red earth of the Devon countryside rising to a wooded ridge on the skyline. There is just a hint of Dartmoor here in the shape of the land, and the light has that soft luminescence which only seems to occur close to the sea on Britain’s south-western peninsula. It was a strange landscape to me then, but over the next few years this vista of intermingled sea and land would become so familiar that I could reconstruct it in my mind’s eye, almost tree by tree and field by field, for the rest of my life.
Across the carriage from me was a young man whom I had been furtively watching, as he had been furtively watching me. I was sure that six weeks earlier he, like me, had received the fat envelope portentously marked ‘The Lords of the Admiralty’. It contained a magnificent scroll saying that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, having complete confidence in me, her trusty and well-beloved subject, was conferring on me the rank and status of a probationary Second Lieutenant in the Royal Marines, a letter instructing me to catch this train to Exton on this day, a travel warrant for my ticket and some rather intimidating instructions as to what I should bring with me and how I should dress. I was to be smart, wear a jacket and tie and a hat. My travelling companion opposite me was indeed wearing a hat – a very smart brown trilby. My own hat was stuffed in my suitcase, as I hate hats. It was a most inappropriate green felt affair, with a slightly rakish Robin Hood air to it, which I had recently purchased and would, in the coming months, try to wear as little as possible. He was looking very smart in a new sports jacket, cavalry twill trousers and sparkling shoes. I was wearing a duffle coat and looking pretty scruffy with a jacket that had definitely seen better days (my father had lent it to me), a rather crumpled shirt I had washed myself and very down-at-heel suede shoes. He was looking every inch the young Royal Marine officer. I was feeling very inadequate.
But then, apart from a brief return home to Ireland to see my parents, the last two months since I left Bedford had been spent in London, where I had been doing odd jobs and having a whale of a time. Mostly I had been interior decorating for a friend, rather older than me, who had just bought a couple of run-down houses in Ealing. He would go on to make a million and end in jail. I had also earned a little money washing up in Joe Lyons Corner Houses, and spent it all very fast with old Bedford friends of both sexes. All that was now being left further and further behind me with every clack of the rails under our little train rattling along the bank of the Exe estuary.
Sure enough, when the train arrived in Exton, my travelling companion and I got out together. When we did our introductions later in the day, I discovered he was called Roger Munton. He would be best man at my wedding, all but get engaged to my wife’s cousin, and then be tragically killed in a car crash. But for the moment we found ourselves on the narrow platform along with eight other behatted young men being shouted at by a burly man who, we would discover, was our drill instructor, the inimitable Colour Sergeant Bert Shoesmith. He was giving us orders and referring to us as ‘young gentlemen’, though in a voice that told us he definitely didn’t mean it. He commanded us to pick up our kit and ‘embus’ in some nearby three-ton military trucks. Beside him, in quiet but wordless command, was an incredibly smart, rather suave officer with black, slightly oiled hair, a cane under his arm and a Sam Browne belt with brass buckles so shiny that the sun, reflecting off them, seemed to lose none of its intensity. We were to discover that this was Lt Graham Mackie, our course officer.
We were ‘marched’ (if such a term is applicable to a ragged group of young men without the slightest idea of how to march) to the waiting truck, driven up the hill and through the gates of ITCRM (Infantry Training Centre Royal Marines), which was to be our home for the next two years. Today CTCRM (Commando has replaced Infantry) consists of a shining complex of multi-storey buildings and modern facilities; then it was just a collection of old World War Two wooden huts. Here, and on nearby Woodbury Common and Dartmoor, young commandos had trained during the war, and their ghosts were everywhere, including in initials carved in the woodwork of the huts and on the trees of the little wood inside the camp that was used for rope work, ‘death slides’ and instruction on how to climb rope nets on the side of a ship.
We were given a short briefing and then shown to our ‘cabins’ (ITCRM, Lympstone was very solidly on terra firma, but, the Royal Marines being part of the Navy, everything was in naval terminology – so the room you slept in was your ‘cabin’, and an evening having fun off camp was known as a ‘run ashore’.) Each cabin housed two of us. We were arranged alphabetically. In the next-door cabin to me was Tim Courtenay, soon to become one of my best friends; I would marry his cousin in three years’ time. I shared my cabin with Richard Armstead, who married my wife’s sister a few years later.
My nine fellow trainee Second Lieutenants were:
Richard Armstead (retired as a Captain, died 2001; son joined the Royal Marines);
Jim Bartlett (retired as a Captain);
Tim Courtenay (retired as a Major and subsequently made a Lieutenant Colonel);
Peter Clough (retired as a Colonel);
Angus Gordon (transferred to the Royal Navy as a pilot and retired as a Lieutenant Commander);
Andy Moreland (retired as a Major; son joined the Royal Marines);
Roger Munton (killed 1962);
Ron Wheeler (retired as a Captain, one-time Conservative County Councillor in Devon); and
Rupert van der Horst (retired as a Brigadier after 33 years service; his son followed him into the Royal Marines and, as a much loved and respected commander of the SBS, was tragically killed in a diving accident).
Together we made up Young Officer Batch No. 19, known as YO19, or simply ‘The Batch’ for short. We were one of two ‘batches’ of young officers who joined the Royal Marines (known internally as ‘The Corps’) in 1959; YO20 joined six months after us.
At this stage we were all strangers. But by the end of the two-and-a-half years’ training that lay ahead, we would know every detail of each other. We would know which of us would need help to cover the last few miles of a thirty-mile, seven-hour march in full kit across Dartmoor; whose mental processes were not to be trusted after three nights on the march without sleep; who would get drunk first and who would be sick first, and how many pints of beer it would take. We would know whose visio-spatial sense was so bad that, whenever he was leading us, one of the others had to be always at his shoulder to check his map-reading; we could spot early signs of bad temper in each other, even before we recognised them in ourselves; we would know who could do brilliantly at everything, but somehow could not command men; whose feet smelled worst in a wet trench, and who not to sleep close to after they had been eating beans; who snored so loudly that a would-be enemy could hear him from hundreds of yards away; we would even know the pattern of each others’ bowel movements after a week in a bivouac on ‘compo’*. In short, we would come to know each other probably more intimately than any other living human being (including parents and partners) ev
er would.
Our training began in earnest the following day. We were harried from morning to night, and the pace was frenetic. Physical training and runs were intermingled with classroom work (the history of the Royal Marines, military history, the principles of tactics, the theories of warfare, world affairs and much else). There were exercises, and instructions on field- and woodcraft, including the techniques of living out in the wild. There were tests all the time, including changing clothing quickly. There were inspections of kit at unannounced times. There was weapons training – lots of weapons training – with the whole range of weapons used by the Royal Marines at the time, from light machine-guns to rocket-launchers. But, above all, there was drill … and drill and more drill.
We were taught first how to clean our kit, and spent long hours deep into the night trying to make rough, service-issue leather parade boots and the equally dull officers’ Sam Browne belts shine with a spit-and-polish sparkle you could see your face in. I was never very good at parades, being rather ungainly in gait, and my uniform seemed to act as a magnet for gathering pieces of fluff and general scruffiness out of nowhere. I have a good voice, however, and therefore found commanding a parade rather better than being under command on one. This was not always true, though. On one occasion, when I was supposed to be in charge, I recall haplessly watching my colleagues marching off to the farthest reaches of Lympstone parade ground while my mind froze, unable to remember the command to turn them round. This caused the ever-present Bert Shoesmith to bawl in my ear, ‘Come along, young sir. Say something – even if it’s only goodbye!’
Drill sergeants ruled our lives in those days, and they had an inexhaustible store of choice phrases. The only difference between the vocabulary they used on the Marine recruits, who trained alongside us, and on us officers was that with us the word ‘Sir’ was included somewhere, no matter how eviscerating the language which surrounded it. A favourite of one of our instructors – usually shouted with his tonsils about an inch from one’s nose – was, ‘You, sir, are enough to make bishops bag off* and barmaids eat their young.’
We Officers used to be paraded alongside the Marine recruit squad every Sunday for church parade, which took place outside the little brick World War Two army hut that served as ITCRM’s church at the time. As officers, it was assumed that we would know how to behave in church. No such presumption was, however, made about the ordinary Marines alongside us; they therefore needed a briefing from a drill sergeant. A legendary story has it that one of these briefings went as follows:
RIGHT! In a minute you will file to the right in a horderly fashion into the church and you will all sit dahn. The next thing wot will ’appen is the Padre will walk in. You will all stand up. Then you will all sit dahn again. The next thing wot will ’appen is the Padre will say ‘Let us … ’. ‘Let us’ is the cautionary word of command; you do not move a MUSCLE. But when ’e says ‘Pray’, get down on yer knees and pray like FUCK.
A similar legend tells of a Lympstone Drill Sergeant who, spotting that one of his new recruits had not taken off his beret in church, bawled at the unfortunate:
TAKE YER ’AT ORF IN THE ’OUSE OF THE LORD – C**T!
On one occasion, during an inspection of kit, I was found to have squirrelled away more than the regulation three bits of lavatory paper we were allowed to carry in our kit. The Drill Instructor was clear:
Only three bits of shit ’ouse paper, young sir. That’s all your arse’ole needs! One up, one down and one to polish!
Shortly after we joined, one of my colleagues made the mistake of attempting to try and grow a moustache. After three weeks the wretched thing was barely visible, but Shoesmith spotted it and, pointing at the moth-eaten growth with his drill sergeant’s cane from three yards away, bawled, so that the whole parade could hear:
And what do you think this is, young sir? Yer eyebrows come down for a drink?
We also played a lot of sport, especially rugby. It was at Lympstone that I played alongside another of the great rugby players of my generation, Richard Sharp, the famous fly-half who was capped for England fourteen times and captained his country in their triumphant Five Nations victory in 1963. He was three years my senior and had joined up as an ordinary Marine in one of the last National Service intakes before conscription was abolished. He was also an exceedingly decent and modest man. The story goes that his rugby playing talents were spotted by an alert officer who put him in the Unit third team, where, of course, he excelled. Then, in the Unit second team, he excelled again. Finally, he was selected for the Unit first team. When told of this exceptional honour and given the date of the match, he said, as politely as possible, that he could not attend because of a previous engagement. His Troop Officer ordered him to cancel the engagement, which Marine Sharp, again respectfully, declined to do. ‘Why not, Marine Sharp?’ came the disbelieving and angry response. ‘Do you not realise what a great honour it is to be chosen to play for the Unit? What on earth are you doing that can be more important than that?’ ‘Playing for the Barbarians at Twickenham, Sir. Sorry, Sir,’ was Sharp’s reply.
We spent much of our time out in the field on exercises, living rough. One exercise involved clandestinely moving across Woodbury Common at night to establish a new defensive position and digging in. This meant digging fire trenches, which were then camouflaged before first light. In these we spent the next three days, rain and shine, under simulated attack. Digging a five-foot-deep trench in the flinty soil of this outcrop of Dartmoor at night was one of the most laborious and miserable things I can remember from this period. By dawn the following day none of us had got deep enough to provide proper shelter, so the trenches had to be completed the following night, with horribly blistered hands. On the first morning our position was ‘probed’ by our simulated enemy who sent in small groups to try to identify our positions. We each took turns at being in charge, which meant, among other things, giving the order to fire when under attack. The standard fire order goes: ‘Number four section, enemy to your front, four hundred yards – rapid – FIRE!’ As luck would have it, my colleague in charge at the time (he turned out to be a most gifted soldier and commander) had a pronounced stammer. His fire order became a classic, long remembered and retold afterwards. He ordered us to ‘stand to’ in our trenches and then, when the enemy was clearly visible in the dawn light and within range, he gave his fire order: ‘Number f-f-f-four section, enemy to your f-f-front, f-f-four hundred yards – F-F-F-FUCK it they’ve gone!’
On another exercise we were camped under makeshift winter bivouacs of sod walls for warmth with our groundsheets serving as a rudimentary roof, doing weapon training at Willsworthy Camp on Dartmoor. We rather enjoyed this camp because, although the buildings were Second World War, they were warm and mostly dry. The camp also had one of those latrine systems which consists of a series of cubicles (ten I seem to remember), each positioned over a trough with water flowing in at one end and carrying the detritus down the trough to a drain leading to a septic tank at the other. The flow in the trench was about that of a lazy trout stream, which nicely facilitated a practice we called Drake’s Fireships. To play this you had to be upstream of your colleagues as they went about their morning business. You then gathered a large, loose ball of service-issue lavatory paper, set it alight and launched it towards an unsuspecting downstream defecator, much as the great Admiral launched his fireships against the Spanish Armada at anchor off Gravelines. If you got it right, and all ten downstream traps were occupied, the squeals of pain and rage issuing seriatim from each one gave a sort of rippling xylophone effect that was most satisfactory. Naturally, there was always early-morning competition for the most upstream traps.
On this occasion, however, there was none of that. Although we were quite close to the camp, we were banned from its facilities and had to make do with what we could construct or dig on Dartmoor’s unforgiving hillsides. No sooner had we built our pathetic little sod bivouacs, than the skies opened and it poured …
and poured … and poured. We spent three miserable days living and sleeping in a sea of mud, and then the exercise was abandoned – not because of our discomfort but because we were needed to join the rest of ITCRM, which had turned out to the last man to help Devon farmers and families, saving lives, property and stock in one of the worst floods in the county’s history.
In one exercise, towards the end of this phase of our training, we were dropped on Exmoor and had to make an approach march over two nights, lying up in woods during the day, to a point just short of RAF Chivenor near Barnstaple on the north Devon coast, on which we were tasked to mount a night-time commando attack. On the third night we carried out our reconnaissance and on the following night our assault, which aimed to plant dummy bombs on their aircraft. The assault did not succeed, as the RAF Regiment guarding the airfield had been warned in advance. We were forced to pull back and then had to make our way through ‘enemy-held’ north Devon, using escape and evasion techniques, to a safe pick-up point in ‘friendly’ territory on the other side of Exmoor. We split into pairs, the better to evade the enemy. I was with my friend Tim Courtenay and it was my job to lead us across Exmoor in the dark. I made the fatal mistake of disbelieving my compass and attempted instead to find our direction by reading the land and trying to compare what I could see with what I thought I should see from the map. The night was very dark, and we got caught in some bogs (which, uniquely on Exmoor and Dartmoor, seem to occur more often on the tops of hills than on the low ground at the bottom of them). By three in the morning it was very clear that I had hopelessly lost us, so we elected to spend the rest of the night in a shallow sheep scrape and find our bearings when the dawn came. Light found us in the upper reaches of the very beautiful Doone Valley, miles from where we should have been. By now the rendezvous time for our transport back had passed. We decided that our only course was to make our way back to Lympstone, some sixty miles to our south-east, on our own. Thanks to hitches on trains, the help of a farmer on a tractor and the driver of a small delivery lorry, we made it back by nightfall, to find that there was a full-scale search on for us. My low marks for map-reading were compensated for by the high marks we received for initiative and self-reliance.
A Fortunate Life Page 7