PART ONE
CONFESSIONS OF A ROYAL MARINE COMMANDO
A Young Man’s Mischievous Journey Into UK’s Finest
David Stanley
A Sense of
Place Publishing
Copyright 2012
CHAPTER ONE
THE SCHOOL YARD
A lifetime of adventure, more full of comedy than
tragedy, began in the most despised quarter of my childhood – the schoolyard at Hinchingbrooke Comprehensive School in Huntingdon, Cambridge, England.
While the name Cambridge evokes images of elite scholars wandering between the sandstone courtyards of one of the world’s most famous and beautiful universities; not all of Cambridgeshire echoes to the “jolly ho’s” of the rowing set.
I grew up in the small village of Leighton Bromswold on the
outskirts of Huntingdon.
We might have been only 30 miles from the historic riches of Cambridge University. But no elegant over-paid under-worked scholars could be seen searching our streets for fashionable restaurants in which to while away the afternoon.
Thirty years ago Leighton Bromswold consisted of nothing but a string of drab houses and had no lighting to illuminate its dreary asphalt streets.
There were no facilities beyond the village’s pub, The Green Man, the center of virtually all social activity.
The coach house turned pub was several hundred years old and believed to be haunted.
With no other social outlets, its ghosts did little to deter the hard drinking community of Leighton Bromswold and its surrounds.
Hinchingbrooke Comprehensive was nine miles from my home and the scene of much of my early torment.
I was bullied from day one of entering secondary school.
Hinchingbrooke was a tough place, filled with welfare kids
from the surrounding housing estates.
Oxmoor estate, in particular, was a London over-spill which bred some of the meanest boys.
They picked on me from day one for one simple reason: I was short and they could get away with it. In any fight they always won.
Despite the beauty of some of the area’s farms and rural setting, this was not reflected in the demographic makeup of the school.
The era’s social workers had used the tried and true bureaucratic practice of dumping dysfunctional families and the intractable, nasty, thieving, thuggish offspring they so often produce in a remote location such as Leighton Bromswold, out of sight and therefore away from the wider public’s indignation.
The bullying would begin at the bus stop near my home each morning and continued on the bus and into the Hinchingbrooke schoolyard.
The social workers had done me no favors by dumping these tough little estate bastards into what was otherwise a genial rural community. Far from being out of
my mind, they were in my face.
I was physically amongst the smallest in my class, skinny, short and easily bullied.
I had the fighting ability of many a young boy brought up in tough circumstances, but my size made certain I lost almost all the fights I was involved in.
My father had died the year before I joined the school and was not there to protect or advise me.
His death escalated the bullying and teasing.
I was repeatedly taunted, called “a bastard” because I no longer had a father.
Like any son, I missed his guiding hand. The teasing over his absence made everything worse.
After the devastation of my father’s prolonged death from cancer and the funeral two years previously, money was short.
All our lives my father’s work on one of the neighboring farms not only brought in enough for us to live comfortably, but came with free housing and other benefits.
My mother’s tears at the funeral were the only tears I ever saw her shed.
After my father’s death I became the sole child of a single mother with a stern outward manner. This was a time when people were born and bred tough, long before public displays of affection achieved fashionability.
My mother was as tough as everybody else in the area.
Born and bred in this depressed little corner of England with the misleadingly romantic name of Leighton Bromswold, the fearsome nature of her
personality and the merciless bark of her voice made sure nobody messed with my mum, never ever.
She knew I was being bullied mercilessly at school but never made any comment.
That was until finally, one morning, when I was 13-years-old, having watched me arrive home bruised, scratched and upset week after week, mum determined to solve the bullying issue once and for all.
For all her harsh demeanor and undemonstrative manner, she wasn’t going to see her sole offspring suffer at anybody’s hands.
The torn school uniforms, which she had to repair or replace at a time when we were hard-up probably incensed her more than the fact I had become a punching bag for the area’s local louts.
Of course there is nothing more embarrassing than a parent interfering in your schoolyard battles, that arena which looms so large in every child’s imagination.
As I trailed after her on the way to the bus stop 300 meters from our council house, all I could think of was that now, publicly humiliated by having my mother step in to protect me, a future of nothing but even worse bashings lay ahead.
None of the now routine touchy feely stuff, complaining to teachers, calling in school counselors, was for my mother.
Nor was she bothering to confide in or comfort me as she strode early that wintry morning towards the small sign
with “Bus Stop” written on it, located next to the village’s only telephone.
Right up until the early 1980s Leighton Bromswold’s possession of a telecom link to the outside world, set inside a classic British bright red cast iron booth, was the village’s only hint of modernity.
My three main tormenters, all older and bigger than me, were already at the bus stop; happy with the idea that they could
start yet another day making my life hell.
They didn’t look happy for long.
When we arrived it was just “shock and horror”, or “shock and awe” as the Americans later came to term extreme bombardment.
Mum, already dressed in her plain work clothes, lined up my three principal tormentors, brooking no opposition.
She made them stand in a row, the erratic mist of their breaths on the cold morning air displaying a rare uncertainty.
“You want to fight with my David, no problem,” she said in her angriest tone.
“But it will be one against one. You can be first, you next and you can be last,” she said, pointing to each in turn.
Mum pushed me towards the first boy and we started fighting, exchanging a few half-hearted punches before he backed quickly away.
The second one was shaking his head, he did not want to fight.
The third one ran home and was not seen for the rest of the day.
Despite my short stature I was never bullied at school again.
That day marked a small beginning to what was to become a full on revolution, the building of my self-confidence.
Having survived so much bullying, I realized for the first time in my life that I should stand up for myself, win or lose.
The bullying didn’t stop, and I was still frequently enough beaten to the ground, but from that morning on I always fought back.
I learnt to stand up for myself and fight when it is necessary to fight, to never back down on important issues.
Coincidentally, within weeks the Royal Marine Commandos recruitment
team arrived at our school.
I was particularly interested in the unarmed combat display.
My most vivid memory of that day was one of the marines joking while doing press ups.
He had a naughty smile on his face as he said: “This is what I was doing to your mums last night.”
This was the first time I realized that military men often have a good sense of humor.
Transfixed by their display in the school grounds, on the spot I was convinced to join.
That same night I told my mother I was going to become a Marine.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said in her usual
tough-as-nails manner, turning her back on me and concentrating on the stove as she made the beans on toast which was our regular, one could say inevitable, evening meal.
But whatever she said, that was the day when I found my dream; and nothing whatever was going to deter me.
For a 17-year old boy from a rural English village a career as a Commando held all the potential thrills that life could possibly hold.
I began to research the Marines in the school library and found that
the Commando Brigade of Her Majesty's Royal Marines was a core
component of the Britain’s Rapid Deployment Force, highly trained and
capable of operating independently. They were regarded as the elite of the elite, amongst the best soldiers in the world.
Joining the Commandos guaranteed
that you would see action; unlike much of the rest of the British military.
Joining the military did not necessarily mean that you would see action, despite the Suez, Irish and Falklands conflicts.
Since the end of the Second World War many aspiring soldiers had been caught spending their days doing utterly mundane duties - such as guard duty on the decaying barracks Britain’s withering military establishment.
In contrast the Royal Marine Commandos specialize in amphibious, mountain, jungle and Arctic warfare and are often sent to the world’s most dangerous places.
Their members are conditioned to withstand freezing cold and stifling heat, to operate in environments ranging
from harsh deserts and high altitudes to tropical swamps. At the same time they are expected to be smart enough to use modern propaganda techniques to win the hearts of minds of innocent civilians caught up in conflicts.
The Commandos, revered by anyone with an interest in the military, pride themselves on their capacity to deploy at a moment’s notice and are always amongst the first to be sent into action.
The usefulness of the Commandos to successive governments of the United Kingdom is without peer. Since their founding in 1664 they have been granted dozens of military honors.
Was there any other career one could possibly want? Not as far as I was concerned.
CHAPTER TWO
THE ADVENTURE BEGINS
I was 17, and being a randy
little sod, no longer a virgin. I managed to achieve this breakthrough the year before, at 16, at the bottom of a children’s slippery dip slide next to a graveyard in the neighboring village of Spaldwick.
This momentous event, the beginning of a lifelong addiction to the charms and allures of the opposite sex, occurred during the final hour of Spaldwick’s monthly disco.
The location was chosen because I was fearful of my friends catching me in the act.
Only the week before, on a trip to Felixstowe Beach, we had discovered one of my friends having sex on what he and his chosen one no doubt thought was a quiet, dark, private corner in which to exercise their mutual lust.
That previous Saturday night, after the pubs had closed, a group of us had grabbed a crate of beer and headed off to the beach for what we thought would we be a riotous drinking session where we could get helplessly, hopelessly drunk away from prying adult eyes or disapproving parents.
To our surprise and instance hysterics we spotted, right at the end of the beach, our mate Pete’s lily white bum pumping like a motor-cycle piston at full throttle, 12,000 revs per minute.
The blissful couple was completely unaware of our presence until we grabbed hold of Pete’s feet. His conquest of the evening literally held on to him with her legs wrapped around his backside. We dragged them both down the pebbled beach, the sand piling up through their private parts; their moment of passion entirely ruined.
Pete shouted: “You bastards. I’ve barely started.”
We were crying with laughter as we ran off down the beach into the night, leaving their lust deflated and ourselves in hysterics.
Later, crammed into one of those ubiquitous Volkswagen campervans of
the era, we ribbed Pete about the sand in his pants and what a top girl he had picked, how she had held on like a rodeo rider.
I didn’t want any such misadventure to scar the determined efforts to lose my own virginity, the thoughts of which, like most adolescent boys, had been preoccupying most of my waking hours.
The Spaldwick dance, catering to under-21s, was a focus for every teenager from the villages surrounding Leighton Bromswold.
Nothing but a bout of cholera would have kept me from taking advantage of the opportunity it provided to ogle, even meet, some of the local girls.
And as was my nature, I was regularly in trouble for fighting just about anyone there, particularly, it seemed, bikers twice my size.
I was born with a natural ability to offend pretenders, or anyone up themselves, and in the steamy hormone drenched atmosphere of the Spaldwick Dance Hall my mouth was always getting me into trouble.
This monthly event evolved before long into a lengthy dispute with the local bikers gang, who were all trying to look like Hells Angels and decorated themselves with badges and tattoos to prove they were into Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Judas Priest and other heavy metal bands of the day.
They were just “wannabees”, with their sleeveless jean jackets over the top of their leathers making them look more like idiots
than the tough guys on bikes they thought they were.
For reasons I no longer recall, I liked to take the fuses out of the side panels of their bikes, making their lights unworkable.
When they stumbled out drunk into the car park at the end of the night, arm in arm with the girl of their choice, they found themselves dealing with the fact their bikes no longer had head or tail lights. The immediate consequence was they no
ability to go somewhere quiet for the quick nookie they had planned before dropping the girl home to her parents.
The police were never far away and driving without lights was not an option.
The girls, reeking of cheap perfume, marauding tarts to the last, were forced to stand around watching their chosen hunk of the evening fumbling stupidly in the dark, trying to get his bike going.
Their manhood at stake, the strutting of the bikers that had been so much on display as they exited the dance hall with a girl on their arm and the certainty not just of the physical pleasure but the social status of “getting a root” for the night soon turned to anger when they realized someone had deliberately cut their lights.
As every second passed their “hunk” appeared less desirable as his frustration grew. The pouts on the girls faces grew longer, making them look more like their mothers than the pretty young things they had so recently appeared to be, both parties being intoxicated by alcohol and hormones.
The teenage village girls were a million miles from the sophisticated young things of London’s Chelsea.
They were overly made-up, their permed hair cemented into place with hairspray. And in the inimitable style of the early 1980s they were badly dressed with white shoes and matching, ever present, cheap white handbags.
These same bags, dirty from the beer stained dance floor, had spent much of the evening piled in the centre of different groups of girls, who would dance around them like witches at a coven, perhaps hoping to summon up the man of their dreams; or at least one of the pimply lads swilling beer with his mates at the other
end of the hall.
They may have contained nothing but cheap lipstick and the odd condom, but to these girls those bags were the centre of their being, their heart and soul, a symbol that they too were a fashionable part of a bigger world.
They had no idea that far from providing them with international model status, they marked them out as permanent members of the welfare estates and working class families from whence they came and amidst which they would die.
Their expressions grew sourer by the second as the expected moment of passion, sometimes in reality nothing much more than a knee trembler in a back alley, ebbed away. At least the stain on their dress proved that somebody cared, somebody thought them attractive.
They were desperate days; at least on the questions of love and sex.
This went on for months until finally the bikers caught me in action.
Surrounded by some of the toughest and biggest bikers in the county it looked very much like my number was up.
The fighting began.
One of them had me by the collar while the others surrounded me, preparing to beat the life out of me.
Luckily there was another gang of lads I knew through school who decided to take my side - just to even up the odds and because they didn’t like the bikers any more than I did.
There was a punch-up which lasted only a few minutes before the bikers realized they were outnumbered and beat a humiliating retreat.
I was set for a beating and would no doubt have been hospitalized if they had not stepped in.
My new found friends saved my ass and some of them have remained lifelong friends. We still laugh about those melees after the Spaldwick dance.
While the youngest and smallest, for whatever reason, perhaps just the fact that I had the balls to mess with the bikers’ lights and make such a fool of them, I was adopted by this group as one of their own.
From that point on life got much better. I now had the feeling of belonging to a cool gang, not being a lonely, skinny victim. They were my first group of friends.
CONFESSIONS OF A ROYAL MARINE COMMANDO (part one) Page 1