Ashes In the Wind (35 page)

James takes Anna and two halves of bitter over to a table in the corner. She looks surprised by this sudden detour.

‘Were you in the army? I’ve never known a soldier before.’

‘Known in the biblical sense?’

‘Known in any sense, thank you very much.’

‘Well, now you know me. “I ’listed at home for a lancer, Oh who would not sleep with the brave.” You would have fancied me in my tight overalls, green velvet waistcoat with gold froggings, red jacket trimmed with gold braid and a high green collar with a silver Irish harp. And swan-necked spurs.’

‘I’m not sure about the spurs, and besides, I fancy you now. What was it like?’

‘It was a different world.’

It was a different world that began with the casually brutal regime of the Royal Armoured Corps Training Regiment at Catterick. James arrived with sixty other bewildered National Servicemen in a cold Yorkshire autumn and was given a battledress, denims, two pairs of boots, a knife, fork and spoon, a mess tin, a shapeless black beret with a cap badge – the mailed fist of the Royal Armoured Corps, ‘That’s the wanking-spanner’ – pants, vests, scratchy shirts, braces, a tie, sheets, blankets, pillows, a steel locker and a narrow iron bed in Number Four Hut, Kandahar Lines, Salamanca Barracks, Catterick Camp, North Yorkshire. And his number, which he forgot once and, after doubling round the square twenty times, never forgot again.

‘Wakey, wakey. Hands off cocks, feet in socks,’ the hut lance corporal shouted at five in the morning, banging his night-stick on the nearest metal locker and tipping anyone still in bed after a minute out onto the floor.

The obscenities were as regimented as the drill. ‘Trooper Burke, if you don’t wake up I’m going to insert my cock into your left ear hole and fuck some sense into you.’ The living conditions, James had to admit, were no more Spartan than Winchester.

‘Right, line up, you useless articles, tallest on the left, shortest on the right, move,’ shouted Corporal Blinkhorn. ‘Now I’m going to pick out the Potential Officers. I can tell you a mile off.’

He went down the line pointing out the POs, and he didn’t make a mistake.

‘You not only talk different, you look fucking well different, and you’ve all got names like Peregrine and Humphrey and Archibald. Christ, we even had a Hilary once. Some of you have double-barrelled names, but not with me you don’t. That white shoulder flash don’t mean a fucking thing to me.’

It did mean something; it singled them out for extra abuse from the corporal, and some relatively good-natured teasing from their fellow troopers.

They spent six weeks removing the pimples from their best boots with spoons heated on candles, then building up carapaces of black boot polish that shone like ebony; they went on long route marches, they went on night exercises, they fired World War Two .303 rifles on the ranges; they learned to fold issue pyjamas into twelve-inch squares so that the stripes on the tops and the bottoms were exactly aligned – ‘No, Trooper Burke, those fucking pyjamas are not for wearing, they’re for ironing into fucking perfect squares’; they learned to make the unlit iron stove in the hut gleam with Zebo; they learned to blanco the webbing that went over their shoulders and polish their brasses with Duraglit, including the little brass hole at the bottom of the pistol holster, the hole easily forgotten, although not by the inspecting sergeant. And the shiny mailed-fist cap badge.

The wise man of The Squad was Matthew Barrington, an older trooper who had been at Cambridge for the last three years and was destined for the same regiment as James. Partly because of his age, partly because of his temperament, he escaped the worst of the abuse. ‘Your fucking BA doesn’t outrank these, Barrington,’ said Corporal Blinkhorn, pointing to his two shoulder stripes, but quickly decided that there were easier targets in The Squad.

‘When they shout at you,’ Matthew told James, ‘you need the right look. Admiring subservience, impressed but not terrified. Say “Yes, Corporal Blinkhorn” as though in six months’ time you’ll be giving him orders and you’re remembering his name for the future. Or imagine you’ve just heard a particularly brilliant performance by an operatic villain, Scarpia in
Tosca
for example, and are applauding in spite of your feeling of revulsion.’

James had never been to an opera, but he took Matthew’s advice.

Six weeks of basic training were followed by two weeks in the Potential Officers’ Wing preparing for the War Office Selection Board.

‘Pass WOSB and it’s gin and tonics in the Officers’ Mess for the next two years,’ said Matthew Barrington. ‘Fail, it’s halves of bitter in the NAAFI.’

WOSB was a three-day ordeal. James and the other POs were given railway passes and sent off to Hampshire for three days of assault courses, lecturettes, written papers, interviews and the culminating test of leadership, the Task.

‘It’s always the same – a ten-foot river and an eight-foot plank,’ said Matthew to James. ‘Just shout a lot in a masterful tone of voice, boss everyone about.’

It was an accurate forecast and sound advice. At the end of WOSB the group was lined up and an officer handed out an envelope to each candidate. When James tore his open, he saw to his relief, ‘Recommended for Officer Training’.

‘Think of this as purgatory,’ Matthew told James as they arrived at Officer Cadet School in Aldershot. ‘You’ve been in hell, you’ve escaped, and after four months here you’ll be a second lieutenant, a cornet as our regiment calls us, drinking subsidized gin and tonic in heaven.’

‘Gin and tonic is your Holy Grail,’ said James.

‘Exactly so. Why, did you join the army to travel abroad and kill people?’

‘I’m like you, a pressed man.’

James discovered an entirely new pecking order at Mons: the Royal Armoured Corps at the top of the tree, then the Gunners, then everybody else, although he noticed that it was only the ‘everybody else’ – the REME, the RASC, the Catering Corps – that did anything that could be described as useful outside the army.

‘Not all cavalry regiments are the same,’ said Matthew. ‘We’re heavy cavalry, comfortably in the middle. The light cavalry are much grander than us. In the 10th Hussars they won’t have you without a private income of at least a thousand a year.’

‘That still goes on? In 1958?’

‘You have a lot to learn.’

James did have a lot to learn, and not only about the social gradations of the British Army. By the time he left Mons he knew how a car engine worked, how to read a map, how to operate the notoriously unreliable No. 19 set – the Bravo Delta Romeo Mike of the alphabet remained with him for ever. And how to deal with a riot. In the grainy army film (‘Amritsar,’ said Matthew), they were advised to give one warning on the loud hailer, ‘Disperse or we fire,’ and then shoot the ringleader. The approach worked on the film.

The months at Mons were crowned by a final exercise, five days and nights on Salisbury Plain, after which 203 Troop, G Squadron, marched up the steps of the parade ground and duly passed out.

The Royal Irish Dragoons were in Malaya; James and Matthew flew out in an uncomfortable Viscount chartered by the RAF that stopped at every colonial and ex-colonial outpost on its roundabout route: Brindisi, Baghdad, Bahrain, Karachi, Delhi, Rangoon, Saigon, Singapore. The journey took four days, including an overnight stop in Mrs Minwallah’s Grand Hotel in Karachi. In Singapore they transferred to a train to Kuala Lumpur; Matthew was made to sign for a pistol and twenty rounds of ammunition by a harassed quartermaster lieutenant.

‘You’re in command of the train,’ said the lieutenant.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Only means something if you’re ambushed. Hasn’t happened for a long time.’

‘We are on active service,’ said Matthew to James later. ‘We’re keeping the CTs, the Communist Terrorists, at bay. Luckily we just swan about in armoured cars. It’s the infantry and the Special Forces that go into the jungle and do the hard stuff. But we’ll all get a general service medal after six months.’

‘If spared,’ said James, remembering his Ulster nanny’s caution about any reference to an uncertain future.

In Kuala Lumpur, where the regiment was based, no one had been told that the days of Empire were over. Race meetings, polo, gymkhanas, golf, cocktail parties, dances were a more sophisticated version of life in County Kildare. Without the rain. James was put in charge of Three Troop, A Squadron – two Daimler armoured cars, two Saracen armoured personnel carriers and twenty-eight men.

‘You’ve got Sergeant McLester,’ James was told by his squadron leader. ‘He won a Military Medal in the Normandy campaign. He’d be an RSM if it wasn’t for the drink; busted to private six years ago, climbed back up. You’ll not need to boss him about too much, just keep him sober.’

James took this advice, and the regimental duties in KL were not exacting. Vehicle maintenance, regular inspections, the occasional parade, left a lot of time for sport, and the regiment was sport-mad. James rode out every morning at six o’clock on a regimental polo pony, returned in time for breakfast and first parade at eight, watched while Sergeant McLester organized the day’s work. The Officers’ Mess lived up to Matthew’s Promised Land of gin and tonic, although a couple of crusty bachelor captains, one of whom was the adjutant, kept the excesses of twenty subalterns aged nineteen to twenty-four under some sort of control. Once every couple of months one of the regimental bands would beat The Retreat, an evening occasion to entertain local dignitaries with military music and marching.

‘Odd title,’ said Matthew to James. ‘Considering we’re meant to be doing the opposite. Still, it’s a chance for the ex-pats to blub when they hear “Land of Hope and Glory”.’

After a month in Kuala Lumpur, James and Three Troop were sent up-country on detachment to relieve a troop from C Squadron. Camp Gurney, named after a murdered high commissioner, was two thousand feet above sea level at the far end of the Cameron Highlands, two hundred miles and a day’s journey from Kuala Lumpur. As they drove north, the landscape changed until all around them the green waves of the tea plantations flowed over the hills and the valleys. The air became cleaner, scented.

‘It’s the tea,’ said Sergeant McLester when they stopped for a brew-up at halfway. ‘No shortage of the stuff up here.’

James’s first impression of Camp Gurney was of something out of
Beau
Geste
. Set in a clearing at the end of a rough laterite road were half a dozen wooden-walled, atap-roofed
bashas
on stilts inside a perimeter fence of barbed wire. The Union Jack flew over a small parade ground of beaten earth that doubled as a helicopter landing pad; an open hangar, the only building with a corrugated roof, housed the Daimlers, the Saracens and the REME. There were Bren-gun posts at each of the four corners of the camp. Outside the wire was a shallow moat filled with evil-looking pointed bamboo stakes at two-foot intervals. A strip fifty yards wide had been cleared of scrub and trees to separate the camp from the jungle and the road. The river was half a mile away, and in a clearing between the camp and the river were half a dozen longhouses, the home of seventy or so Malays. It was all a far cry from the comforts of Kuala Lumpur and the Selangor Club.

On James’s arrival he was briefed by the District Officer.

‘Your job is to show the flag, escort the food convoys, patrol the roads, cheer up the tea planters and the tin miners, and convince the Malays that we’re on top. Which we are, by the way. The Emergency will be over by the end of the year, I reckon. Have they given you any jungle warfare training? Speak any Malay?’

‘No and no,’ said James. ‘National Servicemen aren’t around long enough to be worth training. I was given a copy of
The Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya
and told to read that.’

‘Let’s hope that’s all you need. You’ll stick to the road; it’s the job of the infantry to look for CTs in the jungle.’

James reported each evening by wireless to his squadron leader and was otherwise left to his own devices. His troop patrolled regularly along the rough, dusty roads that criss-crossed the five hundred square miles of his territory, calling on the five big tea plantations and three tin mines that they were there to protect, and liaising with the Hampshire Regiment’s platoon when wireless communications were good enough.

He found the independence of his command both exciting and frightening. He was responsible for almost thirty men, two armoured cars and two armoured personnel carriers – half a million pounds of hardware. And although Sergeant McLester, a tough Ulsterman from County Antrim, took most of the routine decisions and organized the men and the maintenance of the vehicles, he made it clear to the troop that James was in charge.

‘Served with your father in Normandy,’ he had said to James in Kuala Lumpur. ‘Good soldier. Killed a lot of Germans with his Sten gun, so he did.’ Some of this glory had attached itself to James.

Each morning at six they moved out on patrol, the air still cool and sharp, the jungle beginning to come to life. After the initial wireless check, Three Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta all on net, at least for the moment, James looked at the lead armoured car from the turret of his Daimler, then back at the two Saracens, and felt the romance as well as the loneliness of his little command.

From the top of an armoured car the jungle looked magnificent. White-, red- and green-barked trees a hundred feet or more high supported a dense green canopy that filtered out most of the light. Their trunks were covered with vines and creepers; mosses and ferns created an aerial garden hung with bougainvillea, hibiscus and frangipani. There were innumerable butterflies, moths and dragonflies, and birds – wonderful birds, James thought, keeping a note of each new sighting in his notebook. Back from the road, and rarely seen, were elephants, tigers, wild pigs and monkeys. The villages were primitive, without electricity or running water unless they were attached to one of the large plantations. The Malays were beautiful, friendly, shy.

‘Don’t be taken in by the cheerful waves as you drive by,’ said the District Officer. ‘They are much more frightened of the CTs than they are of us, and for good reason.’