Going Commando (22 page)

The crowd had already watched an information video showing us as a new breed of commandos, steely-eyed harbingers of death who dispatched every potential obstacle of Royal Marines training with aplomb. If only they knew.

We were called forward individually to march, to smartly salute the officer commanding Commando Training Wing, then to take off our cap comforters for the last time. The officer then handed over our Holy Grail.

When it was my turn, I felt electric. With applause ringing
in my ears I officially donned the coveted green beret. I was now a commando. A quickly photographed handshake and then I returned to the troop, this time wearing the commando beret and a huge grin.

Quickly changing, as if we had stuffed up, we disappeared back to the accommodation block only to reappear a few minutes later dressed in full blues uniform. Lined up by the gymnasium, we followed the Royal Marines Band playing ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’. Never had it sounded so powerful, never had I felt so powerful. I was on Cloud Nine.

As we marched onto the parade ground, my heels dug further into the ground, my arms were straighter than ever and my head was held as high as anyone could manage. The audience of friends and family awaited us. Seamless, perfect and performed a thousand times before, we marched, firing blank shots in time with the music. We performed slick, drilled formations to the fascination of the crowd, before being inspected by the guest of honour. For once I didn’t get picked up. He must have been scared; I was now a commando.

As the parade came to an end, the anticipation grew with a knot tightening in my stomach. Finally, the adjutant shouted the most longed-for final stanza to complete our epic poem:

‘Royal Marines, to your duties, quick march!’

G
iven a long weekend prior to deploying to 40 Commando, I decided to go home to see those I hadn’t visited for quite a while. My mum and stepdad had moved yet again, but it was of no concern to me, I was visiting the mates I hadn’t seen for some time back in my old haunt of Knottingley.

In Knottingley’s neighbouring town of Pontefract, the only place to be on a Saturday night is the legendary nightclub Kikos – if you’re an underage drinker with a propensity for violence after a couple of shandies, that is. Patrons have been randomly killed there, one man by a group of stiletto-wielding women who managed to shoe him to death.

But it was a place I was familiar with, so I stumbled there with Rick, a dear old friend who was about to embark on his own adventures as a global bum. As Tetley hand-pump bitter was served perfectly all over Pontefract, and therefore tasted like heaven’s milk, I accurately calculated we’d both had more than a couple.

A poor simulation of Caribbean plastic palm trees lined the entrance of Kikos, and as we made our way over the sticky carpet to the neon-lit dance floors, the smell of Malibu and vomit hit the nostrils. But Kikos does have a certain protocol that must be followed to the letter. The club had two dance floors, one for residents of Pontefract and one for those from the surrounding towns.

Rick’s parents were now living in Pontefract, so we thought their dance floor would be okay. After all, a couple of Pontefract lasses were giving us the eye and as I was a newly-graduated commando, who could blame them?

Trying to dance as if my shoelaces were tied together, doing the ‘bootneck shuffle’, I succeeded in attracting attention. I don’t know if these lads were dance judges or just very parochial guardians of the dance floor, but within five minutes a crowd had descended on me.

I didn’t know where the fists were flying from, but I wasn’t doing particularly well at fending them off. I did note that Rick also seemed to be doing his best to get beaten up. Drunkenness is a curse in such situations. Though my inebriation dulled the pain, I knew I was getting a proper pasting.

The cavalry arrived in the shape of the bouncers who dragged the two of us out. Into the cool night air I was cast, like the contents of a dustbin, but minus my left shoe.

Or Rick’s left shoe, to be exact, as he’d lent me a pair. They were expensive and relatively new, so I was determined to reunite them. The bouncers, however, refused my request to re-enter. There I stood, covered in blood and beer with only
one shoe and a moist sock to walk home in. Obviously this didn’t meet their dress code.

Luckily, an old schoolmate, Wayne, was leaving the club as I stood there pathetically. I explained my misfortune and as he was a good egg, he happily returned inside to locate my shoe.

‘It’ll be easy to find,’ I said, wiping blood from my mouth. ‘It’s on the Pontefract dance floor with no one stood in it.’

I waited with Rick at the main entrance, but our attention turned to the noise at the fire exit. Wayne was ejected just as I’d been, but with my shoe in his hand. He’d located it in the place where I suggested, but the same gang that attacked us earlier saw his recovery operation.

Wayne was set upon, but as a rugby prodigy in his youth he managed to hold onto the shoe as if he was about to score the winning cup-final try. The bouncers had seen events unfold and turfed him out as well. He too was battered and bruised, but he had my shoe.

Drunkenness can bring with it many feelings, differing according to what we drink. Vodka, for instance, makes me immensely withdrawn; scrumpy cider makes me do very silly things but turns me into a happy drunk; a certain brand of lager makes me aggressive, no wonder it’s nicknamed ‘wife beater’ (not that I’ve ever hit my wife – she’d kick the shit out of me); hand-pump bitter makes me very emotional.

So here I was, very emotional, wanting to see Alison.

Alison had been my childhood love from the first moment I saw her in the opposing primary school team at a road safety competition final. I was only ten and she lived a whole 3kms from my house, in the neighbouring village of Ferrybridge. Just
seeing her, sat there at an opposite desk answering questions about how to approach a humpbacked bridge, I realised she was the girl of my dreams. But distance can be such a cruel mistress and I sensed I’d never see her again.

Aphrodite showed me compassion, however, and as we entered secondary school we were placed in the same class. Aphrodite is also a bitch sometimes, as she forgot to inform Alison about me. My love affair became a strictly one-way relationship. Her lust was directed towards the older boys, who could get served cigarettes without ID.

After leaving school, our chosen paths couldn’t have been more different. I was Forrest Gump and she was Jenny, a pacifist undertaking a sociology degree at Sheffield University. Yet as good mates we stayed close, writing letters often. So close, in fact, that in my drunken stupor I decided to visit her.

I was going to 40 Commando and then to Northern Ireland. I could get shot, killed, or worse, bummed by some crusty old marine. I needed to see her; it might be my last time. I knew where she lived and so trudged off against the better judgment of Rick and Wayne, who much preferred the attention of the nearby burger vendor.

Nowadays, it would probably be called stalking, but back in the good old days you could jump over someone’s fence at 2am and throw stones at their window with little comeback.

The sane thing to do would have been to knock on her front door. But I wasn’t sane. My much better idea was to go around the back, using all the commando skills of a shopping-trolley collector, fall into a stream full of bramble bushes, rip my cords to shreds, sink to my waist in stinking, algae-infested
water, lose the left shoe again, then scramble over the back fence into her garden.

Carefully picking up rocks that would make a sound but not break the window, I threw more and more until at last the upstairs curtains moved. There she was in all her glory, sleepy, with hair stuck up like straw.

There I pathetically stood, looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon after losing a fight against the really nasty monster from the neighbouring Red Lagoon. She rushed down, and for the next hour I was in bliss at getting my wounds tended to by my ‘Alison Nightingale’. But my kind offer of drunken sex was politely declined. She obviously had a hang-up about not sleeping with inebriated bootnecks covered in blood and algae.

I woke up the next morning with a sore head and my virginity intact, but also a feeling of immense excitement. It wasn’t even the fact that Alison came down and made me breakfast in a sexy nightie. It was due to the adventure I was now to embark upon.

I said my goodbye to Alison with little emotion; the clarity of a hangover made me realise my closeness to her had now been redirected to those I was about to rejoin. All I had undergone for the last nine months was for this, my first step into the world of a Royal Marines Commando.

From watching my DL lick a glob of false shit from his arse in the shower of the induction block to donning the green beret in the Falklands Hall, the transition from civilian to Royal Marines Commando was now complete, yet my journey had only just begun.

Sporting a huge black eye, with cuts and bruises all over my
face, I boarded the train at Leeds looking like I’d already been to war. As I watched the familiar countryside go past my window, I suddenly had a feeling of
déja vu
. I had boarded this same train at the same time exactly eighteen months before, for the journey down to CTC. The British Rail sandwiches hadn’t improved but I reflected on how my life had. My outlook had changed beyond recognition and, although I looked from the outside like a battered child, I now looked upon myself as an invincible man.

My mother had not been there when I boarded the train the previous summer. She wasn’t there now. It didn’t matter. I had a new mother now who watched over me as the train took me to my destiny.

She would look after me through my youth and into my adulthood. She would offer me advice whether I wanted it or not, giving me the freedom to grow yet supporting me when I got it wrong. It was she who showed me the values of courage, determination, unselfishness and humour, yet exposed me to so much more in her advocacy of humility. Unlike my birth mother, she made me accept praise and chastisement in equal measure, driven by the very ethos she instilled in me. She introduced me to the true meaning of friendship, putting me together with strangers and turning them into brothers, many of whom I had yet to meet. My new mother had created me in her own image and knew me as well as I knew myself. She was still there by my side when I reached Taunton, the home of 40 Commando.

I was back with my real mother now: the Royal Marines.

New chapters of my life awaited me. Even with the most vivid imagination, I could never have imagined all the fun and antics the coming years would bring, shared with some of the
most outrageous characters ever put on this earth. Encounters that would make up for all the pain suffered for the first seventeen years of my life.

I could not wait.

Read on for an exclusive extract from
Mark Time’s hilarious second book,
Going All the Way
.

THOSE FAMILIAR BUTTERFLIES returned, tickling my stomach as they did on my first day of training, when I alighted from the train platform into the sunshine of Taunton – home of 40 Commando Royal Marines.

A picturesque country town and administrative centre for the county of Somerset, Taunton has the air of an overgrown country village; a once-thriving market square, resplendent in council concrete and blooming borders, contrasts with the odd remaining castle keep that ensnares the history buffs.

Taunton has been home to 40 Commando RM since
1983, or more exactly the small outlying village of Norton Fitzwarren. As the name suggests, Norton Manor Camp was once owned by the local gentry; its commanding manor house is now the officers’ mess, standing high above the rest of the camp. Its previous role was as a junior leaders’ camp for training the British Army’s sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds.

To the local thugs these young lads were easy targets, and many young squaddies were beaten up as a result. When 40 Commando RM arrived, the unit was on a ship bound for exercises around the Mediterranean Sea, so a small rear party was given the task of moving the remaining stores, equipment and paperwork from Seaton Barracks in Plymouth to their new Somerset home. As a rear party they were few in number, and the local ruffians thought that a total of forty commandos were now the permanent camp incumbents. Often the odd bootneck visiting town was given a going over, the thugs confident that the other thirty-nine wouldn’t seek revenge.

Unbeknown to them, the 40 Commando RM main party had now returned from the Med, and the thugs had seriously miscalculated as 650 commandos had now arrived. When news of these indiscriminate attacks reached the returning members, swathes of marines entered town and meted out swift retribution. It was an honourable alternative to a welcome march, I suppose.

On entering Norton Manor Camp, I thought I’d gone back to the 1950s. The main gate sentry, dressed in full lovat uniform, stood smartly in front of creosoted wooden huts. Accompanied by Jay, a fellow King’s Squaddie with whom
I’d passed out of Royal Marines basic training, the guard commander warmly greeted us, checking to confirm we weren’t lost and trying to find the local youth club.

A marine walked towards us, his green beret in his well-ironed green denim pocket. From within the confines of the guardroom strode a brute of a man with a much louder voice. In his hand he held a thin cane tipped with a nickel thimble cap, signifying him as the provost sergeant.

Thankfully, his booming words weren’t directed at us. ‘Oi, Lofty, where’s your beret?’

‘It’s here in my pocket, Colours.’ The lad, although clearly a commando, didn’t look much older than me.

‘Why is it not on your head?’

‘I got a no-headdress chit, Colours. I got my head cut open playing rugby.’

‘Ah right, hold on there then.’ The provost sergeant returned after a short trip back to the guardroom. ‘Let me have a look at your chit.’

The young marine took out from his pocket a small piece of paper written by the camp’s medical officer, excusing the wearing of headdress.

The provost sergeant examined it carefully. ‘Okay, come here.’

The young marine closed in on the provost sergeant who, in one swift movement that belied his size, reached into his pocket, pushed the chit to just below the young man’s hairline and stapled it to the marine’s forehead.

‘Okay, you can wear your chit instead. Now, what do you want?’

Jay and I exchanged glances. Was this how life in a unit was to be? We had heard it’d be pretty relaxed, the fruit of the labours of our training.

The guard commander smiled, pointing us in the direction of the transit accommodation. ‘Welcome to 40.’

My nostrils were aroused by the amalgam of desiccated aromas: pollen, dust, sundry wood treatments and forgotten carbolic soap. I walked along the threadbare carpet laid over creaking floorboards and wondered whether this was the dream I’d envisaged. The wooden transit accommodation was sparse, with pre-prepared bedding similar to that I’d been issued at Commando Training Centre for those many elongated months.

With the whole evening spare before reporting to the movements sergeant the next morning, we sat on our beds pondering what we should do. All options, we decided, were too dangerous. Despite being newly qualified commandos, there was nothing more frightening than being in a camp of 650 others. As a result, we dared not venture out any further than the heads, and only then once we’d done a recce to ensure there weren’t any green-bereted loons having a piss.

Late in the evening, an RAF corporal joined us. He was to spend a couple of weeks here before moving to more permanent accommodation at a nearby RAF communications detachment. We said little to him, not knowing whether to call him ‘Corporal’, as we were just out of training, or ‘mate’, as we were fully-trained dealers of death who laughed in the face of danger (as long as it wasn’t the face of a fellow bootneck).

But he had little to say to us, other than to request the
direction of the NAAFI – somewhere we’d considered visiting, although we thought we might get bummed on the way.

We rose early the next morning and, with stomachs hungry from missing the previous night’s dinner, decided to go to breakfast. The RAF corporal followed us into the heads wearing his uniform. Jay and I instantly gained stature watching him shave with his jumper on.

‘We don’t shave with our tops on,’ I explained, echoing the words of my drill instructor in the induction fortnight of basic training.

‘I don’t give a fuck, mate. I’m not a Royal. Who are you again?’

‘I’m Mark,’ I said, a little more indignantly than warranted. ‘If you do that in the regular grots you’ll end up with a regimental bath, one that consists of bleach, washing powder and a hard, bristly bru…’

‘I know what a “regi” bath is, son,’ interjected the corporal. ‘Unlike you, I’ve been in longer than a NAAFI break. When I want advice from you I’ll ask for it. Got it?’

Well and truly put in my place, I didn’t really want to start my new career on a charge for arguing with an RAF corporal, so I left the debate rather deflated.

I saw him a couple of days later. He had moved temporarily to HQ company accommodation and had somehow lost both his eyebrows.

Welcome to 40 indeed…