Soldier Of The Queen (24 page)

some soldiers would sleep underneath because there's a two-foot clearance. However, if the tank was on soft ground it would sink gradually over the course of several hours. Then the only way to get it off the person being crushed would be to start the engine and drive off. But sometimes the act of driving off would push the tank down further and any soldiers underneath would be crushed to death. I never saw this happen, but I had heard of it happening a few times when I was in the army.

In the final days of one exercise we were camped in a forest. The weather was bitterly cold and we decided to make a fire using twigs, paper and petrol. As we stood around it talking and warming ourselves a Geordie thought it was not warm enough, so he picked up the bucket containing the petrol, which was about a quarter full, and ineptly threw the remainder towards the fire. The stream of airborne petrol passed through the fire, ignited and continued on its flaming flight towards me. I didn't see it until the last second, when I put my hands up to my face and fell to the floor. I could feel a burning sensation around my right eye and I could hear Paul shouting: "Put him out! Put him out!" Fortunately I was wearing several layers of thick clothing because of the extreme German winter. Paul was beating me, kicking foliage over me and generally causing more damage to me in his efforts to extinguish the flames than would have occurred if he had left me to burn. When I eventually got to my feet, I found I couldn't see properly through my right eye, so I was taken to hospital. They kept me overnight and the next day told me my injury was not serious. Apparently, it had not been caused by the fire, but by the pine needles contained in the foliage Paul had kicked over my face. The fire left me with slight blistering on the face and hands and scorch marks on my clothes.

I kept up my calls to Elizabeth. I liked to hear what was going on at St Angelo and around the town. For all my keenness to get out of Northern Ireland I found once again that I was actually missing the place. I suppose it was a combination of missing Elizabeth and missing that sense of excitement and focus that fear and tension bring. On top of all that, though, was the question of what I was going to do when my term of service ended in a few months' time. I didn't have a clue. The army hadn't equipped me for anything other than being a soldier. And there was nothing from my old life that I could return to - apart from crime.

I'm not sure who first suggested it as an idea, but in one of my telephone conversations with Elizabeth we started discussing the possibility of my joining the Ulster Defence Regiment. At first I thought it was a mad idea. Apart from Elizabeth there were not too many UDR people I liked and I knew my Irish-Catholic background was a source of discomfort to some of the bigots. But I had heard that quite a few English-born soldiers joined the UDR after serving in Northern Ireland and I began to wonder seriously whether I could make a go of it. Over the following weeks I churned over the idea and, to my surprise, it became more appealing as time went on. I didn't see myself as someone who would make a career of it, but as the horizon seemed empty of other possibilities I thought I could at least do it for a short while. It would offer me a temporary haven while I worked out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. At least I would be with Elizabeth, in a place I knew, earning money doing the only job*! was trained for. It seemed better than being on the dole in Codsall, renewing my acquaintance with the local police. After several weeks of indecision I decided to go for it. I was going to join the UDR.

I had another period of leave due before I left. I wanted to buy a car and drive it over to England. Another soldier, a horrible little Welsh bastard, heard I was looking for one and offered to sell me his. It was a very nice car, albeit left-hand drive, and worth about £3,000. I decided I'd buy it, but as I didn't have that sort of money I asked for a loan from the German bank into which my wages were paid. At first they would not give me it, because they saw I was due to leave the army. But I lied, saying I had just signed up for another three years. Surprisingly they gave me the money without checking my story. I showed the Welshman the loan agreement, but said the money was not going to come through for several weeks. I asked him if in the meantime he would let me take the car with me on leave. He agreed. I didn't tell him the money had already been paid into my account.

Paul was coming with me, and on the ferry over we got extremely drunk. When the boat docked I was asleep in the bar and Paul had collapsed in the shower cubicle in our cabin. It took quite a while for the appeals they were making over the tannoy to penetrate my drunken brain. When I finally realised the registration number they were calling out was my own I ran to the cabin to get Paul. He was totally out of it, so I switched on the shower to wake him up. When the two of us got down to the car deck the place was empty apart from my car. An irritated-looking deck hand came up to us and asked if it was ours. I said it was. He said: "Have you been drinking?" I said: "No, I'm just feeling tired."

I drove off at Harwich at about two o'clock in the morning. I thought I was still in Germany and started driving down the wrong side of the road. It was an easy mistake to make at the time because there were no other cars on the road and my car was left-hand drive. However, I took a bend and saw a car coming towards me on what I thought was the wrong side of the road. I swerved the car between two bollards that were meant to prevent cars driving into a pub car park. Somehow I got through and came to a halt. I jumped out of the car and started shouting at the driver of the other car, which had stopped nearby. I soon realised that he was a policeman. He couldn't work out how I had managed to get through the bollards. He breathalysed me, but amazingly I passed.

"
Look, I'm not daft," he said, "I know you've been drinking, even if it hasn't registered." He told me I was not to drive the car again that night. So we slept in the car until the sun came up.

The rest of my leave was spent in a drunken haze: I decided I was going to blow the £3,000 whatever the consequences. I thought that the way I had passed the breathalyser test despite being drunk meant there was something in my metabolism that could allow me to drink as much as I liked and still drive without fear of being done by the police.

On one of the last days of my leave I got in the car after a drinking session. Two friends from home were with me. The windscreen was covered with ice, so I cleared a little slit in the ice to enable me to see. Then I drove off at high speed into the fog. A little way down the road I smashed into the back of a parked car. Unfortunately, there were two people inside, a man and his girlfriend. His head hit the windscreen and was split open, but he wasn't badly hurt. His girlfriend was all right and so was everyone in my car. The police arrived with the breathalyser. I thought I'd pass it easily as I hadn't drunk half

as much as before. However, I failed. I was arrested and ended up being fined £250 and banned from driving for 12 months. The car was a write-off and I had spent almost all the £3,000.

Back in Germany I told the car's owner that I'd had a smash in it and that the bank were not releasing the money. I said that when the insurance money came through I would pay him. He wasn't happy, but there was not a lot he could do. I only had a few weeks to do in the army. In the end neither he nor the bank got their money.

In those last few weeks I was called in for a careers-advice chat with a senior officer. I told him I was thinking of joining the UDR. He asked me what else I could do. I said the army had not really equipped me for anything, despite everything they had promised when I had signed up. He suggested I took the test for the higher-grade Class 2 Heavy Goods Vehicle licence (I already held the Class 3). I didn't tell him I was banned from driving. He must have had a word with the army examiner, because my test was very straightforward.

"
See if you can drive that," the examiner said, pointing to an amphibious lorry called a Stalwart. I got in and drove it round a field a few times. I didn't take it onto the public highway. After a short while he told me to pull over. I asked him if I had passed the test. "What do you think?" he said.

Before I left I received my Certificate of Service. The range of Military Conduct Gradings is: 1) Exemplary, 2) Very Good, 3) Good, 4) Fair, 5) Unsatisfactory. I was given an "exemplary" grading. The commanding officer added a testimonial:

O'Mahoney has been in the army since 1979 during which time he has been employed as driver and is qualified to HGV level.

He is a cheerful soldier who can be relied upon to do his best. I have no doubt that he will do well in civilian life as a driver and I would recommend him to any future employer.

With only a short time to go before I left I had let my hair grow longer than the regulation length. I did this deliberately because I didn't want to go back to Northern Ireland with a soldier's short hair-cut. However, a good friend of Nasty's in the regimental police approached me one day and told me to get my hair cut. He was from Northern Ireland himself. I told him why I didn't want to, but he insisted. We had a big argument which resulted in my being arrested for insubordination. I was taken before the troop leader. I explained my reasons for not wanting to cut my hair, but he wouldn't listen. He fined me and ordered me to have my hair cut. I was sure that Nasty had had something to do with it. He knew I was going back to the North and he was probably hoping that republicans would realise I was a squaddie and shoot me. The idea of Fenians shooting a Fenian would have had great appeal to him, especially if he had known what I only discovered myself years later: that "Fenian" — the favourite loyalist nickname for Catholics - came from the activities of one of my nineteenth-century namesakes. John O'Mahoney co-founded and named the IRA's historical forerunner, the Fenian Brotherhood (later notorious for the so-called "Fenian Rising" of 1867). I don't think Johnno was from our branch of the family, but I might have met him once at a party.

The night before I left Germany my troop held a farewell party for me at which I got quite drunk. The party came to a raucous end when Paul and others announced that they had a surprise for me. The room full of soldiers and wives fell silent as Paul said that they had flown over a special lady to be with me for the evening. Everyone thought he was about to introduce Elizabeth. The the door flew open and a full-size blow-up doll was thrown into the room. It was wearing a miniskirt and a T-shirt bearing on its front the logo of the
Liverpool Echo
newspaper and on the back the words "I get it six nights a week." For some reason this seemed to upset some of the wives and the party ended. Paul and I were staggering back to our room without our inflatable friend when Nasty came towards us. I still had the hump with him over the hair-cutting incident. "You off tomorrow then, Fenian? he said.

"
Fuck off," I said.

"
What did you say?"

"
I said fuck off. Have you got a problem with that?"

He just stood there as I walked towards him. When I got about six feet away he backed off, saying: "Don't start, O'Mahoney. Or you'll be locked up tomorrow instead of going home." I knew his bottle had gone, just as it had gone when we had come under fire in Northern Ireland. Paul wanted to bash him as well but we knew he would have grassed us up, so we left it.

Then the next day I flew back to Northern Ireland.

I arrived in Fermanagh for Christmas. It was good to see Elizabeth again, but I felt strange walking around as an ordinary civilian. I moved into Elizabeth's flat in the centre of Enniskillen, near the Watergate Bridge just opposite the castle. Until that time her mother, father and brother had been an invisible presence, appearing occasionally in conversation, but never in the flesh. That was about to change: I had been invited to spend Christmas Day with them. I knew her father was a retired RUC officer and that her brother had followed him into the police. I also knew her mother was a devoted follower of the Reverend Ian Paisley. I remembered how she

had stood unsuccessfully as a Democratic Unionist Party candidate in the May council elections. Beyond those bare facts I knew little else.

I got an inkling of troubled times ahead when Elizabeth sat me down and told me she wanted to explain a few things before I met her family. She said her mother had quite extreme views on a number of issues and, however ridiculous I found them, she would like me to respect them. In essence her mother was a fundamentalist Protestant who didn't like having anything to do with Catholics. Nor did she want her children having any such dealings. Elizabeth said she could not be honest with her mother about my background: in her mother's eyes, because I'd been born a Catholic, I would always be a Catholic, at least until I had been re-baptised as a born-again Protestant. I had never really liked the term "born a Catholic". I was not born a Catholic. I was born naked and screaming. My religion had been imposed upon me. If I'd been born in India I would have been a Sikh or a Hindu or a Moslem. The only God I had ever worshipped was George Best - and he was an Ulster Protestant.

Elizabeth knew my views and agreed with them to a large extent, but she asked me, for the sake of family harmony, to keep my Catholic background secret. In fact she wanted me to lie. She knew her mother would pick up on my Catholic name, so she suggested a cover story. If asked, I was to say that my family came originally from southern Ireland but had been Protestants for generations, the stain of Catholicism having been expunged long ago. Her other stricture was that I had to make sure I didn't swear or blaspheme in front of her mother. I said: "Of course I'm not going to swear!" But she explained that, for her mother, swearing and blaspheming came together in the use of such words as "Jesus", "God" or "bloody". Nor could I expect to drink alcohol in her mother's house — or even give the impression that I had ever drunk alcohol anywhere in the world at any time. Apart from all that, she thought I'd get on fine.