Firebird (37 page)

If you enjoyed reading
Firebird,
you might be interested in
Shoot to Kill
by Michael Asher, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Shoot to Kill
by Michael Asher

1 - The Maroon Machine

On my first morning in the Parachute Regiment Depot at Aldershot, I met a sour-faced corporal. ‘Excuse me, mate,’ I said, ‘but where’s the Personnel Selection Office?’

The corporal was a barn-door of a man, an inch shorter than me. He sniffed suspiciously. ‘You a recruit?’ he inquired.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then I’m not your fucking mate! See these tapes?’ He pointed to the two snow-white chevrons stitched on his heavy-duty pullover. ‘I’m a corporal, and from now on you call me
corporal
! Got it? You’d better get it quick, or you’ll be out on your arse before your feet touch the ground!’ That was my welcome to the Parachute Regiment.

I followed his directions in something of a daze. Was he supposed to talk to me like that? I wasn’t really in the army yet. I came from a school where colonels and generals were ten-a-penny in the Old Boys’ Club. A corporal seemed very small fry.

I introduced myself to the clerk at the reception-desk. He was a corporal too. He was taciturn and morose with a moustache like a barbed-wire entanglement and sad brown eyes. ‘Name and number?’ he snapped.

I told him my name. ‘I haven’t got a number,’ I said.

‘Everybody’s got a number!’ he replied. ‘Oh yes, here we are, Asher, private fourth class, 24246810, Asher, M. J. That number is yours till you die. Don’t ever forget it!’ Then, when I had put my suitcase down, he handed me a sweeping-brush and gave me my first order. ‘Get sweeping!’ he said.

The Personnel Selection Officer was a crusty captain who had risen through the ranks. ‘Why did you volunteer for the Parachute Regiment?’ he asked me.

‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘I wanted to jump out of the sky.’

‘Perhaps you should have tried growing a pair of wings, then!’ he suggested drily. He studied the file on his desk. ‘I see you enlisted under an “S-type” engagement, as a potential officer,’ he commented.

‘Yes, sir. I failed the Regular Commissions Board, so I joined the ranks.’

‘Well, at least you haven’t given up. That’s one thing in your favour. But it’s not easy being an officer in this regiment. This regiment is the best there is. You’ve got to be the best. We’ll be watching you, private. Now go and see the clerk. He’ll assign you a billet.’

The clerk with the moustache told me to wait outside the store. A floppy latex mattress came sailing out and almost knocked me over. ‘Get on the ball!’ the clerk said, grinning. Then he fixed me with a piercing stare. ‘Do you piss the bed?’ he demanded.

‘No!’ I answered, surprised and indignant.

‘If you stain the mattress, you pay for it!’ he said. ‘Now get that bugger up to your billet, last room on the left.’

The room was on the second floor of a four-storey block of granite and glass: ‘the most up-to-date barracks in the country’, the recruitment literature had claimed. Modern it was, but its newness only emphasized the atmosphere of bleak austerity. Each room held four bunks of a scarred battleship grey. With each bunk came a wooden bedside locker and a large equipment locker. As I squeezed my mattress in through the door, the lockers creaked open ominously. Their innards were turbid with fluff and sprinkled liberally with fag-ends and empty contraceptive packets. A formica-topped table, much chipped and besmeared with boot-polish, had been pushed into a corner. Four stand-up chairs were piled against a plate-glass window. I dropped my mattress on the bare springs of a bed near the window. Then I went back to collect my bedding.

Staggering in for a second time under a pile of sheets and blankets, I found someone else in the room. He was a young man of my own age, and he was fuming as he tried to insert his wobbly mattress into its canvas cover. ‘Bleedin’ thing!’ he cursed in a northern accent. ‘Give us a hand, will tha!’ I clutched the mattress in a vice-like grip, while he drew the tight-fitting cover over it, grunting and sweating. ‘You’d think they’d make ’em right size!’ he said when it was done. Then he grinned at me and stuck out a calloused hand. ‘Walker,’ he said. ‘Dave Walker. How’s tha do?’

He offered me a Park Drive cigarette, and we stood smoking by the window. Directly below us a turtle of men in camouflaged smocks and helmets were tramping around the square. There were incomprehensible commands like cries of pain. The men moved in perfect unison, and the crash of their boots on the asphalt came up to us like thunder. ‘That’ll be us soon!’ Walker said. I could hear the awe in his voice. We looked down on those strange animals in wondering silence. We were eighteen years old. That window was the shore of the rest of our lives.

‘I wonder who else we’ll get in this room,’ Walker said. ‘I hope it’s not a coupla wankers as will get us back-squadded!’

‘What’s back-squadded?’

‘Weren’t tha at the Recruit Selection Centre? Don’t tha know how they do it?’

‘I came here straight from the Army Careers Office.’

‘They give us twelve weeks basic training. At the end of that they assess thee. If tha’s a dud, tha gets back-squadded to another platoon. That means tha’s to do it all over again. Most of them as is back-squadded leave.’

A tingle of fear ran down my spine. What if I failed? I’d failed the Regular Commissions Board, and now I could never go home to my family and say I couldn’t even make it as a ranker. They had advised me strongly against joining the ranks. No, I told myself,
I
had
to pass now I was here.

Our faces dropped when we met our third room-mate. He was a tall bumbling man called Chapman who ambled about the room with an expression of complete imbecility. He kept on insisting that he came from somewhere called the ‘Dingle’. I wondered if he was quite right in the head. He had with him a moth-eaten cardboard suitcase held together by a leather belt. When he opened it, Walker and I saw a gigantic carving-knife lying on top of his clothes. Walker raised his eyes to heaven as if to say, ‘We’ve got a right one here!’

Little Jock McGowan was the next to arrive. He had an apple-fresh face with an impudent look, and his hair had been honed to a fine stubble. His bomber jacket and baseball shoes reminded me of the local yobs I used to see hanging round Lambretta scooters in my home town. But McGowan had a genial manner. ‘Here!’ he said at once, when he saw me struggling with my mattress cover. ‘Lemme show ye how it’s done! I’m an old navy man. Four years in the merch, that’s me!’ He fitted the mattress with perfect alignment.

Our room was divided from the one next door by a thin partition. The two rooms were connected with the corridor by a common entrance. Soon that room filled up with recruits. There was a lanky, emaciated youth from Oldham named Clark. He had a long, lascivious face and looked like the worst kind of street-corner layabout. He announced that he would be known as the ‘Oldham Stud’. There was a blond, rugby-playing Londoner called Smart. His father kept a tailor’s shop in Soho, he said. There was a seventeen-year-old Welshman, inevitably called Williams, who was bandy-legged and came from Merthyr Tydfil. Finally, there was a solemn farm-boy from Gloucestershire called Smith. His black hair was cut Elvis Presley style with a long fringe which he kept flicking out of his eyes. He wore a crinkled leather jacket with the words SATAN’S SLAVES stencilled on the back.

I had just brushed out my locker and arranged my shirts and books on its shelves, when a voice screamed, ‘STAND BY YOUR BEDS!’ I turned to see the same squat corporal who had shouted at me on the way to the PSO. He advanced into the room menacingly. ‘STAND STILL!’ he yelled. We swayed by our beds with uncertain rigidity. He stood there for a long moment, hands on hips, regarding us with obvious contempt. He wore polished boots, puttees and immaculately pressed denims. His olive-green pullover was neatly punctuated by a maroon stable-belt. An inch and a half of starched khaki collar showed at his neck. His maroon-red beret with its silver parachute badge was tilted very slightly forward to accentuate the contemptuous look. His face was broad and dark and full of shadows. This was what a paratrooper looked like, I thought to myself. I wondered if any of us here would ever look like that.

He sauntered forward, inspecting our faces and glancing at our lockers. He stopped in front of me, so near that I could see the red veins in his eyes. A nasty smile wavered on his lips. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘If it isn’t my
mate
! What’s your name,
mate
?’

‘Asher,’ I said.

‘Asher WHAT?’

‘Er, just Asher.’

‘ASHER, CORPORAL, you fucking TUBE!’ His eyes seemed to burn red with anger. He glanced at my locker again. ‘Who told you to put all this gunge in your locker?’

‘No one, corporal, I just assumed —’

‘DON’T FUCKING ASSUME ANYTHING! This locker is for military equipment only! I’ll teach you to put gash in it without orders!’ With a furious motion he swept my pathetic personal belongings out of the locker. They included a framed photograph of my fifteen-year-old girlfriend. She had given it to me the previous evening as a parting gesture. It crashed to the floor, and the glass shattered. ‘Oh
dear
!’ he said with heavy irony. ‘What a
pity
!’ He picked up the broken photo and examined it nosily. ‘All my love, darling Mick!’ he read. ‘How touching! You might break her heart, Asher, but you won’t break mine! That’ll be twenty press-ups for filling your locker without orders. Come on, get pressing!’

I fell on to my arms and began heaving myself upwards. The corporal rested a heavy boot on my back. ‘Two-three-four-five!’ he counted. The other recruits stood to attention, petrified. ‘Eight-nine-ten-eleven!’ My arms were already weakening. There was a burning sensation in my shoulders. ‘Thirteen-fourteen-fifteen.’ My arms were trembling now. I tried not to groan in pain. ‘Sixteen-seventeen … you’re going, Asher!’ the corporal jeered. Then I collapsed in a heap. ‘Pathetic!’ he said. ‘My
darling
Mick! You should have sent her instead! She’d have made a better Para than you!’

I picked myself up, feeling shaky. He took a step closer, so that I could feel foul breath against my cheek. ‘You think you’re clever, don’t you, Asher?’ he said. ‘I’ve seen ’em all. I can tell by looking: you think you’re a clever sod. Well, let me tell you, there’s only one clever sod in this room, and that’s me!’ He moved back to the door. ‘I’m Corporal Jekyll, your section commander,’ he said. ‘You are very lucky you’ve got me. I am the best instructor in the Depot. I am not your mate. I am your god. Do as I say and we’ll get on dandy. Do so much as a fart out of place and I shall
personally
shit on you from a great height!’

Thus spake Zarathustra, I thought.

The army was chock-full of colonels, colonels-commandant, colonels-in-chief, major-generals, lieutenant-generals, full generals, field marshals and Supreme Allied Commanders Europe. But so low was I that a corporal was as far above me as God.

The rest of the day was taken up with assemblies and disassemblies. Each time the order ‘GET FELL IN!’ rang along the corridor, we would line up outside. There were dozens of rooms along the corridor, and the line of recruits soon extended its full length. There were young men of all shapes and sizes, and from every corner of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. ‘FROM THE RIGHT, NUMBER OFF!’ the order would come. The first man would shout ‘ONE!’, the next man ‘TWO!’, and so on down the line, until the number reached the hundreds. It passed down the chain with such swiftness that it was difficult not to anticipate it and get your number wrong. If that happened, the nearest NCO would ‘shit on you from a great height’, and you’d do press-ups. Everyone would wait for you to finish, and then the entire process would begin again. We usually numbered off five or six times until we got it right. One or other of the corporals assigned to our platoon would bellow out some trivial orders and then dismiss us.

Jekyll had us strip down our bunks, mattress covers and all, and remake them ‘the army way’. He said the mattress covers had to fit ‘like French letters’. ‘You will notice,’ he told us, ‘that sheets and blankets have three stripes down the centre. This does
not
mean that they have the rank of sergeant …’ He broke off for polite giggles. ‘The stripes will be
exactly
in the centre of the bed, and not a fraction out!’

The sheets had to be turned down exactly twelve inches over the blankets. ‘How can you be sure it’s twelve inches, corporal?’ Chapman asked.

‘Use your fucking dick to measure it, Chapman!’ Jekyll answered. The blankets had to be smoothed out, tucked in and folded at the ends with hatchet-sharp ‘hospital corners’. ‘I want to see them like that every time I inspect them,’ Jekyll said. ‘Any bunk not up to scratch will end up on the floor!’ And to demonstrate how easily this could be arranged, he flicked my bed over with a deft twist of the hand. The iron frame separated easily into its three component parts, as it crashed to the floor in a mass of sheet and blanket. ‘Practice makes perfect!’ he said. ‘And it better
be
perfect when I get back. I want to see this room dug out and the floor gleaming like a mirror!’

Five times Jekyll inspected the room that day and five times he found it wanting. Five times our bunks crashed over on to the floor or the blankets parachuted out of the window. Sweeping, bed-making and dusting (‘
Underneath
the lockers, not just on top!’) were interrupted by more assemblies, which seemed increasingly meaningless as fatigue crept up on us. The work was broken by trips over to the mess for meals. We queued up to collect egg and chips from bulky army cooks who wore silver chevrons on their white jackets. Even the cooks were corporals, it seemed. Huddled five to a table, we ate quickly. We kept our eyes downcast, lest we drew the attention of the recruits from senior squads who swanned about the mess like magical creatures. By ten o’clock that night I was dropping with exhaustion.