Over the next two or three hours the other teams straggled in, tired, cold, hungry and seriously pissed off. The euphoria that my team experienced at arriving first was heightened by the fact that we were enjoying brandy, Mars bars and Piccadilly No. 1 cigarettes. Everyone was, to use army parlance, ‘ticking like meters’. But they all cheered up when someone spotted a three-tonner grinding across the heather. Captain Kitchen had returned. The three-tonner stopped and left us with an issue of rashers, sausages, and, I think, eggs and bread, and departed to its next drop-off zone. When we had unpacked the rations we realised that we had been left no means of cooking them! It’s like the old Ancient Mariner – ‘Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink!’ Even Captain Kitchen was clearly crestfallen.
I don’t how to explain my feelings at that moment, but I would like you to know, I in no way gloated or crowed or enjoyed, in any shape or form, the position I knew I was in. The bloody little Primus stove and its little frying pan had rubbed my thighs sore on the marathon across the moors, but I did manage, in a six- or eight-inch frying pan, to cook breakfast for sixteen desperately hungry men. Later that day, we were issued with picks and spades and told to ‘dig in’. We were to spend the next two or three days playing war games, and although I was still under restriction of privileges, I was made company commander for the day and ordered to attack and take an ‘enemy’ position. We had not been prepared for this exercise, nor for the presence of the camp commandant and his staff. In the hurly-burly of the mock battle, I can remember Kim Fraser leading the attack and playing his bagpipes as we advanced up the hill, and I can also remember pushing a very senior member of the observing staff out of the way of a misfired mortar which was otherwise certain to have landed on him.
As usual there was no indication of how well you had done, but some days later when we had returned to Aldershot, Fraser and I were invited to have dinner with the General! Once this became known, rumours were running rife that he and I were certainly in the running for the Sword of Honour, or at least Junior Under Officer for the last few weeks before our passing out parade! Heady stuff! But I knew in my heart of hearts that Kim and I had been both too good and too bad to be awarded that honour. As it was, the great event of the dinner took place. During the grand and pompous evening of generals, colonels, brigadiers, resplendent in their mess kit, with their elegant wives, both Fraser and I were too shy to start a conversation and too insignificant to be included in one. But we were at the same table and after the dinner and the toast to the Queen, after the port and cigars we adjourned to the anteroom where white-coated mess staff were rolling out a narrow green baize strip some 25 feet long on the floor. The strip was divided and numbered into segments from one to twenty-five, and like an indoor race track, it had plywood cutout fences and jumps. Six brightly painted plywood cutout horses were placed at one end of the carpet. The officers and their wives threw dice and if, for example, you threw a six, your horse could be advanced six places towards the winning post. Fraser and I, in our best mess kit, knelt on either side of the course and moved the wooden horses along the track. That was our reward!
I am someone who has never kept a diary, made notes, collected press cuttings or retained photographs, so it is likely that I will get many of the events in this chronicle out of sync. But fresh in my mind on this blustery, Irish, December day in 1996 is the recent visit which my wife Tess and I made to Bosnia, as guests of the British Army and the 26th Regiment, Royal Artillery, where, in a bombed-out abattoir, we were invited to throw the dice for the selfsame horse-racing game and to back a horse called ‘Floyd’s Fancy’, which romped home after several successful throws of the dice, at 30 to 1, and won us enough money to buy drinks for the entire team. At that moment of the evening, after a week in Bosnia with IFOR, having seen the good and dangerous work that they were doing in the most appalling conditions, I experienced a frisson of déjà vu, and I realised that in both instances I was, and had been, quite privileged.
After the excitement of that evening, which, even though Fraser and I had been mere jockeys, was and still is a special time of my life, we came back to reality with a bump. The course was coming rapidly to a close and shortly we would take the final tests and examinations for our commissions. The pace was hotting up. We were at the stage of being interviewed for our suitability for our chosen regiments. I was still ‘badged’ for the 11th Hussars and I was summoned to an interview with Colonel Turnbull and asked to explain my reasons for choosing the Cherry Pickers.
I told him that I had studied military history from the Hundred Years War right through to the Great War of 1914. I had read Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, every word of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; I had read All Quiet on the Western Front, I had read Lions Led by Donkeys, Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade and seen Zulu and much, much more. But, through my association with Fraser, De Rougement and many other fellow cadets, whose names I can sadly no longer remember, I realised that I did not have what was required for the 11th Hussars, to wit the ability to ride, to play polo or, indeed, cover my mess bills. The Cherry Pickers were an elite regiment. Amongst others, Prince Michael of Kent was a serving officer at that time. It was implied to me that the regiment had a fund available to assist desirable young officers of limited means but, despite the blind romanticism that drove me on at this time of my life, I realised that I would be more comfortable in an ultra-professional, modern-day regiment; one which was steeped in history and glory, albeit only since 1916; a regiment which eschewed the values of the historic cavalry but was not encumbered by its tradition. I elected to join the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and serve with the likes of Lieutenant Bale and Corporal Maclver Jones.
Shortly before our commissioning parade, for some reason a few of us, including Douglas-Home, grandson of the former Prime Minister, found ourselves near Bristol and I took them all home to 50 Coombe Dale, where my mother cooked them homebaked bread, faggots and peas.
Years later, when I was running a bistro in Bristol, I had the uncanny feeling that Douglas-Home had left the Army and attended Bristol University and, as a student there, was a customer at the bistro. Or if that wasn’t the case, he had gone into horse-training and had just turned up one day.
Also at this time, on one of the final parade rehearsals, Major Edwards made a rare visit to the drill square. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘remove your hats. Last night, the greatest leader died. Winston Churchill is dead. It is possible that some of you will be selected to attend the state funeral.’ I know for certain that if I hadn’t shot my goddamned bed, not only would I have at least been a Junior Under Officer, I would have lined that funeral route. But curiously, there does exist a 35mm film that shows both Winston Churchill’s funeral and my commissioning parade. It was taken by David and Hillary Taft, who attended both ceremonies along with my mother and father, who once again caused me a wince of embarrassment when he, in his modest and courteous way, addressed my platoon officer, Captain Kitchen, as ‘sir’. That night, as blood brothers, my course comrades and I, at a celebratory dinner in the Hen and Chicken Inn (where we ate what we thought was a splendid dinner of corn on the cub, potted shrimp and roast duck with orange sauce, Stilton and port) ripped in half and signed pound notes which we swore, one day, we would match and commemorate this occasion. It never happened.
We were all granted commissioning leave prior to joining our regiments. I took the Dover to Calais ferry and hitchhiked down to the Loire valley. One evening as dusk was falling, a battered, grey deux cent trois Peugeot pickup truck stopped to give me a lift. A man of about forty, gnarled, tanned, with black