It was a quiet, sunny day in the early part of the 1960s when my mum received the phone call.
‘Joan speaking,’ she said.
It was a neighbour, Marjorie, who lived next to our comfortable house in Toton, a suburb of Nottingham.
‘Er, Joan,’ she said. ‘Don’t panic or anything. Just nip upstairs and quietly go into the back bedroom.’
‘Why? What’s wrong?’
‘Just be quick, eh?’
So my mum put down the phone, went upstairs and opened the door to one of the bedrooms. And there she saw me. Somehow I had managed to open the window, climb into the frame, then hold onto the window itself and swing outside. I was rocking to and fro with a big smile on my face. The only problem was that I was 3 years old, and my makeshift playground was twenty feet up in the air with nothing to break my fall. Quite how Mum managed to hold it together enough to gather me in her arms and pull me back inside to safety, I don’t know. But I guess, with antics like that, it’s no surprise that my family started to call me the Terror of Toton.
That wasn’t the only time I gave my mum cause to catch her breath. Far from it, if the stories I’ve heard about my earliest years are true. Our house was in a cul-de-sac about 100 metres from the busy A52. This major road linked the north Midlands with the east of England and, even in those days, it was full of lorries and other fast-moving traffic. Not the ideal place for a toddler to go walkabout, but that’s just what I did, not long after the window incident. The Terror of Toton was found wandering across this road on the back of his treasured hobbyhorse, oblivious to the danger he was in.
Perhaps it’s a bit too much to say that as a toddler I was a free spirit. Perhaps all toddlers are free spirits, and in many ways I was no different from a lot of children. As for so many little boys, my Action Man and soldiers were always my favourite toys. And I certainly remember being taken to a playgroup in a big Victorian building and spending the whole time sitting by the exit, waiting to be collected, while all the other kids happily played nursery games. I hated being cooped up inside—I just wanted to be out in the fresh air, left to my own devices. No doubt my tendency to swing from first-floor windows or venture alone across busy main roads was a source of some anxiety for my mum and dad, but I sometimes wonder if I’ve changed so much since those very early years.
Ours was a large family. When I was born, on 25 March 1961, my oldest brother John was already 18, my oldest sister Jill 16, and my youngest sister Rosalind was 8. John and Jill were more like an uncle and an aunt than a brother and sister, and I probably couldn’t help but be inspired by them in some way. Jill became a midwife and John a policeman—both professions in which they served the community, just as I would aim to do when the time came for me to make my own choice of career.
My dad, Matt, worked for the TV company Rediffusion as an area manager and general troubleshooter. It was a good job and it meant we lived comfortably in a large, four-bedroomed house, had a nice car, and my older brother and sisters went away to private schools. But in 1965, just as my earliest memories start to take shape, disaster hit our happy, well-to-do family. Dad suffered a massive heart attack and stroke. He died, leaving Mum widowed with a 4-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl to look after. So I barely remember my father, and those memories I do have come more from creased old black and white photographs and from what other people have told me about him than anything else.
What I do know is that my father’s death inevitably made life very difficult for Mum. Dad was eleven years older than her, and they’d married when she was 21. All her adult life he’d been there to look after her. Now she was on her own, with no real income and two kids to care for. She sold the house and we moved into a smaller one in another part of Nottingham. Mum took a part-time job at Rediffusion. She did the best she could, and in the circumstances she coped remarkably, but from that point on money was always tight.
As for me, I became an independent little thing and even as a small boy I remember feeling that I was the man of the house, with all the duties and responsibilities that came with it. I wasn’t the type of kid to talk about the sadness I felt, but although our family was large and close-knit, I was constantly aware of the hole in my life left by the death of my father. Some holes can never be filled, and I have always carried with me a sense of that early loss. I probably always will. And yet, even as a child, I knew there was no point complaining about these things. All you can do is play the hand you’re dealt and get on with your life as best you can. It was an early lesson, but it would prove to be one of the most important I ever learned.
I went to school at the local comprehensive. I suffer from dyslexia, but back then I doubt they even knew what dyslexia was—I think they just assumed I was a bit thick when it came to letters and numbers. I was a fairly enthusiastic student, though, despite all the extra lessons I had to take. I liked school, and I liked learning. But it was outside the walls of the classroom that my heart really lay.
At the end of our cul-de-sac in Toton there was an army training camp—Chilwell Depot, which is still used today as a mobilization centre for the Territorials before they go off to Afghanistan. Back then it was separated from the road by a simple chain-link fence. One of my earliest memories is of wandering to the end of the road and pressing my face up against the fence to catch a glimpse of the soldiers moving about inside. I was transfixed by the sight of their vehicles, and by the olive drab of their uniforms, which matched the clothes my Action Man wore. If I was lucky, I might spot one of them carrying a weapon. And, like any other boy, I was addicted to the war movies and cowboy films that were so popular at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Throughout my early childhood the British Army held a fascination for me. So it was that, the very moment I was old enough to become part of the Army Cadet Force, at the age of 11, I joined up.
A bit like the Boy Scouts, the Army Cadet Force is a youth group where young lads are given a bit of structure, discipline and the chance to have quite a lot of fun. I was issued with my very own olive-drab uniform—which I always made sure was immaculate—and once a week I would attend a drill night, and occasionally we would go away on camps. The Cadet Force was tailor-made for me. Most of the adults who ran it were ex-Army, and they taught us all the things I’d been longing to know: about guns and fieldcraft; about first aid and how to use a map and compass; about signals skills and other kinds of military know-how. As a small boy, my nose pressed against the fence of the training camp in Toton, I had wondered what it might be like to be a soldier; now I was being given the opportunity to act it all out.
The Army Cadet Force was a constructive influence in my life. It was good fun and got me out of the house, of course; but it also gave me something to work for and something positive to think about. I particularly enjoyed the camps we went on. There are several of these camps dotted around the country, where a couple of hundred cadets would descend for a few days. Because all of them actively wanted to be there, and most of them tried hard to be the best at whatever they were doing, there was always a real buzz about these places. Back then, the cadet camps were made up of old wooden huts that looked like something from the Second World War. These huts contained little more than a small pot-bellied stove in the middle, with beds arranged along either side. Basic stuff, but I loved it because it gave me the opportunity to do the one thing that I enjoyed above all others, and that was being out of doors. It was thrilling to use a map and compass to move stealthily through the woods, creeping up on other people without being heard, and to build shelters what seemed like miles from civilization. I loved being close to nature, out in the wild, learning the basic fieldcraft skills that would—I imagined—allow me to survive out of doors on my own.
And, like any young boy would, I enjoyed learning how to handle a gun. We would go to proper rifle ranges, ones that real, grown-up soldiers used. It was all very exciting, even though the weapons we were given to practise on were rather old bolt-action rifles that looked like relics from the First World War. They fired reasonably large rounds, though—.303s—and for a young lad the kickback from a weapon like that was quite severe. But that didn’t matter to me. I was just thrilled to be taught how to fire a gun, just like the soldiers in the war movies. And sometimes, when we were away on camp, we were given the chance to drive tanks. Imagine it—barely a teenager and driving a tank. No