As a youth, it was highly evident that I was operating on a physical level somewhat below that of my peers & although somewhat average at school rugby, due to my being big-boned, sport by & large was not really my forte. So, when it came to actually leaving school & getting a job, naturally I drifted into something befitting my laidback character – I joined the British Army. Now I know what you might think that the military is no place for someone like myself but you are wrong. In my experience there are 4 types of characters who join the British military. Firstly, you have those who are very keen & soldiery & actually enjoy doing their day job (known as ‘the professionals’). Secondly, you have those who have had frequent skirmishes with the law & consider the forces to be an alternative option to prison (known as ‘the dodgy f**kers’). Thirdly, there are the plain out & out fruitcakes who have decided that a life in the services offers substantially more perks than a life in Broadmore (known as ‘the psychos’). And finally, there are those who join in search of ‘travel’ & ‘adventure’, as proclaimed by the Army Careers Office (known as ‘the gullibles’). I fell very much into this latter category.
Admittedly during basic training, the Common Military Syllabus for Recruits as it was formally known, I must say that there were multiple episodes of miscommunication between myself & my instructors, especially when it came to anything remotely physical. For some strange & unfathomable reason my troop sergeant, let’s call him Sergeant S, took an instant dislike to me. I just seemed to niggle him. Now the most logical thing to do in this situation would be to keep one’s gob shut & stay well out of his way, I, er, found it quite entertaining to, er, bait him (Children, do you know what it’s like to run around a parade square lots of times with a rifle held above your head? I do). Eventually after a year of fun & games, & much to everyone’s surprise (not least Sgt S), I blagged my way, sorry, I mean, I finally passed out (not literally) from borstal the Junior Leaders Regiment Royal Artillery. Everywhere where right & glory lead & all that….
And so, that is how on the evening of September 6th 1988, I found myself stood standing in the pouring rain outside some large metal gates waiting to be let into my new adult artillery unit, by two large un-metal squaddies in the beer capital of Europe, Dortmund, West Germany.
For a while I loved it. It was one big adventure. But it wasn’t long before I became jaded with the bullsh*t. Ask any squaddie who served between 1660 & 1995 what the worst bit of army life was & they will undoubtedly say ‘all the f’king bullsh*t mate’. But what does this delightful term refer to, I hear you cry. Well, bullsh*t (I will abbreviate to BS for sake of having to keep finding the asterisk key) is basically all the fuquittery that one has to endure on a daily basis irrespective of whether you are in the Paras or the Pay Corps. It is the stuff they don’t tell you about in the Careers Office when you sign up (otherwise nobody would take the Queen’s/ King’s shilling) & it is something that civilians really can’t quite comprehend. So, in no particular order of personal hatred, BS includes, parades, block jobs (the cleaning of one’s accommodation usually on a Sunday evening), room inspections, locker inspections, kit inspections, leaf sweeping, litter picking, physical training, more physical training, Basic Fitness Tests, Combat Fitness Tests, weapons tests & being ‘dicked’.
The last one, although sounding rather inappropriate, simply refers to ‘being volunteered for something that you did not volunteer for’. Prime examples of a damn good dicking are guard duty (known as stagging-on), duty driver, duty NCO (Non-commissioned Officer), & my absolute personal favourite, waitering in the Sergeants & Warrant Officers mess. Just when you thought you might have an evening/weekend free to yourself to partake in an evening/weekend of jovial merriment & banter with your chums, you find out, after careful scrutiny of Regimental Orders & Battery/Squadron/Company Orders (the various daily publications that relay information down from the hierarchy to the menials) that you have to spend the evening/weekend kowtowing those in the hierarchial middle-management sector, whilst feigning flattery to their pretentious other halves. Ah, such memories…
Although many revert to the time-honoured tradition of dealing with the BS by regularly consuming vast amounts of alcohol, for me it wasn’t going to be my personal form of therapy. In the evening or at the weekend (if I wasn’t dicked), I would make myself scarce, escaping from the barracks to just, well, wander about. Unlike anything stupidly energetic like running, travelling slowly in a half-arsed sort of fashion allowed me to not only mentally unwind and chill-out, it let me become an observer, a voyeur if you like, of the world around me.
With Dortmund being a quite a large city with a decent tram network, I would often make my way a mile or so up Oesterstrasse up to the suburb of Brackel, whereby I’d hop on the tram into Dortmund zentrum (city centre). I’ve always had a bit of a thing with railways so usually after a bit of mooching I would head to the Hauptbahnhof (railway station), and just sit and enjoy a beer and a bratty (German sausage) whilst watching the German population go by. Growing up in Basingstoke, the departure board in the town train station would display exotic destinations such as Bournemouth, London Waterloo, or even as far afield as Birmingham, but the board in Dortmund would display daily ‘international’ departures. I liked the fact that I could if I wish, travel on continuous, highly polished rails from Dortmund to Amsterdam, or to Paris, or to Brussels, although I was a little concerned that the Russians might invade while I was away (it was the tail-end of the cold-war after all). One particularly dismal autumn day though I looked at the departure board & decided to just go for it – the army & the Russians, for that matter, could do one. So, in my best fractured German, I ordered a return ticket to Frankfurt, a city about 200 kilometres away, & with a little adrenalin surge (I was going temporarily AWOL after all), sat back in my seat & listened to my Sony Walkman.
As the train clickety-clacked through the drab sidings of Dortmund’s industrial suburbs with Axl Rose’s dulcet tones warbling in my ears, I felt strangely free. In the anonymity of that carriage I was just another ordinary, spotty-faced teenage kid on the train, albeit one with a very short haircut at a time when the average German youth sported a dapper mullet, complete with a 70’s porn-star moustache.
End of Part 1…
The Dawdler 
Letters to the editor