Connery (Part 9)

Catterick

At the recruiting office in Manchester there was a poster on the wall of all the branches of the service. It occurred to me that I would like to join the Parachute regiment. There were several reasons for this. One was that the Paras were an elite group, much feared and admired; two, I’d seen a documentary about the Paras when I was a kid; three, it seemed like a good opportunity to get the chance to jump out of an airplane with a parachute and finally and most importantly I liked the maroon beret. This is not supposed to be a joke. It really, really, really looked good and as soon as I saw that poster, all those other reasons became just retrospective justifications. The recruiting officer told me it would be tough but – with a smearing smile – he thought that I could make it. I could tell he was impressed by my determination, my pluck, and he didn’t believe I would have any difficulty with the tests. I filled out all the forms and in the next month I received my dates for my tests over in Catterick in North Yorkshire. It’s not an easy place to get to. I left Victoria and got the Transpennine train to York and then another train to Darlington and then from there you get the bus. The garrison isn’t very pretty, but the tests were relatively easy. And the physical was okay too. Well, for me. My fellow recruits were mostly younger than me and they weren’t as tough as they thought they were. They certainly weren’t bright. In fact, they were the riffraff the recruiting officer had said the army no longer required. They were that sort of stupid that is harshly hostile to anything that looks smart. Too stupid to know it’s stupid. There was a general marked suspicion of intelligence, so I kept my mouth shut regarding university and my background and my test results, though the officers and the trainers who had obviously seen my files had a way of making snide comments. It took three days to do all the tests and ‘see if I was a good fit and if the parachute regiment was a good fit for you’ as we were told. Everything was done in a light-hearted cheerful manner: like any other Open Day. There was much joshing and banter in the dormitories at night. Barrack room humour, I suppose you would call it. As soon as I had decided to go in for the army, I had picked up my fitness regime, so I was ready for what they had to throw at me. Once I had passed the test and been accepted, I went back to Manchester and finished everything off, paid up my bills, closed my rental agreement, talked to the university about my withdrawal, spoken to the local education authority about whether I owed them money – they decided I didn’t – I told the comparative literature professor that I was going to join the army and she laughed as if it were a joke, even when I told her it wasn’t a joke. We ate a curry and she got too drunk and I had to carry her from the taxi to her doorstep. I slept on her sofa and woke to the sound of her being noisily sick in the bathroom. When she had gone back to bed, I let myself out and ran home. It was about six miles and I did it in a good time.

On the train back to Catterick to begin training, I watched the brown hills turn grey under a pounding rain and the water ran in sheets down the glass. The steep roofed brick buildings with their large institutional windows could have been mistaken for an old comprehensive if it weren’t for the Chieftain tank, the sentries at the gate and the barbed wire fences. I went to the office and signed the relevant forms, handed over my letter, had my name ticked off a clipboard – ‘you’re early Coleridge, that’s a good start!’ – received my kit, medical, haircut and then I was directed to the dormitory and sat thinking as slowly the others began to arrive, with an excited panicky chatter. Small groups already forming and some of my fellow recruits attempting to assert themselves. There was the inevitable Liverpudlian comedian, the wily sounding Cockney, an unintelligible Scot from Aberdeen and a small group of lads all from the same school in Doncaster. We had twenty-one weeks of basic training and then a five-day test. All that open day bonhomie had disappeared, and the training instructors shouted at us that we were worms and scum and pigs and all sorts of swearwords. Some of the curses were so wildly inventive and obscene and original that you had to be careful not to smile and get another stream of rhetorical questions about whether the sergeant major: ‘was a comedian? Just here to amuse you?’ Often, they delighted in standing as close as they could to you and see how much spittle they could get into your face just by shouting at you and not actually spitting. The answer by the way: quite a lot.

The training was okay. I didn’t like the stuff about making us all obedient. I mean the discipline. I could do it, but I always retained a secret part of me that couldn’t ever be touched or exposed. I knew how to kill someone. I had killed someone. So, all of those parts that were supposed to be hardening us into trained killers were a bit wasted on me. I knew that my battle face wasn’t going to be necessary and all the stuff about esprit de corps, teamwork and solidarity I was dispensing with at almost exactly the same time as I was hearing it. I could use people certainly, but I’d not be sacrificing my safety to help anyone in a hurry. I got on well with the other trainees. It felt just like being back in school again, only school was one long PE lesson outside in all weathers, or inside a draughty gymnasium. We drilled on the square and learned some basic stuff about tactics and the rules and regulations of the British Army. We learned how to strip and reassemble and then fire weapons. Small arms, sidearms, pistols, revolvers, sub machine guns, machine guns, rifles, shotguns and we even fired grenade launchers. This was by far my favourite thing to do. Click, thump, boom. I enjoyed the time we spent on the firing range and I loved learning about different weapons. I enjoyed, with a real physical thrill, the impact of the recoil on my shoulder or in my hand and in the distance a target shredding or disappearing in a badge-sized welt of orange and smoke. The smell of gunpowder and hot metal. Sharp, acrid, delicious. Drifting over rain wet fields beneath Yorkshire skies.

I began as well at night – when everyone else was sourly breathing the barracks air – to visualise how I might use my new skills. What opportunities would open up. We weren’t just taught to shoot, there was knife work and other examples of lethal force. Garrotting apparently still a thing. Then there was the training in tidiness and fastidious attention paid to shiny, shiny, shiny boots, metal accoutrements, our kit and what not. Sewing and ironing were two skills I picked up quickly. This was all largely irrelevant other than making you succumb to a thousand relatively random rules, but for me it was easy, and I suppose it did give you skills that would render you more self-sufficient. If something went wrong, you were prepared to fix it. Dr. Habbermas would later diagnose me with OCD. She would say it was to do with my family. ‘Chaos and lack of structure in childhood can lead to a maniacal need for order in adulthood,’ she thrummed in her smoker’s voice. Also Dr. Havelock noticed it in Whitby. I know what you’re thinking. Habbermas and Havelock? Doctors both! Who are they and when will they feature more prominently in the tale? Is this being written from a hospital or clinic? Is this a memoir, a confession or a medical treatise? Or all three?

As for the OCD, at this point it wasn’t something people knew about and so I just thought of myself as naturally neat and tidy. Certainly, when I grew up being tidy and neat was just being tidy and neat. In the army, it gave me an advantage. One of the aspects of soldiering which caused recruits the most consternation was something I could align with easily once I’d absorbed the rules. Internalised, it became second nature and a source of satisfaction. It got so a line that wasn’t folded sharply or a surface that wasn’t polished to a bright shine irritated and appalled me. Slovenly, I understood the meaning of that word and it was as abhorrent to me as it was apparently to the army. I worked quickly and would sometimes help the others. In this way I found that I gained popularity and so I did it more. The other boys found me someone they could rely on and as a way of allaying boredom I would think up other ways I might become useful to the group.

There were some who didn’t completely take to me. Paul Scottson was a bristled Geordie with a snide and nasty sense of humour and a wish to dominate those around him. His head was so oddly shaped it looked like it had been kicked around a concrete yard, such were the dents. He had wet eyes which seemed black to me and his face was white as the underbelly of a frog, speckled with painful acne. He was large and strong though and did well on the marches and the hand to hand fighting. He smelled like the inside of a car when a bag of bananas has been left in there for a week in July. He didn’t really have a sense of humour at all. He’d make these nasty insulting comments in the place where people with more charm and intelligence would have made jokes. They were parodies of jokes, except that parodies are usually funny, and obviously his never were. For instance, he called me ‘dick breath’. The idea was that because I was neat and had shown a certain facility with that part of army life, I must be homosexual and that was a bad thing. I understood what he meant because homosexuality was supposed to be disgusting and weak. I’d heard it my entire life. Used it myself. “Gay” never really meant homosexual where we lived and when I’d grown up. It meant weak, foolish, soft, effeminate. The opposite of manly, tough, hard. Everything could be gay. Comic books, the way someone ran, a hat, clothes, a sport, a tv programme, reading books, Songs of Praise, expressing interest or enthusiasm for something that wasn’t a sport. It meant a certain type of not good. When I was at university, I met a few openly gay students. One of them was very camp; one of them not at all. Scottson’s name-calling didn’t bother me as such. I mean either all sex is disgusting or none of it is. There was nothing particularly disgusting about one appendage going in an anus rather than a vagina. If anything was really disgusting, something I had a lasting disgust of, it was kissing. The mouth that you eat with and speak with and you put those together and slurp saliva and spit about. Think about it. You spit on things that disgust you, as the ultimate sign of contempt and then you kiss the person you supposedly love and spit into each other’s mouths. It is vile if you think about it for a second, rationally. Admit it. Think about it and admit it. Vile, vile, vile.

Of course, none of these arguments were going to work with the squad and I had the good sense not to bother to even try. Trying was gay. The only thing that disturbed me about Scottson’s slur is the attitude it represented. It wasn’t that he was in some way impugning my character or damaging my reputation except in the way that he was taking a liberty in thinking himself close enough to me to be allowed to do such a thing. Fortunately, I came across him one evening in one of the blind spots at the corner of the barracks and I punched him as hard as I could in the voice box. He was a strong man and as I’ve said good at fighting, but this was outside of context and I had a good swing. He hadn’t expected it and he was afraid of consequences. Plus, he obviously hadn’t pegged me as a threat. He hesitated, standing there stunned, clutching at his throat with his mouth swinging open and I kicked him as hard as I could in the groin. There’s no way of describing the pain, the nausea and the heart-breaking fear that grips a man who has been solidly kicked in the cock. It is a moment worse than death, because death has an end, and this seems to go on for ages and ages and ages. While he was down, crumpled, collapsed, crumbled into a powder of pain and exasperation and gasping for air, unable to do anything, I put my boot on his face and mashed it in, gently putting my full weight on it until his head dug into the gravel of the path to find room not to be crushed. I did it slowly. I didn’t want him to be marked up too badly and I didn’t suggest he lick my boot or anything childish like that. But the deliberateness was also a type of communication. I was letting him know I could and would stomp his face in. This was a course of action absolutely open to me. It was a humiliation because at that moment, there was nothing he could do about it. Then aware that only twenty seconds had elapsed – I was counting in my head – I walked quickly away, leaving him to unwind himself once the pain subsided and pick the small stones out of his face and mouth.

From that point on, Scottson stopped calling me names and was very guarded around me. Reserved. I understood he had several choices available to him. One would have been to report me. But I would have lied and with the burden of proof on him, I don’t think he could’ve managed it. Plus the army is none too keen on men who can’t handle their own scrapes and must always run to the nearest officer. To borrow a phrase, the army thinks that kind of man a bit “gay”. Two, he could tell his pals and organise some sort of revenge beating but to do that he would have had to tell them all and even if he invented some sort of falsehood like I jumped him from behind, it always stinks of desperation. And he didn’t really have any friends. The sensible path was the one he took and though I was also wary of him – don’t underestimate the self-destructiveness of the truly stupid – I felt that I had jabbed a fork in Gavin’s face again, if you understand my meaning. I doubt Scottson had said anything – there was no way it made him look good – but news had somehow spread about what had happened; guesses, rumours and surmises. Plus, Scottson, as I said, had few friends and was unpleasant, whereas I was always ready to help sew on a button or explain a rule, lend a hand, and I was a good listener. This is not to say I was universally liked. I was not. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t have a sense of humour and I didn’t put in the kind of placeholders that Scottson did. I just let silences sit there, if that’s what they had to do. I was an odd ball. Deep. A quiet one. A weirdo. But we were all so physically exhausted from the training. That kind of socialising wasn’t as important as it was in the real world. Having someone to help you with a bit of kit or to check your weapon was properly cleaned when an inspection was due was much more valued than someone full of chitchat. Most of the time we were either doing highly energetic stuff or collapsing with exhaustion.     

It was interesting watching as the other candidates dropped out, got injured or struggled. I didn’t find it that hard. Yes, it was tough, but it was nothing I hadn’t already in some way prepared for. Once the basic test was over and the values of the army had been well and truly driven into us – obedience, loyalty, selflessness, service and the other stuff – we began the pre-parachute course and selection procedure with Pegasus Company or P Coy as it was always called. This consisted of another course of training followed by eight tests which took place over five days, starting on a Wednesday and ending on the Tuesday with a break at the weekend. The officers would increase their level of aggression in the run up to test week; lots of shouting, spit-spraying invective and tempers lost. I understood that they were also to some degree being tested. If a large number of us failed, it would reflect badly on them. Generally speaking, I got on okay with the officers in the sense that I didn’t get into trouble and I did what I was told. I had a neutral accent. I had softened my northern accent a lot and I often found myself imitating the accent of the last person I spoke with. Anthony Hopkins had a good voice, so I liked to copy his sometimes. Especially the way he puts his emphasis on the end of words. Sonorous Welsh sound that lingered like a rung bell.

The officers also saw that I got on well with my section and that was important. I came first in some of the races and I was always in the top three when it came to weapons training and marksmanship. I was considered a prodigy on the range and in unarmed combat. When it came to test week, I couldn’t wait. I was heartily bored of Carrick and the surrounding countryside, the leafless trees, the twigs, and muddy puddles, the sucking bog, the bracken. Always being wet, always being cold. There was a drudgery to it and the feeling of being in prison. The furniture was horrible, the walls were painted a two-tone green, both shades reminiscent of bird muck, and the windows all had that reinforced wire stitched inside the glass, making everything look crosshatched. The sky pressed down like a blanket that had been hung out to dry in the rain. It didn’t help that I was there by choice, especially because my mission was not exactly the same as the army’s mission. Even in the talk about peacekeeping, there was also an undercurrent of violence and risk so that was good. But no one was openly saying we are here to learn how to kill and then to kill. Even among some of the older officers, I was fairly sure I might be the only one there who had actual experience of killing someone. And up close as well. So that you saw the shock, the horror, the blood in the light of the streetlight and the sound it made, the pouring splatter on the pavement. It’s heat and steam. I thought about that at night as well. It was interesting how clear that memory replayed in my head. It got clearer and clearer as I replayed it. My heart beat in my chest. Other times I would totally forget that it had happened. And when I remembered it again it would come as a pleasant ‘oh yeah’ surprise.

One of the tests we did after a steeplechase and a long hike in full kit and pack was called Milling. It’s basically the same as boxing but you are only allowed to punch your opponent in the head. No ducking or blocking is allowed. It is supposed to encourage aggression and probably to see who is afraid of receiving and delivering physical violence. It took me back to Michael Collins and the Traveller’s Rest basement.

I was paired with a lad from Brighton called Dave Crack. He was as big as me but slower with an oblong head and hair that sprouted rather than grew at the top, and I knew that once I hit him in the face the first time, he would be so amazed that I would have a free hand to just keep punching him. The rest of the squad sat in a square on benches in the draughty gym and fights lasted one minute with breaks when the clock was stopped, and blood was wiped from faces and the floor. One of the more unnecessary cruelties was the awarding of a golden handbag to the trainee considered the weakest at the task. Scoring wasn’t based on winning or losing; it was simply about showing the requisite physical courage and aggression.

Did you mind getting hurt? No. Good.

Did you mind hurting someone else? Erm…

People don’t realize it, but this is the more difficult part.

I took Dave’s first punch because I knew it would be tentative, probing, with an absence of malice: and then I went after him as hard and as fast as I could. My third punch broke his nose and then after that I could punch him without worrying about getting hit by anything harder than a cabbage leaf. When they stopped the fight to clean his face and try to fix his nose, I stood eyes ahead, no sign of triumph or glory, counting my heart beats which were elevated but not too fast. It was little more than a school scrap in a gym. That same echoey sound. That smell of sweat and fear. The same sound of frightened boys shouting from the side lines to cover their own doubts and fears. I let Dave hit me a couple of times. I didn’t want him to get the golden handbag, not out of any consideration for his feelings, but if I won fighting the worst, my victory wouldn’t have any value either. I needed some bruises on my face otherwise people wouldn’t realise I was going through the eight tests. When we sat in the canteen, half of them were spitting bits of teeth out as we were eating. I had a fat lip and a bloody nose but that was it. Enough to show I’d been there but nothing to hurt me too much or distract me in the tests that still had to come. There was a camaraderie though. We’d all passed through something unpleasant. We shared a communal guilt for how much we had enjoyed punching each other, being punched and watching other people get a good punching.

There was an elevated obstacle course called the Trainium, which was feared but I had a method for that. It was about heights mainly. So, you simply had to get over that. I say simply but that was hard to get right. I used a technique where I just concentrated on very specific areas. Once I had this sorted out, I found that I wasn’t disorientated. Many of the actual tasks were quite simple. Cross over this bar; walk this beam; jump this short distance. It was the height that made them complex. Messed with your sense of balance. It was a distraction. Ultimately, the height asked a question: ‘do you mind dying?’ If you could answer the question, then you were halfway there. Emotion was not a problem for me though. Fear registered only abstractly and once I had focused on the task in hand, I took it coolly and received applause from my mates and muted praise from my training officers and sergeants.

I received my maroon beret, had it fitted on my head during the parade ceremony when family members turned up to watch from the temporary stands. Uncle Mike and mum and dad sat in the cold and applauded with looks of bitter impatience on their faces. ‘He always loved pretending to be a soldier,’ dad was telling Uncle Mike when I went up to greet them, splendid in my dress uniform. Mum seemed angry and I realized for her the trip to Catterick was just another trip to school. Another interruption in a routine of comfortable imbibing. There was nothing for us to say or do and they hurried away with the excuse of the traffic, even though I was free with a week’s leave and had booked a table at a local curry house. I ended up going anyway and eating on my own with a book by Clive Barker propped up against the condiments.

I was sent to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire where I did my parachute training. The first jump was from a barrage balloon. I was nervous – you can see the ground very clearly, high up though you are – but I enjoyed it as well. The cold of the airplane at altitude, the fixed stares, the standing watching the lights, the hand on your shoulder, the door open and the wind of speed pushing you backwards away from the door and then… The freedom of being out there in the middle of nothing, falling through space, pushed back by the onrushing wind and pulled down by the relentless geometry of gravity. The pull of the rip cord and the dislocating yank of the parachute never once happened without a plunging sensation of disappointment. The temptation was to ride the slide of freefall all the way down to an instantaneous slap of the land and death. Steering your descent and nailing your landing were tediously routine activities compared to that glorious drop. That fall that could be rendered endless.

I enjoyed all eight jumps in the end. Though I twisted my ankle on my sixth so that the last two were a little tender. Injuries were normal and you were also being judged on how you could carry on even when you were in pain. I appreciated that and believe I earned the respect of the men who followed our progress.

I loved the training and I loved the possibility of learning how to do things. All tasks were broken down into small parts. You do this, then this and then this. It was very easy for you to understand. All you had to do was concentrate and apply yourself. There was a soothing certainty. Everything in the army was about being able to do things automatically without thinking too much about it. It was getting people who didn’t do well at school to suddenly be capable of complex skills. Muscle memory, problem solving, it all blended into one. My scores were high; my officers were very pleased, and I spoke with the captain about potentially going on to officer training myself and becoming an officer. It would mean more courses but it would also mean more variety. I demurred. I said that I wanted to get some experience and then after a year apply, if that was still possible. For some reason this answer pleased the captain. I can’t think why. I suppose it was the discipline and the self-sacrifice he detected. Which wasn’t the reason at all, but I was happy for him to think like that if that helped him. The truth however was I didn’t want to do any more training and I didn’t want things to become more complicated. Being an officer, as far as I could see, would mean more administrative duties and dealing with more people. I had already been promoted to lance corporal and that – for the moment – was enough.

At the beginning, I had honestly thought that I perhaps wouldn’t make the whole course. I had researched carefully how to get out of the army legally, what my rights were and what various opportunities might arise. It was no longer impossible by any means, but you had to be careful, especially after the first six months when things got very restrictive. Your contract was for four years and then you had extensions, but I always had it in the back of my head that I would just get out, if it got too hard. Knowing there was an escape route meant it was less likely that I’d crack. However, I found that I fitted in very well indeed. The army seemed to recognise me for what I was. I would work hard and uncomplaining; I enjoyed having a structured life; I enjoyed not having other decisions to make. I gladly relinquished responsibility on a day-to-day basis and was happy to subsume my thoughts to some larger mission. The army thought that that mission was their mission and in some ways those missions were aligned. But it was also my mission entirely. A secret mission.

Of course, there was another secret that the army was holding, and you only gradually realised what that was. Their secret became apparent once I had finished my training and was now fully established as a lance corporal in the Paratrooper Regiment. Here it was. They had nothing to do. The recruitment videos and literature would trumpet disaster relief and humanitarian aid; peacekeeping missions and what have you, but the army was designed and built for war. I hadn’t been trained to use a grenade launcher – amazing as it was – in order to fire food at the hungry, or medicine at the sick. We were designed for the front line, for combat and for enemies that we were legally allowed to kill in that temporary agreed upon suspension of civilisation called war. If there were no war, then there was nothing much for us to do except being moved from one place to another; given some time-killing task and then moved back again. Hurry up and wait. Then of course there was the training. Training was a constant aspect of our lives. In this sense, it was like a grown-up version of the scouts. You just started collecting your badges for the sake of it. I got my HGV licence when I was doing basic training. I learned languages and picked up some engineering skills as we went on. We were constantly reminded that this kind of training would prove invaluable when we returned to the civilian world. There was a constant tone here, a noise in the voice whenever the civilian world was mentioned that made you understand that those idiots didn’t have a clue. They thought they had it lucky, but we had discovered the secret to a happy and adventurous life. The army fed us, looked after us, housed us, gave us access to transportation and further education and all we had to do was be ready for a war that seemed vanishingly unlikely to break out.

I’d heard this tone before, and I was to hear it again and again. At university, the tone was reserved for anyone not in academia. Even though this was no longer the elite and select institution it had once been, there was this residue of complacency that stuck. I would also find it during my association with the intelligence community and with what we could probably call the criminal underworld. Everyone who lived in a world that enclosed and demarked from the rest of existence; where their belonging involved sacrifice of some kind and perceived benefits, then there was this sense of difference and superiority. And also in all these worlds individually and privately members of the inner circle would confess their doubts; would confess it wasn’t worth it in the end; how they longed to be out; how they suspected they had gone wrong and there was a happier greener existence back in the real world, the ordinary world. The one they pretended to despise. In the end, the fear of a wasted life.

In the end, I applied to become an officer – with recommendations and approval from all my superiors – and I was back to training once more. Sandhurst and then various postings up and down the country. It was the same boggy countryside, with the tall pine trees that had been replanted once the deciduous forest had been logged and topped by an acidic mist. The soil was acidic also and nothing grew in the undergrowth except some bracken poking out from a dense carpet of pine needles. The same obstacle courses and firing ranges, drills and marches. This time they shouted at you the same obscene bile but always capped it with a ‘sir’. The first couple of times it made you laugh. But you choked on it if you didn’t want to spend the whole of your free time doing extra laps of the obstacle course or face down with a pack on your back doing a hundred and fifty push ups.

And there was book learning too. My languages were the obvious place to start and so I was allowed to polish them up until they shone. My German and my Spanish now comfortably as good as my French. My Italian was just a sharper more excitable Spanish and I found myself doing courses in small rooms on Russian and Arabic. Intelligence work wasn’t specifically discussed but there was a feeling that I might be useful in that direction and I had a number of interviews in which – for the first time – I was asked about my political affiliation, my family background and there were even psychological tests. Tread carefully, I thought at this point. I fully understood the way I thought and the way I felt gave me some distinct advantages over my fellows but was not normal, was not smiled upon. It would not do to be transparent. The army tried hard to make other people like me. They tried to make them aggressive in a way that could be switched on and off; use violence, with control certainly, but also use it in a way that most people, almost everybody recoiled from. They trained us to overcome fear and let out the full-throated roar of our pure brutal aggression, but I had not had fear to start with. I had no trouble being aggressive when I felt no antipathy. Or using violence in a way that was extreme and highly risky, both for myself and other people, without hesitation prior or remorse afterwards. So, on the psychological tests I cheated. Fortunately, the library held books about what I was no doubt being tested for and I was able to spot most of the questions and answer them accordingly. So: no, I didn’t like setting fires when I was young. I had never taken pleasure in hurting animals. I felt that I was as good as other people and no better. Not all, but then again it wasn’t necessary to be totally normal.

The army was a net that caught misfits and screwballs and people who just can’t hack it in the civilian world and a fair share of psychotics. There are a variety of mental problems which soldiers have when they enlist as well as the ones that they collect as they go on. The ADSD, depression, anxiety, addictions, narcissism, schizophrenia, sociopathy and suicidal thoughts. That’s why most soldiers find it very difficult to readjust to civilian life. It simply exposes the problems that they already had and were successfully covered by the army. So not too many red flags went up. Not an unusual number.

And as for my family they were disreputable in a totally understandable way. A pair of drunks who had no real structure in their lives. Easy to understand. Nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times.

And politics? No, I had none. Wanted none. Couldn’t say I properly speaking understand them, sir. Just point me where you want me to go and give me a job to do.

‘Love Queen and country and all that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And if there was a war no objections to going?’

‘In a flash sir.’

‘And killing? If push came to shove?’

‘Not something I relish sir…’

‘Yes?’

‘But as you say, if push came to shove.’

‘Excellent,’ Major Pilsen said, sharpening his pencil and brushing the shavings into his hand and then throwing them over as if they were spilt salt. ‘And how would it be if there was other work to do? Something a little more … I don’t know … covert?’

‘Intelligence, sir?’

‘I’ve been told you have a certain aptitude,’ Major Pilsen said. He was a broad man with a meat eater’s face and a handshake as warm as a urine sample. ‘Certain attitude. Keep yourself to yourself. Don’t seem to need company. Quiet. That sort of thing.’

‘Yessir?’

Pilsen nodded. ‘A man who could be relied on to do a job on his own, not necessarily require constant supervision. Someone who could take responsibility.’

‘I’d be happy to help in any way,’ I said. ‘Happy to serve, that is.’

I’d noticed these questions before, anticipated just such an interview. It was a coy seduction. A series of small sideways glances. And it was imperative that I was not too eager, but at the same time sensible enough to show I understood what was going on.

‘And as for morality,’ Pilsen lowered his voice. Quiet, but not a whisper. ‘Conventional legalities and niceties put to one side. If you were to be given that sort of dilemma… Would that be a problem, do you think?’

‘I’d rather not say,’ I said. ‘Sir.’

Pilsen made a mark on his form and squinted at it before looking once more at me and leaning back on his face with a tight little smile. ‘Well…’ he said.