Nigel Benn (5 page)

Mostly, the girls I went out with were lots of fun. We’d get up to high jinks on the top deck of the number 25 bus and do just about everything except make love. There was one girl I was quite keen on for a few months. I made love to her on Wanstead flats late one night but it turned out to be a horrible experience. We were in the heat of passion when I pushed against the ground with both hands for extra leverage. Instead of feeling
terra
firma
, my hand squelched and slid along the grass. I had plonked it smack bang in the middle of a huge mound of dog mess.

Another girlfriend and I were travelling home on the number 25 when the urge to make love
overtook me. I couldn’t wait to get home so we got off the bus, raced into a derelict house and made passionate love against the crumbling wall. I was exhausted by the end of it because this girl was hefty. She was bigger and heavier than me and the strain really showed. My legs were like jelly. After that I vowed I would do daily leg exercises to build up my muscles.

I left school at 16 not knowing quite what I wanted to do. I went on the dole and continued seeing the boys and having a lot of fun. But I was very hurt at the ending of my close friendship with Colin. When I make friends, I’m very serious about the relationship. Colin had some very fine clothes and gold coins and ducats. They were worth a lot of money and were stolen by one of our circle of friends who then pointed the finger at me. The devastating thing was that Colin believed him.

In the meantime, Mum was becoming increasingly anxious about my friends and the direction, or lack of direction, I was taking in my life. My brother John was already serving in the regular army, serving with the First Battalion, Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in Minden, West Germany. She begged him to persuade me to join. Thank God I did. The decision to do so was a major turning point in my life.

P
latoon Sergeant Weaver was a bastard and a gentleman. He thought he was God. We believed he was and he certainly behaved like a deity. He ruled by fear and scared the living daylights out of me and all the other raw recruits who joined Tobruk Platoon for their initial 18 weeks’ training at Bassingbourn Barracks in Royston, Hertfordshire.

Sergeant Weaver was a one-off but I respect him for what he put me through. My first impression was that he was a racist bastard. I was wrong about the ‘racist’. He treated everybody the same and put us through the toughest regime I have ever experienced. You would get a pasting just because you were in his platoon. He’d go up to a guy and say, ‘Look at those nostrils!’ and pull out the man’s lip.

To see how tough we were, he’d order us to get down on our knees and stick out our chins. Then he’d walk by and crack jaws with his NCO’s baton. It was done to find out if you were a man. There was no racial abuse involved. If you could
take it, you were tough and passed the test. In one of our survival practice sessions, I was made to swim under a boat in freezing cold water. Sergeant Weaver watched approvingly as my fellow soldiers then threw me naked into a bed of nettles. While hating him at times, I admired the way Weaver conducted himself. His grooming was immaculate. I had never seen anybody as well turned out as he was.

His approach would pay dividends for us later in our training. When we were sent to Scotland for our final assessment, we were grateful he’d hardened our resolve. That’s where they really sorted out the men from the boys. Anyone who put a foot wrong would receive one of several punishments, each more barbaric than the last.

If you were given ‘Corporal Rock’ as punishment, you were unlucky. It was one of the hardest to endure. You had to carry a big rock on your back for the
whole
day. It was about five stone in weight and, for brief spells, you were made to run with it until you had reached the point of exhaustion. But I would have preferred Corporal Rock to ‘Corporal Entrails’, which meant wearing a disgusting necklace of raw animal guts and offal for a 24-hour period, even during mealtimes.

While on manoeuvres in Scotland, I escaped the more horrendous punishments but still had to endure an ordeal. I was blindfolded, locked in a corrugated tin shed and then, to brighten the proceedings, a thunder flash used in skirmish attacks was thrown into my ‘cell’, causing a deafening explosion.

Many of us were given nicknames. At first, I was useless at map reading and my inability to find tracks earned me the nickname ‘Pathfinder’.

I went into the Army a boy and came out a man. I was 16 when I enquired at the Forest Gate recruitment centre about becoming a soldier. The wartime slogan ‘Your Country Needs You’ did not apply to me.
I
needed the
Army
. I missed being with John, and as he was the one who had always pleased my parents, I thought it would be nice to follow in his footsteps, besides which there had been some subtle hints from Mum. I had also seen my brother box in the army finals at Aldershot and thought I’d like some of the action.

Shortly before I approached the recruitment office, John had rung home from Germany to find Mum in tears. She begged him to do her a favour. ‘Please, John, for my sake and his, get Nigel to join up, because the way he is going he’s heading for prison.’ John and Dad worked on me and convinced me to enlist, advising me that it was the best thing I could do.

There was nothing else that interested me at the time so I applied and sailed through the army selection tests before I was 17. Not that they were very hard. You just had to prove you were not too thick by ticking lots of boxes.

Then you were sent away for a couple of days to see how fit you were. After that, there was a delay of several months until I had reached seventeen. I started my training on 11 May 1981. Private Nigel Gregory Benn, Army Service Number 24604617 — a number I will never forget
— would soon make his mark. One of the good things about the Army was that you were immediately made to feel part of a new family which had a long history. It gave you a sense of belonging and a provenance which you might not otherwise have had. On top of that, it instilled a sense of direction, comradeship and the guts to carry on when the going got tough. I owe the Army a great deal.

The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers had a proud and distinguished past. Formed in 1968, it was an amalgamation of the Northumberland, Lancashire, Warwickshire and London fusiliers dating back to the seventeenth century. King James II asked Lord Dartmouth to raise a Regiment of Fusiliers at the Tower of London in 1685. They were armed with the snap-hance musket which was the same as the French fusil. The king described his soldiers as ‘My Royal Regiment of Fusiliers’ and they became the ‘Seventh of Foot’.

Their headquarters is still at the Tower, together with regimental memorabilia and silver. Among the documents is a list of my army fights. The records will say I was undefeated.

In 1881, the City of London, in recognition of the regiment and the old trained bands who helped make up its numbers, granted it the treasured privilege of marching through the city with ‘… drums beating, bands playing, colours flying and bayonets fixed’. I wish I had been there to see the regiment when it took advantage of this privilege on 29 April 1994. That march was held to commemorate the twenty-fifth year of the
regiment’s formation, but at the time I was away in Barbados.

Immediately prior to joining the Army, I felt I had quietened down a bit. Mum and Dad no longer had problems with school but they were still worried about some of my friends. One or two of the older ones had a bad reputation and had been in trouble with the law. On the odd occasion, I was still a dab hand at shoplifting and had had a run-in with the authorities after stealing from Woolworth’s. Apart from that, I was having a high old time, although there was no real direction in my life. While Debbie Hogan was my regular girlfriend, I was still very much into going out with my mates and seeing my older buddies.

My music tastes had also started to change since leaving school. I was into soul music now which meant going to different clubs. Soul clubs were much quieter and more trouble-free than the reggae venues. We went to places like Lacey Ladies in Seven Kings, the 100 Club in Oxford Street, Oscar’s and Global Village. Stratford Town Hall and Ilford Town Hall also had good club nights and entry was relatively inexpensive. Our circle of friends included some great dancers with names to match: Shakin’ Stevens, Oily, Mutley and Bassey. We were one big happy family going from club to club.

Debbie and I were far too young for a serious commitment and I was still attracted to other girls, particularly to one with whom I became absolutely besotted. She was the most beautiful black woman I had ever seen. Vanya was a goddess. She had a
huge Afro hairstyle, which she sometimes plaited and which seemed to have a life of its own.

We dated but didn’t sleep together. Not that I didn’t want to. She was gorgeous. I took her back to my mate Paul’s one night while his parents were away and sat talking with her for 20 hours. However, by the close of this marathon I was back to where I started. She was far too shy to do anything physical with me at that time.

Later, when we took up again while I was on leave from the Army, our physical relationship flourished. She was as beautiful as ever but less introverted. I don’t know why I won her over then, possibly because I was fairly boisterous. She was still a little reticent but a very decent girl. I was proud to be with her.

Bassingbourn Barracks might as well have been in a different country. It seemed a million miles from home. My first night away from Mum was murder. I cried like a baby. For the first time, I realised how vulnerable I still was at 17. What a change from my confident old self. When surrounded by stable and loving parents and family, I had felt tough, invincible and grown up beyond my years. Here at camp I even had a picture of Debbie which I slipped under my pillow and clutched tearfully before going to sleep. Not one of my friends in east London thought I would make it beyond two weeks. They were convinced I would fail to knuckle down to army discipline.

The experience was new to me and it took some time to adapt to the strict regime. It began the moment they woke you. They threw you out of the
bed and then turned the bed upside down. But it was not all bad. We had a good bunch of lads and I made friends quickly. Joe Reeves became my best mate in those first six weeks and the other lads in my circle were Ducksy who had been a gardener, Jimmy Henderson, whom we called Jap because of his oriental appearance, Stretch Armstrong who had no teeth, and another Joe who was a massive black guy and a right hard-case.

The training was easy until they tried to get me to map read. We had some free time but in the first weeks there was little or no opportunity of meeting women so I remained faithful to the photograph under my pillow and generally tried to behave myself. I wasn’t going to have any old trollop who had been through the British Army, at least not the ones I had seen around Royston.

Once I’d overcome my loneliness and had been given a few days off, I returned to my confident old self again. Feeling happier, Joe Reeves and I became a bit lairy and our antics would sometimes reflect badly on Tobruk Platoon. To teach us a lesson, Sergeant Weaver organised an old ritual which involved running the gauntlet. The whole platoon formed itself into two rows of soldiers and Joe and I had to walk down the aisle between them. The soldiers had been given permission to whack or kick us as hard as they wished. Like a pair of reluctant brides, we began our passage down this dangerous aisle, but it was only poor Joe who suffered an onslaught of blows which rained down on his head, shoulders and back. Nobody dared touch me because I had issued
a prior warning that I would beat the hell out of anyone who dared. ‘Whack me,’ I said, ‘and you’re marked. Marked!’

Tough as they were, my colleagues had better sense than to attack me. The week before, they had seen me fight a 6ft 9in giant called Pete Driver. He was my first unofficial fight opponent in the Army. Pete was so big, they had to break up two beds to improvise one long enough to accommodate him. We shared the same dormitory and I had been looking out of the window, watching another soldier dismantle a general purpose machine-gun when Pete told me to get down.

Uttering some fairly common expletives, I suggested where he should get off, adding that his size didn’t scare me one bit. It seems that he was annoyed with the verbal abuse or else he didn’t like my attitude. Either way, the result was the same. He attacked me.

He lurched forward at me like a huge bear and shoved me with the stub of his hand. Thrown back, I recovered and ran at him, knocking him down on to the bed. Then I smacked him in the mouth with my fist and his teeth went through his lip. He was a tough so and so and got up and punched me in the eye. It split and there was blood everywhere. Suddenly, I saw two of him. Two massive bears towering over me. His punch had given me temporary double vision. That was no help whatsoever, just twice as scary! I legged it but the two of him chased after me.

By this time, we had acquired a growing audience and the Sergeant Major, hearing the
rumpus, shouted at us to stop. As he did so, I turned around and kicked Pete in his nuts. He didn’t budge. It seemed as though he hadn’t felt a thing.

Because we shared the same quarters, I was terrified at first that he might throw a wash tub over me while I slept, but he knew the ‘koo’ — the score. He realised that if he came for me, I wouldn’t back down. But, then, I had respect for him, too. He could have inflicted serious damage on me. After that incident we became quite good friends. Pete’s height resulted in Sergeant Weaver often making him fall to his knees when talking to him. Gods were not expected to look up at mere privates.

Pride of place on the wall above my brother’s head at his barracks in Minden was a photograph of me looking as if I had jumped six feet off the ground while doing a martial arts kick. In fact, the picture lied. I had jumped off a box which was conveniently left out of the shot. However, John had already told his mates and colleagues about my fighting abilities and this picture corroborated his proud boasts, and compounded my reputation even before my arrival in Germany. I was posted to Minden at my request but didn’t advise John of the date. I surprised him by springing out from behind a tree in the camp square just as he was returning to quarters from dinner. He was delighted and shocked and hardly recognised me in my flat cap, jeans and trainers.

During the Second World War, our camp had been home to the German SS and a penal battalion.
Now it catered for armoured regiments and their personnel carriers which would take us to the Soviet border in the event of attack by the USSR.

The first thing John did on my arrival was to read me the Riot Act. ‘You’re in the Army, now. Things are going to be slightly different to the way they were back home.’

He stressed that I should keep my temper in check and my hands to myself. Avoid fights at all costs, he warned. I think he was asking me to show tolerance, especially as I would be sharing a room with a real hard nut. Everybody was scared of this guy and John didn’t want to see me beaten up.

In spite of the warning, I battered the hell out of the soldier as soon as I moved in. He was playing his music loud, far too loud for my liking and I guessed it was done to get on my nerves or to test my reaction. I asked him to stop and he refused, so I punched the daylights out of him. He tried to have a go at me but I got in first and gave it to him. From that time on, I was one of the main men in camp. Everybody showed respect. John tried once more to read me the Riot Act but his words fell on deaf ears.

You didn’t have to be in the Army for very long to realise there were great advantages in being a good sportsman. I was given a work-out in a ring two months into my posting and must have impressed the officers who thought I showed enough promise to continue. John was already in the boxing team training up for a fight. They put me in the ring with Shifty who stood about 6ft 3in and had a massive chest. I panned him all over the
ring and the Sergeant Major took me straight out of uniform and into a tracksuit and that was it for the next year or so.