Today Everything Changes: Quick Read (2 page)

I felt angry with people who had shiny new cars or motorbikes and used to kick dents in them – just because I could. I damaged people’s shops, and messed up their goods, simply because they had stuff and I didn’t.

I remember being very angry with my teachers. By now I had gone to seven different schools, so I had a lot of teachers to be angry with. I was angry that they put me in remedial classes to help me catch up, but I didn’t exactly do anything to get out of them. In fact, I liked being at the bottom of the class. It gave me yet another reason to be angry. I liked the feeling of being a minority and that everyone was against
me. I was part of a select club. It justified my anger, so I was entitled to do things that others couldn’t or shouldn’t do.

As soon as I started at the local comprehensive school, I got into another gang. We went thieving in areas that had smart houses and cars. We reckoned the owners deserved to be robbed.

We’d saunter past women sitting on park benches, grab their handbags and do a runner. If anyone left their car for a minute or two to buy their children an ice cream, we’d lean through the window and help ourselves to their belongings. We would do the same at traffic lights if a window was open and there was something to take. If a car was hired or had a foreign number-plate, there was a good chance of finding stuff in the boot. The driver and his family were on holiday so they must be rich, right?

During our school lunch breaks we took off our blazers and hid them in our bags so that no one could identify us when we stole. We thought we were dead clever. In fact, ours was the only comprehensive school in the area, which didn’t really occur to us. Then we’d go around looking for things to steal. One day we got into a car and found a few letters that were waiting to be posted. They contained cheques. We were sure
we’d cracked it. We had no idea that we couldn’t do anything with them.

One night, three of us broke into a camping shop. We didn’t really know what we wanted. It wasn’t as if we planned to go hiking in the hills. I hadn’t been further than to the seaside at Margate. But in that shop you could get badges that showed you’d passed swimming tests to sew on your trunks. We took a few of those and all became gold-medal swimmers. Then we used a frying-pan in the campsite window display as a toilet. We thought it was really funny, but actually we were showing our anger at the world and how it treated us.

By the time I was fourteen, I was bunking off school most of the time. I got a job loading electrical goods into wagons, then helped deliver them. I made a fortune, mainly because I nicked radios, speakers and anything else I could get my hands on when the driver wasn’t looking.

I earned more than my old man. My attitude was, ‘School is rubbish. I’ve got a job. I’m earning money’, and that was it.

In the area we lived, you had a really good job if you were a printer on the newspapers in Fleet Street or working in the docks. At the next level down, you had a good job if you were a tube train driver, or a panel beater. I didn’t know what a panel beater did but the word was he got paid good money.

One summer I ended up working more or less full time for a haulage firm, delivering Britvic mixers and lemonade during the summer. I managed to get extra pallets of drinks put on the lorries, sold them to pubs and pocketed the proceeds.

In the winter, I delivered coal. I thought I was Jack the Lad because I could lift the sacks into the chutes. I couldn’t move for old ladies wanting to make me cups of tea and fill me up with homemade cake. I thought I knew everything I needed to know. I felt sorry for my mates who were still at school.

By now I was all hormonal and trying to impress girls, so it became very important that I was clean. You could buy five pairs of socks for a quid in Peckham market, in shocking colours like yellow and mauve. I made sure that everybody saw I was wearing a different colour every day. But at home we still didn’t have hot water. It didn’t matter because we didn’t have a bathroom either. We made do with a kettle of hot water in the kitchen sink.

I had to get the coal dust off so I started to have a shower at Goose Green swimming baths. It cost 5p for the shower and a towel, 2p for soap and 2p for a little sachet of shampoo.

It was now that the Bruce Lee craze swept the country. People would roll out of the pubs and into the late-night movie, then come out thinking they were the Karate Kid. On Friday nights, outside the cinemas, curry houses and Chinese takeaways of Peckham, the local lads would be
characters head-butting lamp-posts and each other to Bruce Lee sound effects.

I took up karate in a big way and trained three times a week. It was great, but it wasn’t enough.

I was still angry with everyone who had more than me. A group of mates and I started tipping over Portaloos so we could snatch the occupants’ handbags as they tried to stop themselves being covered in shit. After all, they deserved it, I thought.

The only problem was, not everyone saw things the way I did.

One day, three of us were about to start wrecking a flat in Dulwich that was full of nice, shiny things that someone else had worked really hard for. However, this time the police were waiting. I made a run for it, but got cornered near the railway station by a policeman and his dog.

At the age of sixteen, I ended up in juvenile detention, or jail for kids.

Detention didn’t help me at all. It just made me worse. As I saw it, the reason I was in there was everyone else’s fault. It just reinforced my belief that no one cared about me. And if they didn’t care, then why should I?

Then, one day, the army came to see if any of us wanted to be soldiers.

‘I want to fly helicopters,’ I said to the sergeant. He said that I could if I wanted to. They couldn’t catch this boy out. He had shown me a film with a little two-seater helicopter (called a Scout) in it. The pilot wore a pair of shorts and a T-shirt as he flew really low over the beaches of Cyprus. He was waving down at the girls, and they were waving up at him. I rather imagined myself at the controls. My biggest decision, I reckoned, was the colour scheme of my shorts.

There and then, I took a simple test in English and maths, which I failed. I was told I was ‘functionally illiterate’, which meant I could cope with only the simplest questions. My literacy levels were that of an average eleven year old.

But what did I care? I was going to fly helicopters!

I was given a train ticket and went to Birmingham where hundreds of other would-be soldiers gathered for three days of tests, to see if I was good enough for the army. We had medical checks, too, and did a bit of sport. We watched films and were given talks about army ‘combat arms’ and ‘support arms’ and where soldiers
were stationed around the world. I loved it. The Army Air Corps seemed to operate everywhere. Cyprus and Hong Kong looked good to me for starters.

As I was doing the tests, though, the terrible truth dawned on me that there was no way I could become a pilot. I didn’t have a qualification to my name. The thought of all the time I’d wasted, mucking around the estate, flashed in front of me as if I was a drowning man.

At the final interview, an officer said to me, ‘You could go into the Army Air Corps and train as a refueller. However, I don’t think you’d be best suited to that. You’re an active sort of chap, aren’t you, McNab?’

‘I guess so.’

‘So do you fancy travelling, seeing a bit of the world?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Well, why not a career in the infantry? The battalions move every two or three years, so you’d be going to different places. It’s a more exciting life for a young man. We have vacancies in the Royal Green Jackets.’

‘Right. I’ll have some of that.’

After all, I was only going to do my three years, then go back to south London and become one of those well-paid panel beaters.

I’d got on to the train at Waterloo suffering from what I thought was the world’s worst haircut.

There were lots of other lads on the train with their bags of gear, but nobody was talking to anyone else. We were still silent when we got into the fleet of white double-decker buses that were waiting to take us new ‘Junior Leaders’, as we were called, to the battalion’s camp at Shorncliffe, near Folkestone, in Kent.

The idea behind the Infantry Junior Leaders Battalion was not only to train sixteen and seventeen year olds for a year to become infantry soldiers but also to become the infantry’s future leaders, the corporals, sergeants and warrant officers, the backbone of the army. Before that happened, though, we all had to be cut down to size. As soon as we arrived, from our various parts of the country, all 1,100 of us were given another haircut. A really outrageous bone haircut – all off, with just a little mound of hair on
the top of our heads, like a circle of turf. I knew straight away I was going to hate army life.

To make it worse, I found out that it was not just for three years that I had to sign up for but six because of all the extra training I needed. The army wanted its money’s worth out of me. I hadn’t really understood the contract, I just thought the options were three, six or nine years. I’d thought I’d signed up for the minimum three years, but I was wrong about that too.

The camp was very big, located on the high ground above Folkestone. Most military camps and their training areas were in the same sort of place, wet, cold and windy, maybe it was because nobody else wanted to buy the land?

As we drove into the camp, I saw some lads in shiny steel helmets picking up leaves, cigarette ends, even matches. They were being told off by a big guy with two stripes, very shiny boots and a big stick under his arm.

‘Who are they?’ I asked the bus driver.

‘Prisoners.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Went AWOL, mostly. New recruits go missing, get picked up and brought back. Then they get all the horrible jobs.’

‘What about the guy with the stripes?’

‘The provost corporal. He’s going to be your worst nightmare. That’s all you need to know about them.’

We drove past squads of junior soldiers
marching or running all over the place, some with weapons, others lined up outside the gym getting shouted at by the man in charge.

The next day was a blur. We were given our kit, some documents and then more documents. There was more shouting and just ten minutes for food. We were told that we were not allowed to wear jeans because they were ungentlemanly. We’d been given a civililan clothes list for when we were not in uniform and from now on that was what we would wear. If we didn’t have a pair of proper trousers, we would be buying some at the first chance we could get.

We had to stand to attention if a trained soldier came into the room, even if he was a private. We had to say to him, ‘Yes, Trained Soldier. No, Trained Soldier.’

And then I found out I had to shave every day, even though I didn’t need to. I didn’t need to shave until I was nineteen. I had teenage zits all over my chin, which didn’t help me look like a soldier when I cut the tops off them every morning.

They weren’t the only bits of blood I had to contend with. As a south London boy, I thought
I was a bit hard, but other people there made me look like one of the Teletubbies. They had homemade tattoos up their arms, smoked rollups, and came from places I’d heard of but wasn’t exactly sure where they were, such as Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and, of course, lots of Scottish places. I couldn’t work out the names because I couldn’t understand what the Scots were saying. I’d only been north of the River Thames about three times. The furthest south I’d ever travelled was Margate. I hadn’t ever been on an aeroplane. After my third scuffle in as many days, I wanted out.

I shared a large room with twenty-three other lads. The showers, toilets and basins were in a large room we called ‘the block’. For the first time ever, I had my own space. It might only have been a bit of lino the size of a broom cupboard, which I had to polish every morning, but it had a bed, a locker and a bedside mat that were mine. I paid for it and my food every week out of my wages.

I’d never had a space of my own before. The last couple of years, I’d slept in the living room of our flat, having to wait till Mum and Dad were asleep or my younger brother went to bed before I could. The constant smell of cigarette
smoke made the back of my throat sting. I used to hate it, maybe that was why I’d never smoked.

We were allowed just three sheets of hard toilet paper at a time. There was a sign on the back of each toilet door to remind us: ‘Three sheets only: one up, one down, one shine.’ At least it was better than where I’d come from. On top of that, there was the luxury of hot water, plenty of it, and we were ordered to use it. Sometimes we had to shower three times a day, after PT in the morning, after further training in the afternoon and before lights out at night.

I never got tired of hot showers. At night I used to take a plastic chair in with me and sit under the hot water for as long as I could. It made me feel like a millionaire.

Every day started at six-thirty, when the duty sergeant would burst in, turn the lights on and shout, ‘On with your socks, feet on the floor.’ Everybody had to be standing on their bedside mat by the time he’d walked around the room.

I was in C Company, which included my regiment, the Green Jackets, the Light Infantry and all the Scottish regiments. The Scots’ training sergeants always had a bagpiper in tow to wake not only us up but all the rest of the battalion.

As soon as we were up, it was a mad panic. There was a lot to do before we were inspected at eight o’clock. We had to wash, shave and get dressed. Then we went to breakfast. This was the only meal we didn’t have to march to and from. Instead we ran. Everyone had to have breakfast. It was called the Queen’s Parade. If you flaked out on the assault course or on the drill square later and it was found out you hadn’t had breakfast, you were in the shit, big-time.