A Fortunate Life (24 page)

By now the end of my course was fast approaching. My final exams were to be in February 1970, and I wanted to spend the last two months as I had started, living with a Chinese family and immersing myself in the language. Jane flew back with the children just after Christmas 1969, and I moved back into the habits and environment of a Chinese living in Hong Kong.

On 14 February 1970, two weeks before my twenty-ninth birthday, I took my final exams gaining a First-class Interpretership in Chinese, recognised by the Civil Service at the time as being the equivalent of a first-class degree in the language. Before I left Hong Kong, I was promoted to Captain and received my next posting. I was to return to the UK to take command of Echo (E) Company 41 Commando Royal Marines. My student days were over. It was back to soldiering again.

I
TOOK THE OPPORTUNITY
to visit my family in Australia on my way back from Hong Kong in February 1970, spending a fortnight with them before travelling back to the UK to be reunited with Jane and the children.

We immediately started house-hunting in the Plymouth area, so that we could move the family down there as soon as I joined my new unit, which was stationed in Bickleigh, on the edge of Dartmoor between Plymouth and Tavistock.

At the time, a gratuity of a thousand pounds (a very great deal of money in those days, when the average house cost about four thousand) was given to all those who achieved a First-class Interpretership in Chinese, and we wanted to use this to buy our first house. But we could find nothing we liked and so settled for a rented cottage in Horrabridge, five miles south of Tavistock, which for the first four months of my new job we used as our home and a base for further house-hunting in the area. I took command of my new unit, Echo Company, 41 Commando Royal Marines, on 5 May 1970. To my delight I found that I had as my second-in-command an old friend, Alan Hooper, for whose soldiering skills and intelligence I had a very high regard.

Alan and I drove the Company very hard in those early days. By then the troubles in Northern Ireland had started, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before we would have to go there. So we had to move fast if we were to create an effective and cohesive unit which could cope with the pressures of the very difficult kind of soldiering we would find on the streets of Belfast. We practised the techniques of crowd control and patrolling in an urban environment, of course. But it wasn’t techniques I was so interested in – anyone can acquire those. In these kinds of operations, the weight falls not on the senior officers, but on the junior commander on the spot: at the road block, or the point of interface with a hostile crowd, or in
the aftermath of a bomb attack. So Alan and I spent a lot of time building up the initiative, quality and self-reliance of our junior commanders in the Company, ensuring that they had the confidence of the Marines they commanded and knew that they had our confidence, as well.

We spent a lot of time on initiative training in small groups on Dartmoor. It was on one of these in the early summer of 1976 that I was passing a flooded clay pit when I saw someone about three hundred yards away throw a package into the water. I watched for a moment and saw the package resurface and then noticed ripples circling out from it. It was alive! I reached the edge of the water just as a bedraggled and half-drowned dog emerged. I took her home to Jane and the children, who fell in love with her immediately. I said, rather pretentiously, that in view of her origins we should call her after a Chinese water nymph, but they ignored this and christened her Tina, and so she remained.

She was, I think, the best dog we ever had.

She was a half-Alsatian, half-greyhound and as fast and agile as a knife. I have seen her catch rabbits, flushed out from a hedgerow by a friend’s Jack Russell terrier, in mid-field. And she would often bring me pheasants she had caught on the ground before they had time to fly. But she was, by nature, as soft as butter and adored our children. Later, when we had a cat, Boney, Tina adored her, too. Indeed, when Boney had kittens it was Tina who looked after them, carrying them in her mouth upstairs to the airing cupboard, one by one, every night, with the cat following imperiously, like an aristocratic lady supervising her nursemaid wheeling the children in the park.

I used to take her to work with me every day, where she ran with us on our morning runs and sat under my desk when I was in my office. She had, however, one distressing habit which I could never rid her of. She would sidle up to any Marine I was upbraiding for some failure or other and lick him on the hand, or even, if I was really cross, put her paws on his shoulders and lick his face in a gesture of comfort and solidarity. This, of course, did nothing to enhance the dignity and severity of my reprimand. But my Marines loved her for it.

During the summer Jane and I finally found the house of our dreams. It was a stone cottage, which, as a hunting lodge, had featured in the Domesday Book and was set in a deep valley about three-quarters of a mile from the little Devon village of Milton Combe (famous in the area for a very good pub called ‘Who’d Have Thought It?’). It was
called Lillipit Cottage and came with an acre of land and a lively little trout stream running through the garden. Despite the fact that it was somewhat dilapidated and needed a complete new roof, we fell in love with it at first sight and offered
£
6,700 for it –
£
200 more than the asking price. To our delight our offer was accepted, and we moved in during the summer of 1970.

Our first task was the roof, and this presented us with a real problem. It consisted of the old-style Cornish Delabole slates (smaller than modern slates) which are very much a feature of this part of Devon and, of course, unobtainable, except at an exorbitant price. But luck was on our side. We selected from the Yellow Pages a local part-time builder and part-time poacher, who came with a team of roofers and a very great deal of local knowledge. I explained the problem, and he tapped his nose and told me not to worry. ‘We’m be right,’ he promised – and was as good as his word. The antique slates duly appeared in sufficient quantities to complete the job. I thought it impolitic to ever ask him where they came from – though I did notice on our Dartmoor exercises that some of the abandoned barns and farmsteads in out-of-the-way places on the moor suddenly looked a bit more roofless than, I fancied, they had been before.

Jane and I then threw ourselves into redecorating, repairing and refurbishing the inside before turning our attention to the garden. Jane, who is a passionate gardener, created a really beautiful cottage flower garden, while I walled and dammed the stream, built a garage, repaired the bridge, constructed a greenhouse and a tree house for the kids and turned the front paddock into an apple orchard. Meanwhile Kate got enrolled in the local school, and we became increasingly embedded in the local community. Jane also acquired a veritable aviary of domestic fowls to go with Tina and (after Northern Ireland) Boney the cat. These included five Khaki Campbell ducks, dominated by an extremely amorous drake called Barnabas; three bantam chickens, including a cock we called Chantecleer, who was extremely elderly and moth-eaten and used to potter into our kitchen on a winter’s day and, like a drunk at a bar, lean against our Aga for warmth. This feathered menagerie was further supplemented by six white doves, who went feral on us, and a succession of guinea-fowl (they call them gleenies in Devon) who, it appeared, we kept chiefly for the benefit of the local foxes, for they gratefully ate them as fast as Jane could replace them, until she finally gave up the unequal struggle.

For the first time since I had been a boy in Ireland, I felt the joy of putting down roots and having a place of permanence. It was, therefore, with mixed feelings that I received the long-anticipated orders to go to Belfast at the end of August of that year.

I found the process of going back to my home city far more painful than I had ever imagined it would be. The troubles did not come as a surprise. Even from an early age I had known that the discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland would be bound to lead to some reaction. But the ferocity of the violence shocked me, as did the way that it affected my old Northern Ireland friends and acquaintances. I was discovering what I would see in even sharper relief later in Bosnia: that the proximity of violence can transform even the most reasonable and civilised of people, and that the seemingly robust barrier separating civilisation from animal brutality is in fact a wispy, fragile thing which, once torn down, unleashes a bestiality that seems to empower neighbour to do indescribable things to neighbour – and which takes a very long time to put back.

Each of 42 Commando’s companies was assigned an area of the city to look after. Echo Company was given the Old Park Road and Ardoyne areas in the west of Belfast and was based in an old mill building in Flax Street, just off the Crumlin Road.

This was an area I knew well as a boy. I had cousins in this part of the city and friends, too. The news reports had prepared me for the physical destruction – though I remember being deeply shocked at the Old Markets area, where, as a seventeen-year-old, I had helped my father sell his lettuces. The thing which really stunned me most, however, was the feeling that the city of my youth was being brutalised by an army of occupation – and we were that army! I knew why we were there, fully supported it and had no doubts about the need for our presence. But none of this diminished the shock that it had come to this. Or the pain of realising that, for my military colleagues, this was just another ‘internal security’ operation, no different from what we had done together in Aden, Malaysia and Brunei.

But for me it was different. This was my city as well as my theatre of operations. Suddenly I found the Irish jokes increasingly tiresome and the black-and-white certainties of our operational assumptions increasingly inappropriate. For the first time I was beginning to see
military operations not just from the viewpoint of the soldier patrolling the street, but from that of the person living in the street as well. And I found it very uncomfortable. A friend with whom I have discussed this since has concluded that this was all because I was beginning to get tired of the profession of soldiering. But I do not think so. I felt just as dedicated to what I was doing, but much less certain that the way we were going about it was right.

We were all provided with what were called ‘tribal maps’ of Belfast, which showed the Catholic and Protestant estates coloured differently and the mixed areas shaded with both colours. The map showed me what, from boyhood, I already knew: that my patch was divided equally between Catholic and Protestant, with the Ardoyne being predominantly the former, the Old Park area predominantly the latter, and the Bone district fiercely divided between the two.

My day in Belfast began at 6 a.m. with a debrief of the night’s patrols and receiving the reports of those on guard at fixed points on our patch. During the morning Alan Hooper and I would plan the day’s patrols, trying to ensure that we always kept a stand-by unit ready for emergencies, that we treated Catholic and Protestant areas scrupulously the same, and that every part of our area had at least one visit from one of our patrols in every twenty-four-hour period. The main time for trouble came at the weekend and after darkness fell, so we would always have our operations room fully manned with one or other of us present during these times and at other moments of tension. Our day usually ended at around 2 a.m., when I would take a turn round the area in my Land Rover to make sure the ‘patch’ was quiet before going to bed. I do not normally need very much sleep and at the time did not find it particularly hard to maintain this routine. But when I came home at the end of our three-month tour I suddenly found myself more exhausted by lack of sleep and tension than I can ever remember being before or since.

At this time the British Army was still regarded by many in the Catholic community as saviours who had come to protect them from Protestant violence. But I could feel the mood changing. In July, shortly before we arrived, a highly unpopular curfew had been imposed on the Catholic Falls Road area, and many Catholic families had been burnt out of their homes in the largely Catholic area of the Ardoyne, where the gutted, burnt-out shells of whole terraces of houses acted as a stark reminder of the security forces’ inability or
unwillingness to prevent this from happening. Bloody Sunday and internment, still eighteen months away, would finally and catastrophically lose us the confidence and support of even moderate elements of Northern Ireland’s Catholic community, after which it would take thirty or more years of patient politics before we would finally be able to retrieve the situation and recreate the ingredients from which peace might be built. But at this time I felt that the early confidence in us among the majority of the Catholic population of Belfast was not yet irredeemably lost. The key battle, therefore, was not for order on the streets but for hearts and minds. I started a small youth club for the deprived youth of both religious traditions in my area and took them for a two-day outing to an old fishing haunt I used to visit with my father, the beautiful lake and castle at Castlewellan. Our first trip was a great success. But the numbers then started mysteriously to decline. When I asked one of the mothers why her son had withdrawn, she told me that she had been ‘instructed by the men’ not to let her child go off with the British Army. In retrospect, it was probably rather naive of me to imagine that it could ever have been otherwise, but I remember being really depressed about this at the time.

Although we all knew (and our intelligence reports confirmed) that the IRA had a presence in Belfast and in the Ardoyne at the time, they appeared to me to be supported by only a relatively small minority of the Catholic population. It was the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (or NICRA) who were the main (and, in my private view, entirely justified) vehicle for Catholic protest. NICRA in my area was run by a remarkable old man called Frank McGlade, who lived in one of the Catholic working-class terraced houses in the Bone district, about a hundred yards from the back gate of the mill in which we were stationed. Frank was around sixty and something of a local legend among the Catholics as a man of principle and courage. He had been an Irish nationalist activist all his life, had spent a considerable amount of time in prison and was a founder member of NICRA. He was also, according to our intelligence, the commander of the local IRA unit. One day – mostly, I have to confess, on a whim – I decided I would call on him. I walked up the street to his house, unannounced, alone and without any arms (but in my uniform) and knocked on his door. My intention at the time was simply to meet him and talk about the local situation and what we could do to make it better. It was, to say the least, a naive hope and a stupid way of going about trying to realise it.