A Fortunate Life (9 page)

We spent much of our time out in the field on exercises, living rough. One exercise involved clandestinely moving across Woodbury Common at night to establish a new defensive position and digging in. This meant digging fire trenches, which were then camouflaged before first light. In these we spent the next three days, rain and shine, under simulated attack. Digging a five-foot-deep trench in the flinty
soil of this outcrop of Dartmoor at night was one of the most laborious and miserable things I can remember from this period. By dawn the following day none of us had got deep enough to provide proper shelter, so the trenches had to be completed the following night, with horribly blistered hands. On the first morning our position was ‘probed’ by our simulated enemy who sent in small groups to try to identify our positions. We each took turns at being in charge, which meant, among other things, giving the order to fire when under attack. The standard fire order goes: ‘Number four section, enemy to your front, four hundred yards – rapid – FIRE!’ As luck would have it, my colleague in charge at the time (he turned out to be a most gifted soldier and commander) had a pronounced stammer. His fire order became a classic, long remembered and retold afterwards. He ordered us to ‘stand to’ in our trenches and then, when the enemy was clearly visible in the dawn light and within range, he gave his fire order: ‘Number f-f-f-four section, enemy to your f-f-front, f-f-four hundred yards – F-F-F-FUCK it they’ve gone!’

On another exercise we were camped under makeshift winter bivouacs of sod walls for warmth with our groundsheets serving as a rudimentary roof, doing weapon training at Willsworthy Camp on Dartmoor. We rather enjoyed this camp because, although the buildings were Second World War, they were warm and mostly dry. The camp also had one of those latrine systems which consists of a series of cubicles (ten I seem to remember), each positioned over a trough with water flowing in at one end and carrying the detritus down the trough to a drain leading to a septic tank at the other. The flow in the trench was about that of a lazy trout stream, which nicely facilitated a practice we called Drake’s Fireships. To play this you had to be upstream of your colleagues as they went about their morning business. You then gathered a large, loose ball of service-issue lavatory paper, set it alight and launched it towards an unsuspecting downstream defecator, much as the great Admiral launched his fireships against the Spanish Armada at anchor off Gravelines. If you got it right, and all ten downstream traps were occupied, the squeals of pain and rage issuing
seriatim
from each one gave a sort of rippling xylophone effect that was most satisfactory. Naturally, there was always early-morning competition for the most upstream traps.

On this occasion, however, there was none of that. Although we were quite close to the camp, we were banned from its facilities and had to make do with what we could construct or dig on Dartmoor’s unforgiving
hillsides. No sooner had we built our pathetic little sod bivouacs, than the skies opened and it poured … and poured … and poured. We spent three miserable days living and sleeping in a sea of mud, and then the exercise was abandoned – not because of our discomfort but because we were needed to join the rest of ITCRM, which had turned out to the last man to help Devon farmers and families, saving lives, property and stock in one of the worst floods in the county’s history.

In one exercise, towards the end of this phase of our training, we were dropped on Exmoor and had to make an approach march over two nights, lying up in woods during the day, to a point just short of RAF Chivenor near Barnstaple on the north Devon coast, on which we were tasked to mount a night-time commando attack. On the third night we carried out our reconnaissance and on the following night our assault, which aimed to plant dummy bombs on their aircraft. The assault did not succeed, as the RAF Regiment guarding the airfield had been warned in advance. We were forced to pull back and then had to make our way through ‘enemy-held’ north Devon, using escape and evasion techniques, to a safe pick-up point in ‘friendly’ territory on the other side of Exmoor. We split into pairs, the better to evade the enemy. I was with my friend Tim Courtenay and it was my job to lead us across Exmoor in the dark. I made the fatal mistake of disbelieving my compass and attempted instead to find our direction by reading the land and trying to compare what I could see with what I thought I should see from the map. The night was very dark, and we got caught in some bogs (which, uniquely on Exmoor and Dartmoor, seem to occur more often on the tops of hills than on the low ground at the bottom of them). By three in the morning it was very clear that I had hopelessly lost us, so we elected to spend the rest of the night in a shallow sheep scrape and find our bearings when the dawn came. Light found us in the upper reaches of the very beautiful Doone Valley, miles from where we should have been. By now the rendezvous time for our transport back had passed. We decided that our only course was to make our way back to Lympstone, some sixty miles to our south-east, on our own. Thanks to hitches on trains, the help of a farmer on a tractor and the driver of a small delivery lorry, we made it back by nightfall, to find that there was a full-scale search on for us. My low marks for map-reading were compensated for by the high marks we received for initiative and self-reliance.

By now, however, my friendship with Tim Courtenay had another and deeper strand.

ITCRM held its annual Christmas ball on 12 December 1959, some seven months after we had joined. At this time I was ‘between’ girlfriends and so invited my cousin Freda, who lived close by in south Devon. Tim was in the same position. We arranged for both cousins to be put up in the nearby local, the Railway Inn (now rechristened with the rather more consumer-friendly name of ‘The Puffing Billy’). The ball started, if I recall, at 7.30 p.m., so it must have been about this time that, in full Royal Marines mess kit (but nursing a huge black eye from a boxing bout the day before), I went down in a friend’s car to pick up my cousin. I asked the publican, who by this time knew us all well, which room my cousin was in. But he confused the cousins and directed me to the wrong room. After a peremptory knock I opened the door to find, not my cousin, but a very pretty girl in the last stages of getting ready for the Ball. I could see she was pretty, even though her hair was in curlers. I stammered my apologies and beat a flustered retreat. It was only later at the ball (when she looked even more radiant and beautiful), that I discovered that she was Tim’s cousin, Jane Courtenay. I will not say I fell in love with her that night, for we only danced together twice (a foxtrot and a waltz my wife tells me – but how could she tell, given how bad my dancing was?). But I did fall in love with her next day when, along with other colleagues and their girl friends and partners, we met for lunch in the Clarence Hotel in Exeter’s Cathedral Square. I was bored with the lunch, and so was she, so we went off to look round the Cathedral together and, wandering round, found that we shared a love of architecture and classical music. Jane, it turned out, was an art student studying at Bristol and was as engaging, unpompous and fresh in her views as she was beautiful.

We started to write regularly and see each other whenever we could. I couldn’t afford a car at the time, and so I relied on Tim Courtenay to drive me up to see her at her home in Burnham-on-Sea in his open-topped MG. I have very fond memories of these drives up the Exe Valley, full of anticipation at seeing Jane again. These were days when roads were less crowded, and we could stop off at a pub for a couple of pints and a sandwich without worrying about alcohol limits. And it always seemed to be summer, and the sun always seemed to be shining.

It was just at this time, as I was finding a new dimension to my life, that I lost the most important anchor on which I had relied for all of my eighteen years. Straight after the ball at which I had met Jane, I returned home to Ireland for Christmas with my parents. A day or so after I arrived home, my father took my mother, my brother Tim and me off to the Grosvenor Hotel in Belfast. This was, by family tradition, the place we always went when there was something really important to celebrate. But this was not a celebration. My father, with tears in his eyes, told us that he had failed us – his business would have to fold. He had decided, with my mother, that the only sensible course for them now was to pay off their debts and emigrate with the whole family – except me, since I was now established – to Australia, where the Government had initiated a scheme that offered British families passage and assistance in setting up in the new country for
£
10 (the so-called ‘ten-pound Pom’ scheme). They would leave in the spring. My father explained that his only lifetime ambition left was to give his children a proper start in life, and in class-conscious Britain that meant paid-for private education. It was now clear that that he would not have the money even to do this, so he would take the family to a country where it didn’t matter. They had considered Canada, but the Australian scheme was all they could afford. I was heartbroken, almost as much by the sight of my beloved father with tears running down his broken face as at the prospect of being permanently parted from them all.

We had a pretty miserable last Christmas in a rented house in Donaghadee, where we had started in Northern Ireland, and then I returned to Lympstone at the end of the Christmas holidays. I saw them once more, a few weeks before they left from Tilbury Docks on the SS
Strathaird
on 6 June 1960. They had gone down to spend their last few days in Britain with my Dorset aunt, and I got time off to go and say farewell to them. After I had said goodbye to my brothers and sisters, my parents decided to accompany me as far as Axminster on the first leg of my bus journey back to Lympstone. It was not a wise decision. Most of the journey was spent in dumb misery, broken only by my father trying, in a choking voice, to give me advice on how I should live the rest of my life. It was on this journey that I first told them about Jane. And then, there in the town square of Axminster, I said goodbye to them both. It was dusk, raining and very cold for early
summer. I remember seeing their faces out of the rain-streaked back window of the bus as it pulled out of the square, carrying me back to my life in England, as they headed off to refound their family on the other side of the world. I was to see my mother again for only three (albeit extended) occasions, and my father for four, before they died.