Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life. Keith Floyd
was summoned in for a quick lecture on the dos and don’ts of the PO troop. Looking back on it, although he was not, of course, so old, Maclver Jones was uncannily like Sergeant Wilson from ‘Dad’s Army’. He seemed to be too refined and well spoken for an NCO. He took me along to the common room to introduce me to the other members of the troop. The contrast from the previous eight weeks was staggering. There was Clive Smalldene de Rougement, Durant Hougham, Jamie Douglas-Home, Fergus Slattery, Heathcote Amory, and others I can no longer remember, all from Eton, Harrow, Stowe and Clifton; myself, from my minor public school, and two grammar school boys called Kirkham and Weir, who was rather cruelly known as ‘Weird’, and a larger-than-life character ‘Kim’ Fraser (AKA the Honourable, son of Lord Lovat). For a moment I felt a bit awkward, and very conscious of the differences in our backgrounds. But gentlemen are not snobs, and these guys were certainly gentlemen.
The PO block had not been occupied for some time and our first task was to bring it up to standard. This involved hours on your hands and knees, scraping years of urine sediment off the porcelain troughs with razor blades. Hours spent bulling the copper fittings and kit in our bedrooms. The tiled floors had to sparkle and especially the oxidised brass window fittings, which had to shine like highly polished gold. Our personal kit, which we had spent hours preparing for our squaddie passing out parade, was not good enough for Lieutenant Bale. The whole, not just the toecaps of our boots, had to be bulled until they resembled patent leather. Rooms were inspected every morning and there was always something at fault. Once a week Lieutenant Bale would come for a grand inspection and you learned very quickly that there was nowhere to hide. You thought you had everything right, and then he would demand to see your comb. Woe betide you if it had any hair between the teeth!
The day usually started with a three- or four-mile run, followed by gruelling sessions on the drill square, orchestrated by the good corporal of horse, who stood like a ramrod, the peak of his cap flat against his nose, barking high-pitched, clipped commands. Mistakes and errors would be rewarded with ‘That man there! Round the square, GO!’ and round the perimeter of the square you ran, your rifle held agonisingly above your head, until he saw fit to let you stop and rejoin the rest of your troop. There were lectures on tactics, military law, hygiene, current affairs, first aid, endless small-arms training and so on.
Everything was conducted at the double, you never walked between classes. Lieutenant Bale was the archetypal officer. Blond, blue-eyed, elegant, detached and hard as nails. He was an army pentathlon champion, a consummate horseman and had, at some stage, been attached to the SAS. As a consequence, our physical training was tough. Fully clad in combat kit, we would be divided into teams of four. We would then carry a telegraph pole between the four of us. You would have to race upstream in a little river that flowed at the edge of the camp which, of course, was booby-trapped. The only way you could win, and win you must, was to be the first team to reach a 30-foot-long concrete tube. You couldn’t stand up in this tube and the water flowed fiercely through it. There was usually a tripwire that you floundered into that detonated smoke bombs. Sometimes you might race three or four times, sometimes, soaking wet and exhausted, you would be sent straight onto the assault course, or perhaps, instead of a coffee break at the end of your ‘physical’ period, Mr Bale would demand that you paraded, within five minutes, in your number one kit. Of course, you were never anticipating that, therefore your kit was never up to scratch, so you paraded in full battle dress instead, not the ones you were wearing, however. If someone failed to meet standards in the second dress parade, you would have a third. Sometimes, after work we were cleaning our kit after a hard, wet day and he would announce that there would be a troop run. A cool seven miles before supper. And as Sergeant Linneker said, ‘If this is life, roll on death and let’s have a crack at the angels.’
But there were glorious moments too. Map-reading or escape-and-evasion programmes on the beautiful Yorkshire moors. We would often spend three or four days in two-man teams, sleeping in bivouacs at night, trying to snare rabbits or shoot partridge, or tickling trout in fast-flowing becks to augment our compo rations. I had no thoughts of the outside world and was totally engrossed in this frantically physical life of the PO troop. At weekends we would go into Richmond and have a drink in each pub in the square. This rendered you completely legless by the end of the evening. A few of us formed a dining club, and once a month we would dress up in our finest civilian clothes and eat pompously at some country club or nearby hotel. We must have appeared a self-satisfied bunch, eating, smoking cigars and behaving loudly, but boy, did we have fun.
The three-month course flew by and now it was time for us to be assessed to see if we were fit to attend the regular commissions board in Wiltshire. This was a three-day ‘trial’ where you were tested and scrutinised mentally and physically to see if you had that essential, magical quality of ‘leadership’. The only test I can still remember was the old chestnut of a ditch 20 feet wide filled with shark-infested water, which you had to cross with the aid of a 6-foot plank, a broom, a dustbin and a stepladder. Good lateral-thinking stuff. I completed my three days and returned to Bristol for two weeks’ leave, my first in six months, to await the verdict of the colonels and generals of Warminster. The crisp envelope from the Ministry of Defence popped onto the doormat. I could hardly bear to open it. The brief text curtly announced that I had won a place at Mons Officer Cadet School at Aldershot. I wondered how my fellow POs had fared. I hoped that they would be there too.
After a few days at Mons, I realised that my time in the PO troop at Catterick with the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment had been a brief military honeymoon. The honeymoon was over. The pressure on us now was three or four times greater. Gone were the soft-spoken West Country instructors. They were replaced by fierce, shiny-red-faced, immaculate NCOs and staff sergeants from the Brigade of Guards and top cavalry regiments. Happily, in this large intake of unknown cadets, some familiar faces had made it through – Fraser, Douglas-Home, De Rougement and one or two of the others. The vast majority, however, had come straight from school or university, with the exception of a few young NCOs who had successfully passed the RCB.
So it was back to basics and back to the drill square, where I met a man I shall never forget. He was slightly bow-legged, only 5 foot 9 inches tall, with a voice that could strike you rigid at 400 yards, and he clenched a highly polished pace stick. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, in his magnificent cockney accent, ‘my name is Corporal of Horse Clark. You will address me as Staff. I will address you as sir, simply because that is the tradition of the British Army, not because I have any respect for any one of you. Gentlemen, nobody calls me Nobby to my face or behind my back. I am known as the “Black Mamba” because I strike so fast. There is no room on this course for slackness, laziness or scruffiness.’ With that he sprang from his position and poked his pace stick into the chest of a tall, blond cadet, with his nose pushed into his face, and said, ‘You, sir, are already a scruffy disgrace! Report to the company barber immediately after this parade.’ He almost goose-stepped backwards and continued. There is no room on this course for mummies’ boys, because you are in the Army now and I am your mother.’ He paused and drew himself up to his full height and screamed out, ‘Is that perfectly clear, gentlemen?’ We all gazed steadfastly ahead as if hypnotised by the real Black Mamba. ‘I don’t hear you, gentlemen!’ he said. ‘Is that perfectly clear?’ Yes, Staff!’ we shouted in unison.
Drill parades, kit inspections, lectures and weapons training filled our days. Our nights were filled with study and kit cleaning. The pace was relentless. We were dragged out of bed with no notice at midnight and sent crawling across the muddy training grounds of Aldershot. You never knew how long anything would last. After one long night in the pouring rain we were eventually sent, wet and weary, back to the barracks in three-ton trucks. Exhausted, we crashed into bed. An hour later our instructor burst into the ‘Spider’, immaculate in his drill instructor’s uniform, and announced a rifle inspection. Needless to say, no one had cleaned his weapon before going to bed. We had all assumed we would have time to do that before Reveille in the morning. The whole room was given an extra drill parade as a consequence, and I, considering myself one step ahead of the pack, thought long and hard how to prevent this catch-22 situation from happening again. The thing was, every time they made you fall flat in the sand and the mud, the breech of your SLR got filled with the same. So I acquired a pair of ladies’ tights and cut out a tube which would cover the breech and with the appropriate slits to clip the magazine in. Prior to a scheduled,