Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life. Keith Floyd
weapons inspection), we were issued with two magazines, one containing rounds of blanks and one empty. Unfortunately for me, the platoon sergeant was a wretched little man from an ordinary infantry regiment who carried a huge chip on his shoulder because, unlike the rest of the instructors, i.e. the Black Mamba and others, he was not a Guardsman. He also resented the privileges that we officer cadets would eventually enjoy.
In order to test the efficacy of my anti-sand-and-mud device, aiming my rifle at my bed, I clipped what I thought was the empty magazine onto my weapon, cocked it and pulled the trigger. The consequent explosion of a .76 shell in the confined space of our Spider was shattering. I had also blown a hole an inch wide straight through the blanks on my bed and my mattress! Sergeant Gibbon came roaring in. ‘You, that man there, Floyd, you are on a charge, you moron! Company commander’s orders, tomorrow morning at 0830 hours!’ Until that moment, I know I had irritated the good sergeant of infantry because I had been succeeding at everything that was asked of me and he was delighted that I had fallen so heavily and so disastrously from grace. He turned on his heels and strutted, like a crowing cockerel, from the room.
The following morning, in best kit, I was marched at the double for the awful confrontation with our company commander, a blotchy-faced Major Edwards of the elite 22nd Cheshire Regiment. I was made to mark time on the spot in front of his desk while he languidly regarded me with cold, narrow eyes filled with contempt, disgust and loathing. The charge I was guilty of was read out before him, and he said, ‘And you hope to become an officer and lead men, yet you appear to have the brains of a child and the intelligence of a baboon!’ Corporal of Horse Clark flanked me on one side and our platoon sergeant on the other. Although I could not look left or right because I was at rigid attention, I know he smirked when I was awarded twenty-eight days’ restriction of privileges.
Restriction of privileges meant, amongst other things, punishment drill parades before and after the normal working day, regular reporting to the guard room in whatever uniform they elected you should wear, and, of course, you were confined to camp twenty-four hours a day for twenty-eight days, plus you had, as the Army euphemistically put it, ‘lost your name’. This was a severe blow: not only might it jeopardise my chances of being commissioned, it also scotched my weekly dining club meetings and the odd late night and illicit trip to London to attend the Embassy parties and nightclubs that Fraser, De Rougement and Douglas-Home had open access to.
As a penniless kid in Somerset, I used to make Christmas gifts because I could not afford to buy them. With rubber moulds I would make sets of three flying ducks from plaster of Paris, paint and varnish them, or, using the inner tray of a box of household matches, I would, with watercolours, lichen from the apple tree and balsa wood, create miniature glass cases of stuffed fish with cellophane for the glass held to the tray by black passe-partout. These I would glue onto a card upon which I had written with a copperplate nib the Angler’s Prayer, which was – indeed is:
O Lord, give me grace to catch a fish so large that even I, when talking of it afterwards, may never need to lie.
I now decided to do a similar thing with a matchbox tray and, using little corners of serge blankets and sheets from my bed, I mounted a miniature bed inside a miniature glass case and stuck it on a piece of card cut into the form of a shield such as you see bearing studded heads over the fireplaces of regal halls, and inscribed briefly on the card shield: ‘A rare bed, shot by Officer Cadet Floyd, Kohima Company, Mons O.C.S., Friday 13th June 196—’ and hung it over the head of my bed.
At the following morning’s inspection, the Black Mamba, crablike, marched in front of us, tweaking berets, straightening ties and belts. Every day at our platoon morning parade, there would always be one cadet who failed to meet the approval of Staff. It was usually a tall, lanky aristocrat called De Villiers. Day after day he was bawled out for dirty brasses, a crooked tie or an incorrectly placed cap or beret. On this particular morning I think the good corporal of horse was suffering from a mighty hangover and was not in a good mood. He snapped to attention in front of De Villiers and looked at him from toe to head, stared into his eyes and thrust his pace stick into De Villiers, who, unbelievably after all this time, had his belt on upside down.
‘Mr De Villiers,’ he snapped, ‘there is a cunt at the end of this stick,’ and before he could amplify his feelings of utter contempt for De Villiers, the cadet replied, ‘Not at this end, Staff!’ Unfortunately, apart from Corporal of Horse Clark, I was the only person who heard him say it. I dropped my rifle and collapsed into hysterical, uncontrollable laughter. I was rewarded with ten laps round the square with the rifle held high over the head, and while the corporal continued to drill the remainder of the platoon, like the Duke of York marching them up the top of the hill and down again, my forage cap fell off my head. Without his instructions I could not stop running, so I had to leave it where it was, right in the path of the advancing platoon, who trampled it flat! After my ten laps I rejoined the platoon, hatless, and took my place at attention, waiting for the command ‘Platoon dismissed!’ Nobby Clark stood before us, took a deep breath and screamed, ‘With the exception of Mr Floyyyddd…who is improperly dressed on parade, Platooooon! Platooooon! Dismiss!’
The rest of the platoon ran off to the morning’s first lecture while I stood to attention, anticipating yet another charge. Clark marched up to me and said, ‘I saw your trophy above your bed, you’ll be all right, sir.’ Then he raised his voice and shouted, ‘Now, dismiss and rejoin the platoon at the double!’
One cold and wet morning after breakfast, we were back at the Spider collecting notebooks and textbooks for the scheduled morning’s lecture when Sergeant Gibbon strutted in unexpectedly, dressed in fatigues and rubber-soled boots. ‘Change of plan, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘In fifteen minutes you will be embussing for a map-reading exercise on the Aldershot plains. So all you will need are your denims and pouches, a picnic lunch will be provided and we shall return at fifteen hundred hours.’ I didn’t like the man. I didn’t trust the man and something told me he had given us too much unnecessary information. Something made me smell a rat. When he had left the room I pulled the trunk I had kept from under my bed, which contained my secret food supply – Mars bars, apples, biscuits, other objects including a sheath knife, torch, Zippo lighter, blocks of paraffin fire-lighters, hip flask containing brandy and a small but immensely powerful collapsible Primus stove. All of this, along with shaving kit, handkerchiefs, toothbrush and paste, I packed into the pouches and pockets of my kit, along with sixty Piccadilly filter cigarettes! No one saw what I was doing and if we did end up on a routine run or a map-reading exercise for an hour or two, what the hell! The excess weight wouldn’t worry me. I was fit!
I knew I was right the second we got into the three-tonners. Instead of turning left to the training areas, it turned right and headed for Aldershot station, where we were rapidly marched onto a waiting train. Everyone was confused and desperate to know what was going on. The train pulled out of the station and neither the officers nor the NCOs who were with us would tell us anything. After a couple of hours we were issued with ration packs. A pork pie, a Scotch egg, an apple, a chocolate bar and a packet of crisps. Only then did Sergeant Gibbon gleefully announce that we were headed for Dartmoor. Most of the lads only had briefs and T-shirts under their denims; no one had any cigarettes or anything. (I have to say that this is a totally true story that I am about to recount, but it did take place over thirty years ago, and to be honest, I am not entirely sure if the ultimate destination was Dartmoor or the Brecon Beacons.) One thing I do know was that when we arrived in what I think was Tavistock in the late afternoon, we route-marched for several miles to a desolate army camp on the moors, where we were divided into teams of three or four, given maps, a radio, a machine gun, a roll of barbed wire, compass and Chinagraph pencils and told to rendezvous at a grid reference as soon as we could make it. By now it was dark. I can remember two members of my team. One was a hugely overweight, terribly jolly fellow called Brooking-Thomas and the other a tall, crinkly-haired blond fellow called Simon Hicks, who was hoping to get into the 21st Lancers.
I don’t know how long the hike was. It might have been twenty-four miles, it might have been eight. But after a briefing and a big mug of vegetable soup laced with rum, we were dispatched on our ‘mission’. The radio didn’t work, the machine gun had no ammunition and the barbed wire served no purpose except to encumber us with unwieldy burdens. I know