Confessions of a Private Soldier

Contents

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Also available in the CONFESSIONS series

About the Author

Also by Timothy Lea & Rosie Dixon

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

I’ll never know how I managed to end up in the army. I mean, of all the professions I never thought of going into, the army was the one I never thought of going into most.

I never even reckoned it on the telly. All those adverts showing blokes leaping in and out of jeeps and on the point of having it away with WRACs who looked like Raquel Welch. They never convinced me. What about all the geezers who can’t be there because they’ve snuffed it? That’s what I used to ask myself. I bet all these other countries have got commercials showing the bright side: you know, killing people. Somebody has got to come out second best. There has got to be a moment when chatting up birds over the white-hot top of your steaming sub-machine gun has got to stop. And then it’s, poof, you’re dead. And not only the poofs either. Blokes like you and me. And with my luck, especially me.

Of course, I suppose, coming out of the nick had a lot to do with it. Even in these emancipated, ‘anything goes’ days there is still a faint stigma attached to being chucked into the chokey. Especially if it is for flashing your full frontals in a filthy film. The fact that I lost my remission for taking part in an orgy before the assembled inmates of Penhurst Prison did not help very much either. I could say a lot in my own defence but I find the subject too painful to dwell upon and can only commend interested readers to consult Confessions from the Clink for the full and sordid details.

Anyway, I was at a very low ebb when I eventually staggered away from Penhurst, not least because of the physical deprivations I had been forced to endure. Putting it another way: I had not had my end away for three months. The early days when Penhurst had been a haven for do-gooders and good doers were long past and successive governors seemed to be vying with each other to bring new stringency to the penal system. As for me I was very worried about my own penal system, if you know what I mean. Three months is a long time to a healthy lad who likes throwing it about, and I was not at all certain that the four-fingered widow was an adequate substitute for what I had been missing.

When it was time to go the Governor said a few words about keeping my nose clean – I don’t think he was really referring to my nose – and I was pushed out with my train fare home. At least it would have been my train fare home two weeks before when they put the fares up. In the end I have to hitch-hike home and I am not in a particularly sparkling frame of mind when I eventually bang on the front door of 17 Scraggs Lane, ancestral home of the Leas. The minute I have done this I turn sideways and wait for Mum to pull back the curtains of the bay window. Mum knows that there are a lot of funny people about – after all, she married one of them – and she does not believe in taking chances. This suits Dad who has no wish to communicate with the outside world, most of which he owes money to.

Two minutes later Mum’s mug peers suspiciously through the lace curtains and settles into a resigned smile of welcome. I am disturbed to find that she blushes when she sees me and it occurs to me that my performance on the stage in Penhurst Prison still lingers strongly in her mind. How anybody could have mistaken cannabis for spinach I – and, no doubt, the two ladies I was appearing with – will never know.

‘Hello, dear,’ she says, opening the door and looking nervously up and down the street. ‘You’re looking very thin. Are you all right?’

‘Fine, Mum,’ I say, stepping uninvited into the house. ‘The old pile hasn’t changed much.’

‘Well, they don’t. Not unless you have the operation and I don’t fancy it at my age.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ I say hurriedly. Blimey, I love my old Mum but she is as thick as a set of cork table mats. If you don’t spell everything out in words of one syllable she will always get you wrong. ‘I was talking about the house. It’s just the same.’ This is not strictly true because the heap of junk that Dad has nicked from the lost property office is even larger than usual and swollen by an imposing selection of gas masks, some of them as recent as World War II. Should the Chinese decide to attack with gas, 17 Scraggs Lane should be one of the last dwellings to succumb to the Yellow Peril.

‘I don’t know how people go on having this stuff to lose,’ I say. Mum nods her head in agreement.

‘Your father hates to see anything going to waste, that’s the trouble. Every time they have a sort out down at the office he brings it all back here.’ Mum’s use of the word office is significant. She reckons it sounds posher to refer to her old man as working at ‘the office’ rather than ‘the lost property office’. Mum is a bit of a social climber on the side and for that reason, if no other, my latest lapse must have been a very choking experience for her.

‘How’s Dad taken it?’ I ask.

Unfortunately I am staring at the harpoon gun when I speak and Mum is swift to take the opportunity to misunderstand me.

‘The usual way. Slipped it under his mac. Didn’t you read about it in the papers?’

‘What happened, Ma?’

‘It went off in the tube and pinned him to the ceiling.’

‘Ooh! Ma! Was he all right?’

‘He didn’t suffer any physical injury. Some ruffians took advantage of his situation to steal his wallet and undo his braces.’

‘That’s not nice, Mum.’

‘It was terrible. He thought they were trying to release him and then they suddenly got out at Clapham North and left him with his trousers round his ankles. He couldn’t move ’til the train got to Morden.’

‘Didn’t anyone else try and help him?’

‘No. He said they all took one look at him and went in the next compartment.’

Diabolical, isn’t it? Still, I suppose, when you think about it, it’s not every day you see a bloke pinned to the roof of a tube train by a steel bolt with his trousers round his ankles. It could give you a bit of a turn, couldn’t it? Not the kind of thing to send you home whistling if you were escorting your best bird back from the Granada, Tooting.

‘How is Sidney?’ I ask, eager to switch the conversation from my mother’s unfashionable ailment and father’s misfortunes.

For the uninitiated I had better explain that Sidney Noggett is my poxy brother-in-law and a frequent contributor to most of the misfortunes that befall me. He has an unpleasant habit of coming out of every situation smelling of violets whilst the odour that surrounds me is of a rather more earthy nature.

‘You should see him soon,’ says Mum. ‘He said he’d pop in before dinner.’

‘What’s he doing now? Still in clubs, is he?’

‘I don’t know, dear. You’d better ask him. It seems to change so often I can’t keep up.’

That does not surprise me. Sidney’s business ventures are seldom of the long-term variety. Either bankruptcy or the police – or sometimes both in a muck sweat, dead heat – always seem to catch up with him.

‘And Rosie and the kids?’

‘They’re very well. Rosie is going to dancing classes.’

‘She’s left it a bit late, hasn’t she?’

‘Not ordinary kind of dancing. This is all about finding the Zen or something.’

‘What was that, Mum?’

‘It’s no good talking to me. You’ll have to ask her. She should be here later.’

Sister Rosie has been becoming more and more of a handful since she started reading the colour supplements and watching BBC2 and I am not surprised to hear that she is into some new kind of self-exploration kick.

‘Every Thursday, down at the British Legion Hall. They get a very nice class of person there. They’ve all got little French cars.’

I can imagine. It is always the ones who should know better who get tired of pottery classes first. Before you know where you are they are doing ‘O’ level French and knitting red, white and blue mittens for the laundry man. After that it’s anything goes and the privet eaten down to navel level by the milkman’s horse.

Rosie was always a bit of a raver but in the old days she had the decency to feel guilty about the way she was carrying on. Now she reckons that she has the same right to get her end away as a bloke. Disgusting, isn’t it? I feel a lot of sympathy for Sidney. In fact I think it is one of the things that keeps us together. I mean, if us blokes don’t stand shoulder to shoulder and stick up for our rights we could find ourselves in the same situation as the Yanks: millions of big-mouthed women trampling all over us.

‘Where are they living, now?’ I ask.

‘Vauxhall. Rosie wanted to be near the West End. They bought an old house and gutted it. Must have cost them a fortune.’

I feel like pointing out that it cost Sidney a fortune but I do not pursue the matter. Deep down, where no one in his right mind would dream of looking, I know that Mum is a woman, and they are basically all the same.

‘I told them they were fools,’ says Mum. ‘Do you remember when they had that lovely place at Streatham? I never knew why they gave that up.’

‘Because Sidney was skint at the time. He goes up and down like a blooming yo-yo. You don’t want to worry about Vauxhall, Mum, it’s very fashionable at the moment. It’s going up.’

‘Most of what I’ve seen is coming down,’ sniffs Mum. Poor old thing. She doesn’t understand that all the nobs are fighting to live in places that the people who live there are fighting to get out of. She would reckon she had moved into Westminster Abbey if you offered her a flat in Wimbledon. She does not realise that people want to be near the art galleries and theatres and all the other places they never go to because there is something on the telly.

‘The kids all right, are they?’

Mum’s face assumes the expression of doting joy that is always reserved for her disgusting grandchildren.

‘Jason is doing ballet now.’

‘Blimey. Is Rosie trying to turn him into a poofter? They haven’t given up hopes of having a girl, have they?’

‘He’s got a natural bent, that child,’ says Mum, reproachfully.

‘That’s what’s worrying me. I haven’t forgotten him on that diabolical telly programme.’

‘I don’t want to hear a word against little Jason.’ Mum gives a tell-tale sniff. ‘At least he hasn’t broken his mother’s heart yet.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I say hurriedly. ‘And talking of heartbreak, how’s Dad? Hard at it as usual, I suppose?’

‘No need to be sarcastical,’ chides Mum. ‘Your father hasn’t been very well lately. One of his old war wounds has been playing up.’

Quite what my father did in the war has always been something of a mystery to me. Fire watching has been mentioned but I think it was mainly the one burning in the grate of 17 Scraggs Lane. Certainly I don’t think he ever traded bullets with the enemy. Cigarette cards, maybe, but not bullets.

‘What injury, Mum? Writer’s cramp from trying to get his post war credits?’

‘Don’t mock,’ says Mum, coldly. ‘You’re in no position to point the finger. You haven’t exactly brought lustre to the family name.’

‘Lustre’ is a most unusual word for my mother to use and I can only assume that she lifted it from a furniture polish advert on the box. I got my education that way.

‘I know, Mum,’ I say, humbly. ‘I’m going to try and make amends.’

I mean it too. I know I have been a disappointment to my parents since I first got done for nicking lead, diabolical decision though it was. I saw three fellows loading lead on to a lorry and they asked me if I would give them a hand. Said they were collecting for the church roof. Trouble was that they were stripping the lead off the church hall. Not knowing the religious landscape of the parish – and being a bit of a twit into the bargain – I was the mug who landed up in the South Western Magistrates’ Court.

I am about to enquire after Dad’s whereabouts when the man himself appears as Mum makes a discreet exit. He emerges from the kitchen clutching the carved up copies of the TV Times which serve as bog paper in the Lea mansion. I think it advisable to point out that Dad has been doing his stuff in the outside throne room beyond the kitchen and not – no, you could never have thought that, could you? Still, I suppose if you knew Dad as well as – no, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, there he is: five foot ten and a half inches of temporarily relieved depression centred over South West London. He looks down at my legs as if he expects to find a ball and chain around one of them and tosses his head contemptuously. I wonder if he is going to make his joke about ‘the return of the prod-it-all son’ but he restrains himself.

‘So you’re back, are you?’ Is this all he can manage?

‘I think you said that last time, Dad.’

‘What do you expect? The bleeding poet lariat reading an address of welcome?’ Dad shakes his head bitterly. ‘I suppose you’ve come back to bring more shame about our heads.’

‘I don’t know about “our heads”, Dad,’ I hear myself saying. ‘It’s certainly a shame about your head. The rest of you isn’t so good either.’ The minute I close my mouth I know that I have spoken foolishly but, somehow, with Dad, I don’t seem to be able to restrain myself. He really does know how to get up my bracket to beyond the hair line.

‘You cheeky little basket!’ he snarls. ‘No sooner inside the door than you’re at it. I don’t know how you have the gall to come back here. This isn’t the Prisoners’ Aid Society.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ I say, controlling myself with difficulty. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t mean to be rude. The words just jumped into my mouth.’

‘Well, next time, swallow them before they jump out again. If you’re going to stay around here you’d better learn a bit of respect.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

‘You nearly broke your old mother’s heart, you know.’

‘Yes, Dad. She was hinting at it.’

‘She was a blooming sight more than hinting at it to me, I can tell you. I had to put up with her day and night. It nearly drove me round the bend.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

‘Talk about paying a debt to society. I reckon I footed your bill while you were in there. My taxes subsidised you. All that and your mother going on the whole time.’

‘Yes, Dad.’ He does make a meal of it, doesn’t he? It must be like a holiday down at the Lost Property Office when he doesn’t show up. I don’t know how Mum puts up with it.

‘I hear you’ve been having a bit of your old trouble,’ I say, deciding the time has come to change the subject and demonstrate a bit of concern for the miserable old git.

Dad looks at the bog paper. ‘I think it was the sausages we had last night. I don’t know what they put in them these days.’

‘I didn’t mean that, Dad,’ I say, patiently. ‘Mum was saying your wound had been playing up.’

‘I’ve had a few twinges,’ says Dad, putting on his ‘I fought through Hell and lived’ face.

‘You want to take it easy, Dad.’

Nature’s greatest argument for compulsory patricide looks up sharply.

‘Are you trying to take the mickey?’

‘No, Dad. I—’

‘I do my bit. I always have done. Not like some people. Some people don’t know what I’ve been through. The doctor said he’d never seen anything like it. He didn’t know how I kept it up. “You’re a walking miracle” that’s what he said to me. He’d never met anyone with my willpower, you see. I don’t talk about it much but me and pain are not strangers. Oh, dear me, no. I don’t let on much but–’

‘Yes, Dad,’ I say, trying to halt the flow before he really gets going. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’ Not again, I must have heard it a hundred times.

Luckily Mum announces that tea is up and I am spared any more details of how Dad is going to romp away with the Martyr Of The Year Award. Not that the alternative is all that great. Mum’s Rosie Lee certainly brings out the gypsy in me and what can you say for a woman who cannot even make a decent cup of tea? I can remember when she used to open the tea bags and pour them into the pot. What with one thing and another it does not take me long to get the feeling that 17 Scraggs Lane has not got a lot to recommend it over the nick.

‘Have you got a job lined up?’ asks Dad.

‘Give us a chance, I only got – I only came home this morning. I didn’t call in at the Labour on the way.’

‘You don’t even know where it is,’ says Dad scornfully. ‘I think I’ll buy you a street map so you don’t get lost.’

‘Perhaps Sidney can find something for him,’ says Mum.

I am swift to shake my head. ‘No. I’m going to stand on my own two legs. Nothing Sidney has lined up for me has ever worked out. Not in the long term, anyway.’

‘That’s not all Sidney’s fault,’ says Mum, wagging a finger at me. ‘I have to speak as I find even if blood is thicker than water.’

‘I don’t care if it’s thicker than melted nougat,’ I say. ‘I don’t reckon that it’s an accident that Wonder Sid has cleaned up the ackers while I’ve been cleaning out the “D” Block khasi.’

It is at this propitious moment that there is a quick ‘We are the champions’ on the door bell and I prepare to greet my poxy brother-in-law as Mum goes off to do a recce through the lace curtains.

‘Hello, Timmo!’ says Sid a few moments later. ‘I didn’t know you were coming out today.’

‘Didn’t you get a telegram from Buckingham Palace?’

‘I didn’t bother to read it. I thought it must be another bleeding garden party.’

‘Sidney!’ says Mum, shocked. As far as she is concerned there is nothing to choose between God and the Duke of Edinburgh. Probably not a lot to choose as far as the Duke of Edinburgh is concerned. I am not really taking a lot of notice because I am drinking in Sid’s clobber. He is wearing a black serge safari jacket and matching trousers with a raised seam. It is all very trendy and makes him look a bit of a poofter. Not at all the Sid I remember back in his faded denim days.

‘He’s not looking too bad, is he, Mum?’ says Sid. ‘He needs a bit of your home cooking to fatten him up.’ Sid winks at me and I give him my ‘do us a favour’ look. Mum cooks like she has a pathological hatred of food and is trying to pay it back for some injury it has done her in the past.

‘I’ve got a nice bread pudding planned for this evening,’ she says, proudly, as I wince. I make a better bread pudding when I’m mixing paste to go fishing.

‘How’s the family?’ I ask.

‘Smashing. Rosie should be over with the kids in a few minutes. Tell you what. Why don’t you and I slip out for a couple of jars and then we can look in later. There’s not room for us all in here. You fancy a beer, do you?’

‘Great idea, Sid. Let’s go up The Highwayman.’

‘Don’t go drinking too much,’ warns Mum.

‘There’s no danger of that. Not with those two buying!’ says Dad who is about as tight as a gnome’s foreskin when it comes to lashing out for a round of drinks.

When we get to The Highwayman I hardly recognise the place. There is piped muzak, a snack bar and everything tarted up with the most diabolical wall paper. It quite puts you off your ale. Not that this commodity is very easy to come by anyway, and when I ask for a packet of crisps the geezer behind the bar looks at me as if I have been trying to force my hampton through the slit in the Doctor Barnado box.

‘We don’t do crisps,’ he says witheringly. ‘You can have a toasted sandwich.’ He indicates a fish tank bearing the word ‘Toastimat’, inside which are littered a few melting blobs which remind me of the scene three feet below a vulture’s perch. The sight is not calculated to have me diving into my pocket for 30p.

‘Let’s go in the garden,’ I say.

‘Kiddies only,’ says the barman sharply.

‘But there aren’t any kids here.’

‘That’s the rule. If you don’t like it–’ He keeps looking me up and down as if he is trying to tell me something.

‘The place has changed a bit, hasn’t it?’ I say to Sid. ‘I don’t recognise any of the old faces.’ It is a fact that all the birds look as if they have just had their hair done and the blokes are wearing ties. One or two of them even have suits on.

‘There’s a lot of middle class people around here, now, Timmo,’ says Sid. ‘You get the office workers coming in here for lunch. They even serve coffee.’

I can hardly believe my ears. Coffee! In the boozer?! How disgusting can you get? Still, I know what Sid is on about. A lot of the big houses around the common have been pulled down and in their place are posh blocks of flats catering for dynamic young executives. It is getting so the place is almost fashionable.

‘You’re shooting up the social scale a bit, aren’t you, Sid?’

‘No, not me, mate. I’m working class and proud of it.’ This is a sure sign that Sidney is tucking away a bit of loot. When people are on the make they are always trying to act posher than they really are. Once they get a bit of cash and security they start telling everyone that success has not changed them and go around complaining about the price of brown ale.

‘What are you doing then, Sid?’

Sid narrows his eyes into slits and tries to look like a cross between Charlie Clore and Paul Newman.

‘These days you’ve got to move fast, Timmo. Things change so quickly you’ve got to be in and out. Grab the money while it’s going and then get into something else. You can’t sit back and make long term plans. The public are fickle.’

‘But what exactly do you do, Sid?’

‘Well, Timmo, in a nutshell. I see a new craze coming and I capitalise on it. Do you remember the hula hoop revival?’

‘No, Sid.’

Sid looks disappointed. ‘No, well maybe that’s not a very good example. “Hulava good time.” I think it was a bit subtle. A bit ahead of its time. By the way, you don’t happen to know anyone who wants forty thousand hula hoops, do you? You could use them as cheap tyres for penny farthings, Or cut them open, seal one end and use them for storing marbles.’

‘I’ll keep my eyes open, Sid.’ I will too. I can see all the signs that Sid’s keen eye for a business disaster has not deserted him. How, I wonder, can he find the gelt to buy houses? He must still have some cash salted away from his Cromby Hotel days.

‘But this latest one can’t go wrong,’ exults Sid. ‘It’s a sure fire winner. Nobody’s really begun to tap the potential.’

‘What is it?’

Sid looks round carefully as if the boozer might be crawling with industrial spies. ‘Pogo sticks.’

‘Pogo sticks!’

‘Not so loud, you berk. I don’t want to tell everybody.’

Sidney watches a couple leave the pub and I can see him wondering whether they are going to rush home and start dismantling the telly to make pogo sticks.

‘You reckon they’re going to catch on, do you?’

‘With a bit of help from the right quarter. The art in this game is to get the merchandise before you start the craze. That way you get it cheaper.’

‘I understand that, Sid. But it’s a bit risky, isn’t it? What about all those hula hoops?’

‘I was unlucky there, Timmo. I didn’t know all the little wrinkles. I’ve got a professional public relations adviser now.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He gets you into the papers without you having to pay for an advertisement. He’s got lots of great ideas. We’re going to have a pogo stick race round Trafalgar Square and an attempt on the world pogo stick high jump record outside Buckingham Palace. Imagine that! It will give the whole thing a sort of royal seal of approval. We’re giving one to Ted Heath. He’s athletic, isn’t he?’