not fucking about, Anthony,’ he said, barring my way. ‘Until you’ve properly hurt him, don’t even think about coming through this door again.’
The next time I came across the bully he was waiting in the dinner queue. I saw him before he saw me. He was holding a tray with a bowl of chips covered in steaming hot beans and a carton of Ribena on it. He was with his mates, I was alone. Despite the fact that I had no backup, I decided it was then or never. I walked up to him.
‘I just want to put everything to bed,’ I said. ‘Is that all right? Do you want to shake hands?’
The bully just stood there, looking at me, dumb as an ox. To be fair, he was probably trying to work out how he was supposed to shake my hand when he was holding his tray. But whatever it was that was going through his head, I decided that that was my moment. I punched him square in the bridge of the nose. He fell back, chips and beans flying everywhere, cutlery and tray clattering to the ground. I didn’t hang around to see what damage I’d done. I was gone.
Later that afternoon my stepfather received a phone call from the headmaster.
‘I’m calling with unfortunate news,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve had to take the difficult decision to suspend Anthony from school for a period of one week.’
‘Suspend him?’ said my stepfather.
‘I’m very sorry to have to let you know that Anthony physically assaulted another pupil today. We can’t let something like that pass without taking appropriate steps.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Well, yes, you obviously understand then that even though this was very out of character for Anthony, we do have to …’
‘No, no, no,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m not saying I’m glad you suspended him. I’m saying I’m glad he hit that prick. I told him to do it. How long did you say he was suspended for?’
‘A week.’
‘You’ll see him in two.’
I can’t deny there was a certain pleasure in seeing my tormentor caught under a scalding orange rainstorm of Heinz’s finest, though to be honest I wasn’t especially proud of myself for hitting back. It might have largely ended my problems with that particular bully, but it just didn’t feel like who I was. I did at least manage to take one crucial bit of positivity out of it. From then on I knew I had that capacity within me. When push came to shove, I learned that I could react with some level of violence and cause a bit of damage. But that wasn’t the only thing I learned. Over the two-week holiday from school that the punch had earned me, I played the scene over and over in my head. I’d obviously been scared before the moment I struck out, but what exactly had been the source of all that fear? What had been holding me back from sorting the problem out for so long?
I realised it was a dread of the unknown. I was scared of punching the bully because I didn’t know what was going to happen next. He could have thrown hot food in my face. His mates could have piled on top of me and kicked me shitless. He could have barely flinched, calmly placed his tray to one side and then calmly broken my jaw. Anything could have happened. That, I realised, was the truth about most of the fear we’ll experience in our lives. Humans don’t like being in the dark about things. We hate not knowing what’s behind the door. We like to be able to see the future, to put one foot in front of the other and walk through life steadily, carefully and predictably.
Learning to cope with deep states of doubt would be the journey of my life in the military. That’s one of the things it teaches you – and it’s a long, tough lesson, because it’s going completely against the grain of your human nature. It was only years later, going into war zones as an operator, that I truly learned to cope with the fear of stepping into unpredictable situations. By that stage I knew that if I got to my target, I could act. I could punch through an enemy position, I could cope with being shot at and, if I needed to, I could pull that trigger and end a life. I had that capacity in me. And the seed of that capacity was planted way back when I was a boy, at that moment in the dinner queue.
When I was a new recruit at Pirbright, those lessons were still an extremely long way off. Three weeks after I’d seen that young lad being posted through a plywood wall, I found myself on the parade ground beside him. We were in formation, waiting for the corporal to arrive for inspection. Next to us, looking confused and out of place, was a new recruit called Neil. He’d joined our troop after falling out of Basic Training, having suffered a broken ankle on week five of his intake. Now he was mostly better, he’d been inserted back into the programme. Neil was a big, leery lad and slightly chubby round the middle, probably out of shape after being out of action for a while.
The problem was that Neil threw the numbers out. We were supposed to be arranged in rows of three, but now we had an odd number of bodies, so there was a gap at the front of our formation. I knew that in this eventuality you were supposed to arrange yourself in such a way that you still looked orderly from the front. The corporal was probably seconds away from rocking up and Neil was in the wrong place. He had to sort himself out, otherwise we’d all be in the shit. I flashed him a friendly smile.
‘Mate,’ I said to him. ‘Why don’t you jump up here, because the instructor’s going to come any second?’
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said, taking a step towards me.
Seeing what was about to happen, Ivan spoke up. ‘All right, mate, he’s only trying to help you out.’
‘And what’s your fucking problem?’ said Neil.
‘You’re the one with the fucking problem.’
‘Do you want to sort this out then?’
‘All right.’
‘Once we’ve knocked off tonight, I’ll see you behind building 2D.’
I couldn’t understand it. Why was Neil being such a dick? Did he feel, coming into a new troop, that he had to dominate people to get respect? Maybe it was that he’d clocked up a few weeks’ more experience than us prior to his injury, and so when I told him where to stand he felt insulted. What was the point of reacting like that? I’d been polite and respectful to him. If I’d have said the same thing in France, I’d have been thanked. But the UK was a completely different culture and these kinds of situations would probably be solved with aggression or outright violence.
‘It’s dog-eat-dog over here’, I thought to myself. ‘It really is every man for himself.’ The cheeky and helpful manner that people found so charming at my mixed-sex French school were getting me nowhere quickly in this hardcore male-only environment. Rather than it winning me friends and allies, as it had over there, I was being met with an attitude of ‘Who the fuck does this prick think he is?’ I sensed there was something else going on too. People were defining me by my appearance and my polite cheerfulness. Neil, for one, had seen I wasn’t a big lad and was reacting to that, judging me as beneath him. ‘You little gobshite,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I’m not taking orders from you.’
There was only one thing I could do. Everyone thought I was a soft lad, so I had to prove them wrong. I knew there was going to be a confrontation that night, and given the size differential between Neil and Ivan, my new pal was going to get pasted. As the dark silhouette of the corporal marched towards us, I silently decided I’d join him in the fight. I’d defend him as he’d defended me.
That day passed slowly. When the time came and I saw Ivan slip out of the accommodation block, I trotted after him down the dark path.
‘What you doing?’ he said.
‘You were sticking up for me,’ I explained. ‘I’m part of this.’
‘This is nothing to do with you,’ said Ivan.
‘I’ve got to stand up to this guy,’ I said. ‘I’m going to help you out, aren’t I? Otherwise, who am I?’
I