Confessions of A Private Soldier
BY TIMOTHY LEA
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Also available in the CONFESSIONS series
Also by Timothy Lea & Rosie Dixon
About the Publisher
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