How to SAVE 40% ON your Chronicle
EVEN now, I’m still in touch with the cracking lads I trained with over 30 years ago – yet I often get asked, Why did I join the Army?
My usual answer was I’m dyslexic and thought I was joining a library.
It wasn’t because of unemployment – by 1986 the age of Thatcherism, the “yuppie” and “Loadsamoney” was upon us.
So why did a hippy dippy leftie recent university graduate end up in Aldershot on a dank Sunday evening?
An early memory of the Army careers office still sticks with me – the lump in front of me was asked by a recruiting officer: “Listen son, do you think you could kill somebody?”
The knacker in question frowned thoughtfully, then ventured in all seriousness: “Aye, but ye’d have to give iz their address first, and I cannot dee Tuesday mornings ’cos ah sign on y’knaa. But once ah’ve done it am ah in? An will it mean the coppers cannit dee nowt either?”
Scary? The next time I saw him he was was toting enough firepower for a Rambo sequel. At 22, I was older than the 17 and 18-year-olds next to me – some came from what we used to call broken homes but now pass as normal; one or two could barely read or write; others had apprenticeships or good jobs under their belts.
I was a working class kid like the other lads, but I had been to university like the posh officers. I already didn’t seem to fit.
How did a socialist student turned Thatcherite salesman end up running around Aldershot butt naked at 4am with only a mess tin covering his bits? I blame one person – Billy Bragg.
He was the leftie singer songwriter who once claimed his short stint in the armoured corps had helped him find himself. Yes, I signed up for three years in the Army on such a radgie premise.
My train trip to Aldershot was bittersweet – London was in the midst of the late eighties’ yuppie boom, there was a materialistic excitement – I’d never seen a Sock Shop store before!
However, after Kings Cross it was out again from Waterloo. Then, suddenly, the guard announced Aldershot, this is Aldershot. A throng of hard-looking skinheeded youth seemed to suddenly fill the platform – it looked like the Leazes End on derby day!
In Aldershot, every other car seemed to be a Land Rover and every other bloke either a squaddie in uniform or a squaddie in civvies. This was easy to spot as the eighties squaddie look of bleached 501s, Unit sweatshirt, cropped hair and desert boots was incongruously camp – more Bronski beat than Band of Brothers.
Yet, wearing my M&S suit and polyester university tie as reminders of my previous incarnations, it was dawning alarmingly on me how I looked an utter pillock.
I reported to the guardroom at Depot RCT – the home of the Royal corps of Transport. It started badly. On reporting to the corporal on duty, he looked at my suit as if he’d just discovered a tab butt in his can of Watney’s pale ale and sneered in disgust: “**** me , it’s Reggie Perrin!” And when he heard my accent,he screamed: “I ****** n’ hate Geordies!”
So my first hour in the Army was spent doubling around a drill square dressed in an M&S suit with my BHS fake leather suitcase over my head as a psychotic cage fighter screamed: “Run, Reggie, you Geordie **** ”, every time I passed his window. It didn’t bode well pets ...
■ Mike is performing his all new one hour show entitled “On Yer Bike Mike – Giz a Job”, which covers his numerous employment adventures, at the Stand Comedy Club on Monday, April 29.