Going Commando Read Online Free PDF Page B

the rundown pit town in West Yorkshire where I’d been brought up. Spending most days either at home or out on the NUM picket lines, my stepdad did little to encourage bonding, although he’d take me to play football as I was talented.
    His public face was that of a champion to the miners’ cause, but I loathed him. Many a time I’d return from school only to find the kitchen stinking with dirty plates – totally acceptable given his busy day was filled with watching the horse racing and working his way through a bottle of cheap whisky. We’d argue about who was going to do the washing up. I tried using my stack of homework as a get-out, whereas his case would be short and to the point, consisting of a punch-up I’d invariably lose. My record against him read twenty-one fights, zero wins, twenty losses – and, if I’m being kind to myself, one draw - I’d once managed to twat him on the nose.
    Yet I supported him and the miners, becoming an outspoken socialist. Knowing everything there is to know about everything, I saw the world through my red-tinted glasses and wholly partisan view of Maggie Thatcher and the Conservative government.
    But whichever side of the electoral fence you sat, the miners’ strike destroyed our community and the fractures still remain thirty years later. Despite his earlier championing of the cause, my stepdad went back to work before most, so his comradeship with the other miners became a distant memory, resulting in our house being daubed with ‘scab’. Even worse, we awoke one morning to find our living room curtains ablaze after someone had set them alight by poking a burningnewspaper through the letterbox. Socialism, it seemed, was honourable enough within the pages of The Guardian ; having some leftwing arsonist trying to set fire to me put me off it for a while. After the strike collapsed, the subsequent months became a festering wound. Once close families drew battle lines over garden fences. Breadwinners saw their dreams of a job for life dashed and the hopes of future generations were put in doubt through the decline of local industry. The Smiths became the soundtrack to disaffected local youths, who chose delinquency over order, blaming anyone who wore a tie for the bleakness they had inherited.
    I had to escape this life. I could see it dragging me down.
    I decided to turn my life around and knuckle down at school. I was bright enough to be in the same class as a future maths professor, a heart surgeon and an adviser to the Home Secretary (it’s not hard to advise politicians, the difficulty seems to lie in getting them to act upon it), but up to then had neglected my academic potential, preferring to drink Woodpecker cider in the park with the lads, go to Leeds United matches and try to start fights with the police. Now I set my sights on going to university and training to be a geologist.
    Unfortunately, that meant studying for ‘A’ levels, and that, in turn, meant stability. But with my stepdad now ostracised by his community, he and my mam were looking for an escape route of their own. I discovered this by coming across ‘business for sale’ particulars and circled classified ads in mushy pea-covered newspapers. My life was about to take another turn, with the impetus provided by my mother.
    ‘You need to think about leaving home and getting a job,’ she said to me one day. ‘That will be better for you than that sixth-form rubbish. Here… have a look at these.’ And with that she thrust a bunch of army recruiting pamphlets into my fifteen-year-old fist.
    I had never had any interest in the military. The Air Force Cadet detachment at my school was enough to put anyone off. Only the metal-mouthed geeks had joined and none of them had cool mates, unlike us geology boffins. But to my surprise, as I pored over the pamphlets I found a genuine interest in something other than football and basalt. The British Army seemed to be an ideal fit for me – mates, travel,