Chapter 1

Hi! My name’s Dave Desmond.
Hold up, this is supposed to be an introduction so I should be a bit more formal.

Hello, my name is David Paul Desmond; if my father had had his way it would have been David Brubeck Paul Desmond, but my mother vetoed that as she was no modern jazz fan. I am known by various other names, which I won’t confuse you with at the moment. As you proceed through my story – and I hope you will continue reading, and not get bored by this opening preamble – you will get to know the names, and how they came about.

I was born on June 12th, 1964, in the London borough of Plaistow, and in consequence I am a lifelong supporter of ‘The Hammers’. My blood is not red but rather claret and sky blue, the colours of that illustrious football club. For those of you who are not familiar with the more arcane aspects of The Beautiful Game, ‘The Hammers’ refer to West Ham United Football Club – aka The Irons.

Although I wasn’t born within the sound of Bow Bells – you would need bloody good hearing to hear the sound of the bells over the noise of London traffic – I could be described as a Cockney. I sound like one, use the speech patterns and slang associated with the breed, and had I not joined the army would no doubt have ended up in one of the traditional occupations of Cockneys, such as a driver of a black cab, a street trader, or criminal.

My Dave Brubeck Quartet fan of a father died when I was about three years old; not sure of the details but judging by my mother’s cooking skill it could have been food poisoning, although years later I learned that he fell under a bus after coming out of a pub. My mother struggled to bring up her three kids properly but failed miserably. She liked drink and men, but not necessarily in that order, and we had a series of ‘uncles’; some good, some bad, most indifferent.

I shouldn’t be too hard on her. I never went hungry as there were plenty of pie and mash shops, chip shops, kebab, curry, Balti, and Chinese, takeaways in the local area, and went to school properly shod, with clean and tidy clothing on my back. Except for the odd clip around the ear, which no doubt was richly deserved, my mother never laid a finger on me, and although she did have a very extensive vocabulary of foul and profane language it was never directed at me.
There were plenty of kids in school with me who couldn’t say the same about their mothers.

My brother Tommy, named for our father, left for Australia as a cabin boy on a P&O freighter out of Tilbury docks when he was 17, and was not heard from again. I was about five years old at the time and don’t have much memory of him. My sister Sonia married a Yank airman when she was aged 18, and left for the States with him at the completion of his tour of duty; I was eight years old then, and can well remember my mother crying buckets when they flew out from Heathrow.
Sonia was killed a couple of years later in a car crash, her husband who was driving, and drunk, also died. My mother wept more buckets of tears when she received the letter with the news from the in-laws.

You will see that there was a considerable difference in age between me and my siblings? My mother had no qualms in telling me I had been a ‘mistake’, but that knowledge has never bothered me any. How you get here doesn’t really matter a toss. Planned for, or escaped through a hole in a defective condom, you’re here, and must make the best of it.

As a youngster I ran around with the other local street beaters in a gang, getting into all sorts of petty crime, like shoplifting, pinching stuff from parked cars, and regularly bunking off from school, in fact a typical East London upbringing.

When I was about 15 the current ‘uncle’, a local copper, suggested to my mum that it would be a good idea if I enlisted into one of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, as I was leading a life style which would inevitably lead to me spending long spells in one of Her Majesty’s prisons. My mother took his advice, and so it was on one bright East London morning she and my ‘uncle’ accompanied me to the Army Recruiting Office in Plaistow High Street.

After some interviews, an exam, and a medical, I was accepted into the Junior Leader’s battalion of The Royal Green Jacket Regiment{RGJ}.
It was the best move I ever made, and have never looked back. Thinking about it much later on I realised the copper wasn’t just thinking of my well-being when he suggested a career in HM Forces, but was keen to get me out from under his feet. I had bunked off school one afternoon and came home to find him and my mum playing hide the sausage on the kitchen table.

I loved the army; the discipline I’d never had, the good food – likewise, the uniform, the drill, the outdoor living, the danger, the shooting, and the comradeship. It was during my training at the Junior Leader’s battalion I became aware of how different the Green Jackets were to other British Army regiments. The RGJ derived from the Duke of Wellington’s best troops in the Peninsula War; the famous 95th and 60th Rifles, or Rifle Brigade and Kings Royal Rifle Corps, as they became. Added to them were the 52nd, The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Those regiments marched at the ‘Light Infantry pace’ of 140 paces to the minute, compared with the 120 per minute of ‘heavy’ British infantry regiments – and they still do.
The Regiment has a laid back attitude to rank and discipline. That doesn’t mean to say the regiment was undisciplined or contemptuous of authority, in fact rather the opposite. Every rifleman takes responsibility for himself; self-reliance and self-discipline is the hall mark of the RGJ.