Chapter 2: Camp Kenyatta

Training Team Kilo 92 flew out from Heathrow in a VC 10 of East Africa Airline on the 1st August 1992. Harry and Colonel Jones were in club class, while the rest of the team sat in economy with the poor people. I sat next to Colly Flowers, a sergeant in The Mercian Regiment. He was a Para-trained man, and a person I had taken an instant liking to when I had met the rest of the mortar training team. He had a broad Brummie accent— well no, he wasn't actually from Birmingham but from Wednesbury, which is only a kick up the arse away, but has a distinctly different accent than that of Birmingham, or so Colly assured me. You would have to be a native of the area to recognise the difference. He was of mixed race; his mother was also of mixed race but his father was Nigerian, and Colly was as black as the ace of spades.

I had suggested to Harry that to keep a low profile the mortar training team could have comprised entirely of black soldiers.

Harry laughed, and said it had been suggested, but the Judge Advocate's Office had vetoed it as MoD could have been charged with racial discrimination, under the Race Relations Act of 1976.

Across the aisle from me was Doogie Blantyre. He, Colly and I tended to keep together as we were all parachute-trained soldiers. The three of us watched with interest as two of the cabin crew demonstrated how to put on the lifejacket if we ditched into the sea, and grab an oxygen mask if we lost pressure.

The girls were very tasty, and one of them certainly wouldn't have needed a life jacket for buoyancy with the pair of knockers she was packing. She had a gorgeous arse, and I asked Colly if he thought she was African or a home-grown British black girl.

"I think she is African. She has an accent that places her in Mombasa rather than Manchester. The other one looks like she may have some white in her..."

Doogie interrupted him. "I'd fucking soon stick some fucking white in tae her; some fucking tartan at least!"

Doogie was a Jock, but not a bad bloke for all that.

We all agreed, that given half a chance we would indulge in some energetic miscegenation with either, or indeed both, girls.

Eventually Colly and Doogie fell asleep, but I couldn't drop off as I was still pondering on Harry and Mel being an item, for make no mistake about it, Harry Ledbetter didn't fuck a girl until and unless he was in a steady relationship with her. OK, he may have had many, concurrent, 'steady' relationships, but he was never a one night stand sort of bloke.

During the time spent on that hillside in the Falklands Harry had told me many things—not that I'm going to repeat all of what he said. He had been engaged in a rather convoluted sexual liaison with four females before we had left for the Falklands. Harry had met his future wife, Cynthia, while he was still at Sandhurst. The Sandhurst cadets, all young bloods, would motor up to London on a free weekend and hit the clubs. It was in Stringfellows, a regular haunt of Sloane Rangers, that he had met Cynthia and her two cousins, Abigail and Alice, who were twins but not identical. Harry embarked on a torrid, passionate sexual relationship with all three girls, not all together–although he did have three-in-a-bed sex with the twins, but Cynthia was not included in this group shagging activity. If this sordid association wasn't sleazy enough, when Cynthia took Harry home and introduced him to her parents he promptly bedded her mother.

She already had a number of toy-boy lovers, and Harry became another. I realise this doesn't cast Harry in a very good light, but you have to remember he was of an age to be very susceptible to a winking, inviting minge, even if that minge belonged to his girlfriend's cousin, or indeed to his girlfriend's mother. Eventually, and don't ask me why as Harry never explained, he and Cynthia got engaged, and indeed they married a few months after we returned from the Falklands. I have no idea if Harry kept up his relationship with the twins and /or Cynthia's mother after his marriage.

It is not a wise career move for a recently commissioned officer to get married, but fortunately for Harry the marriage soon ended. Harry and Cynthia, like me and Miriam, never lived together on camp; but Cynthia, unlike Miriam – well as far as I know – soon embarked upon a series of highly visible sexual affairs, and Harry sued for divorce, which was quickly granted. His ex-wife Cynthia, and practically all the women he had relationships with, were Sloane Rangers; girls with parents who were aristocrats, or upper class types, with positions in the higher reaches of finance, law or politics. Sloanies themselves rarely had a full time job but usually just dabbled in part time stuff – PR or media work. Mel, as a working class girl with a career in the army, was a completely different kettle of fish to those self-centred, arrogantly superior, snooty, county-set bitches that most Sloanies seem to be, although obviously there are exceptions to this generalisation.

I finally fell into a fitful doze, still wondering how a pair of such disparate lovers as Mel and Harry came to be, for although Mel was good looking and intelligent woman she was also a married woman, and Harry didn't usually paddle in someone else's pool.

We landed at Nairobi after an uneventful 8-hour flight and were whisked through Immigration and put on a coach that took us to The Nairobi Hilton Hotel. After getting our rooms sorted out, and then having a meal, we were briefed by a military attaché from the British High Commission, in one of the hotel's function rooms.

He welcomed us, warned us of the high incidence of HIV AIDS in East Africa, informed us that we had an early start next morning to continue our journey to Camp Kenyatta, where the logistics mentoring and the mortar instruction would take place, then gave a huge hint that we shouldn't go wandering about Nairobi in the evening. I took his advice and turned in early—air travel always knackers me—strange, when you think you are sat on your arse for hours at a stretch.

It was an early breakfast, then a 4-hour road trip. I noted the hung over look of several of the team, who hadn't taken the advice given last night—silly buggers. I made sure I didn't swap any bodily fluids with them; I bet they had been dipping their wicks in some poxed up tarts.

Camp Kenyatta – named for the first President of an independent Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta – is about 50 miles to the NW of Nairobi and about 4000 feet higher. It stands on a dry arid plateau, amid vegetation that I daresay is called savannah, sprinkled with some spindly trees and thorn bushes. It is the HQ of the Kenyan army and consists of many barrack blocks, a hospital, a detention facility, ammunition and supply storehouses, and many small arms and artillery firing ranges, with an airstrip and a helicopter pad.

Colonel Jones and the logistics training element of the team were housed in air-conditioned, modern bungalow type accommodation – probably an annexe of the Sergeants Mess. The lecture rooms and the team office were in a group of buildings near a large swimming pool—so they were OK. However, due to the rather clandestine nature of having a mortar training element in what was meant to be to primarily a logistic and support training team, we were billeted well away from the rest of Training Team Kilo 92.

We had our own compound, with a cookhouse and an attached mess hall, and several bashas, for both accommodation and administration. Basha is the name given to a square built, mud walled, thatched roof building, with individual rooms. I suppose it is a modern version of the rondavel, which were thatched roofed, round mud huts. We had individual bearers who brought us a cup of tea in the morning, cleaned our kit and the rooms, and generally treated us like 'pukka sahibs'. I could get to like being waited on hand foot and finger, and could see the attraction of having servants. Some of the cooks in the small cookhouse that we used, as did the Kenyan trainees, were very tasty looking African girls, and had we had more time I think I would have been getting my leg over my first black girl – unfortunately we had a full day of work, and the girls had disappeared by the time we had finished dinner.