Mad Bad and Dangerous to Know Read online

  Immediately after the war tank-training in Germany was conducted in a cavalier fashion, with little respect for the vanquished farmers whose crops were often crushed and barns destroyed. By the 1950s ‘Huns’ were being referred to more often as ‘German citizens’ and, after the Berlin airlift, as ‘our German allies’. Year by year damage-causing training rights were curtailed until for brigade or divisional exercises a complex scale of compensation was laid down and upgraded each year. Slight damage to a twenty-year-old pine tree could earn its owner £100 and a crushed gate-post £50. Often smiling farmers would stand by open gates waving invitingly to oncoming tank commanders. A poor crop could be turned into a small fortune if a British tank could be persuaded to drive over it once or twice.

  When no tank exercises were anticipated there was an Army budget available for adventure training and on the strength of this I received permission to train the regimental langlauf (cross-country) ski team and form a canoe club, taking groups of Jocks down different European rivers. It all went wrong when I organised a large-scale training exercise canoeing on the Kiel Canal, where officially we shouldn’t have been in the first place, but it was night-time so I thought our trespass would go unnoticed. Being crafty, some of the canoeists waited for a merchant ship or tanker to pass, then, braving the powerful backwash between hull and canal bank, they would tuck in behind their chosen vessel which sucked them along, making for less work and good camouflage from my watchers on the bank. Unfortunately, a corporal on my staff accidentally landed a red phosphorus flare on a ship’s rear deck. He could not have chosen a worse target, for it was a Soviet tanker with a liquid chemical cargo so volatile that the crewmen wore rubber soles so as not to risk causing a single spark. A klaxon and red light system installed along the canal began to honk and flash as though World War Three was about to erupt. All canal traffic across Europe stopped for five hours and I was later heavily fined by my brigade commander.

  During my annual leaves Ginny and I contrived to meet, openly when her father lifted his embargo, discreetly in the back of the Peugeot when he did not. In 1965, my third year in Germany, we spent four precious days together at a hotel in Dartmouth where I signed in under a false name. But by then her father was growing paranoid, made her a ward of court and hired a Securicor agent whose enquiries among the chambermaids, a snoopy bunch, soon established what had been going on. Mr Pepper telephoned my commanding officer in Germany to reveal the extent of my iniquity. Since Ginny was by this time well over the age of consent, my colonel clucked soothing noises at him and delivered me a mild scolding, during which he was unable to keep the twinkle from his eye.

  In the autumn I was sent to Berlin for a month with my troop to man three tanks which, in the event of hostilities, were intended to repel the Warsaw Pact from Hitler’s Olympic Stadium. While my tanks swivelled their guns about defiantly outside the giant arena, I sneaked into the empty Olympic swimming hall and, attempting, as I was periodically wont, to confront my horrible fear of heights, jumped off the high competition board, scaring myself silly in the process.

  I was about to apply for a one-year extension to my short-service commission, when I spotted a three-line advertisement in regimental orders. ‘Officers wishing to apply for secondment to the 22nd Special Air Service should obtain the relevant form from the Orderly Office.’ Only a week before I had listened spellbound to a Mess story of SAS patrols in Borneo, the only war zone where the British Army was still in action. Here was an open invitation to a three-year secondment with this then little known but élite regiment. I consulted the only Scots Grey I knew who had served in the SAS, a sadistic corporal called Jones who had been to Bavaria on one of my ski courses. From him I discovered that map-reading and extreme fitness with a heavy backpack were important. He added, ‘In Bavaria, you told me you hated heights. You’re not going to be much use parachuting then, are you?’

  By chance a two-week course in parachuting happened to be available in the south of France and the colonel let me go at short notice. The parachute school was at Pau, near Lourdes. A fellow student explained that this was no accident. ‘You see, those men who are crippled here at Pau can seek speedy recovery in the holy waters just up the road.’

  I was the only non-Frenchman in a class of eighty. The first jump, from a Nord Atlas transport plane, was by day. I tried to cure my terror of heights by the simple method of keeping my eyes firmly closed as I threw myself into space. A few seconds after exit, my parachute opened and tugged my body harness up sharply between my legs, jamming my family jewels in a painful position. But at least the canopy had opened. I looked up, expecting to see a neat array of rigging lines running away from my shoulders to the periphery of my chute. Instead there was a single knotted tangle which met in a bunch behind my neck. I experienced instant panic. The ground was already uncomfortably close.

  In fact I was merely experiencing a common problem called ‘twists’, usually caused by a poor exit from the aircraft. The instructors had probably explained ‘les twistes’, but I had failed to comprehend what they were saying. The normal process of elasticity slowly unwound the tangle, but I was spinning like a top on landing and hit the ground with a wallop.

  I left the Royal Scots Greys in December, assuring my friends that I would be back in three years’ time. After spending Christmas at home, I went to Dartmoor and the Brecon Beacons and trained alone with a forty-pound pack and Ordnance Survey map. Then, in February, I drove to Bradbury Lines in Hereford and through a security gate to the SAS barracks, a battered huddle of low huts or ‘spiders’.

  Altogether 124 would-be troopers and twelve other officers congregated in the barracks for the selection month. For the first week, officers were tested separately. The first night’s activities included a naked swim across the River Wye in temperatures below freezing. There was a great deal of map-reading and fast cross-country movement and very little sleep. Our packs weighed only thirty pounds, but this was soon to be increased.

  SAS staff with binoculars seemed to be everywhere. Any form of cheating led to dismissal from the course. Two officers twisted their ankles on the third day and one decided he was not cut out for the SAS. Then there were ten of us. On the fourth day another fell by the wayside. I was selfishly delighted with each new dropout for we all knew that more than 90 per cent of applicants would be failed by the end of the month.

  After a night in wet clothes tramping through woods without torches, we were ushered into a classroom and doled out question sheets involving complex military problems. I never discovered how I fared at this test – which is perhaps just as well. That evening we missed tea and went, feeling famished, on a fifteen-mile night march to reconnoitre an isolated reservoir. Back in the classroom, both hungry and tired, we were questioned one at a time by an intimidating group of veterans. Fortunately my short-term memory was good and I remembered every detail of the reservoir, down to water-height, construction materials and the nature of surrounding countryside.

  At 10.00 a.m. on the sixth day, I returned from a twenty-mile trudge over the Black Mountains to find a brown envelope on my bed – instructions to carry out a theoretical but detailed raid on a specific bank in Hereford and to brief the SAS staff on its execution by 6.00 p.m. that evening. I gauged that there were two hours in hand to grab some precious sleep, set my alarm and crashed out.

  The alarm failed to rouse me and the other candidates, each detailed to a different Hereford bank raid, naturally avoided waking me since their own chances of success would improve with my failure. I woke at 2.00 p.m. and rushed down to the relevant bank. Too late, for it had closed an hour before. I knocked on a side window and shouted at the young woman who appeared that I had an appointment with the manager. She must have decided my short haircut and tweed coat looked harmless, for she opened up and took me to the manager.

  Thirty minutes later, after checking my passport, military ID, German bank account and SAS course papers, as well as phoning my London bank manager, he accepted that I genuinely wished to open an account. The only untrue frill that I added was the large amount of family silver I wished to store with him. He was quick to assure me how secure his bank was and thoughtfully explained the excellent alarm system. Thanking the manager for his help, I left to make detailed plans for the robbery, including a scale drawing of the offices and security devices I had been shown. The paper was ready on time and handed in to the staff.

  That evening was the only free period of the week so three of us drove to a nearby town for a mammoth meal. I had kept a carbon copy of the bank raid plans and this somehow slipped from my coat pocket in the restaurant. Later the Italian restaurateur found it and called the police.

  The first I knew of this turn of events was upon reading the headlines of the national newspapers the following day. These included ‘Big Bank Raid Mystery’ and ‘Ministry Enquiry into Bank Raid Scare’. Two days later the headlines had changed to the Daily Mail’s ‘Army Initiative Upsets Police’ and comments in The Times that ‘the Services are letting their zeal outrun their discretion’. A weekend-long security operation had stopped all police leave because every bank in Herefordshire had been surrounded, owing to the lack of a specific address on my plans.

  I was summoned before the SAS adjutant. It was instantly clear to me that he thought I had planted the plans in the restaurant out of misplaced mischief. This appealed to the SAS sense of humour so I only received a warning. Had they known the plans had been genuinely mislaid, I would have been sent packing.

  SAS selection courses no longer involve theoretical bank raids.

  By the end of the first week, at which point candidates of all ranks came together, seventy men and six officers remained. Week two saw the departure of forty more men and two officers. I was still arou
nd, a lot thinner and craftier. The final test of the third week was known as Long Drag. This was a forty-five-mile cross-country bash carrying a fifty-pound pack, twelve-pound belt kit and eighteen-pound rifle without a sling. During most of the selection course I moved alone for greater speed but on Long Drag I set out with Captain Fleming, one of the three other officer survivors. We decided that the only way we could beat the clock on this last dreadful test was to hire the services of a local farmer with a black Ford Anglia.

  At Pen-y-Fan we were lying sixth, about a mile behind a Scots Guards officer, the son of Britain’s Chief Scout. We needed to maintain that position to avoid suspicion so, with adroit use of the Ford, binoculars and mist cover, we managed to arrive at isolated checkpoints, some of them several miles from the nearest feasible access point, almost a mile behind Lieutenant MacLean.

  I felt guilty afterwards but not badly so, since subterfuge was very much an SAS tactic. I passed the selection but, sadly, Fleming, who finished Long Drag alongside me, was failed. In late February 1966 the SAS CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Mike Wingate Gray awarded three officers and twelve men their buff-coloured SAS berets and sea-blue stable-belts. Since all SAS officers are ranked captain or above, I missed out the rank of first lieutenant and became the youngest captain in the Army at that time. But not for long. ‘Pride came,’ in the words of my CO, ‘before a bloody great fall.’

  ‘You are not in yet,’ Staff Sergeant Brummy Burnett warned us, ‘so don’t get cocky.’ He was understating the facts. The selection course proved merely a warm-up to the next four months of intensive training, during which we picked up eight personal skills basic to any beginner sent out to join his first SAS unit: fast response shooting-to-kill, static line parachuting in six-man sticks, demolition, signals using Morse, resistance to interrogation, CQB (close-quarter battle), field medicine and survival techniques.

  The CQB included self-defence against an assailant with knife, pistol or blunt instrument and in each case we learned a two-step response again and again until our movements were karate quick. Field medicine was not my favourite subject as I become squeamish easily. Some of the lecturers were fresh back from Borneo and taught us practical tips: ‘When your mate’s shot, treat him for shock. Give him liquid if you have it, except when the bullet enters between nipple and knee. Don’t forget that, ’cos a bullet going in above the knee might end up in the stomach and the poor feller won’t want liquid inside then, will he now?’ Signals training began in sound booths until we were Morse proficient to five words per minute. Morse was no longer in use in most of the Army but with the tiny but primitive SAS gear we could transmit quick bursts of coded message thousands of miles with little likelihood of hostile direction-finding equipment locating our position.

  Brummy himself supervised shoot-to-kill and other sergeants taught us demolition, from the mathematics of fuse-burning rates to the tensile strengths of suspension bridge targets. We demolished old buildings, steel girders, railway tracks and pear trees, and by the end of three weeks I possessed a boot-full of detonators, fuse wire and plastic explosive, the result of demolishing my set targets with less than the issued amounts. I should have returned this volatile booty to the stores but I did not. My motives were acquisitive rather than criminal. I did not intend to blow up anything in particular but fancied the notion that I had the capacity to do so, given a suitable target.

  Survival skills were taught by a tiny Welsh corporal who slit the throat of a sheep on our classroom table and watched over us as we skinned the animal, dug out its entrails and boiled the mutton. None of the meat was wasted and he stressed that no sign or scent of the butchery must remain. Theft from farms in winter, leaving no trace of our visit, or making it appear that our hen coop depredations were the work of foxes, were dealt with in minute detail. At the end of the Welshman’s week, I felt confident of surviving anywhere short of the Gobi Desert.

  At Abingdon airfield I discovered for the first time just how many things could go fatally wrong with a parachute jump, facts I had been protected from in Pau by the limitations of my O-level French. But I also found out I had glandular fever. I was despatched home to recover.

  Ginny’s father, an artist at blowing hot and cold, now decided Ginny could officially see me again and she appeared at my bedside in a light summer frock with a fashionably high hemline which can’t have been good for my swollen glands.

  ‘I picked these for you in the wood.’ She gave me a bunch of late spring daffodils. Ginny was no longer just the little girl I had loved for so long. At nineteen she was tall, shapely and much sought after by a number of eligible West Sussex suitors. While in Hereford I had kept wary tabs on my competitors through Gubbie.

  Later that summer I ran into an old Eton friend, William Knight, who wanted to register a protest at the way 20th Century Fox was desecrating a trout stream that ran through the picturesque village of Castle Combe in order to film Rex Harrison and Samantha Eggar in The Adventures of Dr Dolittle. William, then a wine salesman in the area, had learned about local anger whilst in the village pub. With my opportune supply of explosives, I was to mount the diversion which would draw away the security patrol and I was also to alert a friendly journalist to cover the story. The diversionary flares did their stuff but my tame journalist shopped us to the Daily Mirror who in turn informed the police who were lying in wait. The result was a pandemonium of excited cries and canine joy. Having but recently learned all there is to know about evading capture by various types of hound, I made good my escape by jumping into the stream which was the centre of all the fuss and submerging all but mouth and nostrils. But I was the only one of the conspirators to return to where we had parked our cars. It so happened that my fifth-hand Jaguar would not at that time start without a tow, so I changed into smart clothes, dried my hair and waited in the bushes for William to return for his Mini. He did not turn up but a police car did, sliding quietly and without lights into a corner of the park. After twenty minutes with no William and no movement from the police I decided I must make a move as I was due to fly out to Malaya for SAS jungle training the next morning and it would not do to miss the plane.

  Retiring up the lane some distance, I reapproached the carpark whistling and, after surveying the dimly lit cars, spotted the police and went over to them. There were two officers and, when I hailed them, one put a finger to his lips. In a low voice I explained my car would not start and could they kindly give me a tow-start.

  ‘Which car is yours, sir?’ the driver asked. I pointed at my Jaguar.

  ‘You must be Captain Fiennes, then.’ It was a statement not a query. They must have been told my car’s registration. ‘I think you had better come with us.’

  Considering I could have gone to gaol for seven years, the fine of £500, plus costs and legal fees at the subsequent court case, was an intense relief. But I was immediately expelled from the SAS and I realised that I would no longer achieve my dearest wish, for the Royal Scots Greys might not want a convicted arsonist for their commanding officer.

  Ginny was another casualty of the Castle Combe affair, for her father, believing she had obtained my explosives from his Sussex chalk quarry, immediately packed her off to stay with cousins in Spain, which had no police extradition agreement with Britain. He warned her under no circumstances to contaminate herself further by even telephoning me. I was, he snorted, mad, bad and dangerous to know.

  As for me, I was recalled to Germany and the tank troop. Here I was encouraged to channel my energies back into the canoe club, the langlauf ski team and boxing and in the summer I set up another Norwegian journey following an ancient cattle trail over Europe’s largest glacier, the Jostedalsbre in Central Jotunheim, and then a canoe run down the glacial waste waters. These proved too rough for our canoes but on that journey I learned to lead by physical example rather than rhetoric and also to choose for challenging endeavours a selection of chiefs and Indians, not merely a gaggle of the former.

  The langlauf Greys that year were better than ever. I was not to know it but the months of dedicated ski-training for the Greys were to serve me well for the future, just as the years of preparation in battle tanks subsequently proved about as useful as learning Latin, due to Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher interfering with and eventually closing down the whole Cold War set-up. During our final week of ski-training in Bavaria Ginny came over from England. We skied together and drank hot chocolate by log fires. We laughed and talked, threw snowballs, and Ginny learned to langlauf.