Eye of the Storm Read Free

the best in any army, anywhere in the world.
    This book, then, is for 22 Special Air Service Regiment and the men who made and continue to make it, with not always uncritical affection, but always with gratitude.
    P ETER R ATCLIFFE , DCM     
    August 2000     

 

Chapter One
     
    O N the night I was born – in a council flat in Salford, Lancashire, nearly fifty years ago – blizzards raged across the north-west of England for six hours. My mother remembered that the stark outlines of Salford’s dockland slums, clustered at the end of the Manchester Ship Canal, lay softened under a blanket of white that morning. It was the only time in donkey’s years that the city had looked clean, she said.
    L.S. Lowry, the matchstick-man artist who spent a lifetime painting Salford’s crumbling, soot-streaked houses and soul-destroying cotton mills, seems to have missed the opportunity of capturing the moment. Not of recording the birth of a matchstick child – baby production being the major industry there at that time, since there was little work – but of showing Salford looking pretty. But then, Lowry went for accuracy, preferring his slums to look miserable, rather than as if they were covered in icing sugar.
    When I was a few years older, I found out that virgin snow in Salford was usually defiled before daybreak by yellow trails of spattered cats’ piss, long before kids like me could mould it into frozen missiles, and even longer before it melted to grey slush and oily puddles that seemed to reflect the grim lives of the people who lived there.
    My mother was a staunch Roman Catholic, something reflected in the number of children she had. My brother, David, had been born two and a half years before me, and three other children – Jean, Stephen and Susan – were to follow. My father was a bread-delivery man who had flirted with Catholicism, although he never converted. His interest in the faith was not religious, however, but arose because he wanted somewhere to park his car, an old Wolseley Four Forty-Four largely held together by thick layers of black paint. The parish priest had offered to let him park it for free in the church grounds if, in return, my father became a Roman Catholic, but in the event the only time he ever went near the church was to collect or park his car. For my dad there was always a means to an end.
    He worked hard, to be fair, getting up at 4.30 each weekday morning to go to the bakery to pick up the van and begin his rounds. I never knew him have a day off sick in his life. On Saturday mornings we kids would help him on the bread van and then, in the afternoons, we’d go to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United play. I became an ardent fan, and by the time I was eight years old I was regularly going to the ground by myself. My problem, however, was lack of cash, so to pay my way through the turnstiles I used to steal money from my father’s pockets.
    He must have suspected that I had been nicking his change, because I’ll never forget what happened the day he caught me at it. He said very little, just made me pack my things in a suitcase and then took me down to the local police station. There, behind the wooden counter in the front hall, was the largest police sergeant I had ever seen. What was worse, he was obviously waiting for me. ‘Come with me,’ he said in a deep, official-sounding voice, and marched me off down a grey-painted corridor and into a room where another stern-faced copper took my fingerprints, handing me a piece of tissue paper with which to wipe the sticky black ink off my fingers. Then, gripping my arm with fingers that felt like pliers, the sergeant put me in a cell, slamming the steel door – also painted grey, like all the metal in the place – shut with a bang that sounded like the end of the world. I was scared to death, tears of sheer fright pouring down my cheeks.
    If I’d hoped the police would be moved by my plight, however, I was disappointed. They