A Fortunate Life by Paddy Ashdown Page B

of a shining complex of multi-storey buildings and modern facilities; then it was just a collection of old World War Two wooden huts. Here,and on nearby Woodbury Common and Dartmoor, young commandos had trained during the war, and their ghosts were everywhere, including in initials carved in the woodwork of the huts and on the trees of the little wood inside the camp that was used for rope work, ‘death slides’ and instruction on how to climb rope nets on the side of a ship.
    We were given a short briefing and then shown to our ‘cabins’ (ITCRM, Lympstone was very solidly on terra firma, but, the Royal Marines being part of the Navy, everything was in naval terminology – so the room you slept in was your ‘cabin’, and an evening having fun off camp was known as a ‘run ashore’.) Each cabin housed two of us. We were arranged alphabetically. In the next-door cabin to me was Tim Courtenay, soon to become one of my best friends; I would marry his cousin in three years’ time. I shared my cabin with Richard Armstead, who married my wife’s sister a few years later.
    My nine fellow trainee Second Lieutenants were:
    Richard Armstead (retired as a Captain, died 2001; son joined the Royal Marines);
    Jim Bartlett (retired as a Captain);
    Tim Courtenay (retired as a Major and subsequently made a Lieutenant Colonel);
    Peter Clough (retired as a Colonel);
    Angus Gordon (transferred to the Royal Navy as a pilot and retired as a Lieutenant Commander);
    Andy Moreland (retired as a Major; son joined the Royal Marines);
    Roger Munton (killed 1962);
    Ron Wheeler (retired as a Captain, one-time Conservative County Councillor in Devon); and
    Rupert van der Horst (retired as a Brigadier after 33 years service; his son followed him into the Royal Marines and, as a much loved and respected commander of the SBS, was tragically killed in a diving accident).
    Together we made up Young Officer Batch No. 19, known as YO19, or simply ‘The Batch’ for short. We were one of two ‘batches’ of young officers who joined the Royal Marines (known internally as ‘The Corps’) in 1959; YO20 joined six months after us.
    At this stage we were all strangers. But by the end of the two-and-a-half years’ training that lay ahead, we would know every detail of eachother. We would know which of us would need help to cover the last few miles of a thirty-mile, seven-hour march in full kit across Dartmoor; whose mental processes were not to be trusted after three nights on the march without sleep; who would get drunk first and who would be sick first, and how many pints of beer it would take. We would know whose visio-spatial sense was so bad that, whenever he was leading us, one of the others had to be always at his shoulder to check his map-reading; we could spot early signs of bad temper in each other, even before we recognised them in ourselves; we would know who could do brilliantly at everything, but somehow could not command men; whose feet smelled worst in a wet trench, and who not to sleep close to after they had been eating beans; who snored so loudly that a would-be enemy could hear him from hundreds of yards away; we would even know the pattern of each others’ bowel movements after a week in a bivouac on ‘compo’ * . In short, we would come to know each other probably more intimately than any other living human being (including parents and partners) ever would.

    Our training began in earnest the following day. We were harried from morning to night, and the pace was frenetic. Physical training and runs were intermingled with classroom work (the history of the Royal Marines, military history, the principles of tactics, the theories of warfare, world affairs and much else). There were exercises, and instructions on field- and woodcraft, including the techniques of living out in the wild. There were tests all the time, including changing clothing quickly. There were inspections of kit at unannounced times. There was weapons training –