First-9

Sometimes it’s only by looking back that you can spot the moments when you made your biggest, most life-changing decisions. At the time, you’re too much in the eye of the storm. The change seems too enormous. The unknown places that lie on the other side of it are too dark and frightening to contemplate. So you pretend it’s not happening. You push it away, think about something else. You quietly decide to deal, another day, with the sudden understanding that you’re so unhappy that, at some point soon, you’re going to have to grab the steering wheel and yank your life in a radically new direction.

When I look back on it I realise it was in Macedonia that I first knew, deep down, that my days in the green army were numbered. In the civilised yet elite men of the Deuxième Rep I saw a different way of serving, a different way of fighting and a different way of achieving excellence. I glimpsed the possibility of a different future; a way of being me that was faithful to the truth of who, in my heart, I was. In the actual moment, though – as I joined in yet another round of merry, Kronenbourg-fuelled French singing – all I knew was that the respect I had for my tribe of paratroopers was dying.

I’d love to tell you that, when I left 9 Para, I immediately transformed back into my cheery and gentle former self, but true stories are never that simple. Life makes you work harder than that. The fact is, I went the long way round. Not wanting to socialise with Bus and the others didn’t alter the fact that, slowly but surely, I had become one of their kind. No matter how much I might have missed aspects of my younger self, I simply wasn’t that innocent little boy any longer. I had been changed by my experiences. I was a man now. And, more than that, I was a paratrooper. I’d forgotten how to be anyone else. Getting back to the core of myself would be a long journey. Finally getting there would mean making friends with my demons. And before I could do that, I’d first have to find them and fight them.

I’d meet those demons on the streets of Portsmouth. Separating myself from 9 Para, and avoiding the endless rows with Hayley, meant spending as much time as possible with Nan, which meant being in the town where I’d grown up. This had an unexpected effect on me. I found myself thinking more and more about my real dad. Vivid and detailed memories of him would pop into my head out of nowhere, as if someone had switched on a TV.

He could hardly have been more different from my stepfather. His name was Peter Aaron and he’d been a software engineer at IBM. Not only did he never lay a finger on me or my brothers, he barely even told us off. One of the long-forgotten scenes that appeared in my mind – and kept playing and replaying – took place just before he died. A friend named Simon from down the road had come round to play. Simon and I were passing the time, bumping down the stairs on our arses. After doing it a few times, Simon sat on the top step and decided he didn’t want to go again. I didn’t care, but he was blocking me. In a fit of temper I pushed him with my foot. Simon tumbled down the stairs, burst into tears and grassed me up in a loud wail. I thought, ‘Uh oh, I’m in trouble here.’ But when Dad came to see what had happened he just smiled up at me and said, ‘Play nicely, lads.’

We moved to Australia when I was one and lived there for three years. I started to get flashbacks of that former life, too – a place of warmth and fun and unconditional love that was soon to vanish completely. I could see him in a swimming pool under a perfect blue sky, holding these two white kittens. I could see him teaching me to ride my bike. I could see him putting the seats down in the back of the car and making a bed with pillows before we went on a long journey. I could see him holding my hand as we walked to the shop to get chocolate digestives. He loved chocolate digestives and would literally eat them by the pack.

The more I thought about Dad, the angrier I became at the fact he’d been taken from me when I was so young. Following the strange and sudden events of his passing, our family gained a lot of money and lost everything that was important. It was only now I was a man that I realised how cruel it was that we hadn’t been allowed to mourn him. As a child, you just accept things. Now that I was old enough to understand, I was sick with fury. The day after he’d died, every photo of him disappeared from the house. His smiling face vanished from walls, shelves and the front of the fridge. Me and my brothers were forbidden from talking about him, by threat of beating. We weren’t even allowed to go to his funeral. His death was made absolute.

Dad’s death might have caused the sky to rain money, but that didn’t mean life was easy. My new stepfather loved us and sincerely tried to do his best for us, but he was from a completely different background and his values were alien to the ones Dad had raised us with. My stepfather had been raised tough. We got used to him returning from the pub with cuts and bruises and black eyes from fighting, and that would lead to screaming arguments with Mum. He thought me and my brothers were soft. He was determined to toughen us up. He was incredibly competitive by nature and always insisted his stepchildren had to be the absolute best at everything. My thing was football. There might have been nothing to me, size-wise, but I could run fast and had stamina. I had a bit of talent, too. I’d been on Southampton’s books from the age of seven and also played in my local side. My stepfather was our coach. He’d turn up to games in a knee-length leather raincoat, cycling shorts and black boots, with a Rottweiler at the end of a leash.

If he looked like a lunatic, he could act like one as well. Before every match he’d storm into the changing room with his dog and blare out ‘Simply the Best’ by Tina Turner at top volume on a ghetto blaster. He’d make us all play in shirts that he’d sent to the printers to have ‘SIMPLY THE BEST’ stamped across the back. The other parents were petrified of him. One goalkeeper who came to play with us was just brilliant, but his father ended up removing him after one season because our team was so ultra-competitive. I started hating going to football because of the pressure he put on me. I always had to be the best, to play at my very highest capacity. The only way I knew I’d be OK, and stay out of trouble, was by being out in front of everyone else. To win was to be safe.

At home he ruled with an iron fist. When we moved to France he insisted that our big house was kept spotless at all times. I could never have friends round because I knew after dinner he’d make us spend literally an hour and a half cleaning up – scrubbing pots and mopping floors. I’d do everything in my power to keep him on his good side, because his bad side was frightening. He’d punish us physically, sometimes badly, with a belt or a wooden spoon or his open hands, with me curled up in the corner of the room. A part of me thinks I got the brunt of things because I looked so much like my real dad and, so I’m told, acted like him too.

The only place I didn’t feel the need to excel was at school. It wasn’t that I was badly behaved. I was captain of the athletics team and the football team, and all the teachers liked me. I would never have dared be cheeky. The problem was, I just didn’t have much interest in learning and I could never seem to concentrate. I was at my happiest when I was reading my SAS Survival Book and playing with my brothers on our large patch of family land, which even had its own woodland. We had so much space, we were like little gypsy kids, hunting and scrambling around, playing with Rambo knives and bows and arrows.

One summer, when I was ten, my stepfather bought us all air rifles. At the end of a long, fun day I was out with my elder brother Michael when I saw a grey squirrel running up the trunk of a tall pine tree. Without thinking, I aimed and fired. It fell out of the tree, making a horrible cracking sound as it hit the branches on its way down, and landed in a bed of dry pine needles at our feet.

‘What shall we do?’ I asked. It was staring up at me with its little black eyes.

We stared at it for a moment. It was bleeding from its backside where I’d shot it. Its arms were twitching.

When we got back to the house we told my stepfather what had happened. He was standing in the huge doorway of our house.

‘And it’s still alive?’ he said, looming over us. ‘That’s what you’re telling me?’

‘If you’re old enough to shoot it, you’re old enough to kill it,’ he said. ‘Get back there and finish it off.’

We returned to the woodland as slowly as we could in the hope its heart would have given out by the time we reached it. It was in a terrible state when we found it. Blood was matted in its fur and its tiny pink mouth was moving. Michael didn’t say anything as I raised the barrel of the air rifle. My hands were trembling, which was making the rifle move. Worried I would miss again, I pushed the muzzle up against the squirrel’s little head, closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. There was a dull thud.

Walking back towards the house, I was too dazed with guilt and remorse to really speak. Of course, I could never have imagined it would one day be my job to do the same thing to grown men. I’d sometimes think of that squirrel when I was raising my weapon to fire. I felt worse for that animal than I would for any of them.

It was a retired major, whose house was being renovated by my stepdad, who first suggested I might have what it takes to succeed in the military. ‘You’re a good worker and you’re fit,’ he’d said. ‘You’d have a good career.’ By that stage I was sick of school. All I wanted to do was run around outside in the mud, making camps and shooting targets. The idea of being paid to do that sounded pretty good, and the fact that I’d get to leave home was a major bonus.

And now, here I was, a fully-fledged member of 9 Parachute Squadron. And I’d come to hate it. One afternoon, a few weeks after my return from Macedonia, we were returning in a military wagon from an exercise when we passed a road sign that said Wood Green. I hadn’t seen or heard those two words in years. Sitting in the back of that noisy wagon, I felt swamped by a thousand long-lost childhood memories. I saw a row of smart brick semi-detached houses. I saw a sweet shop. I saw a park that I used to explore that had a massive, make-shift spiderweb that I used to love climbing. I saw a red postbox outside my granddad’s house. I saw myself standing beside it with my eyes squeezed tightly shut, counting to one hundred, during a game of hide and seek with my beloved Uncle Tony, who was only ten years older than me.

‘You all right?’ asked the guy sitting next to me, a decent Scottish lad named Greg.

‘Wood Green,’ I said. ‘It’s where my dad’s family lives. My real dad. I’ve got uncles and aunties there. Haven’t seen them in, like, years.’

‘Yeah, it was my mum,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t allow it, so we lost touch. Shame, really.’

‘I wouldn’t have a clue how to find them,’ I said, as the military wagon sped further and further away. ‘It was a long time ago. Too long, really.’

The following evening Greg and I went out for a couple of beers. I’d had yet another row with Hayley, and felt a sudden and overwhelming need to get drunk. Everything was going wrong. Anger was circling me like so many birds of prey. I was angry at the army, I was angry at Cranston and Bus, and I was angry at all the cowardly arseholes who’d jumped me the week before. I was angry at my wife. I was angry at my mum for stealing my dad’s memory from me. I was angry at the knowledge that I had family out there that I’d been forbidden from seeing and who were now completely lost. I was angry that the boy I’d once been had been changed into a man I didn’t like or even recognise.

At somewhere near closing time I went for my final piss of the night. Staggering out of the bathroom, I saw that Greg had moved onto the dance floor. And it looked like someone was getting up in his face. As I pushed my way through the crowd towards him, the moving bodies seemed to part of their own volition. I was in a dark tunnel, and all I could see at the end of it was a twenty-year-old knobhead in a white Adidas top shoving my mate with the heels of his hands.

All of the rage I’d felt over the last few months entered my fist and exited, explosively, into his chin. He flew back about six feet and fell sprawling onto the floor. The crowd opened up around him in horror. He didn’t move. I’d knocked him out with one punch. It felt good. It felt amazing. In that moment I decided the nice boy from Normandy was dead. If anybody gave me any shit from now on, they were going to get their jaw broken.

When you leave the army you spend your final three months working on your ‘resettlement package’. This means you’re free to pursue the next phase of your life, whatever that might be. For the lack of any better idea I’d applied to join the Metropolitan Police Force and began a training course up at Hendon in north London. The most difficult thing about it was the culture shock. The rules of banter that operated in the social world of the Paras did not apply there. In my first week, at lunch, I sat down next to a guy who was wearing a turban with a police cap badge on it. I’d never seen anything like it.

‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘I bet you get loads of shit for wearing that on your head.’

I was expecting that to be the beginning of a conversation that would be interesting, honest and, most of all, bonding. In the army he would have come back with a joke about it, like, ‘Yeah, it’s the craphat of all craphats’ – something of that sort. But that wasn’t what happened. He reacted badly.

The guy sitting opposite me looked disgusted. ‘Ant, you just can’t say things like that.’ He picked up his tray and walked off.

I ate alone, confused and angry. I was only trying to start a conversation but had been made to feel like a racist arsehole.

On a day off from my course at Hendon I decided to drive to Wood Green. I thought I might bump into a member of my real dad’s family or spot a familiar landmark. I suspected it would be a pointless mission, and that’s exactly how it turned out. I spent two hours driving around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the red letter box that sat outside my granddad’s house. It was ridiculous. I was on the way back to the barracks in Aldershot when, stuck in a long queue at some roadworks, I glanced a little way down a side road and spotted a phone box. It gave me an idea.

I pulled up beside it, slotted in a 20p and dialled my nan. She was my only hope, and a pretty desperate one – she was my mum’s mum, so I knew it was highly unlikely she’d give up an address, even if she had one. If my mother found out I was even looking for dad’s family, she’d go feral. I didn’t even want to think how my stepfather might react. But what else could I do?

My credit jumped down suddenly on the little display on the phone. I decided to cut straight to it.

‘Yeah, I know that,’ I said. ‘But I’m my own man, now. I want to find them. It can’t do any harm.’

‘By why, Nan? Why does it make any difference? My dad’s my dad. Nothing’s going to change that.’ The static crackled down the phone line. ‘She wouldn’t even let us keep a photo of him.’

‘She was only doing what she thought was best,’ Nan replied. ‘Why have all those painful memories hanging around the house?’

‘But all I want to do is find out about him. What’s wrong with that? I only want to know what he was like.’

Risley Avenue! Of course! I recognised the name immediately. I raced into a newsagent’s, got directions from the guy behind the counter and ten minutes later was turning into the street. Through my left-hand window there were rows of traditional red-brick terraces, but the houses on my side were much more distinctive, with many of the terraces being joined by unusual triangle shapes that housed the upstairs windows. I could remember looking at them with great curiosity, sitting in the back of the car when I was a kid.

This, I knew without doubt, was the street where my granddad lived. He’d been a tailor, and me and my brothers had been extremely close to him, even sometimes being allowed to see him for weekends after my dad passed away, before the move to France. When he was dying he’d asked to see us at his bedside so he could say a final goodbye. But we’d not been allowed. I was fourteen when he died. My Uncle Tony offered to pay for flights so we could come to his funeral. Mum, once again, refused.

As I drove further down Risley Avenue it all kept flooding back. It was almost too much. I remembered running to the shops to get sweets – I could remember the exact route. And down there was the way to the park with the fountain and the massive spiderweb. Although Granddad was no longer alive, his ex-partner used to live just a couple of doors away from him. We called her Nanny Ball. I could only pray that she was still alive and hadn’t been moved into a care home or something.

I parked up and walked down the road, looking for her house. My heart leapt when I saw the hide-and-seek post box. It was right on the corner of a crossroads that had a small roundabout at its centre. And there was Granddad’s old house. It was strange to see the place where I’d felt such happiness occupied by someone else, with a dilapidated plastic tractor abandoned on the front-yard lawn and a fat ginger cat staring territorially at me from the side passage. It was like seeing a stranger wearing your best trousers.

I walked on to Nanny Ball’s place. I was thrilled to see that it didn’t look changed at all, with its neat rows of flowers in the beds and the little stone statue of a boy holding a bird bath. I tried to contain my feelings as I gave the knocker a firm rap. Eventually someone came to the door. But my heart sank as it opened to reveal a six-foot-two biker with a huge grey beard and an AC/DC T-shirt.

He was smiling at me strangely. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know exactly who you’re looking for.’

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘You don’t know me, but I know you. It’s Anthony, isn’t it? Follow me.’

He disappeared for a moment to fetch his slippers, and then I followed him up the road. We arrived at a mid-terrace house with a hedge-covered fence and a grey gate. I rang the bell and stood back as the faint sound of footsteps grew louder and the door opened. There was a woman standing there. A woman that I hadn’t seen for a very long time.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Oh Jesus, I can hardly speak. Anthony! Anthony! I can’t believe it’s you!’

She put her hand over her mouth and burst into tears. I could barely speak myself.

She led me next door, to where yet more members of my family were living. There I found a person I recognised instantly from some of my happiest memories. I’ve never seen such shock and joy on a person’s face. He immediately embraced me, all three of us now crying. It was Uncle Tony.

‘I haven’t seen you since you were bloody seven years old,’ he said. ‘I’ve been praying for this day. We all have. Anthony, mate. I can’t believe you’ve come.’

When we finally put each other down, I settled myself on the floor, crossing my legs, as I used to when I was a boy.

‘You know, my brother – your dad – used to sit exactly like that,’ said Tony, eyes brimming. ‘He’d never sit on the settee. He’d just go crossed-legged on the rug like a little kid watching telly, even when he was bloody thirty. And he used to walk on his toes like you do. And the way you lift your eyebrows when you talk, Anthony. That’s just like him. He had that caterpillar eyebrow, too.’

‘It’s incredible,’ Tony continued. ‘It really is. It’s like my brother’s come back to life.’

As the afternoon fled by I told him everything I remembered of Dad – the bedtime stories he’d read every night, and the pillow and quilt he’d spread out in the back of his car, and the kittens in the swimming pool in Australia. Tony couldn’t believe how much I remembered, considering I was so young when Dad passed away. I found out lots I didn’t know about Dad too, like he was a black belt in karate, he played rugby and supported Manchester United, and how his computer job took him all around the world, to places like America, South Africa and Canada.

But by the end of the afternoon both the sky outside and the mood inside had grown dark. For too long, my uncle and aunty had lived with the fury of Mum preventing us from seeing them. They were even angrier about her attempts at erasing Dad from our memory.

‘It’s as good as murder,’ Uncle Tony said. ‘She was trying to kill that poor man in the minds of his own children.’

‘Don’t ever believe he’s not in my mind,’ I said, my eyes getting wet again. ‘I think about him every single day.’

We talked about it for hours. By the time I left, I’d gone from tearful elation to utter sorrow to vengeful rage. I felt about ready to kill someone.

The next time I saw my stepfather was when he came to Aldershot to pick me up, on my last day in the army.

‘Thought I’d surprise you,’ he said, leaning over to open the passenger seat. ‘You can stay with us while you sort yourself out.’

‘Your uncle?’ he said, his eyes draining. ‘And that’s that what you want, is it?’

He went silent for a moment, as the shock entered him. Then he punched the windscreen of the car.

With my mood as it was, my relationship with Hayley was only becoming worse. I began dividing my time between Uncle Tony’s house and a place in Hendon where the Met course took place. During the day I was learning about the law, role-playing potentially difficult scenarios, doing riot control. Having already been through the army system made the physical side of it a breeze. One thing I found strange, though, was that nobody at Hendon seemed to have heard of 9 Para. Whenever I’d mention them to anyone, they’d just look slightly blank. There was one guy in particular who I instantly bonded with, called Johnny. He happened to be a bit of an armchair expert on the military, having once harboured dreams of joining the Forces.

‘I was a paratrooper,’ I told him proudly, when we’d first chatted in the bar at Hendon after a particularly boring afternoon learning about the various definitions of theft.

‘Airborne?’ he said, eyes widening. ‘Fuckin’ ’ell! Sweet!’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘What regiment? One? Two? Three?’

I smiled proudly and sat back on my stool, bracing myself for his awestruck disbelief and his demands for tales of the legendary 9 Para debauchery. ‘Nine,’ I said.

‘9 Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers. You know, 9 Para. 9 Para! How the fuck can you not know 9 Para?’

It took a few experiences like this for me to finally realise that I’d been lied to. 9 Para weren’t famous. They weren’t legends. They were delusional. But that didn’t stop me behaving like a cliched, horrible paratrooper. The strange thing was, now I wasn’t in the Forces anymore I began cleaving to my old persona more than I’d ever done. It didn’t matter that I’d totally rejected it when I’d been there – I’d wear my Para shirt at the gym, and use any opportunity to show off the tattooed wings on my left shoulder and to chug pints and shout ‘Airborne!’

Walking away from the Paras meant walking away from the identity that the squadron had created for me. Now it was gone, I wasn’t sure who I was. I certainly wasn’t the young man who’d joined the services. The only thing I had to fall back on was that I was this 9 Para guy. People would say, ‘Who are you?’ and I’d reply, ‘I’m ex-9 Parachute Squadron.’ It was how I defined myself. But as soon as they heard that, I felt there was an expectation. In order to prove I was a Para I’d have to fulfil it or risk them thinking, ‘You’re not the person you said you were.’ Ex-9 Parachute Squadron might not have been much of an identity, but it was the only one I had.

So the debauchery and destruction continued, and my new mate Johnny was only too happy to assist. While everyone else was revising for the course exams we’d go out on the piss and come back to the accommodation, wrap ourselves in toilet paper like mummies and smash the place up. The lack of revision I was doing turned out not to be too much of an obstacle, as I’d also made friends with a left-handed genius called Greg. I made sure I sat next to him in the exam hall so he could slide his paper across for me to see. Needless to say, I aced every test.

It wasn’t long before the inevitable happened and Hayley and I decided to split. Try as we might, the marriage just wasn’t working and we thought it best to go our separate ways.

When I discovered that more members of my dad’s extended family lived up in Chelmsford I started hanging out there, too. Once I’d formally split with Hayley I moved there permanently. Up in Essex I found myself drawing a lot of unwanted attention. The problem was, I was confident, in good physical shape and the girls seemed to like me. And I liked them right back. I began bulking myself up with the help of regular sessions in the gym and steroids that I’d score from a lad I’d come to know locally. I found that a certain type didn’t appreciate people like me in their vicinity. I was too much of a threat.

I never looked for trouble, but when it found me I wouldn’t hesitate. There was no in between. I was like a switch: if I was on, whoever was facing up to me would be knocked out – I’d fucking annihilate him until he stopped moving. I quickly learned that if I aimed my knuckle at just the right part of the chin, I could knock anyone out and leave them with a broken jaw as a parting gift. People began to joke, ‘I’ve never seen Ant in a fight,’ because there never was one. Whatever someone started, I’d stop in under three seconds. And I did a lot of stopping. It’s true what they say about steroids. What you gain in muscle mass you lose in control over your temper. It’s a dangerous, stupid trade-off, and one I should never have made. I have Emilie, my future wife, to thank for persuading me to stop taking them.

Two weeks before the end of my four-month Met course I went out for a boozy Saturday with Johnny in Southampton. We were leaving a club called Oceana at about 2 a.m. and I asked him to chuck me the keys. I’d always drink-drive, and felt that alcohol didn’t really have much of a debilitating effect on me. In the army I’d grown well used to drinking until 4 a.m. and then being up two hours later for an eight-mile run. I jumped behind the wheel of Johnny’s little red Vauxhall Vectra and decided to take a shortcut down a one-way street. I was halfway down it when the entire street started flashing blue. Shit. Police.

I was twice over the limit. They arrested me and locked me in a freezing cell. As I sat on the edge of the mattress, staring at the concrete floor, I knew this would be the end of my attempted career as a police officer. But I didn’t have a long dark night of the soul. I had a nice kip.

The fact is, I didn’t care. What with the failure of my army career, the failure of my marriage, the grief Hayley was giving me, the estrangement from my mother’s family and all the turmoil in my head about Dad, my life and existence had started to mean nothing to me. Sure enough, I was kicked out of Hendon on the Monday and was drink-driving again by Tuesday. I was even caught a second time, earning myself a two-year ban in the process. Who cared? If I ended up in prison, nobody would miss me.

My relationship with my dad’s family was also now causing me pain. I was seeing a lot of my Uncle Tony, and his talk about Dad and what happened to him was becoming so relentless and intense I felt it was bordering on obsessive. At first I’d been proud when he’d tell me how similar I was to him, but it was now overwhelming. Because my nan was in an awkward situation, I didn’t talk about Uncle Tony and the others with her. So I was amazed when, one Saturday afternoon, just as I was leaving her place after dinner, she said, ‘I’ll take you down the grave if you want.’

We made the journey a week later. It turns out he was buried in a little back-street church in a pretty tea-and-scones village in Hampshire called Hambledon. We stopped at a florist’s on the way to pick up some flowers. When we arrived, Nan stayed back and pointed me in the right direction. It was a lonely, gusty day and the only sound in the place was the wind in the tall elms. I approached it slowly, not quite sure how I was going to handle it. The small headstone was at the back of the plot, near an old, crumbling wall, and the gold writing on it was already almost completely worn away. It just said: PETER AARON, LOVING FATHER AND HUSBAND. I put the flowers down and collapsed, tears pouring down my face, my sobs getting lost in the roaring of the wind as it barrelled angrily around the graveyard.

That night I drove back to my new flat in Chelmsford, which had a balcony overlooking a car park. I’d only recently moved in and had invited some of my new Essex mates around to see it. We were all out on the balcony, drinking champagne, when three young guys walked past. One of them shouted, ‘Fucking hell, nice view!’ The switch flipped. I ran downstairs, chased one of them for about ten yards, got him in a headlock and started swinging at his head.

‘How dare you?’ I shouted at him. ‘I’m having a nice time up there with my friends’ – punch – ‘I’m not disturbing you’ – punch – ‘I’m a nice’ – punch – ‘polite’ – punch – ‘respectful person’ – punch, punch, punch. ‘And yet you shout at me.’ Punch. My fist was wet with blood and snot. It was disgusting, and only made me angrier. ‘There’s no way I’d be so rude as to shout “nice view” at someone.’ Punch. ‘So why shout it at me?’ Punch. ‘You’re going to think twice about walking past someone’s balcony and saying “Nice view.”’

When I woke up the next morning I was alone. I remembered, vaguely, going to a club after the party. I tried to work out what had happened next. I’d obviously lost my keys and booted the door in. It was completely off its hinges, split in half with a big bootprint on it. And I was covered in blood, even though I wasn’t injured.

A couple of weeks later, word reached me that the police were trying to track me down. At first I assumed I was wanted for questioning over the guy in the car park. It turned out to be someone else – a known face around Chelmsford who I knew didn’t like me. He was the kind of character who got beaten up regularly, and he’d told the police I’d bitten a chunk out of his cheek. I hadn’t done that, but it was my word against his, and by now I had a reputation. The police were determined to have me locked up, whatever the truth of the matter. Innocent or not, the police had a knack for getting their way. I knew there was at least a 70–30 chance I’d be locked up for six to eight years. There was only one person in the world I could talk to about this. I bought two litres of whisky, got in my car and drove all the way to Hampshire. I drank the liquor and wept, then slept the night on my dad’s grave.

In order to avoid the police I moved into my mate’s house, above a garage, and made an arrangement to get a fake passport. The plan was to escape to Australia, to lie low for a while. A few days before my meeting with the passport guy I went for a drink with my cousin Terry at a pub called the Ivory Peg in Chelmsford. We’d just rocked up to the bar when Terry jabbed me in the ribs.

Emilie Dines was about as notorious around Chelmsford as I was, except she was famous for her incredible beauty. Of course, Essex is crammed with people who think they’re beautiful but, for once, I could see this woman’s legend was well deserved. She had browny-green eyes, and wore a tight white shirt and her long dark hair in a ponytail. Her figure was unbelievable, the kind of body you dream about but somehow never think exists in real life.

‘Hi Emilie,’ said Terry, trying to act casual, when it was our turn to get served. ‘Have you met Ant?’

A few nights later, Terry and I were in a pub called The Toad. It was during Euro 2004 and we were waiting to watch England–Croatia. And there was Emilie, sitting among her girlfriends, in a yellow and white flower-print dress. I found myself just gazing stupidly at her. To my amazement she turned and beamed back at me, budging up on the bench so I could sit.

And, just like that, we were talking. And we didn’t stop. The game that I’d been looking forward to watching all week became just a smear of background noise. I felt complete, somehow, as if in Emilie I was seeing all the beauty I’d ever need to see.

There was something about the way she said the word ‘fun’ that gave me a suspicion she might like me. Still, she had a boyfriend, and that boyfriend was a policeman. I forced myself to say my goodbyes and went on my way. I had to meet a man about a passport.

I tried to forget her, I really did. But I didn’t do a very good job. About a week later I was up to my arse in grease, working for cash in my mate’s car workshop, when my Nokia buzzed. It was Emilie, a text message. REALLY GOOD TO CHAT THE OTHER NIGHT. NOW YOU HAVE MY NUMBER. Because my phone had no credit, I couldn’t reply. But when I did finally call her, two days later, she told me that about half an hour after I’d left her the other night, she’d called up her boyfriend and told him it was over.

I suggested a date at a pretty village pub in Danbury called The Anchor. I picked her up in a ‘borrowed’ – a customer’s silver Peugeot 206 from the workshop I’d been working in. Once again, we chatted all night. I was desperate not to mess this up, so decided to be upfront about all the reasons why she might decide I was a bad bet. There was a lot to say. I told her about the army. I told her about my first marriage. I told her about the police being after me. I told her about my plan with the fake passport and my escape to Australia. She listened, never seeming to judge, but never quite giving away what she thought. When we walked to the car, under the moonlight, she thanked me for dinner.

‘You know what I think?’ she said, leaning against the passenger door. ‘You should go to the police. Hand yourself in.’

‘But you’re innocent. And if they convict you, I’ll wait. I want to be with you.’

‘I know this sounds cheesy,’ she said, ‘but I’ve never felt like this about anyone before. The first time I saw you at the pub I told my best mate, “I love that guy.” I can’t actually believe I’m here with you.’

It was hard to take in what she was saying. Love? I felt like I was being offered the most incredible gift, but also the knowledge that I could never really have it – at least not if I went to the police.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you a passport too. We can both go. It’ll be fun.’

‘Look how successful you were,’ she said. ‘You were a paratrooper, Ant. And look at you now. Do you remember, when we first met you asked me what I wanted? Well, what do you want? Don’t you want to get the old Anthony back? That young lad you were telling me about. He seemed like a decent guy.’

And I couldn’t say anything else, because she’d pulled me to her body and was kissing me.

The next day, at Chelmsford Police Station, I was charged with grievous bodily harm with intent, which is one down from manslaughter. The investigators seemed genuinely convinced I was guilty, and for that I can’t really blame them. When you considered my reputation and the circumstantial evidence, which even I could see looked pretty bad, I’d have probably wanted to lock me up too.

On the day of the trial my accuser made two critical misjudgements. His first was climbing into the witness box caked in cheap foundation, his second was forgetting to charge up his brain cell before he came to court. My brilliant solicitor began her cross-examination by casually asking if his make-up might be disguising a black eye.

‘So would it be fair to say that it was your intention to mislead the jury?’

And that was it. It was his word against mine, and his word had just been proven in a court of law to be shit.

There were two different kinds of people on the train that pulled out of Exeter St Davids at 8.30 on that bright morning in March 2005: your ordinary commuters, zoned out in preparation for another dull day in the office, and the young men, pale and terrified and smartly dressed, with one-way tickets in their pockets. These lads would be getting off at Lympstone Commando, the station in the middle of nowhere that serves just one place: the legendary Royal Marines Commando Training Centre in Devon.

There were about thirty of us that tipped out onto the narrow concrete platform that day, wearing the suits we’d been instructed to arrive in. As the doors beeped and closed and the train eased off, we were hit by the cold wind coming off the bleak, muddy sands of the River Exe that stretched into the distance. In front of us were a high fence, a locked gate and a drill instructor.

He marched us through the gate and up a long path that wound up a steep hill towards the barracks. We strode past a gigantic assault course through which a group of new recruits were grunting and gurning, their faces muddy, their breath rising in ghostly billows. I passed them hungry with anticipation, noting to myself once more how lucky I was to be there.

Justice had been done back in Chelmsford, but there was no way I was going to be complacent. I knew Emilie was right. I had to change. I had to take on my demons or I was going to end up in prison, no doubt about it. Leaving Essex would be a start. I used to see old guys in their fifties out there who were still fighting, and I knew that would be my fate if I didn’t do something drastic. This meant finding a place that would pull something different out of me. It also meant making the most of this run of luck: things were going well with my relationship with Emilie, I was off the steroids and I’d also put my uncles and aunties at a distance, not because I didn’t love them, but just because I was finding all the constant talk about my dad just too intense. The Royal Marines would be a new start. I felt both lucky and privileged to be able to make it.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that I had found exactly the right place. Our new intake were returning to our accommodation after lunch when the drill sergeant came out into the corridor and called for me.

I approached him with my heart sinking. How had I highlighted myself already? Was this going to be a repeat of Pre-Para?

It was, no doubt, an insignificant moment to my drill sergeant. To me it was everything. That little gesture of respect showed me that, unlike the army, the Royal Marines didn’t respond to individual achievement with envy. They welcomed it. I wasn’t going to be kicked into a ditch at Lympstone for the crime of coming first. Any strength they saw in you, they’d nurture. Although there were some guys in our intake who were edging thirty, most were nineteen or twenty. I was twenty-four, and having my wings stitched onto my kit earned me everyone’s respect.

Trainees on the thirty-two-week course are known as ‘nods’, because they’re run ragged and then pulled into class for lessons, during which it’s not unusual to see them nodding off. The very newest intake wore orange ribbons to denote their status. I lost count of the number of double-takes I saw, from people clocking my orange ribbon and then the wings on my shoulder. It was a fantastic feeling, and couldn’t have been more different from my time as a hated craphat.

I’d retained most of the weight I’d put on over the many hundreds of hours I’d put in at the gym, and I found the physical training to be punishing but fun. We were doing ten-mile marches with heavy weights, assault courses, rope climbs. The big revelation came in the classroom. In the Paras we’d only been taught dribs and drabs of fieldcraft, but the Commando course was another world. It was like going from kindergarten to Cambridge University. We were learning pure soldiering: battlefield patrolling, live firing, survival techniques, troop attacks, section attacks, map reading, judging distance. I’d had no idea how little I’d known when I was at Aldershot. I could run twenty miles back then, and down a pint and throw a punch, and that was it. I was becoming a true soldier and I was loving every minute of it.

On week fifteen us nods were finally allowed out for a drink, strictly between the hours of 18:00 and 23:00. I’d made friends with this big South African guy named Daniel, and we decided to get the train down to Exeter for our first beers in months. We had a brilliant evening, during which I told him all about Emilie, Oakley and my misadventures with 9 Para. We were walking back to Exeter St Davids when this guy, rushing for the train, barged past us, knocking me on the shoulder.

It took a fraction of a second, probably less. The switch switched. My fist went out and he was on the ground, mouth open, eyes gaping, not a muscle moving. The next thing I knew I was handcuffed and being bundled into the back of a police van. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. This was it. ‘I’ve lost my career,’ I thought, as the van door slammed shut, leaving me in the unforgiving steel darkness. Somehow I was going to have to tell Emilie that, after all the faith she’d put in me, I was going to have to get my job back at the garage in Chelmsford.

When the police officers realised I was a new recruit they had me driven back to Lympstone for my superiors to deal with. The next morning I was pulled in to see the troop commander, an old-school type who’d worked his way up the ranks over the course of twenty years. He was a rangy man with dark eyes and a thick vein running down his forehead, and was sitting at his desk with a pile of forms and files in front of him.

‘Middleton,’ he said. ‘I can’t have my men assaulting people in the streets. No ifs nor buts nor maybes. I just can’t allow that to happen, it’s as simple as that. If you can’t control yourself, you have no place here. We don’t want men who are unpredictable. We’ve no use for them.’

‘So if you don’t want to end up in civvies, I suggest you get that head screwed on. Do you understand? I expect a man with your background to be setting an example.’

He spoke slowly and looked me in the eye. ‘Be a shepherd, not a fucking sheep.’

I hadn’t felt this way since I was five years old, when Dad had forgiven me for kicking Simon down the stairs. From that point on I became resolute. That was it. Never again. I made an absolute vow to try to be deserving of the respect that the Royal Marines were giving me. That would mean fighting my demons. We all have dark forces living within us. They’re part of being human. But they feed on damage. The more pain and injustice we go through in life, the stronger our demons become. Mine had been with me since I was five, but it had taken that pile-up of failures and the meeting with my dad’s family to draw them out. And how low they’d taken me. Nearly to prison, and to a life of shame and blood.

I couldn’t let them win anymore. I’d rein in the drinking. And I’d begin using every spare moment seeing Emilie. If I was given twelve hours off, I’d take the four-hour train service to Chelmsford, spend three hours with her, and return. After a few weeks of this my confidence began to blossom. I’d never felt more at home, or more accepted, just for being who I wanted to be.

The difference was stark. Every tribe has its own internal rules. In 9 Para you gained status by showing how many pints you could drink, how many fights you could get into and how much shock you could inspire in everyone at the next horrendous act you dreamt up. In the Marines you gained status through hard work. In 9 Para, and the wider green army, they were always pushing at your weaknesses and trying to bring you back down. The Marines were about building on your strengths, talking positively about each other, building each other up. The typical conversations you’d overhear around Lympstone would be like, ‘He might be weak at this but he’s fucking good at that.’ I’d found my tribe, and I was thriving.

Around halfway through my Commando training a sniper course began. I was standing at the armoury on the first day when I became aware of an electric charge of excitement crackling through the air. Out of the door in front of us came a huge, broad-shouldered man wearing a green beret with a distinctive emblem that showed a raised dagger and two horizontal stripes, adorned with the motto BY STRENGTH AND GUILE. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This was a member of Special Boat Service. The SBS is to the Royal Marines what the SAS is to the army – its most elite fighting force.

We pinned ourselves to the wall, as if the sheer power of his presence might be enough to knock us all over. We were utterly silent in respect and watched as he stopped to make sure his weapon was clear. When he’d gone, the whispers started. All I could hear was, ‘SBS, SBS, did you fucking see fucking SBfuckinS?’

One of the lads said, ‘Did you hear about that experiment they did? They took, like, ten Marines who’d only just passed out and put them straight into Special Forces Selection, just to see what would happen.’

‘And what happened?’ I asked him. ‘Don’t tell me, they all fucking died.’

That morning passed as if in a dream. How did you get to be that SBS guy we’d seen, who had the power to make tough young men fall silent and trained killers cling to the walls? How was it possible? Could I do it? If one newly minted Marine had passed Special Forces Selection on one occasion, then why couldn’t I?

I completed my Commando course in December 2005 and proposed to Emilie over the Christmas break with a diamond ring from Hatton Garden. When I formally passed out, in January 2006, I was honoured to be awarded the King’s Badge award for best recruit, which I’d wear on my left shoulder for the rest of my career. I was posted to Bravo Company, 40 Commando in Taunton, and Emilie and I were moved into married quarters, a smart house two miles from the barracks. We said our vows on 3 May 2006. Sixteen months later I was cutting the umbilical cord of my first daughter, Shyla. I had everything I’d ever wanted: my dagger and my wings, my maroon beret and now my green beret. I also had a beautiful wife and an amazing baby daughter. Then, just ten days after she came into my life, the prediction that nameless Para made in Macedonia when we’d all crowded around that tiny portable television came true. It had all kicked off, and I was posted to Afghanistan.

My tour of Afghanistan with the Royal Marines was when I realised that the key to leadership lies not just in beating your demons. That’s just the start of it. In order to have the edge and strength that a leader needs, you’ve got to make friends with them too. Lots of people deny their demons. They float through life believing that they’re lovely and gentle and wouldn’t harm a fly and, when they inevitably do harm that fly, they try to shift responsibility and blame other people. These men and women are not leaders. These are not the people you want guiding you out of that foxhole and through that storm of bullets. If I hadn’t understood that, I’d never have made it to the SBS, with whom I served two further tours of Afghanistan.

In the Royal Marines the rules of engagement were strict. We were only allowed to fire our weapons if we were being fired at. This meant that if a man in a field pointed his weapon at us, fired a couple of rounds in our direction, then put his weapon down, we weren’t allowed to shoot. If we did, we’d be looking at a court martial and perhaps a prison sentence for murder. It wasn’t unusual for men to receive fire from Taliban who’d then simply drop their gun, run to the other side of the field and pick up a rake. There was nothing we could do, and they knew it.

The first time I killed a man it was an ambiguous situation. I’d entered a Taliban compound and a darkened room that was part of it. Out of the shadows came a man in a white dish-dash. He turned towards me and pulled an AK-47 from beneath his clothing. I didn’t fire. How did I know he wasn’t about to drop it? In that moment I was controlling that demon. But the moment he pointed it towards me, he showed me it was a kill-or-be-killed situation. That’s when I accessed my darkness. Two presses on the trigger. Direct hits to the mouth. He was down.

If I hadn’t had my demons to call upon I’d probably have hesitated. Was this man a father? Who would he be leaving behind? What devastation would I be inflicting on innocent people? What if I was mistaken? It might have made for a pause of less than a second, but it would have been sufficient to get me killed. And, likewise, if I’d had access to my demons but no control over them, I’d have been spraying bullets everywhere. There are people like that in the services, but I’m not a bully with a weapon. I’m not a person who’ll go into a chaotic situation with bad people who I recognise are a threat and kill them automatically. Even in a war zone.

Leaders understand that their demons are an essential part of who they are. By befriending them you’re able to call on them when the time comes. Perhaps you’re an employer who has had to lay off a lot of staff for the good of the company. Perhaps you need to tell someone who’s struggling that they need to try harder. Perhaps you need to tell the person who’s leading you some respectful but honest truth. There’s no way of doing these things successfully without pushing down on your pedal and letting some darkness come out.

But demons don’t become your friends without a fight. And before you take them on, you have to acknowledge that you’ve got them. From what I’ve observed, this is one of the reasons servicemen can struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For the guys I’ve spoken with who suffer from PTSD, the problem isn’t that they can’t process what they’ve witnessed. It’s that they can’t process what they’ve done. They’ve either made a mistake or they’ve done something that’s resulted in carnage. Either that or they can’t handle seeing the everyday horrors of war and accept that they’re active players in it. If you’ve synched up with your demons, there’s a better chance you’ll accept that that’s part of you. You’re an animal. You have teeth, as very many of earth’s creatures do. Once you accept that, it will no longer seem strange that a man who loves his wife and children with all his heart can show up for work one morning and destroy life without thinking.

Making friends with your demons also means accepting that, sometimes, you’re a maker of mistakes. Many people I know with PTSD are perfectly able to process the witnessing of death and suffering. What they seem to struggle with more is the fact that they were a cause of it, either as the result of an error or because, in the stress and confusion of the battlefield, they failed to prevent it. Perhaps fear took hold of them, perhaps something within them told them to hide or to shoot recklessly. It seems to me that, because they’re in denial of their own potential for causing badness, they play the scene over and over in their heads, working through endless different scenarios: ‘What else could I have done to prevent it?’; ‘What other decisions could I have made?’; ‘Why wasn’t it me?’ By accessing the darkness that dwells within you, you can accept you made a mistake and move on with your life. You have to be able to not care. If you deny your demons, I’m telling you, they’ll take you down.

Now that I’m on civvy street I have to dominate my angry demon. I’ve been trained to meet violence with extreme violence, but society has zero tolerance for that kind of behaviour. So when I feel the anger rising and I want to strike out, I have to keep it under my command. Control is crucial. Once you’ve made peace with your dark parts, and have authority over them, you can begin using them to make positives. The same demon that made me violent in the streets of Chelmsford has given me a form of self-defence now. I’ve lost the fear of being punched or attacked, and this gives me huge power. I also use that violent demon to ramp me up with aggression when I need to get a tough job done. By making friends with your demons, you can take all the darkness that lies within you and create light.

LEADERSHIP LESSONS

Make friends with your demons. Having dark forces living within us is part of being human. They’re the result of the inevitable damage of life. Each one of us has a choice: make these demons work for us, or turn them loose against us.

Don’t feel bad for going the long way around. When we watch the movies we see people going through hell and coming out the other side a perfect hero. These are fairy tales. In real life we usually have to go through hell and go through hell and go through hell, and only then, if we’re lucky, do we learn our lessons – only to half-forget them again. This is nothing to be ashamed of. This is simply the rough and tumble of learning.

Most of us have horror stories we can tell about our childhoods. It’s not the horror that defines you, it’s how well you’ve fought it.

Never be afraid to look for help in unlikely places. If I hadn’t asked my nan for that address, there’s a good chance I’d never have met up with my dad’s family. I thought the chances of her helping me were not much better than zero, but you never can tell what’s going on in someone else’s head. Before dismissing other people, give them a try. You never know who’ll turn out to be an unexpected ally.

MAKE FRIENDS WITH YOUR DEMONS