-
- guardian.co.uk, Sunday January 11 2004 02.45 GMT
He was a Scouser who had just returned from home leave during the Toxteth riots, which the soldier confessed he had taken part in. For more than six hours he sat in my carriage all the way from the Hoek Van Holland to Hannover where he departed to rejoin his unit. The squaddie had linked up with my friends and I during a gut-churning voyage from Harwich across the North Sea. For all he knew we could have been an IRA team on our way to Germany to blow up British bases and kill and maim his comrades. But he didn't seem to care: all he wanted to do was talk about Belfast.
After the first bottle of Paddy Whiskey was drunk he opened up to us. He had driven Saracens and Land Rovers along the Falls Road during the worst of the riots. His 'home' for his tour of duty had been North Howard Street Army billet, an old factory transformed into a military base when the Troubles started. Conditions, as I found out with a television crew more than a decade later, were cramped and frugal. There was also the constant danger of IRA sniper, grenade, mortar and bomb attacks on the building.
Our increasingly sozzled Scouser said he missed the thrill of Belfast. Compared to the British Army on the Rhine, he said, it was exhilarating. He admitted that he first learned his rioting skills (put to use in Liverpool during the summer of 1981) engaging with young West Belfast republicans. The pay was good, the action seemingly never-ending, the drink flowed and the women, allegedly, easy and available.
On our train journey eastwards the Army driver was awarded hero-status by one of our fellow passengers, a German mathematician. The mathematics man thanked the soldier in clipped English for protecting West Germany from communism. He even bought the squaddie beer and a box of malted biscuits.
For most of the journey the maths lecturer sat in silence playing with a Rubik's cube. The Scouser cheekily asked if he would buy him another drink. When his benefactor left for the bar the squaddie winked at us, poured water over the Rubik's cube and then started to peel off the colours. When the cube was bare black, the soldier stuck each face with a single colour before the mathematician returned to our compartment.
The second he came in the German was astonished as the soldier held the cube aloft in triumph. 'I think you are a genius,' the mathematician gasped.
Over Christmas I came across a character very much like the Brit I encountered almost 23 years ago on my way to Berlin. But this soldier was purely fictional. Specialist Ray Elwood is the product of the American writer Robert O'Connor in his first novel Buffalo Soldiers. Elwood is a cynical survivor who deals drugs, cons the brass and blackmails his underlings. His story is set on a corrupt army base in Mannheim where there are constant race riots and the troops spend more time in the brothel than on the firing range.
Elwood is a chemically charged Sancho Panza whose main aim is to make a quick buck while avoiding hard work or, worse still, service to his country.
Reading Buffalo Soldiers provoked memories of that Scouse squaddie and set me wondering about why there has been little or no literature produced about the British Army experience in Northern Ireland. There have been several abysmally written and ludicrously plotted sub-Andy McNab accounts of the undercover/dirty war but nothing that truly conveys the boredom, frustration, bewilderment and bizarre incidents that punctuated the squaddie's Ulster tour of duty.
Perhaps this is due to the British regimental system with its emphasis on unit loyalty or the fact that the Brits, unlike the Yanks, are a fully professional army and are able not only to spell but also to point to Basra on a map. None the less it remains a mystery as to why more than three decades of experience has not been captured convincingly in book, play or even film. Maybe the first ex-Brit to do so could start with Elwood or, better still, his real-life equivalent from Liverpool.
· The adage about lighting a candle as opposed to cursing the darkness holds true in Belfast's Botanic area. Farah Hassani and her Iranian husband, Ghaise, are doing their bit for the victims of last month's earthquake in Iran. The couple have been collecting blankets, clothes and shoes for the survivors and those made homeless following the disaster in the ancient city of Bam.
Now Farah and Ghaise are asking the public to donate medicines, sanitisers, surgical gloves and toiletries, especially for women, which they hope to ship to the Iranian embassy in London. They are also hoping for one of the courier companies that ferries goods between Northern Ireland and Britain to help them send over what they have collected so far. Any non-monetary donation, large or small, can be left for the Hassanis at Café Vincent, Botanic Avenue (02890-242020 or 07855 379657).
