LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

but I don’t know much about his background there because he never talks about it. I know he was in the Second World War, but he has never said what he did or even whose side he was on. I have four brothers, the eldest of whom was born in Italy, but he came here as a baby. We didn’t have a deprived upbringing, but we certainly weren’t well off. Yes, there were times when we had to go without, but so did nearly everybody else in this area. This is where I grew up, this is where I played as a child, in these streets round here.

      ‘After I had been at school a while I became a real handful. To be honest, I developed into a right oaf. I used to skip school more than I attended because it was too much like hard work. There was a gang of us and we used to laze round the streets all day. Even when I did go to school I would get out on the street as soon as possible, skipping homework and even meals. Despite it all I didn’t have to repeat anything at school. I don’t know how I managed that. When the time came for secondary school I found it really hard and that was when I was caught out by my lack of work at primary school. I went instead to technical school for a year to study comercial de noche – bookkeeping and accountancy – and as soon as that was over I left school. I was fourteen.

      ‘My parents laid down the law: if I wasn’t prepared to go to school then I’d better get out and work. I worked with my middle brother in his shoe shop until it went bust. Then he opened a small factory making kitchen worktops and I joined him there for a year. My eldest brother also had a small factory making clothes and next I went to work for him. Life was good… I was fifteen, earning money and still living at home and able to buy my own clothes and still have enough left over to go to the local discos.

      ‘We spoke a mixture of Spanish and Italian. Father was a true Italian, but as time went on he learned to speak castellano [Castilian Spanish]. In March 1981 I was called to Colimba. I wasn’t exactly mad about doing my military service, but if I had to do it then do it I would. It was the only way to look at it.

      ‘I remember we had to do two medicals. The first I can’t remember a thing about, but the second, well, I was put into a room, we were all put into a room, loads of us, and we were then told to strip naked and then they made us open up our rear so they could inspect us. They looked right up our backsides. The medical man then came and told me to stand up straight and he looked at my feet. Then he made me show him the soles of my feet and do turns and more turns and then he walked away. Back he comes with a much higher-ranking medical officer and I did the same for him and the pair of them stood there humming and hawing and the senior one said: “Send him anyway.”

      ‘You see, I have flat feet and should have failed the Army medical there and then. But I was in and they gave me inoculations, a uniform, kitbag, boots and a rifle and put me on a bus with all the others for the journey to San Miguel del Monte. The two months I spent there on basic training felt more like six. I can honestly say the instruction I received there was the most stupid I have ever heard or experienced in my entire life.

      ‘We used to be up at 6 a.m., wash and parade and then go into the field for training. One exercise we had to do called target identification, which had us kneeling or lying on the ground using our thumbs or fists up before our eyes to try to locate where an enemy was sniping at us, still makes me giggle. It always seemed to me that by the time I had gone through all this stupid thumb and fist business I’d be fucking dead.

      ‘Night training was just the same as orienteering, copping messages left at checkpoints. We would also have to stand facing a partner saluting and shouting… Jesus, you felt like a bunch of complete arseholes standing there shouting and saluting each other. It was unbelievable nonsense. Another piece of bullshit they made us do was called area cleaning. This was bullshit of the highest order. We would form a line and walk across a field holding a blanket, collecting everything to make it tidy, even the smallest twig. That fucking field was clean enough to eat off by the time we’d finished with it.

      ‘After a month of this crap we went for shooting lessons. The range was basic and so was the instruction. They taught us how to hold the weapon, how to breathe when shooting, and then the target would pop up and we would go ping! Once we had done that we would advance towards the target firing from the waist. That was all we learned: how to fire a rifle and 9mm pistol. I wasn’t to fire a weapon again for a year… and then it was to be in a war.

      ‘Towards the end of this training period they began to ask us what we knew and what we could do, like driving or working as a mechanic or any trade. I could drive, so I was sent to the vehicle depot. Anyone who couldn’t do anything the Army regarded as useful stayed in the infantry. They spent the rest of their time guarding everything and jumping around like arseholes.

      ‘The “dirty war” which spread fear throughout our country was coming to an end at that time. There appeared to be less tension about. A lot of guys were going AWOL, just disappearing when on guard duty. When the corporals went to inspect the guard positions all they would find would be a guy’s helmet and rifle. The guy himself had vanished, never to be seen again.

      ‘It wasn’t hard to see why guys went. We were supposed to be paid a monthly wage, but they always found ways of getting our money, fining us for so-called lost kit and other stupid things. If I was lucky I would finish up with about fifty pesos at the end of the month. The regiment had several exercises during the year, but I missed all the firing because I was in the Service Company, looking after and driving the trucks. When they went on exercise I was used to drive the food to them in a truck.

      ‘By March 1982 the next conscripts were arriving and we were waiting for them to fill our places so we could go home. I remember I was really looking forward to Civvy Street. I had just a week left to do when they told us to prepare for something. They didn’t tell us what it was, but I had a suspicion it was to be the Malvinas.

      ‘One minute I’m sitting there dreaming of freedom and home and the next I’ve drawn my rifle – the same one I’ve only ever fired once – and I’m on a Boeing 707 with no seats, flying out across the South Atlantic to the Malvinas. I couldn’t take it all in. I never dreamt for a moment I would ever be fighting in a real war.’

      Jerry Phillips comes from a background shared by thousands of other British soldiers, the ever-on-the-move Service family. His dad, Michael, was a highly skilled RAF technician whose work was maintaining the flight simulators in which the jet-jockeys of the Air Force kept up the skills needed for flying the multimillion-pound planes with their sophisticated systems and hardware. Jerry was born in Singapore, where his father, then a corporal, was stationed. Every couple of years the Phillips family was on the move, with a posting back to Britain and then back to exotic Singapore again.

      Young Jerry loved Singapore and the lifestyle, boosting his pocket money by prowling the jungle fringes collecting brilliantly coloured butterflies and tropical fish, which he sold to American servicemen on leave from the carnage of Vietnam. Later he branched out, catching snakes and reptiles, which he sold to the locals, who used the skins to make handbags and wallets for the tourists. At school, too, things were going well. By the time he was eight, young Jerry was such a good runner that he won a place in the Singapore Schools’ Junior Team.

      The earliest drama Jerry can recall was when a poisonous snake chased his big sister. As she ran for her life Jerry leapt into action with a stick and clubbed it to death. ‘I’ll always remember that bloody snake,’ he says. ‘It would have killed my sister with one bite. It was my first frightening experience in life.’

      His next followed quite quickly when, in 1968, just before he was nine, his parents’ marriage broke down. For a time Jerry’s life fell apart. Peggie Phillips and her four kids were now just surplus baggage as far as the RAF was concerned and they were shipped back to Britain to a rundown Second World War camp where broken families were temporarily housed. Life was hard for Peggie and her brood, and the RAF didn’t care. Soon, they were on the move again, this time to Ilfracombe, in Devon, where Peggie had a friend who let her and the children crowd into a one-bedroom flat. For a further two years they lived on top of each other until Peggie got a job as a school dinner lady.

      ‘Life was still hard,’ recalls Jerry. ‘Dinner ladies are very poorly paid and she had us four kids to support. We couldn’t compete with the other kids at

Скачать книгу