LITMIR.BIZ

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I missed him – it was if we were one person, we were bonded so close. I stayed in a terraced house in London Street, Worthing, with my father’s parents. I was totally bewildered. Uncle Jean took me to my grandparents’ house, then left. I sat in the corner of the room totally confused and bewildered. I had thought I was being taken back to France to Daniel and Joan. But I was left there, with new keepers, and speaking French.’

      His grandmother, although in her seventies, had love aplenty for the bright-eyed but sad little boy. She had Victorian values and a very keen sense of duty towards her little grandson. Dom quickly became very fond of her, but the pain of the separation from his younger brother was still eating away at his insides. He managed to see Daniel again at holiday times, but they were growing apart as they were raised by different, but very kind people, in different environments.

      Dom’s parents eventually divorced in the mid-1960s and it was then he made the first of several court appearances. This one was to decide where he and Daniel should live, in whose care they should be placed. His father won custody of the boys, with whom he had been abandoned. Soon he would remarry and have two more children. Dom saw him only at weekends as he built another thriving business in Second World War vehicles.

      Peter’s collection became one of the biggest in England and the business began to make him fairly well off, if not rich. In addition, it soon kindled an interest in things military for young Dom, especially as he now travelled with his father at weekends to shows and saw the collectors there, dressed in their Second World War uniforms and creating their make-believe world. Dom enjoyed these adventures with his dad as any boy would. He missed him when he wasn’t around, but his devoted grandparents provided a good home and emotional stability for him.

      Like everything else in Dom’s life it was all too good to last. His grandfather, Bill, died and his grandmother was now too old to cope with the boy on her own. She went off to live in London and Peter moved his new wife and family into Gran’s house.

      ‘At first it was great, but the novelty of being allowed beans on toast whenever I liked instead of proper food and being allowed to stay up late to watch TV – things Gran would never have allowed – soon wore off. Things were going rapidly downhill between my stepmother and me. I was at secondary school and I didn’t realize at first that she knew dad was so successful he was really going places. Her plans were made and there was no place for me in those plans. As far as she was concerned the only family going places with him was her own family and not the previous one.’

      Things went from bad to worse. Returning from school, Dom would find there were no meals for him. He fought and squabbled daily with his stepbrother and stepsister. His father was always working and when he came home he heard only one side of the story.

      ‘I was a teenager by this time and teenagers don’t really talk to adults about their problems. I started hanging round with kids who, I thought, were similar to me. Not bad, just adventurous. I became a burglar, breaking into shops and selling the goods. I worked on my own. I would nick cars and bikes. I was eventually caught and it was the perfect lever for my stepmother to be rid of me.’

      Dom was put in court and faced a sentence in a detention centre, but West Sussex County Council’s Social Services Department was pursuing a new policy aimed at keeping thirteen- and fourteen-year olds out of detention. He was fostered with a couple who were former social workers and who ran a small bed-and-breakfast hotel. He left his troubles behind him. He knew he had to keep his nose clean because one wrong step would see him back in court and the detention order enforced. He knew, too, his chances of joining the Army were slim and any more trouble would put the kibosh on them completely.

      ‘I left school at sixteen and went to work on the local building sites. I grafted, really grafted, and stayed out of trouble as much as I could. I went to the recruiting office to suss out how I could join the Army, but my conviction was against me. When my review came up I went back to court and everyone agreed, police, social workers, foster parents, everyone, that joining the Army was the best solution.’

      So the slightly built, not very tall, teenager fighting the world and ‘the system’ every day of his life took himself off to the local recruiting office in Worthing, and saw the same poster that Kevin had seen on the wall of his local recruiting office, as soon as he walked through the door, showing a Paratrooper landing ready for action. That’s for me, Dom told himself. But he reckoned wrong. The recruiting sergeant took one look at the teenager before him and soon disabused him of any notion of becoming a Para. He’d seen too many Paras in his time and this little fellow had as much chance of becoming one as the time-served sergeant had of walking in space. He was too short, too skinny and too underweight.

      For Dom it was just another challenge. He had decided he would be a Para and that old bastard wouldn’t stand in his way. After all he had been outwitting people like him – pillars of the system – all his short life. The answer was simple. He visited his doctor, who put him on a special diet to help him gain weight. What he lacked in physique, he more than made up for in determination. And determination is what every man who wants to be a Paratrooper has to have by the barrow-load. Dom Gray has determination by the lorry-load.

      As he left the courtroom for the recruiting office he could sense the relief of the local police and welfare agencies. Hopefully, they had seen the last of him. Let the little bastard go off and get up to his tricks in the Army and they would sort him out. They won’t take any shit from him. Dom, with his mat of thick, dark hair and ever-twinkling eyes, was genuinely more high-spirited than bad, someone who had taken too many knocks in such a short life, a little fellow who needed a channel for his limitless energy and aggression, a kid who needed the ‘family’ the Army had provided for thousands of youngsters like him down the centuries.

      The dreaded P Company was just the thing for a lad like Dom. It would knacker him, teach him, give him a sense of achievement, a sense of direction and – equally important – a feeling of belonging. Dominic Michael Gray was going to be a Paratrooper come hell or high water and bollocks to the recruiting sergeant. He was only an old hat anyway, a Fusilier with a hackle on his beret which looked like a fucking ugly budgie.

      By the time the Falklands drama erupted in April 1982 Dom was twenty-one and had four years’ hard soldiering under his belt. He had served in Germany, Canada, Northern Ireland and Oman, that secretive and backward desert sultanate in the Middle East where the SAS had fought a bitter little war against communist insurgents. They had taken the battle to the Moscow-trained terrorists and, using their own tactics, had beaten them. Not only had communism through the barrel of a Kalashnikov been stopped in its tracks; it had also been sent into full, undignified retreat. The Paras at that time were being courted by the SAS, most of whom had begun their soldiering careers at Aldershot. They wanted the Paras as their ever-ready backup, men used to moving at a moment’s notice, soldiers discreet enough to simply vanish from their barracks in Britain and pop up again on the faraway battlefield, men used to operating unsupported far behind enemy lines in small groups or larger formations, men who could easily adapt to any hostile situation, and men who relished the prospect of a good scrap, the opportunity to put into practice everything they had been trained to do. In other words, soldiers they knew were as professional as them and in whom they could place their trust.

      As Dom and his mates in B Company lined the decks of the Canberra watching the bustle of last-minute loading, he struggled to take it all in. Here they were being swept along on the massive tidal wave of publicity. The TV cameras, the photographers, the reporters all there to see them off – it was all a far cry from the way Paras had been brought up to go to war, slipping away quietly from some secluded, sealed-off airfield. As he watched the dockers load stores and kept out of the way of senior NCOs and their apoplectic rages, he became impatient to be under way. He wanted to get there, to get to grips with the enemy before some silly bastard called it all off. This was going to be his big chance, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prove his soldiering ability, his big chance to show the knocking bastards back home who had written him off as another bad lot that when men had to stand up and be counted he would be among them, not skulking in the corner of a boozer with a copy of the Sun and cheering when the news came on TV.

      A much-liked lad, Dom had acquired a lot of skill. He had worked closely and

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