Dr Magnesium

Sergeant Bastard

I stepped down from the stuffy train carriage onto Wendover railway station’s cool and refreshing platform, on that bright morning in late May 1996. I was still slightly intoxicated from my father’s fortieth birthday celebrations which had started off civilised enough the previous evening but had somehow descended into a drunken send-off that had lasted well into the early hours of the morning – an unwise decision that I was now regretting.

I was completely alone as the train pulled away, the rusted old bridge, perilously spanning the track, directly above my head. The small station was surrounded by tall pines, and I found myself enveloped by an almost deafening silence, the rather eerie and strange atmosphere bringing to mind the popular eighties television series Twin Peaks.

I was apprehensive, nervous, and wondering what the hell I had signed up for when I heard a vehicle engine approaching in the distance. I walked through the deserted station and out to the front just as a battered olive-green and black Land Rover pulled up, rattling viciously and coughing out dark clouds of smoke from its rear end. A tall, wiry, stern-looking man with a moustache, bordering on the Hitler style, stepped out and asked me my name in a gruff but subtle South African accent. I stuttered my response, and he nodded for me to put my bag in the back before I stepped up into the front cab. We spent most of that short drive to RAF Halton in awkward silence.

I entered a camp bathed in bright sunshine and was taken to a hall where around forty other young men, with shaven heads and not a pound of body fat between them, were scattered around trying to look cool, or hard, but mostly looking nervous. The energy in the room was similar to my recent YTS experience, and I decided these lads were nothing I couldn’t handle. We were ushered straight into a classroom for the induction, given no time to rest or settle in, split into groups, and the training began.

The following four days at RAF Halton were plain-sailing in comparison to what was to come when we moved on to the twenty-week Trainee Gunners Course at RAF Honington. But for now, we were issued our uniform and taught to march, polish our boots, use an iron, make a bed pack, and, as unbelievable as it sounds now, wipe our backsides correctly. We were allowed to visit the NAAFI every night, which was basically a sweet shop, and I rather enjoyed the steady marches and drill practice that lasted long into the mild late-spring evenings.

It was not at all what I had expected, and apart from the gut-wrenching episodical bouts of homesickness that involved lying on my bed listening to Beatles songs on my Walkman whilst swallowing down the lump in my throat and fighting back tears, it was actually not that bad. We were even allowed to phone home every night, and I phoned my parents and my ex-Marine grandad, who had been instrumental in my decision to join up, for regular moral support and advice.

The RAF Halton days flew by, and before we knew it, forty odd of us were loaded onto a coach and handed a paper packed-lunch bag, containing a corn-beef sandwich, a bag of crisps, a couple of biscuits wrapped in cellophane, an apple, and a carton of juice. I kept myself to myself and slept most of the two-hour journey east to Suffolk.

I hadn’t really spoken to anyone since I’d arrived at the train station, and for the last four days had tried to look as mean as possible whilst projecting a stay-away-from-me kind of vibe, a vibe I had perfected growing up on the tough streets of Liverpool. I continued with this portrayal as we arrived at RAF Honington, and I stepped down from the cool coach and into the glorious East Anglian sunshine, to be greeted by a medium-height, thick-set, mean-looking man who had a dark navy-blue beret pulled tightly across his forehead, in a flat-cap style, the peak of which came to rest precariously on the thick brow that sat heavily above his small, menacing, pig-like eyes.

He lined us up in ranks of three outside an immaculate white building that was blinding in the bright midday sunshine and informed us all that we had ten minutes to get our “scoff” and get back out and lined up. I rather naively asked if I could smoke instead of eating as I wasn’t hungry and didn’t fancy my chances of getting in and out the mess in ten minutes. Without even glancing in my direction, he waved me away with a flick of his hand and assured me I could stay there and smoke outside the mess so long as I removed my headdress.

I immediately thanked him and whipped off my beret whilst simultaneously pulling out a crumpled twenty-pack of Regal King Size from the inside pocket of my DPM jacket, lighting one up, and deeply inhaling the thick, acrid, yet soothing, smoke. I quickly finished the cigarette and was about to get back into line when I had a brain wave – I’d have another one. After all, who knew when I would get the chance again. I pulled a second squashed cigarette out of the battered box, straightening it back into a respectable shape with my thumb and forefinger before lighting it, just as the other recruits ambled out of the mess and started to fall into three loose, disorganised ranks, all the while casually observed by our eagle-eyed sergeant.

When almost all the recruits had “fell in”, he casually glanced at his watch before exploding toward me with alarming speed and murderous intent. He quickly and aggressively snatched the cigarette from my mouth, his fingers catching the lit end and spreading an eruption of fiery red embers all over the pair of us. I watched them bounce off his jacket and gracefully fall to the ground in slow motion, like spent fireworks, and in my peripheral vision, I caught the shocked looks on the other recruits’ faces as he aggressively slammed his forehead against mine and screamed a tirade of four-letter abuse – mostly alluding to the fact that I was a Scouser and a bastard – directly into my face. He was so close that I could feel the warmth of his breath and the wetness of the warm flecks of spittle as they landed on my face. His eyes, bloodshot like those of a maniac, were bulging from his sockets, their gaze drilling deep into my brain as he continued to scream vile hatred and spit into my face.

I was in complete shock and didn’t know what to do or how to react. My whole life, I had always tried to maintain an image. If someone came at me, I would be the one to strike first. I had boxed from the age of seven, so I would use my reflexes and hand speed to get in quickly with a flurry of shots and never back down, especially in front of my peers. But now, I just stood there, backed firmly into a recess, feet rooted to the spot, this man towering over me, spewing unadulterated hatred into my face. I had completely frozen. I felt exactly what I was: a little boy hundreds of miles away from home and missing his mum. My eyes began to well up and a lump formed in my partially closed throat, but I managed to quickly compose myself, the little pride that remained combining with a burning sense of deep shame to force me to snap back into the moment.

I was angry, and I thought, Fuck it, I’m not going to let him break me on day one. So, I stood there, pinned against that wall, shaking like a leaf, and lifted my head up, defiantly looking straight into his psychotic eyes, holding his stare. I could hear nothing now other than the heartbeat loudly racing in my ears, and my mouth was so dry my tongue was physically stuck to the roof. He suddenly and roughly grabbed the lapels of my jacket and physically threw me in the direction of the partially assembled lines, and I half stumbled, half jogged into a space that had opened up for me, my shaking legs so weak they were barely holding me up. I looked dead ahead and roughly placed the navy-blue beret back on top of my head.

I stood in line trembling and drenched in sweat whilst we waited for the last of the stragglers to exit the mess, watching as they were continually harangued by the demented sergeant screaming “raus” and “schnell” at them like a complete lunatic. Burning with embarrassment, I built up the courage to look into the faces of my new colleagues and found no humour, no mocking looks, just sheer terror, every one of those faces pale reflections of my own, what the fuck am I doing here? written in each of their eyes.

That was my introduction to my eventual saviour, Sergeant “Bastard”, the man who would fight hard for me to remain on the course, despite, as I was later informed, the worst ever disciplinary record on basic training.

So, why have I started this book, which is essentially about my journey into and through Medicine, with a chapter about the infamous Sergeant Mick Bastard? Because that split-second decision to stand and fight rather than run away was a “sliding door” moment for me. It was the first tentative step on the road to Damascus, the moment I went from streetwise hustler to soldier.

It’s clear, on reflection, that the humiliating dressing down was simply a tactic employed by the good Sergeant Bastard, who had earned his nickname over the years for obvious reasons. He likely repeated this pantomime performance at the beginning of every training course, picking out the cockiest recruit to make an example of, as a way to stamp his authority, to lay an early marker, but it had been a knife-edge moment for me. I had been on the precipice, fully prepared to just walk away, like many other recruits must have done over the years, but I didn’t. I mustered all my determination, all my stubbornness, what little was left of my pride, and I stood there and looked him in the eye. Despite shaking like a defecating dog, incapable of answering him back even if I had wanted to, I stood firm, and I never backed down. This was my first real test, and I had stumbled through it before using it to motivate myself. It was the spark that caught the kindling that eventually developed into a roaring fire.

This was the first of many challenges I was presented with on basic training, and indeed in the life that followed. But it was significant for being the moment I realised that, by my very nature, I am not a runner; I am a fighter. Those characteristics I had developed on the streets of Liverpool and honed throughout my relatively short military career turned out to be very useful assets in the world of Medicine. When everything is falling apart around you, when others are losing their heads and absolving themselves of all responsibility by fishing around in the wrist, performing an arterial blood gas for ten minutes, that’s the time you have to stand up, steady your trembling legs, take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and step into the thick of the action.

If I had buckled on the morning of 25 May 1996, if I had thought sod this for a game of soldiers and thrown in my lot, then I would not be sitting here now writing this book. I don’t know for sure where I would be, but it wouldn’t be here. Up until that point in my life, I had been given every opportunity to succeed by my parents and my settled home environment, by my natural intelligence, and more than my fair share of sporting talent – not only excelling at boxing, but also successfully trialling for Great Britain at 800 m, and 4 x 100 m, in the early nineties. But up until that point, I had taken all of those opportunities and deliberately sabotaged my chances of success, choosing my friends and the streets over the inconvenience and hard graft of education and sports.

After that encounter with Sergeant Bastard, I gradually found my feet and started to mature. That’s not to say there weren’t many times I almost failed, almost didn’t make it out alive. There was the time I fell out of a helicopter at a couple of hundred feet whilst abseiling. Then there was the time I was off skiving in the woods watching Hale Bopp illuminate the autumn sky whilst the fire position I was supposed to be manning was taken out by heavy machine-gun fire and completely levelled to the ground. Another time, I was held at gun point by a one-legged drunken Bosnian, whilst using a urinal. Or how about the time I stepped directly into a grenade blast to help out a mate who was about to get in deep shit, and left without a scratch? Or the time I fell into a peat bog whilst on night patrol and was saved by my GPMG, or the time I was almost shot outside a KFC in Belfast, or the time I was filling up my Land Rover and the ground immediately in front of the fuel tank was hit by a sniper… I could go on and on. I am often amazed I have somehow managed to get to the ripe old age of forty-six.

One thing I have learned over the years, though, and often the hard way, is that life is precarious and can end in the blink of an eye. Death can arrive at any moment and often arrives far too early. The attitude of an infantry soldier is often fatalistic and philosophical and, undoubtedly, gave me the confidence and bloody-mindedness to eventually decide that I was going to be a doctor, no matter what. A lack of education and qualifications wasn’t going to stop me. That was just another obstacle I had to find a way to navigate around, or barge through, if necessary. I left the Regiment at the end of my minimum-term contract and bounced from bohemian artist to business owner, before deciding that Medicine was where I belonged, and the thought of failure never even crossed my mind. Well, not until my second first interview…

The Interview

Interview day arrived, and I was looking sharp, even if I do say so myself. I had trained for weeks to get into good physical shape, had bought myself a brand-new, expensive fitted suit, had a smart new haircut, and was cleanly shaven, for once. Not satisfied with just practising standard interview answers, I had been practising my charm for weeks. My self-depreciating smile was nailed down, and my humble confidence was on point. I was feeling good.

Rising early to ensure I had plenty of time, I managed to eat a good breakfast, before leisurely getting myself ready: shirt, bright-white and starched to within an inch of its life; jacket, pressed to perfection; trousers, creases sharp enough to slice bread; aftershave, expensive and liberally doused. I was smelling, looking, and feeling good. My wife had kindly agreed to drive me into the city centre so that I didn’t have to worry about the parking situation, and we practised my humble and sincere responses to the continuous stream of questions she fired at me all the way there.

Pulling up outside the front doors of the administration headquarters for the University of Liverpool School of Medicine, Cedar House, I stepped out of the car into brilliant sunshine and straightened my trousers. Taking the suit jacket from its hanger in the back of the car and carefully sliding my arms into it, so as not to crease the front of my beautifully starched shirt, I was ready to go. I was going to absolutely smash this interview; nothing was getting in the way of winning my golden ticket.

Approaching the big, glass double doors, I paused briefly to give my reflection the once over. I straightened my tie for the thousandth time and gave my shoes a final buff against the back of my trouser leg. I was looking the part, every inch the young doctor, and I assured myself one final time that this was mine – I had it in the bag. At the grand old age of thirty, I had managed to traverse the most unlikely of paths from the mean streets of eighties Speke to the cool foyer of Cedar House. I was within grasp of the golden ticket, then all I would have to do was survive the tour and smash the elevator through the glass ceiling…

The first thing that struck me on entering that fabulous building was how quiet it was, which was unexpected because I knew there were medical interviews taking place all day. It was around this time I felt my first twinge of apprehension. Nevertheless, I followed the instructions on my interview letter, which directed me into a completely deserted waiting room with its abandoned reception desk.

Sitting on the corner of the reception desk was an old-fashioned brass bell. Okay, this was odd. My earlier confidence was ebbing away. Was this all a big hoax? Was I being stitched up? My mind was racing as I approached the desk and picked up the bell. I could hear muffled voices in the room behind. Okay, calm down, you’re overreacting. This is natural, it’s just interview nerves screwing with your mind. I rang the bell. Nothing. I waited what seemed like an eternity, but it was probably about half a minute, and rang the bell again, a little harder this time.

The door behind the desk opened, and a middle-aged woman popped her friendly face through the gap. “Can I help you, love?”

I informed her that I was here for my interview.

“I think you’re mistaken, love. There are no interviews here today.”

My stomach literally dropped through the soles of my highly polished shoes, and I instantly began to panic. I could feel my face flush and my cheeks start to burn with embarrassment. Oh my God, is this really a set-up? Have I been pranked? I knew it had all been too good to be true; things like this didn’t happen to kids from Speke.

The floating head obviously picked up on my absolute horror and shouted to her colleague, who immediately walked out from the back office and fixed me with a look of motherly concern. “Can I help you, my love?”

I repeated that I was here for my medical school interview, and she reiterated that there were no interviews today, that they had finished yesterday. It was then that she dropped the bombshell.

“You’re not Lee, are you?”

Oh no, what was she going to say, were the cameramen about to pile out of the back office led by an ecstatic Jeremy Beadle, clutching a massive envelope in one hand and a microphone in the other.

“Yes, I am.”

“Your interview was yesterday, love.”

I felt myself physically deflate within the perfectly starched white shirt, like a popped paper-mâché balloon. All that confidence, all that humble, self-depreciating practice… Oh my God, I’m going to be sick. I felt the colour drain from my face.

“Are you okay, love?”

I pulled the letter out of the inside pocket of my suit jacket and clumsily shoved it toward her. “Look. It’s today.”

She cautiously took the letter from my hand, and I could see genuine pity in her eyes as she read out loud: “Tuesday the seventh. That was yesterday.”

“No, no. It’s defo Wednesday. It’s today, defo.”

I took the letter back and read the word Tuesday, and the world collapsed around me. I was absolutely devastated. Standing there speechless, I tried to force out some words, any words, but none would come. How the hell had I got the days mixed up? I felt so embarrassed, and I started to flush again as beads of sweat gathered on my brow.

“Listen, love, don’t worry. I promise you I will get you another interview. There’s a second round for late entries at the beginning of September. I will get you in then, okay. Okay?”

I slowly nodded my head and thanked her profusely before walking out to face the music, the shame of admitting to my family and friends I had got the date wrong. But true to her word, the Secretary to the Dean of the School of Medicine, as I later found out was her role, got me that interview. Someone who had had no reason to believe in me or help me out, gave me a reprieve. She could easily have said that I had missed my chance. She could have stuck to the rules, but she never. She gave me a chance, and I am eternally grateful to her for that.

As you can probably imagine, the next few weeks were spent in a constant state of anxiety and uncertainty. Would she keep her promise? What had she said exactly? Did she say she would phone, or did she say she would send a letter? I was insecure and riddled with self-doubt, and by the time I finally got that letter and the second interview came around, there was no need to rehearse humility, or practise self-depreciation; all the cockiness and arrogance were gone. I followed a similar pattern. I dressed as smartly as I had previously, ate a smaller breakfast, and I was driven in my wife’s car, but this time, I was quiet and nervous. There literally could not have been a greater contrast between the two interview build-ups.

Arriving at Cedar House early, I sat in the same cold waiting room, perched straight-backed and uncomfortable on a hard wooden bench. Tense and wringing my hands, I tried to focus by reading the names of previous deans, most long gone, engraved onto an old piece of hardwood that looked strangely out of place hung in this modern building of steel and glass. I had none of my normal confidence and was worrying that I was going to screw it all up and blow my second chance when my train of thought was suddenly broken by someone softly calling out my name. Looking up, I saw a tiny Mediterranean-looking woman with large, round glasses framed by a shock of dark, curly hair. She was not much older than myself and was beaming a broad friendly smile at me, head cocked slightly to one side like a curious little bird.

Smiling back, I said, “Hello,” as I loosely shook her soft hand. She nimbly spun on her heels and quickly walked toward the open door that was now situated dead ahead of her, whilst I trailed behind, head slightly bowed, a condemned man on his final procession to the gallows. Briefly pausing at the door, I felt the wrenching sensation of nausea in my lower gut. I straightened my back and took a long, deep breath whilst simultaneously pumping out my chest. Looking dead ahead, I plastered a huge smile on my face as I confidently strolled into the interview room.

I told the panel of five people, sat behind the giant, dark wooden desk that dominated the room, exactly who I was and where I had come from, and more importantly, where I was going. I stood up at the end of the interview and looked steadily into each pair of eyes, as I firmly shook the accompanying hand, and I knew that I had done it.

I had absolutely no doubt whatsoever.

I was in.