Most people take tubes of mustard or curry paste with them to jazz up the rations, and spicy smells emanated from areas where people were doing supplementary fry-ups. I wandered around and sampled a few. Everybody carries a “racing spoon” about their person at all times. The unwritten rule is that whoever has the can or is cooking up has first go, and the rest has to be shared. You dip your racing spoon in so that it’s vertical, then take a scoop. If it’s a big spoon you’ll get more out of a mess tin, but if it’s too big-say, a wooden spoon with the handle broken off-it won’t go into a can at all. The search for the perfect-sized racing spoon goes on.
There was a lot of blaggarding going on. If you didn’t like the music somebody was playing, you’d slip in when they weren’t there and replace their batteries with duds. Mark opened his bergen to find that he’d lugged a twenty-pound rock with him all the way from Hereford. Wrongly suspecting me of putting it there, he replaced my toothpaste with Uvistat sunblock. When I went to use it I bulked up.
I’d first met Mark in Brisbane in 1989 when some of us were being hosted by the Australian SAS (Special Air Service). He played against us in a rugby match and was very much the man of the moment, his tree trunk legs powering him to score all his side’s tries. It was the first time our squadron team had been beaten, and I hated him-all 5’6” of the bastard. We met again the following year. He was doing Selection, and the day I saw him he had just returned to camp after an eight-mile battle run with full kit.