Terrorist training camp, fond recollections of (Vol. I)

Blogging will be scanty for a while owing to circumstances.

Old Holborn remarks upon this story in the Telegraph, which commences in fine Outraged-of-Virginia-Water style thus:

We report today that, as part of the Government’s strategy to fight “violent extremism”, schoolchildren are being encouraged to imagine they are terrorists plotting the July 7 atrocities. … it is ridiculous and dangerous to ask impressionable young people – some of them Muslim – to produce an imaginary justification for Islamist murder.

This makes me feel very old indeed.

Now when I was at school {taking time over lighting pipe and peering over top of half-moon spectacles} we certainly weren’t ever asked to imagine that we were terrorists planning an atrocity.

We were given a rifle each, taken out on the exercise area and told that (as usual, because it is always so much cheaper than trying to re-enact any of the Battles of Ypres) we were behind enemy lines, and (almost always) given a slipper to hunt. Some prefects would be selected by an injudicious process, deprived of their evening in the pub, issued with big sticks and told we were to blame for all their woes, by way of providing a credible opposition.

The exercise area was part of an ancient Forest, in the middle of which was an ancient cottage, in which lived an ancient Forester, enjoying to the end of his days ancient Forester’s Rights. These turned out to include, every so often, being woken up in the middle of the night by people, emboldened by their earlier concealment of their acne using burnt cork, pointing rifles at him and asking general-knowledge questions such as “Where’s the fcuking plutonium?” (he used to leave the door unlocked, the alternative of thunderflashes through the windows being worse).

He was always very understanding about it and only phoned up the Major once, when the latest new lot, encouraged not only by the burnt cork but also apparently by cinematic dramatisations of the works of Mr. Len Deighton, offered to torture him by ingenious psychological means in the matter of a missing briefcase full of secret plans.

Of course this (threatening innocent civilians, damn that idiot’s map-reading, with torture in respect of military objectives) is only a minor war-crime, not really an atrocity as such.

We used to go off to Aldershot (and a range of other exotic destinations) regularly and in between more dramatic entertainments would be sent on atrocity courses run by the likes of the Royal Engineers. My personal specialisation is the destruction, by means of explosives, of suspension bridges. Because of the way the course was organised by the Army I know all that anyone needs to know about this, while being completely ignorant of how to blow up anything else, including any other kinds of bridges.

Once in a blue moon the SAS would turn up in one of those Pink Panther Land-Rovers and vary the customary military menu with such delicacies as parachutes, the latest American and German firearms and the correct, if surprisingly uncivil, method of greeting an enemy sentry without causing a noisy nuisance to his neighbours. At other times we would be entertained by the Ghurkas, who were written by Kipling himself.

Kipling wasn’t actually compulsory, just unavoidable. The Bible was compulsory, but avoidable.

Of course this was a public school (which, frankly, seemed to exist for the sole purpose of making sure that Sandhurst was never undersubscribed). So perhaps Old Holborn’s point about what ought, or ought not, to be taught in state schools doesn’t actually count.