A Pernicious Lodestone in 'Kevin'

1968 was drawing to a close and Kevin was fast approaching his eighteenth birthday. In July he had left his leafy boarding school in Surrey and his resettlement in Stoke-on-Trent was anything but covered in glory. He had escaped the dreary prospect of becoming articled to a chartered accountant and was ending the year kicking his heels as a handyman in a furniture shop.

Education had given Kevin no fixed compass bearing to guide his life into a worthwhile career. Egotistical pragmatism was the lodestone that influenced his next decision; on his eighteenth birthday he crossed the threshold of the Army Recruiting Office in Hanley. His father, whose own military career was drawing to a close, was very pleased to accompany him.

An oath was sworn to serve Queen and Country for nine years and the contract sealed for him to enlist with the Royal Army Medical Corps to train as a physiotherapist. Such a career profession was a complete mystery to Kevin but it sounded very grand. In reality he felt momentum was more important than direction and, although he had never read Voltaire’s “Candide,” he assumed he too lived in "the best of all possible worlds."

Four days later, armed with little more than his optimism, Kevin retreated from life in Stoke and advanced to Keogh Barracks, the RAMC training depot at Ash Vale, near Aldershot. Platoon 6901 was the first intake of recruits in 1969 and new recruit 24109201 Private Bettany and fifteen other individuals blended into a unit of square bashers, boot polishers and barrack room lawyers.

With his boarding school background, Kevin was easily accommodated to barrack room etiquette. He was well aware that peer group approval was a fickle commodity but he assumed that he had the personal equipment and attributes to warrant a more generous portion of popularity. A regular place in the depot rugby team created a helpful impression.

Basic training did throw up some interesting irregularities -a wrestling match with a very senior officer looking for a physical workout; a visit from Captain Bettany RAPC; friendship with Private Patel, an Asian refugee from General Idi Amin’s Uganda; an Oscar winning performance as a volunteer war casualty with a fake compound fracture of the femur; and finding a four leaf clover whilst on picket duty!

When Kevin paraded for the passing out ceremony he was still recovering from a bad hangover. He won no awards for his performance as a recruit but he looked forward to his first posting to the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich. It was less than a mile from where he was born at the Military Maternity Hospital in 1951.

Kevin was not a young man who readily exposed himself to wise counsellors. Since his hasty retreat from Stoke it had never occurred to him that he should explore the meaning of the word `physiotherapist’. He was still relying on a flawed blend of optimism and charm to see him through. Later that year he would have to face the academic rigors waiting for him at the Army School of Physiotherapy.

He longed for the day he could don his blue track suit and Fred Perry T shirt (bought on a loan) and enjoy the kudos of being a `physio’ trainee. Meanwhile he played rugby for 12 Company RAMC, found a quiet place to read his novels, larked around and smoked with other lads waiting for training. He secretly admired pretty army nurses and liked to be seen with a soldier who drove a white Mercedes that had seen better days.

Six months after starting the Physio Freshers course Kevin was a humiliated and embarrassed man. One main reason for his failure to proceed beyond the fresher stage of his physiotherapy course was his shocking complacency in the face of anatomy, physiology, bio-chemistry and other academic subjects. His pretence and fanciful optimism was finally unmasked at the fresher’s exams.

The second main reason concerned the lifestyle choices he made which were peer-centred rather than career-centred. Kevin’s lodestone was influenced by the distraction of several complicated relationships. However sweet the temptations, the bitter consequences never could be undone or redeemed. Only by the grace of God did one of those relationships flourish.

Kevin options were now even more limited. Had a wise mentor been available to offer him sound advice he might have been persuaded to opt for a more realistic course of action; to train as an Army State Registered Nurse. His egocentric lodestone swung him away from such a pragmatic programme.

Instead, Kevin joined two other soldiers and spent twenty weeks at the Army Medical College training as an Army Medical Laboratory Technician Class Three. It conferred the rank of Lance Corporal and it was a modicum of success in an otherwise indifferent Army career.

After the course Kevin remained in Milbank at the Queen Alexandra Hospital, 18 Company RAMC. Despite some good practical progress in haematology, serology, bacteriology, and particularly histology, his main weakness remained bio-chemistry. In this respect he lived in fear of what tests he might be asked to do as the ‘on call’ lab technician.

Dr Samuel Johnson said that “He who is tired of London is tired of life.” In the 1970’s London was still the swinging capital of world culture. The NAAFI culture of 18 Company RAMC radiated no further than The Swan, The Spread Eagle and the Pimlico Tram. Samuel would not have been impressed.

Kevin could not abide the loneliness of study. He craved company more than he craved anything else. Arrivals of new trainee Queen Alexandra nurses was always a cause of great excitement at the hospital. After more complicated relationships he did not deserve to marry the gracious and sweet Angela. He was posted back to the Royal Herbert Hospital to enjoy their married life together in Catford.

Kevin continued playing rugby for both Corp and Company but, during a rugby tour of military hospitals in Germany, he went into a tackle too hard, sustained a head injury, and his rugby career met a premature end.

Kevin’s introduction to the drug culture began with a joint shared in the little park on John Islip Street just outside the hospital grounds. What followed was an obsession with the drug culture, mounting debt and a double life that blighted the next five years of his life.

Kevin was medically discharged from the Army in 1973. It would be 1976, whilst he was at a teacher training college, that the pernicious lodestone was supernaturally purged of its awful power. Only just in time to save his marriage and his family! Only just in time to save his soul!