The Man in the White Suit_ The Stig, Le Mans, The Fast Lane and Me - Ben Collins [53]
With no certainty if or when Top Gear would need me again, I pressed on with the Army.
Chapter 15
A Walk in the Park
The ground froze overnight, and as the sun came up it cast a magic light across the frost-dusted valley. My ground mat had to be snapped and folded like cardboard. I started warming up my shoulders to prevent the shooting pains across my back and neck caused by the five-hour marches. The straps on my ancient bergen had lost their padding and cut into my shoulders like cheese wire. I pressed the store-man to exchange it for a newer one, but the SOB refused. The Chief Instructor just laughed.
We formed up for the morning brief in the middle of a cutting covered in loose shingle and stones from the quarry. The senior NCO emerged from his ‘twat wagon’, an ugly box-shaped Land Rover. He was in jovial mood.
‘Mornin’, gentlemen. Little surprise for you all today: owing to the fact that it’s Christmas there’s no march today, so you can all go back and get your ’eads down …’
Silence. We’d all been here before.
‘No takers? OK then, suit yourselves.’
I was called across to the wagon to receive my first rendezvous point. I read the grid and found RV1 with the tip of my compass … on the farthest side of the map, bloody miles away. I looked at the instructor in disbelief.
‘Having trouble motivating yourself this morning?’
‘No, Staff,’ I said, and jogged away.
Typically, the routes were no longer than 25 kilometres as the crow flies, with ascents in the region of one to two thousand feet. This monster tab looked at least 5k longer, and taking the wrong route could add an hour and result in a fail. I opted to go straight up the side of a sheer waterfall, reducing me to a snot-faced mop of sweat within metres of the start line.
I managed to scale the wall of the ravine and make it on to open ground, but things didn’t get any easier. Every conceivable physical obstacle stood in my path. The correct procedure for river crossings was to strip naked, suit up with Gore-Tex and wade across, facing upstream. That seemed over the top for the stretch of water that now confronted me. It was 15 feet at most from bank to bank. I could clear half that in one bound.
I misjudged the depth, submerged and disappeared downstream, saturating every bit of my kit and sorely weighing myself down. I cursed my stupidity, but thanks to an earlier rushed barbed wire fence crossing that had nearly ripped off my family jewels, my crotchless trousers vented quickly.
I plodded through endless fields of ‘babies’ heads’ – clumps of ankle-high bog-grass that rendered forward movement almost impossible – and braced myself for crossing Death Valley, so named for its double-dip profile and the fact that so many recruits had voluntarily withdrawn from the course after climbing it.
The incline was sheer at times, making the climb truly biblical: you had to dig in with your fingernails. It was three steps forward and four back, knowing all the while that every agony would be repeated on the second peak.
After Death Valley I put in a short cut through a range of felled trees. The layers of broken branches snagged every movement or gave way to shred the front of my shin.
An hour later the fog descended again and a few cairns appeared ahead that I couldn’t place on the map. I had a ‘dead stop’ if I walked too far, because there were cliffs behind the RV I was looking for. A sensation of weightlessness would give me the first hint I’d walked too far. But where were the bloody cliffs? Eventually I saw one of the lads to my right amidst the sea of fog.
‘Hey, do you know where the RV is?’
He was too engrossed in his map to reply. I checked mine and shouted again. After a while I realised I was shouting at a small tree. I finally made it to the last checkpoint and limped over to the woods we were using as a holding area to stick up my basha and get my head down.
An hour later I was woken by a five foot five pocket rocket