David Tomkins - Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures

Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...84

DIRTY COMBAT

SECRET WARS AND

SERIOUS MISADVENTURES

David Tomkins

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licenced or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781780570778

Version 1.0

www.mainstreampublishing.com

Copyright David Tomkins, 2008

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY

(EDINBURGH) LTD

7 Albany Street

Edinburgh EH1 3UG

ISBN 9781845963897

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast

All internal photographs courtesy of the author

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases, names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such respects, not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IN THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK, I OWE MUCH TO MY WIFE , Mary, for her patience, advice and encouragement, to my daughters, Jay and Kelly, and to my son, Billy, for all his efforts in filling the gap during my enforced absence. Special thanks to Roger and Claire Peach and Mike Douglas for showing what great friends are all about. Thanks to Mike for letting me close the circle in Iraq. To Vanessa, Dan Showalter, Frank Garrison, Lev, Steve Osborne, Meli and Soni and all the crew down there, you can be assured you are not forgotten. Thanks to the people named (and the many not named) in this book who played their parts in making the tapestry of my life a colourful one. To all those in harms way, stay safe.

David Tomkins

July 2008

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING

I WAS BORN ON 31 JULY 1940 IN ST GEORGES HOSPITAL IN Victoria, London. My parents lived in a basement flat nearby. As Nazi bombs rained down, my mother hid with me in a coal bunker while my father, an air-raid warden, retrieved corpses from collapsed buildings. My mother, Alice, was as hard as stone, an old-fashioned cockney from East Ham who worked in kitchens throughout her life. She met my father, Jimmy Tomkins, who was Irish, when she was a cook at Bullocks Caf in Wilton Road. I cannot remember any affection from her towards him or me and when she shouted my name I heard her from a quarter of a mile away. I made excuses for her because we lived in such a grotty place and because my father was an alcoholic who would pawn the bed-sheets to buy a drink. To my mothers dismay, he introduced me to the pub and the greyhound track. She neither drank nor smoked and their constant fighting left me traumatised. As a child, I watched her put a pillow in the oven, put her head on it and turn the gas on.

The first time I ran away, a stranger took me to Rochester Row police station. The officers bent down to ask my name and where I lived. As would become my custom, I refused to assist them with their inquiries. When they locked me in a cell, I threw the tea and biscuits they offered me against the wall. I was just seven years old. I suffered from terrible nightmares and my parents put wire mesh up over my bedroom window to prevent me smashing my way out. This must have alarmed our neighbours, as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children knocked on the door. I was taken to the childrens ward at Maudsley psychiatric hospital. I was there for 18 months, during which time I made many escape attempts and staged several rooftop protests, climbing the drainpipes and waiting until the fire brigade were called to bring me down. After a while, I was made to sleep in a converted bed like a cage in an attempt to stop me absconding.

While I was in the hospital, my parents separated and, on my release, I went to live with my mother, younger sister and new stepfather in Croydon. When I was ten, we moved to Romford, an Essex market town bursting at the seams with refugees from the inner city. At lunchtime on my first day at Straight Road Junior School, the other boys flicked their peas at me, using their spoons as catapults. I threw tables and chairs back at them. My mother was summoned to a crisis meeting, where she was told that my expulsion had been ruled out solely on the grounds that I had been a pupil for only four hours. As an alternative punishment, I was beaten by the head teacher. It was a very public thrashing, watched by the whole school at morning assembly. My eyes watered and my skin reddened but I refused to cry. It was worth it. I had piss-marked my territory and after that everybody gave me a wide berth.

At weekends, I ran over the fields surrounding my home to scrump apples and pinch eggs from chicken sheds and played the trumpet with the British Legion Boys Band. I always seemed to finish my assignments before my classmates but idle hands were the Devils tools and I tended to get into trouble. When I was 13, I was expelled from my first secondary school for hitting the headmaster when he caned me excessively hard. My family moved to Camberley, a town in Surrey near the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. I was still being monitored by the NSPCC and social services, and when we moved to Camberley, I received a visit from a probation officer, who had been appointed to oversee my behaviour. He laid down the law as to how my life was going to be under his supervision and gave me a clip round the ear, which really rankled with me.

The kids I hung out with were all into hunting and we spent a lot of time in the woods and fields. Restrictions on the ownership of firearms were less strict in those days and I was able to buy a shotgun licence from the post office for ten shillings. I made the money back selling squirrel and fox tails to the councils pest control department. Id cycle through the woods and along the riverbanks on my dirt-tracker a bike rescued from a refuse tip. I straightened its forks and bent the handlebars into the shape of a cows horns.

I left school shortly before my 15th birthday, with the headmasters endorsement ringing in my ears: You have caused more trouble than any boy I have ever known. My first job was as a paint sprayer. I spent my wages on motorcycle parts and chasing girls, in which department the young US military personnel at Blackbushe airfield provided stiff competition. In this era of early rock n roll, the Yanks cut a dash on their Harley-Davidsons, and cheap booze from the base PX ensured plenty of parties, which most of the local girls would go to. If I wasnt fighting a Yank, I was fighting a British squaddie and I would often return home in the early hours to find my mother had locked me out of the house. Id sleep on the flat roof beneath the bathroom window and if I was lucky, Id wake to find a cup of tea beside me, which my mother had leant over the windowsill to put there. She would lie awake all night worrying if I was cold outside but she was too hardnosed to open the door.

Next page

1234567...84

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures»

Look at similar books to Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

J.D. Rockefeller

Pablo Escobar: The Life and Crimes of the Most Notorious Colombian Drug Lord

Stephen Tomkins

The Clapham Sect: How Wilberforces Circle Transformed Britain

Stephen Tomkins

David Livingstone: The Unexplored Story

J.D. Rockefeller

Pablo Escobar: Colombias Hero or Villain? History of the Greatest Drug Lord

William Tomkins

Indian Sign Language

Escobar Juan Pablo

Pablo Escobar: My Father

Tomkins

2008;2010;

Stephen Tomkins

The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws and the Invention of Freedom

Steve Murphy

Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar, the World’s Most Wanted Criminal

Anthony Boden

Thomas Tomkins : The Last Elizabethan

Juan Pablo Escobar

My Father Pablo Escobar

Roberto Escobar

The Accountants Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartel

Discussion, reviews of the book Dirty Combat: Secret Wars and Serious Misadventures and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.