When the Plan Failed. Utterly

Should you get the Times newspaper, you may or may not have noticed that the lead obituary in Wednesday’s edition was that of General Sir Frank Kitson GBE KCB MC and bar DL.

Sir Frank and I, as it happens, go back a bit. All the way back, in fact, to a wet night in Wiltshire in 1984.

Kitson was 57 at the time, and was looking for a new ADC to see him through the rest of what turned out to be his last post in the army, that of Commander in Chief United Kingdom Land Forces, or C in C(UKLF). You can dimly see why they use abbreviations. I was 24, and a slightly over-ambitious but half competent officer just coming to the end of a tour in charge of my battalion’s Reconnaisance Platoon. Someone in some office or other had the idea of putting the two of us together.

In later years, Kitson became a figure of some controversy over counter-insurgency methods he had introduced to the Northern Ireland in the 1970s but, to us lot, he was a soldier’s soldier. Small, laconic, smart, heroic and irascible, he was as far as you could get from the plodding Melchett figures that most of us came up against most of the time in our military careers. I can honestly say that he was the only general in the army at the time that I would have wanted to be ADC to.

Most ADCs that I had met followed their generals like nervous spaniels, carrying programmes and diaries around with them and looking anxious. My bet was that working for Frank would be different, that, between us, we would break the mould. It was agreed that the interview would take place one Friday evening over dinner in his ‘quarter’, a manor house in Bulford and about five miles from where I was serving at the time. Those who know me well would agree that I am not shown to my best effect at meal times, partly because of my appetite, but mainly because food has a strange habit of distributing itself around places on my face not altogether connected with my mouth, but I went along anyway, primed to eat slowly and well. I decided on a ‘one drink’ policy, a compromise that I hoped would show a mature appreciation of the fine things in life, tempered with the moderation of a responsible driver.

After being shown into the sitting room by his Mess Serjeant (get used to it: Green Jackets spell theirs with a ‘j’), and given a drink, I was all primed to chat knowledgeably to the general on the current state of various terrorist campaigns, having just speed-read his book Low Intensity Operations during my lunch break. Instead, Lady Elizabeth fixed me with a gimlet eye and asked me if I rode horses. It was an easy question to bat away.

‘No way,’ I said. ‘I hate horses.’ I then told her a hugely amusing story about what had happened to me on a horse last time I had stayed with my then girlfriend, when I had rolled forward off the front end when the stupid animal went down a steep hill. She looked less than thrilled.

‘Do you paint?’ she asked. Again, this was easy. ‘I couldn’t draw a matchstick man if you paid me a thousand pounds,’ I said, adding, by way of clarification, that I hadn’t knowingly looked round an art gallery in the current decade. That, conversationally, was the end of her role in the evening.

Even if all my food at dinner went down the appropriate hole, it seemed that something of the stuffing had been knocked out of the event as seem from her point of view. Frank asked me a few questions about South Georgia, and a few more about North Belfast, and then showed me politely to the door whilst the mess serjeant was still brewing my coffee somewhere else in the bowels of the house.

‘Fifty-fifty,’ I said to myself as I swept out of the gravel drive in my little Renault. He will have liked my lack of bullshit.

The following morning, a note was delivered to me in the Officer’s Mess before breakfast, hand-written by the great man. I wish to God that I had kept it, as it was a masterstroke in getting to the point and leaving no room for doubt.

‘I liked you and would employ you,’ it said, ‘but my wife didn’t, and wouldn’t. Not at all. You would be spending as much time with her as you would with me, and it simply wouldn’t work out. I suspect that you aren’t cut out to be an ADC.’

Coincidentally, he was inspecting our battalion a few weeks later. When he got to the end of my platoon with its eight Fox armoured cars, three of which we had needed to push out from their garages to get them on the parade square, he gave me a fathomless look, and said:

‘Why the hell would you want to be talking about ponies all day when you could have all this?’

He pointed at one of the armoured cars, and at C/Sjt Bohan, Cpl Macmillan and L/Cpl Mayer looking wistfully at its defunct engine.

‘Soldier on,’ he said.