My Universities: Intelligence Officer

"Sgt. Rock is going to help me

make the girl mine

keep her stood in line"

Sang the nudge-wink Wurzels of XTC in one of their clunky early 80s singles.

"Not if I've got anything to do with it, duckboy!" I bellowed thoughtfully. I decided to join the Army immediately to stop this witless NCO from doling out the dolly birds to Andy Partridge.

Leech-charming comic-maven Ward Cooper bumped into me and pointed out that I should put on some more clothes or at least stop thinking so hard about Hanna Schygulla if I wanted to reassure the recruitment board.

He also told me that Sergeant Rock was an American and therefore unlikely to oblige XTC with anything other than a concert tour of Nicaraguan Contra camps and a good nuking, but I was taking no chances.

Swansea University's careers officer regarded me with professional distaste. He wanted to help nubile drama students audition for burlesque shows, but instead he had gits with highlights seeking ways to inflict themselves on the "media" and me with my random inquiries.

"Need to be Army officer. Real Army, not Free Wales one, mind. Got to stop Partridge," I panted.

"I hate you," replied Mr Thomas. "I fought for this country in Korea and Malaya, plus a brief excursion into Thailand on my own. I got malaria, nad rot and pink eye, and some sort of squid set up house in my spleen. They had to drain it with a home-brewing kit up my old man. There was piss coming out of my ears for weeks.

"Still, I managed to kill a brace of Communists and render at least one species of antelope extinct. And I never made it past private. Why should the Army make you an officer, you feckless dilettante?"

"Going to get good degree, world owes me living. Buffed bod deserves tailored uniform. Natural authority born of Promethean self-deception. I could go on, but there's no time," I wheezed.

"Very well," sighed the jaundiced killing-machine before me. "Do you have any regimental preferences? The Welsh Guards? Household Cavalry? Afrika Korps? The Chaplaincy?"

The Chaplaincy had appealed ever since I'd read and profoundly misunderstood Kingsley Amis's "The Anti-Death League", but none of these legions seemed likely depots for my small armory of skills, which Mr Thomas had grimly summed up as playing the flute and speaking Russian, in that order of proficiency.

"You won't want the Education Corps, they spend their time teaching Fenlanders how to dress. So it's a marching band or the Intelligence Corps, Boyo. Which is it to be?" he posed.

I'd spent too many autumn afternoons of childhood trying to catapult toads into bandstand tubas to fancy fielding the incoming amphibians myself, so I opted for Intelligence.

Now I'd never wanted to go to college in the first place, having set my heart on becoming an urban shepherd - herding my flock through the mean streets of Treorchy, learning about life, and sharing my Georgian idyll with the Valleys folk as they shared their heroin with me.

But my father had advised me to try yet more education - "Give it a go, boy. You can't drive or use power tools, and you've never fought a wolf. There's nothing for you by here." - and I was a good son.

I'd been drifting through my studies of the Nikhuyaki (Нихуяки) existential-nihilist literary movement of the Russian 1920s in the unfocused expectation of postgraduate work and a sinecure writing stuff like "Experimental Diversion: (Road)Sign as Sign-if-I-er in the Soviet Highway Code of 1928" at a Slavonic semiotics department somewhere like Uppsala.

I usually drowned any doubts in Steppenwolf measures of Don Darías red, but the more I considered the Boyo blend of torpor and ignorance, seasoned with non-plutocrat parents, the more I was inclined towards finding an actual job. Shop-lifting, dancing for pennies and suicide apart, the Army Intelligence Corps suddenly seemed full of promise.

My knowledge of this fine body of fighting men was gleaned from Evelyn Waugh and "Ill Met by Moonlight", so I imagined myself dropped smart-moustached into rustic Illyria with gold sovereigns sown into my shalwar and a couple of cantilevered peasant girls waiting to wash my minor wounds after a hard day confounding the Communists.

"I know what you're thinking by that fanciful twirl of your upper lip and fecund motion of your Levis," snapped Thomas.

"Assuming the brass hats are mad enough to take you, they'll just stick you in front of purloined Soviet tank manuals and a stack of dictionaries in some Holborn basement and lose the key. Wednesday, 1400 hours, Room 15, there will be an officer waiting to speak to you. Dismissed!"

The following week I slipped into my best linen suit for a chat with Colonel Diamond of the Intelligence Corps. This was the first test: can I get through the whole interview without thinking of Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, or at least not let it show?

Col Diamond was clearly trained not to react to ill-shaven young men with watering eyes. Even my "Our Man in Havana" attire didn't perturb him, although on beholding the majesty of his cavalry twill I saw I ought to have opted for a discreet blue pinstripe, stout tweed or at least a Pickelhaube.

He cantered past my history and personality with commendable sangfroid before drawing up before my knowledge of Russian, Russia and the Russians. "This is what interests us, Boyo," he barked cordially. "Gorbachev, perestroika, glasnost - watcher mecker it orl, eh?"

From somewhere I heard a fruity patrician accent reply: "Trouble with Ivan is this, sah. Perestroika and what have you sounds promising, but dissemblin' is second nature to your Communist - assuming he had a first one to start with." The voice was mine, as amplified by my employment aversion instinct. "Need to keep our eyes peeled and our guard up."

From the truffling noises billowing about Col Diamond's 'tache I gathered my analysis was in line with current military thinking. He also thought my flute-playing was a good sign - "keeps the spirits up, what?" - but then he'd never heard it.

We got along splendidly. As I rose to leave, Col Diamond asked "So if yer getter decent degree will yer join th'Corps or go orf and do yer PhD?"

"Join the Corps!" I replied, rather taken with the idea in its own right. I had all but forgotten about my mission to stop XTC (and its breakaway factions like Shriekback, for that matter).

"Yer wrong!" he declared. "If yer've got it in yer, fer pity's sake get it out! Applies ter books as well as ter tapeworm. Otherwise yer'll regret it th'rester yer life and be no bally use ter anyone, sighin' fer yesteryear like some Frenchman. Here's how!"

The colonel was right. Just because I'm as stupid as I sound doesn't mean everyone else is. I learned a valuable lesson that day, one I've chosen to ignore ever since.

Girded with a double-first in Russian Expressionism and Innumeracy honoris causā - the highest honour the University of Wales can bestow without money changing hands - I took myself off to London to pursue doctoral research on Great Maritime Inverts of the Late Tsarist Epoch and gave no further thought to Diamond, derring or do.

One Russell Square afternoon a professor attended my lecture on Masturbation in the St Petersburg Student Imagination (I'm not making this up) and invited me for a celebratory curry. This tandoori night soon became a weekly institution, as we discovered common interests in smoking, Belorussian syntax, North Indian cuisine and slack-drawered undergrads.

Months passed in scholarly seediness before the professor pushed away the remains of our ox Madras, dismissed the second-year slatterns, cleared his throat and said "Don't quite know how to put this, but some friends want to know whether you'd still be interested in the Intelligence Corps. Fast-tracked to captain, minimal blanco-ing of your Sam Browne."

"Col Diamond?" I ventured.

"Hmm." Perhaps the time to liberate the Letts had come. A good time could be had in Daugavpils with a quirt and some Swedish crowns.

"I'm interested."

A few days later I received a breezy letter asking whether I'd had enough of white Rastas, libraries and plain women in leggings and fancied a change. "Ra-ther!" I thought with a slap of the thigh, and called the number supplied.

"Fact is, Boyo, we've recently acquired this stack of Russian tank manuals..."