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Coming from a "Saff’ London council estate, there wasn’t much forward thinking done by me or any of the other kids I grew up with in Peckham.
Along with education, what we were going to do with our lives didn’t feature high on our agenda. Most parents worked part time locally, wherever they could find the work. My mother had a job as a cleaner, then in a laundromat until her boat came in and she got a full-time job at the local chocolate factory.
Most of the men worked on the docks, but the "job for life" deal they had been promised was coming to an end. If your parents were really lucky, they had a job with London Transport, or even better, down at one of the printers in Fleet Street. So the highest hopes I ever had as a kid was to become a bus driver or a printer, although the latter was never going to happen because I had no relations working in the print, and to get a job there you needed to know someone in the "Chapter".
There was one other job I dreamt of, and that was becoming a panel beater. To be honest, not one of us kids really knew what they did, but we knew they earned good money for it, so it had to be good. You didn’t need much education for any of those jobs, so why bother going to school? All I needed was to get a council flat, with or without a job. I had that cracked because my parents were already on the list. All I needed beyond that was a Mark Two Ford Escort and that was me made.
But of course it never works out like that.
Despite what Only Fools and Horses would have you believe, Peckham was never full of Del Boy cheeky chappies, having a laugh on the market then going off to drink cocktails in the pub. It was full of unemployment, drugs, guns, and mindless vandalism. Like lots of kids on the estate, as a teenager I felt angry with people who had shiny new cars or spotless motorbikes, simply because they had stuff and I didn’t. So I used to kick their cars and bikes in, just because I could. I would vandalise people’s shops, and mess up their goods, simply because they had it, and I didn’t.
I went to nine different schools between the ages of five and 15, so I also had a lot of teachers to be angry with. I was annoyed that they kept putting me in remedial classes, but I didn’t exactly do anything productive in the classroom to get out of them. In fact, in the end, I used to like being at the bottom of the pile. It gave me yet another reason to feel angry. I liked feeling I was in the minority and that everyone was against me: I was part of a select club. I now felt my anger was justified, so I was entitled to do things that others couldn't or shouldn't do.
After all, when you have nothing to lose you can do whatever you like. The only problem was, not everyone else saw things the same way, because by the age of 16 I ended up in juvenile detention. I was sent there for destroying a flat full of nice shiny things that someone else had worked really hard for. I just didn’t get that people had to work to get the things that I smashed up or stole, and to get work, you needed to be educated. I just wanted everything without understanding how to get it.
Joining the army
The army used to recruit boy soldiers from detention centres. I fell for the recruiting teams’ patter that I was going to become a helicopter pilot, but I soon found myself in an infantry junior leaders battalion and committed to six years of service. After three months of being shouted at and chased over assault courses, all the stuff that infantry soldiers do, we were marched off to the Army Education Centre. I didn’t even know the army had educators - after all, I was in the army now, why did I need to learn? But that was when my world changed for the better.
I found myself in a classroom, alongside about 20 other boy soldiers, with an old sweat of a captain standing up front. He pointed out the window towards the barbed wire fence and the real world beyond. “Out there, they think you are all thick as sh-t. But you are not, the only reason you can not read or write is because you do not read or write. But from today that all changes.”
And it did. I soon learnt that the reason I wasn’t able to join as a helicopter pilot as I had been promised and had ended up in the infantry instead, was because I had the literacy and numeracy levels of an 11-year-old. I couldn’t even read the tabloids properly. As a 16-year-old, I read my very first book: Janet and John Book 10. It might have been written for 10-year-olds but that didn’t matter to me. I was on my way to getting an education, and even more importantly, understanding why I needed one.
Once I got into the army, and into army education, I began to learn to read and write properly and much more besides. But the most important thing I learned there, was that we weren’t as thick as sh-t, we were simply uneducated, and the army could turn that around. It does that for its recruits, time and time again because not a lot has changed. The literacy and numeracy levels of entrants into the infantry is still the same. The education set-up by the MoD is Europe’s biggest adult education system, and it is a success story that the MoD simply doesn’t shout out loud enough about. The army is one of the very few places left in UK society where there is true social mobility.
I now regularly visit the army training regiments and talk to Soldiers under Training about the importance of education. The main gist of what I tell the troops is that the most dangerous soldier out there is the one with a library card.
Andy McNab’s latest Nick Stone thriller, Dead Centre, is published by Bantam Press at £18.99.