The Carter Conspiracy

The English Monk

The English MonkDom Clem was not a typical monk. Unlike most of his fellow Benedictines, Clem had lived a “previous” existence before taking holy orders. This previous life resulted from a fairly ordinary childhood.

His parents were a loving and relaxed couple. Dad had been a civil servant all his life, working for HM Customs and Excise. He had been involved in the Second World War, but due to a smattering of Jewishness, he was held back from call up until 1940. Clem used to love listening to his war stories – how Dad landed on the Normandy beaches in a jeep driven straight off a ship onto one of the pontoons built by the Royal Corps of Engineers. How he had entered Brussels shortly after liberation and stayed behind to the continued adulation of the occupants while the troops pressed on with their attack. Ensconced in the town hall, he had been taken to the cellars and was shown a secret passage leading to a hidden collection of Bordeaux wine. He drank nothing else throughout his stay. In short, Dad had a “good” war and as far as Clem could make out, had not fired a single shot in action.

His mother was very different. An Irish Catholic from a poor farm in the west of Ireland, she had left home during the war – leaving behind a neutral country – and travelled to England, where she joined the nursing corps and encountered nightly bombing raids. Mum was stubborn and ambitious, argumentative and self-possessed. Clem took after his mother.

Clem, who was christened Patrick and called Paddy (monks take an adopted name on ordination, usually in recognition of an admired and inspirational saint) was sent away to a Catholic boarding school at the age of seven. During his five years at this prep school, he developed a number of traits and characteristics that would subsequently dictate the course of his life.

The first of these was the dominance of Catholicism over every aspect of school life: Mass three times a week, religious teaching twice a week and the application of the strict moral values that underlie the faith.

The others came from his stubbornness and love of arguing, which made him universally unpopular throughout his stay. That led to being bullied, which meant that Paddy learned how to fight and, more crucially, when not to fight.

It also led him to develop his own ideas and beliefs when logical counter arguments were not or could not be put to him. This began to manifest itself in better academic results, his teachers amazed at the brazenness of some of his essays arguing against their teachings yet impressed that one so young could and did use rational and logical thought so effectively.

So it was that, at the age of twelve, Paddy passed his Common Entrance exam and moved to Downside, a public school near Bath.

Downside school was run by and linked to a Benedictine monastery. It was one of the top Catholic schools in England, so Clem’s mother was incredibly proud – both of Paddy’s achievement in getting in and of her achievement in transforming her life from that of an Irish farmer’s daughter to that of a Downside parent.

During his time at the school, Paddy’s passionate Catholicism began to wane as the monks failed to answer his questions or counter his arguments logically. Surely, he argued, Darwin disproved much of the Old Testament. “We’re descended from crawling fish, not from Adam and his Mrs”, he once wrote an essay arguing that if there was a single creator, then he did not deserve worship when so much of his creation caused misery and suffering. He didn’t necessarily believe this to be true, but was disappointed at the weakness of the monks’ and teachers’ response.

His growing passion was the school’s Combined Cadet Force, combining corps from the army, navy and RAF. This was a Wednesday afternoon activity, a time of no lessons and no sport. The CCF was supported by the real armed forces and involved guns, manoeuvres, uniforms and every other attribute of the military that appealed to little boys. By his final year, Paddy was the leader of the whole corps. He loved the order and logic of it all and especially revelled in his ability to lead without being questioned.

By the time his A-level year came around, Paddy was being urged to apply to Oxford or Cambridge University. It was important for the school to see its best pupils move to these institutions as the achievement reflected well on the teachers and would always feature prominently in the school prospectus. Paddy’s mother had already started boasting to her friends about how he had to choose between the two.

However, she had passed on to Paddy her contrariness and he decided that the two universities were not for him. He disliked the libertarian way of life, the lack of structure and the rarefied image they projected. He had also become sick of his mother’s boasting and wanted to make a point to her.

So he joined the army.

There was, at this time, a well-worn career path adopted by the British upper classes for their children, depending upon their academic competence. The brightest and best became doctors and surgeons, especially those who took Latin as an A-level. The rest of the really bright children would become lawyers or accountants, training for their qualifications at one of the many city firms where Daddy had connections.

At the other end of the scale, the intellectually challenged had to be catered for. Those with personality became estate agents, which explains the wonderfully eccentric English surnames emblazoned even today on the boards of leading agents. Those with aptitude but little personality went to Agricultural College and then into “Land Management” – often a euphemism for running Daddy’s estate.

Those unsuited to either career tended to join the army as an officer. Clem realised that he would stand out in this group – and he liked the juxtaposition of his academic brilliance with the career path he chose.

The army couldn’t quite believe its luck. Paddy went straight to Sandhurst and six months later was presented with the Sword of Honour by the Queen – the award for the best student. This earned his mother’s forgiveness for not going to “Oxbridge” as she looked on with tears of pride in her eyes while the Queen enjoyed a short conversation with Junior Officer Patrick Appleberry.

From Sandhurst, it was usual for future regular officers – career army men and women rather than those on a short term commission – to transfer to Old College, still based at Sandhurst, where they would embark on a course of studies in subjects such as military history, politics and international affairs. This proved to be a bit of a bore for Paddy, as the course was designed for non-graduates and was incredibly basic. He was saved by a growing extra-curricular interest in the use and impact of weapons and the changing and rapidly developing effect these were having on military tactics and competence. Paddy soon began to question the current military tactics that they were being taught, arguing that tactics had to change as rapidly as new technologies and types of weapon appeared.

His end of term report by the commander labelled him as awkward but potentially brilliant.

He was then sent on a six-month troop leadership course at Bovington, a military town in the middle of southern England, after which he was commissioned into the Queen’s Own Hussars.

Over the next seven years, Paddy enjoyed all that was good and bad about life in the army. The Hussars’ posting to Northern Ireland for five months in 1979 caused his mother many sleepless night worrying about her son. The fact that he was engaged in a battle against a group representing Irish Catholics did not overly concern her for the simple reason that, like the majority of Irish people at that time, she had grown tired of the conflicts in the North and despaired over the damage being caused to the reputation of her wonderful and friendly country.

It was during this term of duty that Paddy killed his first human being. It was a strange event all round. For a start he was not on duty when it happened. Six months into the tour, he had been due some leave and decided to drive across Ireland to his mother’s home town – Kenmare in County Kerry. He knew that this would not be allowed by his superiors and of course he was conscious that he might be attacked in the Republic if anyone knew who he was or where he was posted. Oddly this just added to the excitement of the whole exercise, which Paddy proceeded to plan with the help of that old cliché – military precision.

So it was that one spring evening, he came to be heading for the Irish border in a borrowed car with Irish registration plates – he believed it was safer to drive an Irish car in Northern Ireland than a Northern Irish car in the Republic.

As he drove south, his mind wandered to the vacation – how he planned to visit the seven pairs of aunts and uncles who still lived in Kenmare and he wondered how many of his thirty-one cousins he would recognise. As he approached the border crossing point just south of Middletown, his mood changed and his body tensed. As he joined the queue of cars waiting to be searched by the soldiers, his attention was drawn to the behaviour of three men in the white Ford Escort in front of him, where an argument seemed to be going on between one of the men in the front and one of the men in the back of the car. Both cars moved forward as the soldiers completed their search of a van ahead.

Paddy watched as one of the men in the back of the car opened his door and got out. He was short and podgy, wearing a typical Irish farmer’s peaked cap and a large black duffel coat. He looked straight at Paddy, then at the registration plates of the car, and then back to Paddy. As the man turned and opened the car’s hatchback, Paddy saw him lift the rear carpet and rummage in the area where the spare wheel is normally stored. Using his body to block Paddy’s view the man lifted something out of a bag and passed it over the back seat to the man in front. Something else was retrieved and shoved inside the folds of the duffel coat before the man got back into the car.

What most impressed the officers that conducted the subsequent inquiry into the incident was that despite having seen no weapons and observed what could easily have been a man getting some snacks out of the back of the car, Paddy knew that the men in the white Ford Escort were now armed. To Paddy, this was merely the benefit of having a distrusting and contrary mind; if it looked like the man was getting food, Paddy would have thought the opposite.

As the Escort pulled forward up to the border guards, Paddy retrieved the pistol hidden beneath his seat for “emergencies” and got out of the car. In the twilight, his visibility was not great but this also worked to his advantage as he was able to amble towards the car without anyone noticing.

Ahead, the first of the two soldiers on duty was escorting the driver round to the back of the car. As the rear hatch was opened, and the guard peered inside, the driver took out his gun and shoved the nozzle into the side of the guard’s neck. Nothing was said – the driver merely put a finger over his lips and, with a smile on his face, intimated that the guard should Ssssh! Meanwhile, the man in the back seat began to get out of the car. The second guard looked on without any idea what was about to happen. Paddy, on the other hand, realised that the driver was now waiting until his colleague had a clear line of fire at the second guard, at which point both soldiers were going to be killed.

Paddy shot the driver through his left ear – the bullet exited at almost the exact opposite spot in his right ear. In the cold evening air, the shot made an extraordinarily loud noise, which seemed to cause everyone to freeze momentarily – until the driver’s dead body hit the ground and all hell broke loose. Paddy pointed his gun at the man getting out from the back of the car and shouted at him to get down onto the road; the second guard pointed his rifle at Paddy and yelled at him to get down. The first guard, freed from having a gun pointed at his temple was unable to collect his thoughts and pointed his gun at everyone in his line of sight.

The third passenger remained motionless, as if unable to comprehend the enormity of the scene outside – or as it turned out, numbed by the realisation that the idiots driving him home had almost certainly cost him his freedom.

Fortunately for Paddy, within a few seconds both guards had worked out who were the “goodies and baddies”. He laid down his gun, once he was satisfied that the second gunman from the car was covered, and put his hands up in the air. Soldiers began to appear from the building that housed the border guards and soon he was able to show his papers and allowed to walk free.

He never did make it to County Kerry. He received an official reprimand over his holiday plans, specifically for not having told anyone where he was going and thus compromising his own safety. He also received a medal for saving the lives of two fellow soldiers and aiding the capture of a wanted IRA suspect – the third man in the car was a notorious bomb maker whose capture brought the IRA bombing campaign to a temporary halt.

All this and Paddy was still only twenty years old.

He grew to love the army life, the way in which everything was done for him, the meals in the mess, the drinking games, the sports, the tours of duty to Belize… by the time of his twenty-fifth birthday, Paddy could not have been happier.

Chapter 3