Interview With My Partner The Strangest Night Of My Life

In the late 1960s, or it could have been the early 1970s, infact it was so long ago, my memory's somewhat faded with time. I was about seventeen and in the prime of my life. Deciding to join the army was never an issue...I couldn't wait.

The time I want to talk about, was on one warm, sunny morning when our battalion left our camp where we were stationed at Deepcut barracks in Surrey. We were travelling to Tregantle Fort in Cornwall on an exercise. I was looking forward to enjoying many of the activities, which included canoeing – abseiling – shooting and map reading, in fact any manoeuvre we were given...no task was too much for this adventurous teenager.

The place we stayed at was an old Napoleonic Fort, which was altogether sparse, not that it bothered a seventeen year old. Living accommodation consisted of eight to ten rooms, each one sleeping up to thirty boys. Heating was an old coal fire, which we endeavoured to keep going, there would have been trouble if we'd let it go out.

Our R.S.M. Was nicknamed Zebedee, because he would spring around the blocks shouting. “Hands off cocks, on with socks.” If your feet weren't on the floor, you'd get extra duties.

When we weren't doing Military exercises, we'd be sent to work in the cook house, which was really just an oversized tent with huge hot water tanks. There we would clean pots and pans, a job we'd rather not be doing, but we endured anyway.

The days flew by so fast with so much to do. Sea canoeing could be tough, especially in choppy waters. One of my favourite activities was abseiling, it really got my body pumping with adrenalin, the sense of achievement when I reached the bottom was such a rush. One poor sod was abseiling off the ramparts of the fort, which was a sheer drop of about forty feet, when he ended upside down just hanging, staring at the ground below, he had to wait for someone to turn him the right way up, which of course had him pretty shaken up.

Our favourite pastime when off duty, was to go across to the shop and play the one arm bandit, which was an old sixpence a go and guaranteed to pay out. Kids queued up to go on, so they'd have drinking money to spend down the pub. We'd play darts against the locals, they had this weird way of playing, you couldn't pick a double, you'd have to spin a small dart board and whatever number the pointer stopped at was the number you started on.

One night while five of us were on guard duty, we got really bored, so decided to have some fun with a Ouija board, which we made ourselves from paper and a glass. To start with we were laughing and messing around, asking if there was anyone there. At first nothing happened, but later although the glass never moved, I suddenly went as cold as ice and never felt more nervous than I did at that moment. There was definitely a presence close by, we could all feel it, the hairs on my arms stood up, it wasn't fun any more, so we stopped and went outside to calm down. Upon returning we screwed up the Ouija board and threw it away. I've never experienced anything like that since. It was the strangest night of my life.