From Commando To Civilian

A major change has recently occurred in my life which needs closer examination, for the honourable and true path that I am now seeking to pursue is being confounded on all sides, much to my surprise. You see, the thing is, for the last...oh, God...14 or 15 years, I have "gone commando". Many of you will find this repellent immediately, but please allow me to state my case. It all began in late 1992/early 1993. I'd finished school and taken a job in a local pub to save up for a flight to Australia, where I would live and work until university loomed. The pub was the Harborne Stores in Harborne, Birmingham (and could people stop spelling it Harbourne, please?)

At that point in history - I better put that, as I'm sure it's much better now - The Harborne Stores deserved the name, as you could get anything in there: drugs, stolen cars, hits arranged, etc. It was a fascinating place to work, given that the clientele constrasted rather sharply with my own life experience. They gave me a hard time at first, as the 'posh boy' - but once I'd learned their orders and charges by heart, they took me on as one of their own.

I remember Bob - I forget his surname - getting me in an affectionate headlock that nearly broke my neck. He was a big bastard, built like an ox. The place was just rammed with characters, mostly of the kind that cashed their unemployment benefit, incapacity benefit or whatever scammed benefit and come and spend it at the bar. Immediately. What a place, you'd have loved it. But perhaps just the once.

The Stores was run by Irishman John Beggan, and his glamourous wife Marie. He was a proper landlord: he'd been diagnosed with an ulcer, and so his tipple was Baileys - the creamy nature of the drink meant his stomach could deal with it. I am unsure as to the liver's capabilities. Anyway, he'd be on the Baileys before we opened. Genius.

It end up being a sad story, actually: long after I'd left the pub, John and Marie were running The Green Man at the top end of Harborne high street. It was New Year - this is probably about five years ago, now - and the karaoke was getting full attention from the revellers. Apparently, a contretemps broke out over who was going to sing the last song. John intervened, and was kicked to the floor and shoed by a bloke and his sons. They were arrested and charged with GBH, that is, until John died and that got upped to manslaughter.

Anyway, I worked at The Stores for about four months and saved enough for my flight, and flew away to Australia. I was not alone: a good mate joined me on the tour. We stayed in Perth at first, in the home of my-sister's-friend's-uncle (actually my-sister's-friend's-mother's-brother) and his family, in Duncraig up north inland from Cottesloe. We paid our way by assisting a family friend build an extension on the house, decorate, wiring, plumbing, etc.

I did this for about a fortnight, and my friend for about a month, before we took a bus 1000 kilometres into the desert to work on a sheep farm for three months. And here's where it all started. It was soon apparent that underwear 'was for girls' among the hardened men of the outback and trust me, they are hardened men. Kecks are for lassies.

My experience of Australia was of either cosmopolitan, laid-back urbanites or socially-retarded, laid-back country folk. When I say socially-retarded, I mean that if you are Aboriginal, black, yellow, brown, homosexual, female, indeed any form of social division identifiable - if you fall into any of those categories, the blokes think you are scum. I've never come across more macho-fuelled bigotry, racism, homophobia or sexism in my life, and I lived amongst that for twelve weeks. I couldn't compete.

The farm is 65 miles north to south, and 125 miles east to west. They call it a farm, we'd call it a county. My friend and I were put up in a portacabin with two single beds, a wardrobe each and a chest of drawers to share in the middle. There were two doors, one opposite each bed and two windows, one above each bed. One of my best memories was of watching a thunderstorm out over the bush from that bed, with huge forks of lightning hitting the ground so close that you were sure you could feel the earth stir beneath you, while The Prodigy's 'Fire' played on the stereo. Haha. Great.

We would wake at 6am each day and dress. There's no point showering in the morning, as you are stinking come midday every day. Showering is an evening thing. Breakfast was served to all farm workers at seven - and mutton, in some form, was frequently on the menu. The people on the farm consisted of the farmer and his wife - an English lady who knew a friend of my Mum's in Birmingham, the main farm worker and his girlfriend, and farm worker number two. Then there's me and my travel companion. Finally, there are the 'seasonal workers', called in for the shearing season, the busy time. These are, invariably, ex-cons, dealers, druggies, probationers, and so on. A motley crew, for sure, and men I had to work alongside for many weeks without obviously shitting myself.

After we'd gobbled down breakfast, we'd gather up the necessary vehicles for the day's work and head out by 730. The basic year on an Australian sheep farm goes like this: do nothing but maintenance of fences, wells, etc for nine months. I don't mean to belittle that task, this farm is 8,125 square miles. So, a lot of work, maintaining all those fences, actually. Water is supplied on an automated basis, via wells, the spinners you see on all the outback movies. They bring water up from the ground, very deep down, and fill up troughs dotted around the farm. They break a lot, and so need constant monitoring.

Animals - not usually sheep, but ostriches, kangaroos, wild dogs - like to make big holes in your fencing, so you have to monitor that constantly, too. Farmers are good to each other: if they find a load of your sheep on their turf, they'll let you know and you can check out the perimeter. They bring your sheep back.

But basically, your crop - the sheep, more specifically, their wool - sits on their backs, growing for most of the year, while they wander about being sheep. You need to make sure your flock has enough food, enough water, and you need to undertake pest control. More on that later. So, in fact, a rather busy time for that 'lay period' of nine months. Then the action really begins. You spend three months gathering all your sheep up in lorries, bring them in for shearing, dip them in disinfectant, put them back on the lorries, take them back to the land.

The farm has an arsenal of vehicles: dirt bikes, basic 4x4s, big-ass 4x4s, articulated lorries, quadbikes, mini-mokes - it's a petrol-head's idea of heaven. I didn't get to commandeer all of them - the lorries I was allowed nowhere near. The dirt bikes, the small 4x4s were my bread and butter, mainly the dirt bikes. And it's really easy: the farmer heads off on recces to find his sheep - they are herd animals, so if you spot one or some, there will be more in the area.

The crew then heads to the identified location with the bikes and 4x4s, rounding them up to a pre-arranged location, which is where you'll find a big lorry with some metal-link fencing. You round them up - easier said than done, as sheep are the most incredibly dense creatures on the planet - and drive them in the direction you want. Meanwhile, the lorry team is building a corral, with a funnel-shaped entrance, into which you skilfully drive the beasts. Sometimes.

Once you've caged the bleating bastards - and don't get mushy on me here - you separate the youngsters from the old buggers, and you undertake 'mulesing'. This is where any lambs - you can identify new lambs, they are the ones with tails - are put in a six-berth cradle and spun around the three functions: tagging, tailing and de-balling. Obviously, the little girls miss out one of these stages.

Tagging involves the removal of a specific shape from the animal's ear - each farmer has his own identifyable snip. You also insert a big plastic earring into a second hole, which has a farm-specific colour. I did this. Then you spin them round to the tailing, where they have their tails cut off. This frequently involves getting sprayed with pumping jets of blood from the little lamb's stump. I didn't do that.

Finally, the mulesing: for chaps, this means opening a very small, tight rubber band with a tool rather like a big pair of secateurs, and then placing the opened-band around the base of the chaps testicles, and then letting go. As you might imagine, some bleating is involved. Earlier, I insinuated that the girls get off scott-free. Not so. In fact, they have the area around their bottoms and privates 'skinned'. I didn't do this either.

All of this barbarity is actually for a good purpose, to prevent infection and disease. The tail would get clagged up with shit, otherwise. And any gathering of faeces around the anus and privates, male or female, is bad news. It also gives the farmer the chance to count his new additions. Subtracting deaths, he can monitor his flock. So, it's all for the best, but nasty at the instant. Once you've done all this to the new kids, you take them to the central farm area to rejoin their Mums.

At the farm, there is again, a very systematic process. You've got a big field full of sheep with wool on them. You want loads of naked sheep. That means they need to go through there: the sheep-shed. Inside it is the most wonderfully manual process that I've ever undertaken in my life. The woolies are counted in. They line up in queues, waiting to be 'called forward'.

Each sheep is taken from the line and taken to a shearer. The shearer - I'm not joking - removes the whole coat of wool in 20 seconds. The artistry involved is awe-inspiring. I did get to have a go at shearing: the poor creature looked like a road traffic accident afterwards, torn and bloody. I actually verbally apologised to the thing. Anyway, back to the professionals.

Once the wool is off, a shed-hand gathers the wool and takes it to the sorting tables. These are huge racks made from large-bore metal piping, about 6 foot by 10 foot, which is what you need for a full back of wool. The gatherer flings the wool and it lands perfectly on the table, where it has all the nasty claggy bits of shit ripped off and flung away. All of the pieces thrown to the floor must be swept out of the way immediately by some other flunkeys. I often did this.

The wool is thrown into large bins - by which I mean a large space with walls - according to the quality. As the wool gathers in these bins, and it gathers quickly, it needs to be taken and pressed into massive bails, using a bail press. These things can exert 200lbs pressure per square inch, so you don't want to catch your hand in one. Once you've compressed 200kgs of wool into a bail (the bail is 3 x 3 x 5 feet), this needs to be piled up in the dispatch shed, ready for loading onto lorries and taking to market.

So, you can see, it's a hive of activity in a sheepshed. Once the act of removing and processing the wool into bails has happened, you're left over with a lot of naked sheep, looking - well - sheepish. Now that they're all naked, some bearing the odd scar of the shearing they've just been given, it's time to get their shots done and take them back out into the wild. One by one, the sheep are led through a dip, where they are submerged in a blue cocktail of anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, anti-missile and whatever else, before getting one more spray of something else from a spraycan down their backbones. My companion did find occassion to write a variety of four-letter words on the sides of sheep. But I wouldn't take part in tomfoolery like that. Oh, no.

And then, that's pretty much it for the sheep. They get back on their lorries en masse, and are personally escorted and disembarked to the fields for another nine months. We'll see most of them again, but some of them will die. Some of them will have kids. The weather might be good and bring rain, and liven up the flora of the land, so often a dust-dry, spiky collection of herbs. If it does, the sheep will eat well and their coats of wool will be better. The weather might be bad, and you find the water-table battling to supply your herd with water. Their coats will suffer. Such are the concerns of an outback sheep farmer.

To get to the point: I stopped wearing underwear back then, as the farmers told me that the sweat that you will produce, if close to your skin, creates rashes. And you don't want a rash in this heat, out here. So I stopped. You have to wash your clothes more frequently, but hey. And for some reason, despite leaving the searing heat of the Great Western Desert, I never started wearing underwear again.

If I can be evangelical for a moment, it's very comfortable. I remember as a schoolboy that any sweating from a lunchtime kickabout would make things sticky all afternoon. I hated doing PE in the early morning, when you had to last all day with dampened kecks. Boxers, briefs - they'd all ride up into your crack, and then you'd suffer the ignominy of having to extracate them from your arse during an afternoon lesson. So, going commando prevents this problem immediately. You don't get the old chap caught in an uncomfortable, strangling situation. Things are more relaxed, a bit more laid-back.

Then, on my recent holiday, I got a rash from my wetsuit. Apart from the back, shoulders and chest, it also hit the groin area rather hard, resulting in itchy, dry patches all over. And so, some underwear, please, not to mention some cream. And then: I found the wearing of underwear novel again, and started my adventure back into the world of men's hosiery.

I thought I'd try a variety of styles of pant, from the brief, to the jockey, via the boxer brief. Some seem to do the job to a reasonable standard. However, there is one design that, frankly, results in my old chap and his two mates escaping from the clutches of the pant and - essentially - dangling free again, as it/they have for the last 14 years. My lass thinks it/they are protesting at being caged once more.

Readjustment has been fraught with difficulty. I keep getting dressed without them, then remember I do again now, and have to get dressed again. I forget that I need to do more washing - I have lots of pairs of socks - but sometimes I run out of clean undies. Perhaps I should just buy more and have an enormous pants drawer? I don't know, but it all seems like so much more bother than just hanging loose.