“
Ed Amies, one of my oldest and closest friends, told my simply that: “So often, God’s callings have a birth, a death, and then a resurrection.”
I had had the birth, and had got stuck into Selection; I had had the death, at that fateful dam in the Welsh mountains--now was a logical time for the resurrection.
If my faith stood for anything it was this: miracles really can happen.
So I made the decision to try again.
This time, though, I would be doing this alone.
I knew that support from my family and friends would be much less forthcoming, especially from Mum, who could see the physical toll that just four months had taken.
But I felt deadly serious about passing this properly now and I somehow knew that it was my last chance to do it.
And no one was going to do it for me.
Some two weeks later I listened to a mumbled message on my answering machine from Trucker.
He’d got lost on the final part of a march. After hours of wandering aimlessly in the dark, and out of time, he had finally been found by a DS in a Land Rover, out to look for stray recruits.
Trucker was dejected and tired. He, too, had failed the course.
He went through the same struggle over the next few weeks that I had, and like me, he was invited by the squadron to try again. We were the only two guys to have been asked back.
With greater resolve than ever, we both threw ourselves into training with an intensity that we had never done before. This time we meant business.
We both moved into an old, secluded, rented farm cottage some six miles out of Bristol. And, Rocky-style, we started to train.
The next Selection course (of which two are run annually) was just about to start. And just like in Groundhog Day, we found ourselves back in that old dusty gymnasium at the squadron barracks, being run ragged by the DS.
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