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Profile: Paratrooper turns novelist
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Anger management - Mick Cotton with his book (Photo Christos Theodorides) Serving over 30 years as a paratrooper in the British Army led one man to vent his frustrations in the form of a novel. ZOE CHRISTODOULIDES meets him
He’s an artist who likes to sit back and paint Monet-style landscapes but has also released a book that presents a violent journey through the strife torn streets of Belfast in the 1970s. Not just any journey, it’s largely based around one that he was personally involved in. I glance at a copy of The Hated but I can’t draw many conclusions from the profile picture on the novel’s jacket.
Broad shouldered, a stern look in his eye, smart suited and boasting a neat moustache, Mick Cotton’s novel is based on some of the horrors he saw in his days as a paratrooper. On meeting Mick - now looking slightly older and I dare say more relaxed than his cover picture - it becomes apparent the book has little to do with letting out anger and a lot more to do with cleansing his system of the ghosts of his past.
Having retired in Paphos, the 65-year-old is full of a bubbly, almost jolly, kind of charm that makes it hard not to be instantly intrigued by what he’s got to say. I was expecting someone who oozes toughness and cares little for jokes or silly banter. Surprise is coupled with bewilderment: his chirpiness certainly seems to at first to stand in stark contrast to the harsh title of his new book. But Mick is quick to explain. “The Hated refers to us lot. It’s how I felt people looked at us. After all the places I’ve been, that’s what we were. No matter what, we were always hated. So that’s why I came up with the name.”
Having spent over 20 years in service with the British Parachute Regiment, Mick has seen and done it all. “As a young soldier just out of training I patrolled the streets of Aden getting sniped at and bombed, it was exhilarating stuff when you weren’t scared stiff. Years later we patrolled the streets of Belfast and the Bandit Country of Armagh where we lost a few men,” he lets on. He then spent time in Rhodesia during its transition to Zimbabwe, where he had to work with former guerrillas and mercenary forces. And in each post, “hated” is what he felt every step of the way as he describes his novel as one that he “just had to get out of his system”.
“I was full of angst in those days, not really knowing what was going on, just putting your life on the line day after day. It does affect you, especially when confronted by the baying mob who just want you dead,” he confesses. “Writing it helped me to get rid of a lot of demons. It is not autobiographical but I have drawn on a lot of my experiences and put them into novel form.”
Going back to the start seems to be the best place to begin when one digs into the experiences that have shaped Mick’s life. Growing up in a small rural town in Shropshire, Mick joined the Merchant Navy at the age of 15, mostly for lack of anything more exciting to get up to. “I was fed up at home, there was never a lot of money around and I needed to get away and have an adventure,” he explains. Doing nearly three years out at sea he describes it as the “school of hard knocks,” admitting he was very naïve in the company of tough men. “It was a hell of an eye opener; it made me grow up very quickly I’ll tell you that.” In charge of serving the crew their meals, his whole world seemed to collapse if anything went wrong. “At best you’d get a smack around the ear. It certainly helped you grow up fast and stand up for yourself.”
But growing up is always hard to do, and by the time he was 18, Mick felt unsettled with a lack of direction that led him towards all sorts of fights. “I think I subconsciously craved discipline and order,” he admits. And it was this craving that led him towards the Royal Marines that then led to another unexpected door opening. “I suddenly saw a poster of a guy who had landed off a parachute with a big grin on his face and thought ‘that’s the guy I want to be!’” So those posters do actually work then? “Oh yes,” he exclaims remembering the excitement he felt. “Certainly worked for me.” He joined the parachute regiment immediately, although he had very little idea of what exactly he was doing or getting himself into.
Following intensive training, a post out in the Middle East was his first taste of real action. It was tough, but his only real fear was that of “being frightened of being frightened”. First up he was in camps regularly attacked by dissident forces in Yemen’s Radfan Mountains, before jetting over to the other side of the world in 1968 to clear the Caribbean island of Anguilla of the so-called American gangsters. But what really sticks in his mind are the £10 notes he then got paid before a few weeks leave. “I’d never seen them before, and it was hard to get change for a tenner back then,” he grins. In a little spare time between posts, Mick met his wife and life long love Audrey in a pub, but time in Malaya and the Hong Kong border followed before they had a chance to get married.
But the sense of drama really hit home when Mick was sent to Belfast in 1970. “At first it was just another job but a bit later when the shooting started it dawned on me that these were our countrymen and troops should not have been deployed there.” Suddenly in a Republican area with shooting and bombing on most days, the reality of it all began to hit a hard note. “By then I was a corporal with about 15 men beneath me. I had to overcome fear, I had to be tough, because they simply can’t see an inch of fear in you.” As he speaks it’s somewhat hard to detect how the younger Mick fits in with the jolly and rather soft older Mick. “The worst thing of all was confronting a mob of rioters who just want to see you dead and want you out of their country. I can understand that now, but at that point it really was horrific to witness so much hatred against you.”
In April 1972 Mick was shot in the arm, stomach and leg. The way he speaks without even flinching begs for the listener to pry further. And how did he deal with that? “I fell down, that’s how I dealt with it,” he says with a big a chuckle. Ready to have bit of a laugh about any memory from the past - no matter how painful - Mick explains that he spent a month recovering in Victoria Hospital and recalls loving the pint of Guinness his was given every morning. But did he not fear for his life the moment the gun shots hit his body? “Yes, to be honest I didn’t know if it had hit an artery or not. But in the end it had penetrated my intestine so I was lucky enough to get away.” But that wasn’t his scariest moment. The worst of it came out in the ‘Bandit Country’ of South Armagh, which Mick describes as a beautiful place: birds singing, green grass, streams of water, the whole lot. But with this came the underlying threat of bombs and ambush. The closest he ever came to being blown up was when a mine ripped off the back wheel of their vehicle.
He describes Ireland as his worst tour as men died around him, something he could never get used to. “I’m not one of them guys that gets used to the sight of death or a bomb victim.” But what exactly were his political views of the situation at the time? “Those few years in Ireland I just thought the IRA were the enemy and we were the guys fighting them. It was a job to do, I fought for survival, my comrades’ welfare and myself. It was them and us. I had nothing personal against my enemies, it was just a job.” Mick pauses as if taking a second to transition between then and now. “It was only later that I reflected and thought what a shame the situation was.”
Amid all this, life at home went on as normal for Mick’s family; his wife looking after the two children as he went off further afield to the Falklands, Malaya, Australia and Zimbabwe. A mere two months out of the year were spent at home and if there was anything that was hard about the job, separation from his loved ones tops the list. “That’s really the only regret in my life. My wife deserves a medal.”
And without him even realising, Mick’s wife noticed that he slowly started becoming more hard, impatient with and a little less tolerant of the people around him. “Throughout everything I was involved in, you were never offered any form of therapy and had to deal with it all yourself. There was no care then for anything like post traumatic stress.” So it comes as no surprise that Mick turned to writing snippets of his experiences down on paper in the 90s. As it became a kind of personal purge, he admits to breaking out in a sweat as he would travel back to places of frustration in his mind. “I started writing an autobiography as a form of relief but then I just found it too hard. I didn’t know who I might upset, who to include or what to water down. So then I started writing a novel that I turned to every so often and I think I wrote myself out of the stress,” he explains.
With plenty of twists and turns, the story starts in Belfast in the 70s following a Para unit through the troubled times, and then on to Africa as a group of ‘mercenaries’ try to recover a hidden fortune. This is also based on real life experience with opposition between “them” and “us” that really got him thinking when in Rhodesia. “At first repelled, I then realised that it was a unique opportunity to meet and talk to the people that we had branded ‘terrorists’. They all had a story to tell and this helped me write the Africa part of the novel. Some of these guys were all right despite the bad eggs among them.”
And how does it now feel to settle down to a quiet life in Paphos? “Pretty good,” puts it simply. “After 34 years in uniform and being told what to do I just wanted to go somewhere where I could relax. It makes me really appreciate time with my wife. And I’m a more tolerant person now, I live for today, I take things in my stride. I’ve no regrets from my military life but if I had to do the whole thing again I’d probably become a businessman and make lots of money”. Happy enough to just sit back and enjoy a little calmness in his life, landscape painting and cups of tea seem to now tickle his fancy.
“If they’d known in the army that I’d have turned out like this they would have beaten me with a shovel,” he says with a cheeky smile. His look then becomes a little more serious. “I had to take on a hard persona back then. There are a lot of iron hard men in the parachute regiments and if they spot weakness you’ve had it. And there are many times I could have broken down. But there was never a point when I thought of quitting; the regiment has that effect on you and when you have that red beret on you just want to keep going.” But that doesn’t mean he’s never thought twice about military conflict. “Whenever I now see it on TV and people dying I think there really should be another way.” And does Mick still have an itch for anything more in his life? “Yeah the Booker Prize,” he laughs. “But really, I’m quite happy just how I am.”
Mick will be on hand in the Paphos area to sign copies of The Hated at: Hearn's Book Shop Coral Bay 10am-12 noon on Tuesday and Thursday; Bookworld Chlorakas 10am-12 noon Wednesdays; The Duck Pond Market on February 5 and 12. Also available on American Amazon
