I was distracted from the frontline though by the appearance on Top of the Pops one Thursday night of a new group. The sampled Prince Buster screech at the start of the song acted like a dog whistle on me. I stared at the screen and saw Terry Hall’s sullen face; Jerry Dammers’ crazy leer and heard Neville Staples shouting strange words. The Specials were calling directly to me.

Now as an adult I find many other former Two Tone fans were just children at the time of the label’s heyday. I’m not sure what it was about the scene that attracted kids. Maybe the sharp tonik suits. Maybe the cartoon figure of Walt Jabsco. Maybe the infectious bluebeat sound. It’s hard for me to have a view as I was entirely unaware of this junior groundswell at the time. My classmates at St Vincents were immune to the charms of The Specials or Madness, who I could see even then were the crowd pleasers of the scene. A new more urgent craze was sweeping them away. Jimmy Mahoney’s latest gift to his little brother was National Socialism.

Back in the infants we often used to play Army or War or Soldiers. The country you fought for correlated with your power and influence in the classroom. John Mahoney and his right hand man, Mark Higgins, were the British. The boys on the next rung down played the Americans. The next the French. The z-listers of the team were made to play the Germans, and I the girl, below even them was made to single handedly represent Italy. I didn’t really know what Italy had got up to in the war – they didn’t feature in many films – so I just used to stand near the school wall shaking a big imaginary saucepan and shouting:‘Don’t shoot! I am a-making ze spaghetti.’ The boys seemed happy to have me thus occupied.

Now though it was the A-listers who wanted to be the Germans. We didn’t play Army anymore, we were too old for that, but copies of grown up looking books by someone called Sven Hassel started changing hands amongst the boys. John Mahoney came to school one day wearing a swastika arm band, an action met with fury and an incredibly long lecture to all of us from Mr Winter the headmaster. I wasn’t sure if this was all still to do with punk. I’d seen pictures of Sid Vicious wearing swastikas, but I’d thought that was just him being mad, not actually a Nazi. I didn’t like the idea of being a Nazi – they were so obviously the baddies. But when John Mahoney started the Blitzkrieg Gang I forgot my reservations.

The Blitzkrieg Gang was the elite commando force to be unleashed upon the Cromwell St rabble. It seemed odd to me – Nazis vs. Protestants – a weird mash up of history. Maybe I’d have found it less strange if I’d know then about the murky role of the Vatican during WW2, or maybe then I’d just have been truly confused. Already the figures of Rommel (John Mahoney’ personal hero), Ian Paisley and Bobby Sands were all getting mixed up into one big, lumpy soup. To join the Blitzkrieg Gang you had to pass an initiation test. You weren’t allowed to know what was involved in the inititation test in advance, and you couldn’t back out once you’d been told. I didn’t like the sound of that at all. I was essentially a good girl. I was also an enormous coward. My greatest fear was that it might involve playing on the railway tracks or in the storm drains of the canal, both things that many boys in the class used to do for fun and which filled me with absolute terror. Life outside the Blitzkrieg Gang though looked like a lonely existence and so in the end I said I’d do it. The leadership greeted the news with a shrug. They knew I’d tag along one way or another.

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