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Escape from the French Foreign Legion

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3 October, 2013 By Vanessa Mills

Clive Chabrier was a young man in England in the late 1950s, with an adventurous nature. He had worked a number of odd jobs - in a circus, as a pool lifesaver and a labourer. He'd travelled a lot across the Continent by hitching or stowing without passport or even money.

He was also a follower of Teddy Boy fashion, and one evening he combed his hair into a quiff, put on his best clobber, and got ready for a big night of jiving at the Palais, in the town of Aldershot.

When Clive said goodbye to his Mum that evening, it would be five years before he saw her again.

Clive Chabrier hitched a lift, with a hearse driver, to Dover and once in France got press-ganged into the French Foreign Legion. The training regime was often brutal and frightening, and took him to forts across the country and into north Africa.

He escaped twice, and eventually ended up in West Australia. By the time Clive made his home in Broome, he had travelled to many outback towns and rural communities, hitched and worked, changed his name several times, and met both good people and unsavoury characters.

With his pregnant wife to be, the couple made their home in Broome in a ramshackle two storey house next to Streeters Jetty.

Clive's recently published memoir is called The Compass of Naivety, a nod to his own luck and naive approach to adventure and the compass point which seems to shift his life's direction swiftly.

An example of that quirk of luck is how a Broome police officer, stopping Clive in the main street, unexpectedly told him to hold up his right hand and swear allegience to Queen and Country - thus making him an Australian citizen.

Vanessa Mills spoke to Clive in the UK for Kimberley Mornings, and he started by recounting that fateful night he was due to go jiving.


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