An Officer and a Gentlewoman (23 page)

In between firing, we sat in the little range hut cleaning the weapons, scrubbing away at the coated layers of carbon (Coca-Cola
is a surprisingly good cleaning fluid for this, which is probably why it is also so effective at stripping the enamel from your teeth). We chatted and joked as we worked our way through the brown paper bag packed lunches, chewing on flaky sausage rolls and swapping crisp flavours. In the background, the firing of rounds could still be heard, interspersed with birdsong and the shouted orders from the CSgts in charge of the range. I was happy as I stripped down the weapon, smiling to myself as I removed the pistol barrel. This was a perfectly contented way to spend an afternoon, sitting in the sunshine having lunch in good company. I lay the pistol spring beside me on the wooden bench, appreciating the weapon’s simplicity. It felt snug as it nestled in the palm of my hand and fitted back together effortlessly. I welcomed its small compactness, and the lightweight sensation as I held it. Handling the pistol felt simple and less complicated than a rifle. And unfortunately since our move to New College we had been spending a lot more time with our rifles and not necessarily for the most gratifying of reasons.

This extra rifle time came about because on our arrival at New College drill took a new and unpleasant turn, as now, having finally mastered the basic moves on Old College parade square, our first drill session in New College started with us queuing up outside the armoury. When I got to the front of the queue the armourer handed me my rifle as usual, lifting it out of its wooden bracket and passing it through the service hatch in the steel cage. From behind him he also picked a bayonet from a hook on the wall and handed it to me for the first time. I held them with awkwardness once more, harking back to that first time I had held my rifle in the Junior Term. This time I felt awkward because I was dressed for drill, not the ranges. I couldn’t understand what we needed them for. Traipsing outside onto the parade square in my Blues with the rifle cradled stiffly in my arms, I clearly recognized the discordance. Rifles are not meant for drill, rifles are meant for killing. Rifles and drill do
not go together like cheese and pickle. Rifles and drill go together like lemon juice and paper cuts. They smart and sting, bringing tears to your eyes. They are clumsy and graceless. Nothing about their design is meant for the parade square. When Heckler & Koch remodelled the SA80 army rifles there wasn’t anything in their remit about ensuring they could be ‘SEIZED’, ‘STRIKED’ and ‘GRASPED’. Rifles are designed for shooting, not holding to attention, but at Sandhurst we spent more precious time prancing up and down the parade square with them than actually pulling the trigger.

And the pain caused carrying this ridiculous 4 kg of pointless metal and plastic around in the sweltering sun was excruciating. Because, of course, during drill the rifle wasn’t carried sensibly like on exercise or in Helmand. We didn’t use a rifle sling or comfortable carrying posture; on the drill square the rifle had to be carried with one, just one, hand, as we switched it from the ‘slope’ to the ‘shoulder’ arms, balancing it against our shoulder, the rifle’s weight held up by just a small group of quickly seizing muscles in your arm. A dull ache would spread its way up my arms, through biceps and triceps, from my gripped hand to my trembling shoulder.

And it was torturous.

The boys had cleverly worked out that if they slipped a small tin of boot polish into their right trouser pocket they could rest the butt of the rifle against it as they stood to attention, taking up the strain, but in Eleven Platoon we wore skirts and couldn’t exploit such cunning tricks.

The very worst part of rifle drill however was the agonizing struggle of the ‘present arms’: standing motionless to attention with our arms extended forwards, holding the heavy rifle vertically out in front of us for inspection. This stress position could go on for tens of minutes, as we stood still under the burning glare of the sun, feeling beads of sweat trickling down our backs, pooling into a damp patch on our shirts, under the heavy woollen Blues jackets. The possibility of fainting loomed ever near.

Each time the rifle was part of a drill move it had to be grasped with an audible ‘STRIKE’ as we slapped it hard in unison. The CSgts wanted to see bloodstains on the white gloves we wore as we struck the weapon forcefully with our palms. And CSgt Bicknell joked that if anyone hit their rifle hard enough to break it, he would give them the rest of the day off.

CSgt Bicknell would stand out in front of the platoon, as we lined up in three ranks before him. Then when we were all ready, he would puff out his chest, angle his chin high into the air and, with his pace stick tucked under his right arm, he would bark out the first commands: ‘Eleven Platoon. Eleven Platooooooon. Shun!’ And his voice would peak an octave higher on the ‘shun’ as in front of him thirty cadets stamped to attention, followed by a flutter of movement as we all tried to gain control of the rifles at our sides. More than once someone dropped their rifle to the ground with an exaggeratedly loud clatter and CSgt Bicknell would go berserk.

‘Come on, ladies. Come on. Stand still. When you come to attention I expect you to stand completely still, I don’t want to see a flicker of movement over there. Nothing. You are to just
freeze
as you are.’

Then he would puff his chest out once more and give the next command: ‘Eleven Platoon. Slooooooope arms!’ And on the clipped shout of ‘arms’ there would be a ripple of clanging metal as we repositioned the rifle from down at our right side to resting against our shoulders, slapping hard at the weapon’s side as we went, creating the audible strike CSgt Bicknell so desired.

‘Come on, ladies. More strike. More strike. Let me hear some aggression in there.’

CSgt Bicknell loved drill. He was a proud guardsman and drill was in his blood. His heart pounded to the beat of the parade square drum, and he was in his absolute element on the drill square, spruced up in ceremonial dress with a brass band and expectant audience. Nowhere was he happier than out at the front, in command of a polished drill squad.

Except, unfortunately, Eleven Platoon was not yet a polished drill squad. In skirts it was harder to hide our drill errors, and the curve of our feminine figures prevented the robotic straight lines expected of marching troops. Hips swayed and their roundness prevented our arms from pinning straight at our sides, which frustrated CSgt Bicknell wildly.

For rifle drill we attached bayonets to the muzzle of the rifle, and their steely edges would glisten in the sunshine as we switched the rifle around, from ‘slope’ to ‘shoulder’ to ‘present’. The clean, polished metal would catch the sunlight and remind any spectators that although we might look daftly unthreatening dressed in our formal uniforms, the rifles in our arms had a far more serious and sombre use. The sight of a parade square filled with over 200 cadets armed with rifles and this iconic blade must have presented a frightening proposition as one poor unfortunate discovered on a summer’s afternoon after I commissioned.

On that day the entire Intermediate intake were on the parade square in front of New College being put through their paces by their respective CSgts when a coach slowly drove behind them and came to a stop at the college entrance. The coach was carrying a party of officers returning from a battlefield tour in northern France and, unbeknownst to anyone on board at the time, an Afghan refugee hiding in the coach’s toilet. As the coach came to a stop for the first time since it had crossed the English Channel, the hydraulic hiss signalled the opening of the doors, and the Afghan stowaway spotted his chance, bursting free from the confines of his locked toilet. As he absconded onto the parade square, making a dash for freedom, he must have cursed his rotten luck when choosing his mode of passage at Sangatte, as he was confronted with the sight of over 200 armed cadets.

We had to get to grips with this new dimension to drill because in the Intermediate term there was another drill examination, and this time it was competitive.

Winning the Drill Competition was an accolade CSgt Bicknell so very desperately wanted. Drill was his thing, and while his brood of girls may not have been able to compete against the boys on the assault course or on exercise, the drill square was an equalizer. CSgt Bicknell believed that drill was about style and panache. That it was about putting on a show, and he felt that the girls would be best placed to do this. He was also a friend of the inspecting officer. So with a bit of dedicated practice our chances looked good.

But first, before CSgt Bicknell could have any crowning moment of glory on the drill square, we had something of more unfortunate relevance to attend to.

There is no doubt that the British Army produces among the best officers in the world. But now, over halfway through the commissioning course, I still couldn’t see how. The stuff we were being taught still felt largely irrelevant to what we would be doing in Afghanistan or Iraq, which for some of us was less than a year away. The marching, the polishing, room inspections and water parades, digging trenches, assaulting East German villages and putting up bashas in woodblocks – I knew none of this was going on in Bastion or Basra, so why were we doing it?

My concern wasn’t that Sandhurst was teaching us skills for all eventualities, but that so far it seemed these eventualities were not the Afghan and Iraqi realities. And while lessons from the past should not be ignored, the current wars staring us hard in the face were hard to ignore too.

Sandhurst justifies this lack of contemporary relevance in its training by pointing out that it is a leadership academy and that the mission-specific gloss is taught after commissioning, by the units and corps cadets commission into. Second-lieutenants leaving Sandhurst are not propelled into the wider army with just a pip on their chests and shiny shoes; instead they are taken deep into the bosom of their new cap badges, held away from real soldiers to be trained further on young officers’ courses; the boys who sign up to
the infantry pack their bergens once more and head back to Brecon for more crawling. The engineers build bridges and then blow them up in Kent. The signallers fiddle with wiggly amps on the Jurassic coast and the pilots climb into the seat of a cockpit and try not to become too RAF.

As it was, on the few occasions we did receive some contemporary training at Sandhurst, it proved to be neither pertinent nor enjoyable. I could think of plenty of war skills that should feature higher up the Afghanistan checklist than dealing with NBC, but at Sandhurst it was the first modern-day training we were given.

NBC is Nuclear, Biological and Chemical warfare, and was undoubtedly selected to take prominence on the Sandhurst curriculum because of its eye-watering, lung-burning, head-boiling potential. I won’t deny that for Saddam’s Iraq this may have had some slim importance but Saddam was now dead, his weapons of mass destruction never existed and the only tasks left for the cadets from CC071 going to Iraq would be closing the doors and turning off the lights. Nevertheless, as we ran around the polo pitch panting and wheezing in our charcoal-lined chemical oversuits, I hoped to God that this wasn’t relevant training for war.

We were playing NBC rugby, although there was no chance of me actually seeing the ball through the lenses of the thick rubber gas mask I had strapped to my face. The sweat from the mid-August sun had turned to steam inside my mask, misting the lenses and obscuring my sight, while the tight seal restricted my breathing, rendering me completely incapacitated for any form of sport. Despite these disadvantages the match was still equal, as the players on both sides were clumsily stumbling around in their NBC suits playing this mal-coordinated sado-sport, fumbling for the ball as if in the dark. And we were happy to stay here, out in the midday sun, running around in four layers of clothing, with rubber gloves and boots on, because we knew that when the final whistle blew something much, much worse was coming next.

It was the gas chamber.

We weren’t allowed to call it that, but no matter how they dressed it up, as a ‘respirator testing facility’, or ‘NBC confidence room’, it was still a chamber in which we were about to get gassed. And the experience was as hideous as it sounds.

We’d long known that the little innocuous grey brick hut that was tucked away among the trees next to Range A would have to be visited at some point. And now, gasping and sweating, we queued outside it like condemned women, nervously waiting to see what would happen inside, each one of us hoping that we’d turn out to be in the statistical 1 per cent of people who are unaffected by the gas. The sweat we had worked up playing NBC rugby was part of the cruel conditioning before we went inside; the dampness on our skin and shortness of our breath would accentuate the symptoms caused by the gas, ensuring we could appreciate the full range of its effects.

And the full range of effects was utterly horrendous.

It was like being water-boarded with urine.

As the door shut behind us we held our breath and removed our gas masks, six of us standing inside a concrete bunker in the woods staring down at the small tablets of CS gas burning on a breeze block in the centre of the room. In front of me, CSgt Rattray was covering the exit, blocking the way to clean, fresh, leafy Surrey air. He turned to look at me with his gas mask on, and I could see a smile forming across his eyes behind the glass lenses.

‘Number? Rank? Name?’ the Rat asked in a muffled voice, prompting me to think and speak in the gaseous fug. Straight away I could feel the surface of my skin starting to tingle with a wasabi sting, as the delicate skin around my lips and eyes started to burn.

‘Whisky, one, zero, six, one, four, five, one. Officer Cadet Goodley,’ I blurted out, trying to hang on to the reserves of my saved breath, so that I wouldn’t have to draw any of the noxious air around me into my lungs.

‘And what is your favourite colour?’ he asked, attempting once more to make me gulp in a lungful of the potent gaseous cocktail.