An Officer and a Gentlewoman (28 page)

It might seem odd that we had managed to get this far without actually belonging to an army home. Without knowing where we were going to end up at the end of it all. It should have been decided long ago, but Sandhurst was wary of removing this incentive carrot. The constant threat of receiving a negative report that failed to get you into the regiment of your choice was there to motivate us through the hours of pointless digging, crawling and polishing. Because throughout our time at the Academy our
performance was ranked against each of the other cadets in the Platoon and Company, apportioning us by our shoe shining and marching abilities into thirds; namely top, middle and bottom. The constant danger of languishing in this dreaded ‘bottom third’ was intended to deter us from hopping in our cars mid-week and racing up the M3 to London for a night on the tiles, undoing all the indoctrination by fraternizing with carefree civilians and alcohol. For if your report placed you in the bottom third you would be overlooked by the more popular regiments, leaving you more than standing scruffily skewiff on parade the next morning, but potentially deciding the direction of the rest of your military life. Movement between these thirds was fluid and changed according to the season and Captain Trunchbull’s whim. Some of those who had once shot to the top of the class for their folding and hospital corners in the Junior Term later found themselves battling it out at the bottom and being crossed off regimental visit lists.

The regimental application and selection process was like the university UCAS system – you applied to four regiments and then this got whittled down to two, with whom you interviewed. For a week these interviews consumed us, looming in the background as a steady distraction, hanging over each one of us like A-level results. The outcome would potentially dictate the rest of our lives, deciding where we would be spending our military careers and which Army family would be ours. The stakes were high and competition for top places was fierce. People withdrew into their rooms to prepare, closing their doors to sit in peace while they learned random facts like who the Colonel in Chief was, what battle honours had been won and what music accompanied the corps march.

I’ve had plenty of job interviews in my life, as I bounced unsatisfied between City employers, searching for something I would never find inside the Square Mile. I’ve even sat in the interviewer’s chair too, recruiting the next graduates touting their souls into corporate slavery. When I worked at HSBC we received
over a hundred CVs for just one place on our team. A pile of one hundred glowing, near-identical CVs to sift through, mounting in my boss’s in-tray. And, when it came to choosing those he wanted to see for an interview, the boss simply picked up the top half of the CV pile and threw it in the bin, commenting that he ‘didn’t want anyone who wasn’t lucky’, turning to the ‘lucky’ remaining CVs to recruit from.

But interview experience didn’t calm my nerves for the regimental selection board, as I stood anxiously in the corridor with seventeen other hopefuls awaiting the outcome of interviews for just eight available places in the Army Air Corps. The interview process that morning had been so quick, just ten minutes in the interview room. Ten short minutes to make my mark on the panel of officers who would decide my future. I had learned the Corps march (Recce Flight) and who the Colonel in Chief was (the Prince of Wales), I’d even learned the Corps battle honours, but I didn’t know which third I was in, top, middle or bottom. Captain Trunchbull hated me so much she hadn’t even given me a report. But as it turned out that didn’t matter, because in reality the regiments already knew who they wanted. Because in reality the work had already been done months ago on visits to Officers’ Messes and at hosted drinks evenings. In reality it was decided by how well you fitted in the mess bar with the other officers, and whether the recruiting Colonel thought your face fitted, rather than what Captain Trunchbull thought of you. The recruiting officers knew that being good at Sandhurst wasn’t a measure of how well you would cope in the real army. With real command, of real soldiers, in real wars. It was not the same as shooting at Gurkhas in Brecon or digging a trench in Norfolk. And where I was going there wasn’t going to be any crawling or digging, because I was joining the Army Air Corps.

The Army Air Corps was my first choice. Not because the sky blue beret complemented my blond hair, nor because I was seduced by the ego of a pilot, but because I quickly realised that being in the Army Air Corps would guarantee I would never spend another
night shivering in a wet soggy hole. Because after eleven months of digging and crawling I wanted a military career that took me as far away as possible from cold showers and boil-in-a-bag ration pack horrors. Because in the Army Air Corps there would be no wary face paint, no sleeping in a shell-scrape hole. No shouting, no marching and no National Anthem at dawn. And because any time I had spent with the Army Air Corps I felt entirely at home, unlike I’d ever felt at work in the City.

With a confirmed regimental home we could start thinking about the future. About our first postings, our first operational deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, our new homes and new lives. Behind closed doors those who had secured places began to shape their new berets, looking at the reflection of the final Sandhurst product in the mirror. I booked a fitting with the tailor to be measured up for my mess dress and Merv, Wheeler and I beamed with the excitement of a wedding dress fitting as we fingered fabrics and swished taffeta around the military tailor’s shop, giggling excitedly.

Mess dress is the traditional evening dress worn at formal occasions, regimental dinner nights and balls, and is basically a very grandiose drinking suit. For the men it is the stuff of Jilly Cooper readers’ fantasies, with high-waisted, very tight trousers worn over polished black riding boots complete with ornamental brass spurs. But although dashingly attractive, what Jilly Cooper doesn’t divulge is that at the end of the night mess dress is also impossible to strip off a drunk man. Each regiment adopts a subtle variation on the mess dress theme, marking themselves out with differing coloured jackets and accoutrements. Some, especially among the cavalry, are incredibly ostentatious and their mess dress can set a young officer back as much as £6,000, for the finest doe fur and gold thread weave.

For women, mess dress consists of a short woollen jacket that fastens at the neck and cuts away to reveal a Victorian style tea gown underneath, which is constructed from yards of billowing
taffeta silk, and poufy netting to create a puffed-up meringue wedding dress effect. It was like something from a childhood princess fantasy, to be worn while trapped in a castle tower awaiting Prince Charming, and the whole outfit was beautifully tailor-made using rich fabrics. This was why we hadn’t joined the RAF.

Standing on top of a stout wooden block in the centre of the tailor’s shop, Mr Fitz Herbert fussed about me with a measuring tape, winding the long tape around me. Sucking between his teeth he made a whistling sound as he wrote my essential statistics down on a scrap of paper.

‘We put plenty of extra material into the seams for future adjustments,’ he said, jotting down my hip measurement in a squiggling scrawl with his pen.

‘Oh,’ I said, looking down at him from my podium. ‘I hope I won’t need to use any of that.’

‘If I get posted to Germany the threat of beer and bratwurst might necessitate an adjustment,’ Merv said, chuckling. Merv had been accepted into the Royal Signals and her mess dress was a modern slim-line fit, which would be less concealing than my acres of fabric.

‘Have you seen these?’ Wheeler said, pulling out a sliver of red silk from the puffed pagoda sleeve of her Royal Artillery mess dress gown. ‘The attention to detail is incredible. I’m never going to be allowed to take my jacket off, so no one will ever even see this.’

‘And the silk buttons at the back,’ I said, stepping down from the block to make way for Merv to be measured.

‘Next up,’ Mr Fitz Herbert said, drawing a line on his scrap of paper underneath my measurements as Merv stepped up onto the platform.

‘It’s such a lot of effort for something you’re only going to wear just to get drunk in,’ Merv said, frowning at me as Mr Fitz Herbert measured her bust.

‘They’re like blue wedding dresses,’ Wheeler said, floating fabric through her hands.

‘What happens with our pips?’ I asked. ‘The second-lieutenants’ pips on the shoulders.’

‘You cover them up,’ Merv said. ‘Until midnight. And then you can reveal them, as you commission.’

‘We officially commission at midnight,’ Wheeler said. ‘Midnight on 14 December.’

I liked the sound of that.

All this meant that by the time we deployed on Exercise Broadsword we already felt tantalizingly there. My new Army Air Corps beret was perched on a shelf back in New College, I had my start date and a letter from the Regimental Colonel welcoming me to the fold. Which is why it was even more devastating to have the carpet now whipped from beneath your feet like the Platoon Donkey had. To have all this pulled away from you when it was so tangibly near, having been built up by the excitement of dress fittings and ordering corps socks. This foretaste and proximity to the final whistle made the disappointment of “back terming” even more tragic.

I couldn’t have joined the Platoon Donkey back in Inters again.

But I didn’t need to, because I was finally on the home straight.

‘Miss Goodley, you take command for this one,’ SSgt Walker said, as I stood lined up along with the rest of Eleven Platoon in three sweaty rows. ‘You take the lead and we’ll see if you can improve the time, this time around.’

‘Yes, Staff,’ I said.

We were at the start of the assault course, formed up as smartly as you can be when you are exhausted and just want to lie down. It was still early morning and weak late-autumn sunlight was filtering through the leaves of the tall trees around us, casting mottled shadows onto the muddy earth below. Rising out of the ground behind us were the high metal bars and rope nets of the ‘confidence course’: an array of knee-trembling challenges set three storeys above the security of the firm ground below. Beside lay the muddy shore of the lake around which the Sandhurst assault course was laid out, following a track that wound its way through the woodland trees.

We gathered ourselves and stood poised, at the start line. Through ten months of practice we had honed this down to a slick manoeuvre now.

Sgt Walker blew a short sharp blast on her whistle and like game-show contestants we were off. We raced up a ramp and onto the top of a six-foot wall then one by one we ran along it, leaping off at the other end like lemmings off a cliff. Then down the track to the next challenge, the rope swing, each person jumping forwards onto the end of a rope and gliding through the air over the cold
waters of the stream below, sloshing onto the bank at the far side and then picking themselves up and running on again. Climbing, hopping, swinging, crawling, jumping, the whole platoon working its way over the obstacles and through the trees. Everyone called out as they went, like chimpanzees swinging in the trees, making noises of encouragement and instruction. We ran from the cargo net, to the monkey bars, to the stepping-stones and water tunnels. Dived through windows and crawled on our belt buckles under the cargo netting. We ran around the course with our helmets and webbing on and rifles strapped to our backs, adding a layer of awkwardness to overcoming each hurdle. It was like the final round of
Gladiators
but with firearms and mud.

SSgt Walker trotted along beside us, scrutinizing our technique and clasping a stopwatch in the palm of her hand. She shouted at us to keep up the pace.

As she had appointed me to command this attempt I too ran back and forth shouting encouragement to the platoon.

‘Come on, guys. Keep going,’ I called as each person ran over the see-saw bridge, dropped off at the far end and raced on towards the high-and-low beams. ‘That’s it, all the way. Come on, keep going.’ This was the third time that we had been around the assault course already this morning. That was three times over the twelve-foot wall before most people had even finished their breakfast.

And it was the twelve-foot wall that was our assault course nemesis, our equivalent of the Gladiators’ ‘Travelator’. Our eliminator.

At five foot seven tall, I was slightly above average height among the girls of Eleven Platoon. The tallest was Wheeler at six foot and the shortest was Lea at just five foot one. So when faced with the brick face of the twelve-foot wall the sums just didn’t add up for us. It may have been an attainable challenge for the strapping six-foot-tall boys at Sandhurst, but for us it was nigh impossible. We kicked and squealed, grunted and strained, before languishing in a defeated heap at the bottom. We lost our tempers
with one another as people were left hanging, their muscles trembling as we tried to establish a technique that worked. After two terms and ten months of trying, the successful method the platoon eventually developed unfortunately involved me being pushed up first, much like my ‘point man’ experience when advancing to contact. Then, once I was in position at the top, it was my job to subsequently start hauling people up one by one until my arms had been drawn out of their sockets and I was left unable to raise them above my head the next morning. As a result the assault course was always where I discovered new muscle groups that I had never before known, and after a few rounds of tackling the obstacles like this they would subsequently ache for days, leaving me incapacitated and struggling to put my hair back into its regulation bun the next morning.

Once over the twelve-foot wall we were on the home straight. A few ditch jumps, a long leopard crawl, then a leap, skip, hop and sprint back to where we had started. Each one of us came racing in, panting over the finish line. SSgt Walker stood there with the stopwatch poised in her hand and, as the last person came in, she pressed stop and stared at the time, her expression giving no clues as to whether we had beaten our target or not. The platoon stood silently in front of her, puffing in the cold morning air. Lined up back into three orderly ranks, our faces were red as we wheezed for air. Our chests heaved up and down, expelling hot breath that turned to mist in the morning chill, forming an opaque cloud around us.

‘Well done, ladies,’ she said, looking up from the stopwatch. ‘Eleven minutes and forty-four seconds. That’s a big improvement.’ There was a low murmur of approval from the platoon as we realized that we had just cracked the twelve-minute barrier. ‘Now take on some water and catch your breath, I want you to do it again in five minutes,’ SSgt Walker continued, and at that the murmurs turned to sighs. We were used to this by now. SSgt Walker liked to thrash us to within an inch of our lives. We were already exhausted
and knew that had just been our best effort around the course, but this was how SSgt Walker liked to push us, it was all part of the Sandhurst approach.

I glugged down some water from my water bottle, feeling it quench my core, happy to let dribbles spill out and cool my face. The sun was starting its climb in the sky and below the tree canopy the shadows were shortening. It was going to be a beautiful crisp autumnal day, one where I would be grateful for a job like this that took me outside, away from the confines of a desk and grey office drudgery. I closed my eyes and tilted my face up towards the sun that was shining down on me through a crack in the leaves above. As the weak heat warmed my cheek, I smiled a satisfied smile.

‘Miss Goodley, you can remain in command for this one,’ SSgt Walker shouted over to me, snapping me from my pleasant moment back to the assault course.

‘Yes, Staff,’ I acknowledged again.

‘And this time I want you to do it in silence, ladies,’ she said, resetting her stopwatch with a series of audible bleeps. ‘Happy?’

‘Yes, Staff,’ everyone replied in unison.

SSgt Walker waited until we were ready again, back into three orderly ranks on the start point, and then she put the whistle to her lips and blew a penetrating blast that sent us running once more. Up the ramp and on top of the six-foot wall, running along it, we then jumped down again, picked ourselves up and ran straight onwards to the rope swing. Grabbing hold of a rope, each girl glided through the air over the stream once more and splashed into the bank at the far side, then on again, hopping, skipping, jumping. Like last time I ran back and forth beside them calling out words of encouragement and giving instructions to coordinate the effort.

‘Wheeler, left foot. Left foot lower and you’re in,’ I called, directing Wheeler to a foothold as she scrambled over the cargo net. This time everyone else remained silent as SSgt Walker had requested, and mine was the only voice heard. The lone voice of
command. Rushing through the trees, the platoon continued to follow each other over the obstacles in convoy, like ants racing silently home to their nest. And as we completed the twelve-foot wall for the fourth and hopefully final time that morning, SSgt Walker stood waiting at the finish line with her stopwatch. And as the final girl stumbled in, crossing the finish in front of her, she pressed the red stop button with her thumb and stared at the digital figures on the watch face.

It must have taken us longer this time. Fourth time around was never going to be record-beating. She raised her head to look at us, a mordant smile on her lips.

‘Twelve minutes ten. Slower, ladies, but still a good effort. Well done,’ she said, dropping the stopwatch on its cord around her neck and walking towards us. She paced along the front rank until she reached where I was standing at the end, and there she stopped, her boots coming to a halt in front of me. She swung around and looked me in the eye, an evil grin crossing her lips. ‘In the lake, Miss Goodley,’ she said nodding her head towards the assault course lake.

What?

I didn’t understand what she meant.

‘Miss Goodley, I asked for that attempt to be completed in silence, did I not?’ she said.

‘Yes, Staff,’ I replied.

‘So why could I hear your shouting voice all the way around?’ she asked.

‘But—’ I started to explain before she cut me off.

‘Get in the lake, Miss Goodley,’ she said, that sly grin returning as she nodded her head towards the lake once more.

Was she serious? I had been in command. How else was I supposed to command the platoon around the assault course? Using sign language? I had no choice. Shrugging off my webbing and handing my rifle to Merv, I walked towards the lakeshore. Looking back over my shoulder, I could see the platoon lined up,
their heads moving and jostling, trying to get an uninterrupted view of the unfolding spectacle.

The lake was dark and still as I approached. Shaded by the surrounding trees, its surface was grey and uninviting. As I reached its edge, I took a step from the dry shore and lowered one of my boots into the murky waters, feeling it drawn into the fine squelching mud beyond the waterline. My boot easily sank into the sludge at the lake’s bottom and, as I took another step forwards, I began to feel the cold water seeping in, trickling through eyelets and folds in the leather. As I continued further, I felt more water absorbing into my woollen socks, reaching my skin with a cold chilling sting.

I waded in until my boots were sodden and the water level reached my calves, then I turned around to look at SSgt Walker and the amused smiles of the rest of the platoon.

‘Keep going, Miss Goodley,’ SSgt Walker shouted, folding her arms contently across her chest.

She was enjoying this.

I carried on, feeling the icy water rise further up my calves and over my knees. How far was she going to take this? I thought wet boots would have been sufficient punishment for talking when I shouldn’t have been, but SSgt Walker was making an example of me here. As I sank deeper, the murky lake water started to work its way up my thighs and I began to feel somewhat unjustly treated by this punishment. I stopped again as the water level lay just below my crotch, and hesitated, hoping this was enough to call me out now.

‘All the way, Miss Goodley.’

Christ no. All the way in. I took another stride forwards and my boot got sucked further into the deep silt on the lakebed. Entering the slow chilling waters like this was like the agony of peeling off a plaster, the slower and more drawn out, the more pain I experienced. I should have just run straight in. Behind me I could feel thirty eyes on my back, watching as I lowered myself into the lake. This
wouldn’t have happened in my City job. The water was at my waist now, and I gasped as I felt the prickling bite of frozen water against the skin of my stomach.

‘Keep going, Miss Goodley.’

Slowly the water rose up my torso, enveloping my body. Arms. Chest. Shoulders. Neck. I paused again, waiting for her to finally let me come out.

‘All the way, Miss Goodley.’

And with that I held my breath and finally dunked my head below the water, springing back out again gasping for air as the cold shock flushed the wind from my lungs. Behind me there was a round of applause as the girls of Eleven Platoon laughed and clapped at my misfortune.

I couldn’t see the funny side.

I waded out and squelched my way back to the platoon where Merv patted me on the back and handed me my rifle with an amused smile. I took it and picked up my webbing, slinging it back onto my back and fastening it around my waist. Standing in a clearing among the trees, I could feel the sunshine on my face again, warming my shivering cheeks. I briefly closed my eyes and tilted my head towards it, letting out another satisfied smile. Despite the goosebumps and mud pooling in my boots, I still wanted to be here more than behind the desk of a London office.

Sandhurst ends on an exuberant high, with friends and family gathered around you, champagne corks popping, fireworks crackling and the sounds of a big band playing. The whole day was a jubilant, unforgettable occasion that is etched deep in the annals of my memory for me to reminisce about as I grow old. Clichéd as it sounds, the day I commissioned still remains one of the best days of my life. And it needed to be, because I required it to blot out our last final act at the Academy. Our farewell swansong. The final curtain call at the end of eleven long months. I needed it to
exorcise my exercise demons, because before the extreme high of commissioning, came the low of Final Ex.

Traditionally the final exercise at Sandhurst is designed to simulate deployment to a theatre of war. Cadets board coaches and instead of travelling to Thetford or Brecon they arrive at Brize Norton to board RAF planes which take them to Cyprus, Canada or France, in the same way that months later these same planes will take them to Iraq, Afghanistan or beyond. Passports are added to the packing list and foreign currency drawn for nights of R&R celebration at the end. Because it doesn’t matter how miserable digging a hole is, doing it abroad, on foreign soil, somehow brings a touch of glamour that extracting spades of clodded mud in Brecon can’t. And we’d heard good things about the final exercise: barbecues on the beach in Cyprus, parties with American Marines in Edmonton, or wine rations in France. So spirits were deeply disheartened when we learned that CC071’s final exercise wouldn’t be taking us overseas. Nor in fact would we even be venturing across the border into Scotland or Wales, because our last act at Sandhurst would see us barely leave Surrey. And although technically new to us, Salisbury Plain was just as bleak and depressing as Brecon and Thetford had ever been. If not worse. And as soon as we’d seen the December weather forecast any remaining exercise joie de vivre was quickly erased.