An Officer and a Gentlewoman (8 page)

We would line up in the classroom dressed for war, helmets and combat webbing on, rifles slung across our chests waiting for
the colour sergeant
9
to shout out the command: ‘For inspection port arms!’

Safety catch, change lever, sights, cock the weapon, conduct the three-point check.

‘Clear ease springs.’

Release the working parts forward, fire off the action, apply safety catch and close the dust cover.

It was all the basic rudimentary stuff of an OTC drill night or cadets’ weekend, practised in TA Centres up and down the country weekly. Around me all the girls confidently carried out the movements; they knew where the safety catch was, how to cock the weapon and what they were looking for when peering inside. I took a little more tuition.

‘Come on, Miss Goodley,’ the colour sergeant would chivvy to me as the rest of the class waited while I fumbled helplessly with the cocking handle. ‘We don’t have all day for you to work out your arse from your elbow.’

We also learned what to do when firing it on a windy day and how to strip the rifle apart and clean it. We learned how to ‘bomb up’ a magazine with thirty rounds of ammunition in sixty seconds and practised aiming shots at posters of screaming Wehrmacht storm troopers in the dry indoor warmth. It was all clinical and surreal. Lying on the cold hard floor of the classroom, elbows uncomfortably pressed onto concrete, didn’t bear any proximity to the rifle’s purpose of killing. Danger and death were removed and that suited me just fine.

I liked skill at arms. I liked feeling slightly wary in the clean comforts of a classroom. I liked being separated from the drill square and my ironing board. I liked lying on the floor and looking through the weapon’s sights while closing both eyelids instead of one for a nano-sleep. And I liked that Colour sergeant
Bicknell, our instructor, was a great big softie and would sneak chocolate biscuits in for us and provide updates on
Celebrity
Big
Brother
(Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty were apparently having as bad a time as us).

In those very early days at the Academy we were all strangers. Some of the cadets knew each other from university or school, but on the whole we were on our own. For those first few nights I would get into my bed and stare into the unfamiliar darkness around me, feeling quite alone in the strange surroundings. A strange room, strange people, a strange way of life. It wasn’t like starting any other new job and harder than the first days at a new school. At the end of the day, there could be no retreat back to the domestic comforts and relaxed surrounds of home; I was trapped here, along with everyone else. But as the days progressed we soon got to know each other, as numbers became names and faces became characters.

There was Merv, the institutional veteran who knew it was all a game. There was Evans who had already served as a soldier in Iraq, and showed me how to fold hospital corners. There were Gill and Gray who flanked me on parade, and Rhodes who was an ironing-folding whizz and the room inspection queen. Allinson was in my skill-at-arms class and would whisper helpfully to me as I fumbled through the drills and Lea was the naughty one in our number, always being punished with press-ups for her misdemeanours. So despite starting out on my own, I wasn’t alone for long as we were lumped together in the thick of it and friendships began to form.

The average age was around twenty-three, as most people typically arrived following university, or after serving some time in the ranks as a soldier. And at twenty-seven I was the oldest in Eleven Platoon, though not the oldest in CC071, as a couple of the boys neared their thirtieth birthdays. At the opposite end of the age spectrum, there was young pup Peters, who was just
eighteen, having joined straight from school. While at times I found her schoolgirl naivety frustrating as she still flirted with the new excitement of alcohol and boys, the large age gap between us didn’t matter. We were both in it together and indeed in those first few weeks Peters was a better and more experienced cadet than me, as she was already a hardy Army Cadet Force veteran. I found my older age to be irrelevant at Sandhurst and its anomaly was not as unusual as you may first think, since more and more people like myself are making the career U-turn and joining the army. Barristers, bankers, teachers, lawyers – plenty jump ship to enlist. In the boys’ platoons there was even a former professional surfer and Singapore nightclub stripper.

One lesson we quickly learned in those first few weeks was that our skills were varied, and in order to get through the commissioning course we were going to have to work together as a team. Those who could fold folded, those who could iron ironed and those who could do drill showed the rest of us, as the platoon clubbed together realizing that collectively we were greater than the sum of our parts. The fostering of this team spirit is one of the marvels of the training process we were in. Sandhurst forced us to build a team, otherwise we would never be able to reach our goal. We were all in it together and all had to muck along. Unfortunately for me I was still searching for my talent to share; I couldn’t do any of the things that mattered in those first few weeks and became reliant on the others to help me out, leaving me feeling like the platoon’s handicap.

Among my many ineptitudes was shoe shining.

As you might imagine, the military is big on shiny shoes. The sergeants who ran Sandhurst were like magpies drawn to glint and shine. Brass glistened, buttons twinkled, metal shone and floors were polished. And shiny shoes were an especial favourite. Hours were spent on it. And the bane of achieving and maintaining a glistening mirrored surface that SSgt Cox could see her face in was continuous, as we scuffed it away each day on the drill square.
We were all issued with two pairs of lace-up brogues, one black and one brown, which were made of dull leather; our task was to convert this into a sparkling patent shine. So each evening when the marching and shouting had stopped, we spent hours in ‘bulling parades’ trying to perfect it. The entire platoon sat on the floor in the corridor outside our rooms, passing around contraband sweets, patiently applying layers of shoe polish and making gently sweeping circles with a damp cloth in an effort to achieve the smooth glassy surface required to pass SSgt Cox’s scrutinizing eye. My shoes spent precious more time on my hands than feet as they assumed almost religious properties. But shoe polishing is a black art and proved to be something else I was incapable of, Merv and Allinson taking it in turns to make the magic happen for me.

Even Sunday wasn’t a day of rest at Sandhurst.

We were given the luxury of a brief lie-in until 7 a.m., but straight after breakfast were lined up on parade for a service in the Academy Chapel and, this being Sandhurst, the occasion still involved ironing, polishing, marching and an inspection, this time of us.

Inspections of our turnout were regular and, as well as perfectly pressed clothes and shiny shoes, our hair came in for scrutiny too. Large quantities of hairspray and hair gel, not seen since the eighties, were used to glue each stray strand to our heads in a slicked-back bun like those of SSgt Cox and Captain Trunchbull, which were held tightly with a hairnet. For church a forage cap was perched atop, which refused to sit squarely on my head, insisting on drifting askew.

Captain Trunchbull would arrive smartly in her Blues, sword clinking by her side, to take the inspection, as we all stood stiffly to attention in the freezing cold. She would slowly move along the ranks, picking fluffs of dust, strands of hair and adjusting forage caps, as we all stood chattering with cold until the purpose
of messing us around on a Sunday morning had been achieved and we were gratefully dismissed inside the Chapel. Once inside the men had to remove their hats but we ladies wore ours, to great advantage. When tipped slightly forwards on our heads the forage cap peak masked your eyes, so with head bowed in prayer no one need know that I was having a sneaky sleep. God knew I was in need of it.

Sunday didn’t stop there either and after lunch we put on our most restrictive uncomfortable clothes for running in and went orienteering. Thick cardboard cotton rugby shirts were tucked into olive, high-waisted trousers that held water when wet, clinging to the skin, and were called ‘light-weights’ with irony. And so, with compass and map in hand, and dressed like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five we trotted off into the woods in search of checkpoints. In the first few weeks, the orienteering courses were run around the grounds of the Academy, but they later progressed to outside in the surrounding area and this involved something of great excitement – leaving the Academy.

All 270 cadets boarded a convoy of coaches that snaked its way out of the Academy gates. We peered out of the window with wonderment at normal life, like shrouded East German communists crossing Checkpoint Charlie. Everyday people walking the dog, shopping at Tesco, holding hands and talking on mobile phones. No one was marching, men had beards, people wore denim and clothes without creases. I gazed longingly at them, deeply jealous of their ordinary freedom.

Sundays also brought a small slice of faux-freedom to look forward to each week, as in the evenings we were afforded the opportunity to run our car engines over, to prevent the batteries from being as dead as we would be at the end of week five. Every Sunday night, in the darkness, for half an hour the Academy roads became gridlocked as cars cruised slowly around camp adhering to the twenty miles per hour speed limit. Each week I would savour this moment, turning up the volume on the Girls
Aloud CD, singing loudly and biting the heads off the jelly babies Deborah had left in the glovebox. There, behind the wheel of my car, I felt normal again: no ironing, no polishing, no marching, no one shouting at me. For just a short while I was cocooned in a blissful bubble.

The crippling routine in these first five weeks was endless and incessant. Days fused together as January became February and I lost track of time, falling out of touch with the outside world. Our days seemed filled with the most inane brainless activities: hospital corners, smiling socks, shining shoes, hairspray and fluff. I couldn’t see how any of this was readying me for the challenges of war, or what exactly it was teaching me about command and leadership. It all felt so meaningless and required zero intellectual concentration; inside my head my brain was shrivelling to an obedient, saluting, nodding nothing as we were becoming institutionalized. We all slept in identical bedrooms, wore identical clothing, behaved in an identical manner and were being prescribed an identical way to live our lives. To stand out was a dangerous heresy. Independent free thought was discouraged, as we were being turned into submissive ordersobeying clones. I began to question what I was doing here. Had I made the right decision giving up a well-paid City career for this? I wasn’t even good at any of it.

As a military virgin I was struggling too, everything was new to me, and I was pretty terrible at all the important stuff: marching, saluting, shoe shining, weapon handling. At least the others had the prescience of OTC or Cadets so their learning curve wasn’t as steep and they already knew how to play the game, but I was floundering like a fish on a line and it was draining my self-confidence. I couldn’t adjust. I craved some individual freedom and, having been accustomed to vague successes in life, I found it particularly difficult being placed firmly at the bottom of the class. I began to sense that I wasn’t
quite cut out for life in the army after all and maybe years of Excel boredom were my destiny.

One evening after another pointless day of marching and being shouted at, I came back to my room utterly deflated. Physically and mentally exhausted, my self-confidence was at an all-time low, shattered to pieces. I began to despair. I closed the door behind me, sat on the edge of my bed and wept. Life was thoroughly miserable. Sniffling into a tissue I considered how demeaning it all was. I was being treated like a badly behaved child: pocket money stopped and banished to tidy my room. My liberty and privilege were denied. I did as I was told and there was no apparent reward. As I sat on my bed with my head in my hands, I realized that I’d made a huge mistake in joining the army. I was wretchedly unhappy here, and couldn’t comprehend a whole eleven months of this unrelenting drudgery. More tears welled as I seriously contemplated leaving. It was obvious that Sandhurst simply wasn’t for me. I leaned over and plucked another fresh tissue, and blew my nose. As I fumbled with the wrinkled white tissue between my fingers I decided that I would persist until the first leave weekend. Then, as I relaxed in abstract freedom away from the intensity of the Academy, I could make my decision on whether to return or drop out. Until then I would grin and bear what they threw at me.

And unfortunately it was all about to get worse as this proved not even to be my nadir.

On the Friday of the third week I woke clammy with sweat and inside my head was foggy and befuddled. My limbs were weak and aching. I felt dreadful. I struggled to stand to attention outside the sergeant major’s office for the morning ‘sick parade’ (the army even make the frail and feverish parade) before traipsing to the Academy Medical Centre. I barely had the energy to sit and lay on the floor of the waiting room until a nurse thrust a thermometer in my mouth. Forty degrees. I had a high fever. Nauseous and 
pallid, I was ‘bedded down’ in the ward upstairs above the doctors’ surgery, where I was to lie for three days sweating it out of my body.

With sickness came a break from the training that I should have been grateful for. I should have appreciated the respite and valued time away from the room inspections and drill square. I should have lain there taking comfort from the fluffy duvet and a bed I wasn’t required to get out of, let alone iron and make. I should have enjoyed my days in bed with toast and Jeremy Kyle, but flashing hot and cold, surrounded by sickness, was even more depressing than the martinet regime. Being in the Army is all about virility, health and fitness. It’s about strong young men and women bounding with energy and vigour, society’s peak of physical prowess, not high temperatures and feverish sweats. Being ill doesn’t fit the army image. It looks weak, and I felt like an outcast separated from my platoon. I lay in bed woefully bored, wallowing in self-pity, fighting the flu, my desolation spiralling, until I was well enough to be discharged and rejoin the training.