An Officer and a Gentlewoman (31 page)

Completing the circle I finally walked up the steps of Old College, and through the Grand Entrance as I had done with Deborah on our arrival all those months ago. Slow marching to the heartening sounds of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Once inside, the doors closed behind me, marking the end to my journey. I stood aside to make way for the adjutant, who followed us up the steps on his horse, waiting again in the same corridor I had been so nervous in eleven months ago. But this time I was laughing. Whooping with joy.

I had done it.

I had commissioned.

And what came next was real.

My eyes are closed. I can sense movement and hear voices around me but my eyes won’t open. They are too tired. In the background I can hear the dull hum of aircraft engines, a loud constant whirring that I can’t block out. My throat is dry and my head feels light; I should wake up to eat and drink, but it’s too much effort. I’m so weary my eyelids hang like lead. I have no idea how long we have been travelling and flying for. I feel drugged, zoning in and out like this, doped on exhausted relief and jet lag. I recall the aeroplane landing at one point, but I don’t know where; I must have slept through it. Maybe I dreamed it. We must have taken off again though because we are flying again now.

It is May 2009 and I’m coming home from Afghanistan.

I boarded a Hercules transport plane at Camp Bastion, and then the RAF Tristar at Kandahar again, making the same journey I took to Afghanistan but in reverse now. My hands and face are suntanned, and I have sand in my boots, but I don’t have that end-of-holiday feeling which normally accompanies a flight home. I’m mellow. At the front of the plane the casualty stretchers are not empty this time, a final lingering reminder as we boarded in the middle of the night of the brutality of war. The blue curtain that separates ‘first class’ is drawn shut this time, shielding the patient, doctors and nurses from view.

At that point, I’m not aware that the injured soldier is Lieutenant Mark Evison. Mark was at Sandhurst with me. He was in CC071. Now shot in the shoulder, he lies fighting for his life less than
eighteen months after the fireworks and joy of our commissioning. Sadly Mark died a few days later of his wounds in the military ward of a Birmingham hospital. His death was the first of our Sandhurst intake.

Slowly, I start to wake from my stupor as the cabin lights around me are switched on. I yawn and wince at the sudden discomfort in my back as I return my seat to its upright position in preparation for landing. Through the porthole window I can see flashes of green between gaps in the cloud below as the aircraft starts its descent. A flurry of white fluff obscures the view and then we are through the cloud, flying high over the Oxfordshire countryside and it is beautiful – lush and green and just perfectly lovely. Home has never looked so good. The trees are full of new fresh spring leaves, flowers are in bloom and Britain looks at its best. After the expansive dust of Afghanistan’s desert the verdant splashes of colour are tonic to my eyes.

Out of the airport terminal and driving home, I can’t help gazing with fixed eyes out of the window, observing the comings and goings of life as normal, taking it all in – a mother pushing a pram, children in school uniform gathered at a bus stop, a painter up a ladder with paintbrush in hand. Over the last few months, daily life has carried on regardless, but for me it has been on hold. As I departed Brize Norton in January I pressed pause, freezing still the life I left behind, but everything has continued despite my absence. The seasons have changed and the news has grown old. I feel like I have woken from a coma and the last four months simply haven’t happened to me. Around me the world looks the same, but after Afghanistan I feel it should somehow be different. A strange feeling lingers with me for days and weeks after I return, a heightened sense and emotion. Like walking out of the blackness of a cinema back into reality after a heart-rending film. I am giddy with unnecessary sentiments that those outside don’t feel.

I stop at a set of traffic lights and two businessmen cross the road in front of the car, sweating in their woollen pinstripe suits in
the May heat. My eyes follow them. I think back to when that was me, racing between meetings, and rushing back to the office to sit with a sandwich at my desk. I’m a different person now. Not fundamentally changed, but a better, more settled me. That something I was searching for when I worked in the City I have found now. The sense of purpose and worth. I stare out of the window at these mundane acts of normal everyday life and realize how much happier I am now. I have escaped. I am free of the London job I so hated. The ordinary. The grey. The bleak. Abandoning it all for the army was a great leap of faith but one I am grateful I gambled on.

Sandhurst was the best and worst experience of my life. It changed me. Subtly, not fundamentally. I’m still the same person, with the same manners and methods, but the experience improved the basic template of me. So much of what I was taught there seemed irrelevant: the marching, crawling, trench-digging and nuclear immediate action drill. I won’t use any of it again (technically I should use the marching again, but it will be to everyone’s benefit if I don’t). But it was the stuff I wasn’t taught that I learned at Sandhurst: the personal pride and stubborn resolve to keep going, to hold my head high and carry on because I can do it, whatever it is. The confidence and fierce self-belief that give drunk army officers in London nightclubs their arrogant name. The standards and morals to make the right decisions. Because Sandhurst can’t teach you how to solve every situation, but somehow when a soldier is in court for assaulting his neighbour, or on his knees because his wife has just left him, you know what to do. Because through all the room inspections, water parades and lessons in waiting Sandhurst actually works. It is ‘the finest command and leadership training course in the world’.

And at the end of it all I did OK.

Though traumatic and painful I successfully made the transition from civilian to soldier. I learned how to iron my uniform, fold hospital corners, dig a trench and survive a nuclear strike. And I
wrote it all down too. Because throughout Sandhurst every Officer Cadet was required to maintain a diary of their experience, usually written in incoherent scrawls at bedtime between when the ironing stopped and my head hit the pillow. These personal memoirs were then periodically collected in and read by the directing staff, presumably to look at our inner thoughts and check how we were coping.

I had never before kept a diary. I spent an entire Gap Year travelling around the world and never once kept an account of it for prosperity. I went through the hormonal development of my teens and turmoil of boarding school but never at any point wrote it down. But under orders at the Academy I chronicled it all and at the end of Sandhurst when the prizes were handed out I received the diary prize. Not a sword like the best cadet, or the trophies presented to the sportiest, but a certificate and handshake from the General, leaving a piece of silverware locked in a cabinet somewhere with my name engraved on it; a legacy of my time at the Royal Military Academy. The accolade was much mocked at the time, diaries are for girls and none of the boys wanted the honour, but that diary has now become this book, and I hope it has given you some insight into the behaviours and customs of the military.

As I stepped outside the familiarity of Sandhurst I realized that in many ways being there had been like looking through a letterbox at the real army. Peering through at a slim snapshot of army life. The morning after I commissioned I drove through the Academy gates for the final time, my head fuzzy with the after effects of champagne and my small Volkswagen Polo, crammed once more with my belongings. As the noise of the Commissioning Ball fireworks still rang in my ears, I watched Old College grow smaller and smaller in my rear-view mirror and looked ahead to my biggest challenge yet.

Soldiers.

Not the colour sergeants or sergeant majors we had met at Sandhurst, but real soldiers. Soldiers that I was expected to
command and lead. Soldiers that would make me proud and let me down. Soldiers that would make me laugh, and make me want to bang my head against the wall with frustration. Soldiers that would introduce me to life’s rich tapestry and teach me more about command, leadership and the pornography industry in just five minutes than any Sandhurst lecture.

A few months after returning from Afghanistan I am back inside the Square Mile again, sipping a cup of tea on Old Broad Street in the City, while I wait for Ann and Deborah. I’m feeling reflective as I watch the corporate slaves dashing back and forth. A copy of the FT tucked under one arm, a mobile phone glued to an ear. Occasionally one will pop out of an office doorway and scurry across the road to get a steaming corrugated card cup of takeaway coffee, before scampering back again like a mouse into its hole.

Not me. I have time to linger.

I stretch out my legs and cross them again beneath the coffee table, feeling mildly smug. I’ve escaped all this. I am no longer in captivity here, enslaved to the bonus pool, mortgage and share prices. I bit the bullet and made the change. I gambled with my future and it was worth the risk. However, it could so easily have all gone horribly wrong. I had known nothing about the military when I joined. I just knew I needed to get a grip and do something with my life, and fortunately I landed on my feet on the other side of the twelve-foot wall. For me the army fits.

Warming my hands around my teacup, I realize that joining the army hasn’t just been about a job either, it has become a way of life too. A way of life I am happy to be part of. In the forces I am now a member of a close-knit community in a way that employment in a London job never could be. The Army is more than just nine to five and a pay cheque at the end of each month. It defines who I am. And I’m proud to be part of it.

With the army I have rediscovered the passion that I lacked. The joie de vivre that had lain dormant since I left university. My
confidence and the energy that faded as each City year ticked by is back now. I feel alive. I have that sparkle in my eye and a reason to get out of bed each day. Because my raison d’être is no longer to make rich people richer. And my perceived happiness and success is no longer measured in money and material gain.

I jab a fork into the corner of my chocolate brownie, breaking off a piece and popping it in my mouth, just as Deborah arrives. She dumps her laptop on the sofa beside me and apologizes for being late.

‘So sorry, Hel. The meeting dragged on. All I wanted to do was just get the hell out of there, but the client was insistent we go through all the numbers one more time.’ Throwing her jacket over the laptop bag she heads over to the coffee counter. ‘Do you want anything else?’ she says over her shoulder.

‘No thanks,’ I call after her, just as Ann walks in with her BlackBerry to her ear. She gives me a little wave and points to the phone with a shrugging gesture that I take to mean the person at the other end is rambling tediously. Blowing me an air-kiss, she joins Deborah at the counter and I quickly eat another mouthful of my moreish chocolate brownie for fear of having to share it with them when they sit down and join me.

‘So? How was it?’ Ann says, sitting down next to me with a skinny decaf macchiato.

‘Come on. Tell all,’ Deborah adds. ‘Did you meet Charlie Boy? What was he like?’ she asks, plonking down her vanilla white caffé mocha on the coffee table in front of me so that she can rearrange her laptop bag and jacket on the sofa. I look at the two coffee mugs with their frothed milk and sprinkled cocoa. When did drinking coffee become so complicated? I think.

‘Yes. Prince Charles was there,’ I say. ‘He even gave me my medal. My dad was so proud. He absolutely loved it. I couldn’t tear him away at the end. He was busy taking photographs of everything.’ I undo the clasp on my handbag and open it up. ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ I say to them as I pull out a small black box with a
crown printed in gold on the lid. I hand it to Ann and she opens it up. I watch her face as she looks inside with an affecting broad smile.

‘Wow. That is so awesome,’ she says. ‘Your bling. Can I touch it?’

‘Yes, of course you can. Take it out of the box,’ I reply. Deborah leans in towards Ann and looks at the medal sitting inside the little box.

‘Oh, Hel, that’s so special. Well done you.’

I stab at another piece of chocolate brownie with my fork as Ann lifts the silver medal out of its case and holds it up by the colourful ribbon.

‘“For operational service. Afghanistan”,’ she says, reading the inscription. ‘And it’s got your name on it too: “CAPT H. V. GOODLEY”. That’s pretty cool, Héloïse.’ She hands it to Deborah.

‘Oh it’s quite heavy, Hel,’ Deborah says, weighing it in her hand. ‘Wow. Your very own bling.’

And this wasn’t the only ‘bling’ I now owned.

When I returned home from Afghanistan there was a parcel waiting for me. I unwrapped the brown paper and inside found a similar small plastic box to mine. Inside it, beneath layers of tissue, was one of my grandfather’s Second World War medals. At the age of ninety he had sadly died while I had been away in Afghanistan and I had been unable to return home for his funeral, instead standing at a memorial service in Camp Bastion for two more soldiers who had died in Helmand action. The medal he left me was his Burma Star, won fighting at a place called Kohima. During his life, my grandfather spoke little of his time in the army, joining in the silence of old soldiers, part of an entire generation who tried to forget by erasing the memory and deleting time. But he did once mention Kohima, a city that now lies in India but was viciously fought over in the Burma Campaign. Before I had started Sandhurst, he told me of Kohima and a carved stone memorial that now
stands there, inscribed on which are the words of the Kohima epitaph:

Holding my grandfather’s war medal, I realized that it would be a complete injustice to the men and women who sacrificed their tomorrows, not to make the most of our todays. They fought and died in the battles of the World Wars, not so that I should be trapped in a City job and London life I so loathed, but so future generations could live life to the fullest and make the most of opportunity.