Never Broken (3 page)

A
s I blinked my eyes open several times the pain in my head was just excruciating. At first I struggled to focus, then I saw a bedside table with some flowers. The small picture of Milly I always carried under my body armour close to my heart was propped against the vase and, looking down at my body, I became aware I was wearing a hospital gown and tightly tucked into a bed. After a few seconds the reality set in: I was back in the UK and safe. A wave of relief washed over me.

A nurse seemed to come from nowhere. She took my hand and said: ‘Hannah, you’re in Intensive Care at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. You’re safe and we’re going to make you better again. Squeeze my hand if you understand what I’m saying.’ I used all my strength to give her hand a tight squeeze, she smiled at me and with that, I drifted back off into sleep.

This was the pattern for the next few days in there as I slowly began to recover. I was in a sort of half-state between waking and sleeping, mainly because of the painkillers I’d been given. The times I was awake soon began to increase and it’s fair to say lying in bed gives you a lot of time for reflection. I was in a lot of pain with my injuries, but even then I had decided I needed to find the strength to fight back to good health: I had Milly and Jamie to think of, as well as my family, and I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, let them down. I found my memory drifting back in time to everything that had lead me to where I was that day.

It’s fair to say that when I first joined the Army I was more Private Benjamin than a serious recruit. But what life in the Army gives you is a grit and backbone that will get you through anything in life and I knew this was what would help me battle back now. Even as a little girl I was made for a career in the Army, although I thought I wanted to be a pharmacist. With three brothers: Hamish, who is three years younger, and the twins, Josh and James, who were born five and a half years after me, it was a male-dominated household and I was very much a tomboy. Pride in those who served in the Military had been instilled in us as both my mum, Ann, and dad, Mac, had met in 1973 at RAF Leconfield, near Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where Dad was an aircraft technician and Mum was a dental nurse. Throughout my childhood I’d spend hours playing ‘Armies’ with the boys at the bottom of our garden at Bourne in Lincolnshire, before we later moved to a village in Cumbria. I’d chase my brothers and friends with plastic guns, rolling around in the mud. Holidays and after school were taken up with adventure games, which more
often than not involved plastic guns. Mum and Dad bought me Barbie dolls but I wasn’t interested and instead loved my Knight Rider pedal car.

Day-to-day, home life was very traditional but Mum loved the outdoors and weekends would be spent orienteering and walking in the countryside, although probably, with hindsight, my parents were desperately trying to tire out four boisterous kids! Dad had a way about him that now I’ve been in the Military I recognise. He never needed to shout at us and underneath he was a big softy and a fantastic father, but when he told you to do something you knew you had to do it. His was a quiet authority that didn’t need a raised voice to make you act on it. Every weekend he would say: ‘Right, go and tidy your room.’ We’d all go and do it and then we’d wait and he would come up and inspect our efforts. The basis of it was personal discipline and taking care of your belongings but ‘room inspection’ is fundamental to Basic Training in the Army, so even as a child I was completing the first stages of my very own training.

Dad was also incredibly clever with his hands and he made us a go-kart he had fashioned from an old Silver Cross pram, powered by a two-stroke engine. We’d whiz around the local park and were the envy of the kids in our village. Then, one year, we had a flood in our home and the insurance company replaced all the downstairs floorboards and carpets. Dad used the wood to make the biggest treehouse you’ve ever seen, with all mod cons, including the old, ruined downstairs carpet, which he dried out. It was a good eight feet off the ground so I had to climb up to it from a long rope ladder and it was entirely carpeted.

My parents never pushed me to conform or become more
girly, instead encouraging me to be myself, so when I insisted on joining the Boy Scouts at fourteen years old, with two other girls, they supported me completely. My brothers were joining and when I found out all the brilliant things the Scouts did, I said, ‘Well, I want to be a Scout, too.’ I didn’t see why girls couldn’t do something which was so much fun, so I was accepted, along with two other girls from my village, as the first female Scouts in our troop. We kayaked in the Ardèche in France and went rock climbing; I even got a badge for tug-of-war. Back then, joining the Scouts as a girl was very unusual but even as a little girl, I was very much one of the boys and so when I joined the male-dominated environment of the Army I felt totally at home.

At sixteen I took a job working in Waterstones bookshop following my GCSEs. I wasn’t a nine-to-five sort of girl, though, and I yearned for a more exciting life, beyond the isolated community in Cumbria where my family lived. Desperate to spread my wings, a career in the Armed Forces appealed as a way of seeing the world and getting paid for it too. My parents were delighted and really supportive as they’d had great careers in the forces and thought I had exactly the right temperament and personality to do well. Crucially, Britain hadn’t been involved in any conflicts for years; Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t major crisis spots and most people had no idea where they were. So, at the age of seventeen, I applied for all three Services. The first thing you have to do is a BARB Test, which is a psychometric test, but it also looks at your academic ability. This determines if you can join and what job you can do within the Army, RAF or Royal Navy. I passed the test for all three.

What swung it in the end were two booming, gruff corporals
at the Army Careers Office in Barrow-in-Furness. They made the Army sound amazing, just like my childhood camping and orienteering weekends with the Scouts. So just like that I giddily signed on – clueless as to the realities of Army life. The Careers Office held a weekly running club, which I joined to prepare myself for one of the key elements of fitness: running a mile and a half in under thirteen minutes. They’d shout gentle encouragement at us when we were running, and I thought: ‘This is OK, I can handle this.’ How different can Army life be? Little did I know! At the age of seventeen I swore my Oath of Allegiance at Barrow-in-Furness Army Careers Office. I read the words from a piece of paper with a small group of others who were also signing up. Serving my country wasn’t on my mind until that moment, but when I stated the words, ‘I will serve Queen and country’ and it resonated with me deeply. I felt a real pride as I took the first major step into my new life.

Straight away I was technically in the Army, but I had a month to wait for my Basic Training to start so during that time I carried on with the running club. Now it was a different ball game completely as I was technically a new recruit; they started ordering me about a lot more and beasting me to make the timings on the runs. ‘Oh, this is harsh!’ I thought. Later, I realised they were getting me ready for what was coming next but the truth is, nothing prepares you for what you walk into when you start Basic Training in Winchester. Within minutes of being dropped off by my slightly tearful, yet proud parents, the other raw recruits and me were being yelled and shouted at like we’d never been before. I joined a group of terrified teenagers huddling together, scruffy as hell in our civvies and plastered with make-up. Straight away, we were thrown full-throttle into military training, aimed at
making us physically and mentally tough. The privileges we had once enjoyed as a ‘civvie’ didn’t apply anymore as we’d signed on the dotted line.

First, you are issued with your brand-new kit of everything you’ll need during your Army career: three sets of uniform; a nuclear, biological, chemical suit; a helmet; two pair of boots; your sports kit, consisting of two pairs of shorts and two T-shirts; trainers; socks; a hold-all for carrying it in; a roll mat and sleeping bag; your rifle and webbing, which you carry your magazines in. It’s all brand, spanking new and in packaging. Then you cart it through camp, which is like a Walk of Shame. Everyone knows you are the lowest of the low as the new recruits and all the while you are shouted at and firmly put in your place. The other soldiers make no bones about the fact they are in charge and you aren’t fit to lick their boots. You aren’t allowed to wear civvies. Instead, you either have to wear your Army camouflage gear or, if you aren’t in uniform, the only thing you are permitted to put on is an unflattering tracksuit you are issued with: Ron Hill leggings and a green sweatshirt. A cardinal rule is that you’re not allowed to wear your beret either, as you have to earn that; make-up is also banned. For the first week you are left reeling in shock.

I was in a mixed platoon, where boys slept on one floor and girls on another in rooms of six. Inevitably, where there’s a bunch of teenagers there is flirting, but it was always very childlike, just like at school. Interpersonal relationships within the platoon were completely forbidden and during Basic Training nothing ever happened as we were all too scared, and to be honest, you were kept so busy with PT, block inspections, cleaning your kit and kit inspections or
going to briefings and studying for tests that you were too tired for anything else, including sex. We weren’t allowed off camp to go drinking so the only source of booze open to us was a Naafi-run bar. No one bought any alcohol – we knew PT the next morning would be so gruelling it wasn’t worth risking a hangover.

For the first six weeks they break you down before building you back up again. We were never fast enough or tidy enough, and we didn’t march well enough. The instructors teach you exactly how to iron a crease down the front of your trousers and razor-sharp creases down your sleeves too. I’d done my own ironing since the age of sixteen, but I still had to learn how to present my kit. You are taught to march, stand to attention, salute and how to clean your rifle, put it together and care for all your kit. One pair of boots would have to be polished for ‘everyday’ wear, but you do something called ‘bulling’ with the second pair, which is where you put on a thick layer of polish for a few days, then you apply water and cotton wool over days and days in a circular motion before repeating the process again and again to get them to the really high shine you see on the regimental parades. Once you pass out of Basic Training everybody cheats and buys lacquer and sprays them instead, but until then your boots have to be immaculate and done the hard way.

Then there’s hours and hours of physical training to build you up for your first big test at the six-week mark: your first attempt at the Army Obstacle Course, which has elements of running, climbing, jumping, crawling and balancing with the aim of testing your speed and endurance. It’s an absolutely punishing schedule as no one has the necessary strength or endurance to do it; you just have to dig deep and persevere.

But even though it was hell, I loved it. Week by week, kids dropped out when they found they couldn’t hack it. I remember one got a knee injury and another just decided it wasn’t for him, but for me that was never an option. I never rang home and said: ‘Mum, please get me out of here!’ – I never wanted to, and I just got on with it.

But while I toed the line with pretty much everything, I’ve always had a rebellious streak and during Basic Training there was one rule I just couldn’t stick to, and that was not wearing any make-up. From the age of sixteen I’d never left the house without my ‘face’ on – brown eyeshadow, pink lipstick, foundation, black mascara and a peachy blusher. I wasn’t vain but Mum had taught me always to make the best of myself and I liked to be groomed as it boosted my confidence. At home I wouldn’t dream of going to the corner shop without lipstick, mascara and blusher on at the very least, so when we were ordered to have scrubbed, fresh faces it was never going to be something I could stick to. Every day I’d put on black mascara and a subtle sweep of peach blusher on my cheekbones and I seemed to get away with it for a while. When I got cocky in week three and tried to add some lip-gloss it was a step too far, though.

The instructor barked: ‘Are you wearing make-up?’ and ordered me to his office. He had a ‘pull-ups’ bar on the doorway and while he did his admin, he made me hang off it by my arms for ages. Each time I dropped off, he shouted at me to hang off it again until I was so physically exhausted I thought my arms would drop off and I couldn’t do it any longer.

His one mistake was he didn’t confiscate my contraband and even his punishment didn’t deter me – I just stuck to the blusher and mascara and, apart from when I was deployed
in Iraq, I never served a day in the Army without wearing at least some make-up. Of course, there were countless other occasions when someone barked: ‘Private, do you have make-up on?’ I’d say: ‘No, Sir’, then quickly go back, scrub my face and reduce the amount I had on, so I didn’t get caught out again.

Army punishments are always memorable and everyone goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid them. One night we managed to get hold of some contraband clear-spray lacquer to buff our floor for a room inspection at 6am the following morning. We polished feverishly until 4am, trying to get it shiny like a pin. But while the floor passed muster, they smelt a rat so not much else did. First, some dust was found on some pipes and then a plughole wasn’t sparkly enough. Each time they found something wrong the instructor bellowed: ‘Ten times round the block! Get away! Get away! Get away!’ and we’d have to run ten laps around camp before standing to attention in front of our beds again.

Then they moved to our lockers. You’d have beads of sweat as yours was inspected. At first, just like everyone else, I got the presentation of my kit wrong and so I spent a lot of time in stress positions – a favourite was holding yourself in a press-up position. Other times, if you’d been on exercise and you hadn’t scrubbed your mess tins until they were sparkling like brand new you knew you’d spend the next few hours doing a ridiculous amount of sit-ups. My worst punishment was a hundred press-ups outside in the pouring rain as I had failed a locker inspection – my clothes hadn’t been folded properly. An instructor stood next to me as I shouted out every single one in the downpour to make sure I completed it. Ultimately, it was all character-building stuff and I soon started to learn
the ‘tricks of the trade’ to get through. For instance, in order to get the arms of my uniform completely flat and the creases razor-sharp, one of the girls showed me how to cheat: sneaking hairgrips up the sleeves of my shirts in the locker so it would sit perfectly.