The riot was essentially a legitimized fight; a scrap between two sides. One armed with potatoes and petrol bombs, the other with batons and shields. I had never before been involved in a fight. I have witnessed fights, usually on a Saturday at pub closing time, but I’ve always stuck to the avoidance technique I learned as a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl when confronted with the swinging fists of a brawl. Back then I was walking into town on a Wednesday afternoon with my friend Camilla. We had just finished netball practice and were wearing our compulsory school blazers that clearly marked us out as public school posh girls. Wednesday afternoon was one of the few occasions during the week when we were allowed outside the confines of the school grounds, and a hundred metres ahead of us another group of girls from the year above were also making the pilgrimage to Woolworths to buy Bootlaces and Nerds. They were much cooler than Camilla and me and were smoking casually as we crossed the park and calling to a group of boys who were lounging around a bench. The path wiggled its way across the park, around beds of rose bushes and a duck pond before joining the pavement that ran along the edge of a main road. We exited the park on to this pavement and followed it along towards a bus stop, located outside a supermarket where children from the local comprehensive school gathered, waiting for their ride home. None of them were wearing stupid blazers. As the girls in front of us approached the bus stop there was a shrieking shout as two girls leapt down from the low bus stop wall and grabbed their hair, pulling them down to the ground, where a catfight ensued. Camilla and I froze in our tracks. I’d never before witnessed such violence and didn’t know what to do. As clawing nails and slaps rained in, my instincts told me to back away from the altercation and get the hell out of there. So Camilla and I did the most cowardly of acts, we crossed the road. We walked away, checking over our shoulder to see if the horror had ended, entering a sweet shop to report it to the owner. We didn’t plough in. We didn’t race over and help. We didn’t attempt any form of heroics. Instead, we ran away, saving the hair on our heads and the flesh on our cheeks from the slashing of attacking nails. (Incidentally, Camilla later became head girl at our school and went on to study at Cambridge University so I take this cowardly response as the sensible, intelligent thing to have done.) Did we lack the moral courage the army so expects? Probably. But I was petrified, just as I was now on Broadsword. But I couldn’t run away from the Broadsword riot. I was a coward caught.
I spent a feeble hour getting pummelled in the riot. Ducking to avoid the fast-bowled potatoes and wincing with each forceful kick. Blinded by confusion and the steam in my helmet visor, I felt helplessly vulnerable, brandishing only a baton gun and pointless blank rounds. I wasn’t robust enough for a shield. I wasn’t tough enough for the physical fight, like Merv, Wheeler and Gill. They were all in the heavy baseline, holding six-foot shields and feeling the full heat of the petrol bombs and brute force of each onslaught.
For the girls of Eleven Platoon the riot was an emotional and scary ordeal. But for the boys the riot was a wholly different experience. They loved it, relishing the thrill of the conflict and elaborate dance-off between the two sides. They revelled in the pleasure of a baton thwack against an aggressor’s back and the satisfying self-justice in giving someone a good kicking. It was in their genetic make up to fight, because they dealt with the adrenaline kicking through our veins very differently from the girls. In me, it turned to fear but in them it became aggression. Our natural instincts were completely opposed; we girls cowered in fear while the boys confronted their aggressors in a descending red mist and beaming smiles on their faces.
Like my swimming interlude on Worst Encounter, Exercise Broadsword was not without its abstract moment. Later that afternoon while we packed up our patrol base home the exercise went into hiatus. Everything stopped. For two hours, batons and petrol bombs were laid down. Starving women and corrupt warlords came out of role, and radios were switched off, while England played Australia in the rugby World Cup. It was like a Christmas Day truce along the Western Front. We came out from behind the security fence of our fortress to walk freely through the village streets that only hours earlier had been the site of such violence. And support for the game was not compulsory either, so I chose to forsake the eighty minutes of unrequited pleasure admiring Jonny Wilkinson’s bum and went for a shower instead.
As I stood in the queue outside the shower block next to one of the earlier rioters, he looked at my tired face. ‘The riot was pretty full on, wasn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ I sighed. ‘I won’t ever be volunteering for public order duties after that,’ I said, looking through the small plastic bag in my hand to see what toiletries I had brought with me.
‘It was awesome though, wasn’t it? I never thought it would be so much fun,’ he went on.
‘It wasn’t fun,’ I replied, a little too curtly.
‘Yeah, true. It can’t have been much fun for you girls out there,’ he replied. ‘You did look pretty terrified.’
‘We were,’ I said, trying not to engage him in a full post-match analysis. I wanted to forget the whole experience as quickly as possible.
‘I got hit a few times myself,’ he said, lifting up his shirt to reveal three large baton welts on his back, red and sore.
‘Ouch. They look painful,’ I said, wincing.
‘Yeah. It was awesome though,’ he said grinning as he reminisced. ‘I suppose it won’t be quite as harsh when you lot are the rioters though. I can’t imagine the girls getting involved.’
‘No. I think you’re right. That sort of violence is not really my thing,’ I said as I thought about how aggressive the rioters had been. I had never hit anyone, nor felt the need to in my entire life and couldn’t see any reason for that to change at Sandhurst.
I was wrong.
Exercise Broadsword was split into three distinct phases: urban operations, rural operations and then the chance to join the actors, role-playing and creating havoc in the village as part of the civilian population. So having been the subject of a riot, it was soon our turn to join the mob throwing the potatoes at another company of cadets.
Initially I stood back. I have the aggression levels of a goldfish and chose not to get involved in the thrust of the riot, instead just shouting abuse and chucking the odd potato at the wall of plastic shields from a safe distance. I am lucky among girls to have a decent throw. When I was at school I had a boyfriend who was the school cricket captain. Each Saturday during the summer term, I used to sit in a deckchair outside the cricket pavilion in the sunshine and watch him playing in the distance. A little white speck in an open field. One afternoon after he had been batted out, he turned his attention to teaching me to throw a cricket ball, properly. Not a pathetic girly donkey drop but a decent full-armed launching lob, and it has proved to be a valuable life skill ever since (along with being able to whistle and wire a plug).
So as the riot kicked off I took to keeping back from the thick of things, but as the heat of the fight turned up everything changed. A red mist descended and I soon got swept along with the mob. As the violence developed and spread, I got infected. Drawn in by the pull of the fair, I abandoned my normal polite civilities and human kindness to make way for an evil Machiavellian streak. I found that with each potato propelled, I got a small kick as I watched it landing among the riot police. I found a strange satisfaction in seeing the minor devastation they caused, and drew cathartic warmth from watching them impact on a riot shield or helmet visor, fuelling the riot melee. As my violence grew, I joined the others in pelting the riot police with more and more potato missiles, understanding entirely the rationale of May Day protestors tearing up Oxford Street for no apparent reason. I became caught like a politician in a moment’s madness.
Broadsword was the big Sandhurst test exercise. The crucial module we all had to pass. It was the most scrutinizing assessment of our ability to command and lead, and those who failed would have to face the music. And in Eleven Platoon this was the Platoon Donkey. Fi
nally her time was up. She had bungled and blundered her way through two terms. Stumbling into trenches, mutinying in the Black Mountains and carrying Alpine mineral water around Thetford. But now was her final curtain call. As the ‘ungoverned space’ continued to take hostages on our return to Sandhurst.
As soon as we got back from Broadsword she was called into the Company Commander’s office and ‘back termed’. Booted out of Imjin Company, her bags were packed that very night. Tears were shed but good-byes were short, as she was too embarrassed and upset to linger. I popped my head around the door of her room as she was stuffing belongings into suitcases between sniffles.
‘Are you all right?’ I said, offering her a packet of chocolate biscuits as if that would make everything OK.
‘Thanks, Héloïse,’ she said, taking a biscuit and perching on the end of her bed to eat it, looking up at me for hope.
‘I’ll be sad to see you go,’ I said, unsure of what I should say. I was sad. But I knew it was the right decision. ‘Who am I going to play “snog, marry, strangle” with now?’ I continued, trying to crack a smile on her sad face. She laughed.
‘What do I do now?’ she said, choking back tears.
‘Things will work out. Don’t you worry. Everything happens for a reason,’ I said. ‘And you’ll come back stronger from this,’ I added, clutching at straws. She would be better for it. She wasn’t ready to commission with us in December, but she would get there eventually.
And we were sad to see her go.
For days we mourned her exit as her departure left a gaping hole in the platoon. The peals of laughter that normally rippled through the platoon lines were absent as the mood darkened and we grieved. It wasn’t a surprise. And we knew it made sense, but it was still sad to see her go. Despite all her faults she had become one of us, a member our Army family. We had bonded through the nights of shivering on stag and chocking down boil-in-the-bag rations. Giggling at games of ‘snog, marry, strangle’ and marvelling at her CS gas immunity.
She didn’t leave Sandhurst altogether. The army had already invested too much time, money and sweat to let her slip back into society. And instead she was sent back to the Intermediate term. Sliding down a snake to climb back up the commissioning ladder once more with another girls’ platoon in the intake behind us. She would be given a second chance. Another shot at digging a trench. Another visit to the gas chamber. Another NBC extraction march and another drill competition.
There was no way I could have done it all again.
It felt good to finally be in the Senior Term. At last we had reached the top of the cadet food chain, moving from shorts to trousers, to applying for university places and meeting up in the pub. By now we knew it all, and we also knew that it was all nearly over. The Academy staff finally eased off, taking a step back and treating us more like the grown-ups that we were. The rigid reigns and suffocating control that had dominated the Junior and Intermediate terms were loosened as more personal responsibility was handed to us. We no longer had to march everywhere (not that I ever really mastered that anyway) and room inspections became a vague memory, although I continued to hide wine in my underwear drawer. In this newly relaxed regime, we were also granted the rare pleasure of some spare time, which became brief treasured snippets of freedom within the Academy fence. We became responsible for our own physical training too, which, thinking about it, was probably what the spare time was for, but instead we spent it drinking tea and relaxing for the first time in eight months.
Returning to New College at the end of summer leave, there was an air of nearly there, as the end was in sight. As I signed back into the Academy in my jeans, mindless of the consequences of being caught in the ‘Devil’s cloth’, I felt as though the worst was behind me. Carrying my bags from the car park up to my room, I felt confident and almost at home in my surroundings. The light at the end of the tunnel I had once thought I would never see was now clearly visible, as the notion of commissioning became a veritable reality. A mere fourteen weeks now separated me from walking up the steps of Old College and receiving my Second-Lieutenant’s pip. In Seniors our confidence had been built up again, we were no longer the floppy-haired civilians of the January frost, nervous, fearful and shy, unsure of where we belonged. Because the most significant change in Seniors was that finally we knew where in the army we were going.
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 h
ow 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.
An Officer and a Gentlewoman Page 23