*
I was woken by the sound of bagpipes, the strangled screeching that had somehow become cause for nostalgia now I was in the military. I looked at my bedside clock, 05.27, army early. Outside in the corridor the bagpipe shrills drifted away, moving along to wake up someone else. I stretched my legs and spun out of bed, with all the excitement of a child at Christmas, leaping across the room and flinging open the door. Standing in the doorway I poked my head out into the brightly lit corridor, looking up and down, watching more heads popping out of the other rooms, each covered by a wide broad smile. The door opposite cracked open and Merv appeared in her pyjamas. Scratching her head she looked at me, grinning from ear to ear. Today was our last day at Sandhurst. Friday, 14 December 2007.
The day we finally commissioned.
For the preceding two weeks since the final exercise our days had been devoted to preparing for this – shining and smartening. Between final mess dress fittings and handing back kit, hours had been spent pacing the parade square, rehearsing and practising until every step of the final Sovereign’s Parade was ingrained in our muscle memory. Each drumbeat, each halting step, every salute, all committed until they started entering my dreams at night. In our rooms each night we had polished and preened, shining shoes and buckles, buttons and brass, until everything was perfect. Because this time it wasn’t just Captain Trunchbull who would be inspecting us, and it wasn’t just CSgt Bicknell we needed to impress. It was the 2,000 spectating family and friends who mattered today.
As the preparations hit fever pitch, I finally understood why Sandhurst places such a high priority on drill. After eleven months at the Academy I realized that it was all about marketing the Sandhurst brand. It was all a show. It was about putting on a good performance for the viewing public, because for most people outside Sandhurst the pageantry of the Sovereign’s Parade is the only insight available into Academy life. Three times a year, with each commissioning day, the gates are opened to family, friends and the national press to come and peer with their cameras. Getting a slim snapshot of life at this esoteric institution. Royalty arrive, foreign dignitaries, politicians and military chiefs, taking their places in the front row to watch the spectacle.
And before them a stately display is laid on, with a brass band playing and 500 cadets marching around Old College parade square in synchrony, showcasing the discipline and superior mettle of the British Army’s Officer corps. This impressive display of pomp and ceremony masks the real blood, mud and grit that go into the commissioning course.
On that December morning, seated in stands at the edge of the parade square, were my parents, brother and Deborah, huddled in the cold with their cameras primed. My grandfather was the only regrettable absentee that day. As a former Second World War soldier, I desperately wanted him to be there. He would have appreciated the whole significance of my commissioning day the most, but at nearly ninety years old he was too frail to make the long journey south. Instead I phoned him the next day to tell him all about it. From his chair in a North Wales care home, he proudly saluted me down the telephone line and chuckled over the miracle that someone had finally forced his granddaughter to tidy her room.
Standing to a flank, formed up and ready to march I could hear the buzz of the crowd quietened as a brass band marched onto the parade square ahead of us. Smartly dressed in their red tunics, the splendour of Old College provided a stunning backdrop behind them as the drum beat out a military melody.
Da-da-da-dum-dum-dum.
The backing track for 500 cadets marching behind them. Now in the Senior Term, we had ditched the rifles that had been so cumbersome to march with in Inters, replacing them with far more stately swords. In the low winter light the rows of swords glittered, catching the sun and sparkling as we advanced to a cymbal clash. Stepping forwards, I could feel the pulsating resonance of the drum beating deep in the pit of my stomach.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Setting the pace.
Filled with nervous pride and a stiffener of port, we were led onto the square by the Academy Adjutant mounted on his steady white stallion. I was tense and anxious. This was a big moment and not the time for one of my drill ineptitudes. For the Sovereign’s Parade we didn’t march in our usual platoons but as a half company, mixed up with the boys of Imjin. To my left was Officer Cadet Leroy from Ten Platoon, who took pride in his appearance and had kindly polished my shoes for me the night before. Leroy was commissioning into the Royal Logistics Corps and his family and friends were also seated in the crowd ahead.
As we marched forward and stepped onto Old College parade square I noticed something out of the corner of my eye on the ground next to Leroy’s right foot.
‘Leroy,’ I whispered loudly over the drumbeat, ‘your shoelace is coming undone.’ At that Leroy tilted his head every so slightly and glanced down. Sure enough his right boot was starting to unravel and a long black lace was starting to snake around his ankles. Next to me he bristled with the hideous reality of what was happening, of all the occasions, right now, here with 1,000 family, friends and dignitaries watching. The George boots the boys wore were laced with extraordinarily long laces too and by the time we reached the front of Old College for our first circle of the parade square Leroy’s lace had now unravelled to a metre in length and was trailing like a whip behind him, kicking forth with each step.
It was catastrophic.
As we marched in circles around the parade square in front of the spectating crowd Leroy’s lace flicked around out of control at his feet, baiting for one of us to stand on it and trip him up. And there was nothing he could do about it. I focused forward, minding each step but casting a sideways glance at the sea of spectators, searching for my parents among them. Eventually we came to a halt and turned to face the crowd standing to attention ready for inspection by the Queen’s representative,1 who today was the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup. Next to me Leroy was panicking. Glancing at the sight of his lace extending along the ground in front of us, he said to me in a hushed whisper: ‘This is the worst moment of my life. I can’t believe this is happening to me.’ With my nerves this sent me giggling at the situation and I started to choke as I held them back. ‘I’ve got to bend down and do it up,’ he said.
‘No, no, no. Leroy, you can’t do that,’ I pleaded. We were standing in the front row. No one but the head of the British Armed Forces would see Leroy’s lace, but the entire gathered crowd would see him crouch down and do up his laces. And the Academy sergeant major would probably have him shot on the spot for ruining proceedings. No, he had to leave it.
As the air chief marshall approached with his entourage Leroy began sweating. I could feel the tension and fear in him for what was about to happen. We were warned daily at Sandhurst by CSgt Bicknell and CSgt Rattray about the horrors of a stray lace. Then I heard a scraping sound, and felt Leroy fidgeting beside me. I heard it again and glancing down realized he was using his sword to scrape up the offending lace on the ground. Trying to drag it towards him, so that it didn’t extend quite so obviously a metre in front of him. But it was futile. The air chief marshall was working his way along the front rank and was almost upon us.
Next to me Leroy stiffened and held his breath. Accompanying the air chief marshall was the Academy commandant (a major general) and the Academy sergeant major with his rack of campaign medals pinned to his barrelled chest glinting along with his brass buttons and shiny shoes in the sunlight. Everything about his appearance screamed perfection. If he saw the stray lace lying in a winding ribbon on the parade square I was sure he would rip Leroy’s throat out.
The air chief marshall continued to move forward, stopping every third or fourth person to engage in pleasant chit-chat.
Christ, why did we have to be in the front row?
He moved nearer.
Standing to attention my head was thrust forward and my chin angled upwards but my eyes were stretched sideways in their sockets, focusing intentl
y on the progress of the Academy sergeant major. Watching him as he looked around, taking it all in, absorbing the atmosphere and sense of occasion on this proud moment: his favourite of the term. A moment Leroy’s lace was about to destroy.
The air chief marshall was steps away now and as he moved towards us from his conversation three cadets away he settled his eyes on Leroy and walked towards him. I became almost faint with fear on Leroy’s behalf. This was horrible. The most important day of our year at Sandhurst, a day that would stick with him for the rest of his military career. As the air chief marshall stopped in front of Leroy his aide de camp hovered behind, and the Academy sergeant major stood back glancing around at the faces in the front row. He was bound to spot the lace trailing beneath his feet. He had the eyes of a hawk. He could spot a speck of mud on a boot at thirty paces.
‘And are your family here today?’ the air chief marshall asked Leroy.
‘Yes. Yes, sir. My … my … my mother and father have travelled up from Devon, sir.’ Leroy stammered out his response as, inside his heart was beating out of his chest.
‘Goodness, that’s a long way to have travelled,’ the air chief marshall said. ‘I do hope they have a lovely day.’ And with that he turned and continued on, dragging with him the rest of his entourage including the Academy sergeant major. Leroy almost collapsed with relief. His lace had gone unnoticed and he remained unscathed.
As I continued to stand to attention holding my sword steady as the air chief marshall completed his rounds, I looked for the faces of my parents in the crowd, scanning the rows of faces watching. But there were too many people for me to find them. At the same time up in the stands my father was busy clicking away, watching the spectacle through his camera lens, eager to get a good shot of the day. When I later got home I looked through these images and was disappointed to see that I wasn’t in a single one of them. Instead he had mistakenly snapped photographs of Wheeler, thinking she was me.
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.
1 The Queen doesn’t attend every Sandhurst commissioning and in her place a Sovereign’s representative is sent, varying from alternative Royalty to military Generals and even the Prime Minister.
12
TEA AND MEDALS
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 successfu
lly 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.
An Officer and a Gentlewoman Page 26