An Officer and a Gentlewoman
Page 27
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:
When you go home, tell them of us and say,
for their tomorrow, we gave our today.
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.
Smart as a carrot
On Old College Steps
Learning to love Billy the Whistle and the dash-down-crawl routine
The Big Dig
Zzzzzzzz
Camouflaged with Officer Cadet Gill
Officer Cadets Wheeler and Van der Merwe
Breaking and entering in Celini Village
Living the dream as platoon sergeant
Gas, Gas, Gas!
Eleven Platoon with CSgt Bicknell in his element
Assault course madness
The End – Final Exercise
Receiving my bling
Copyright
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012
Copyright © Héloïse Goodley, 2012
The right of Héloïse Goodley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN : 978–1–78033–014–3
ewoman