by Dick Francis
We were sitting round the kitchen table having dinner and my mother and stepfather both looked at me expectantly.
It was a bit like asking President Lincoln’s wife if she had been enjoying the play before her husband was shot. What should I say?
In truth, I had enjoyed myself immensely before I was blown up, but I wondered if I should actually say so.
Recording my first confirmed ‘kill’ of a Taliban had been exhilarating; and calling in the helicopter gunships to pound an enemy position with body-bursting 50mm shells had been spine-chillingly exciting. It had sent my adrenalin levels to maximum in preparation for the charge through to finish them off at close quarters.
One wasn’t meant to enjoy killing other human beings, but I had.
‘I suppose it was OK,’ I said. ‘Lots of sitting around doing nothing, really. That, and playing cards.’
‘Did you see anything of the Taliban?’ my stepfather asked.
‘A little,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘But mostly at a distance.’
A distance of about two feet, impaled on my bayonet.
‘But didn’t you get to do any shooting?’ he asked. He made it sound like a day’s sport of driven pheasant.
‘Some,’ I said.
I thought back to the day my platoon had been ambushed and outnumbered by the enemy. I had sat atop an armoured car laying down covering fire with a GPMG, a general purpose machine gun, known to us all as ‘the gimpy’. I had done so much shooting that day that the gimpy’s barrel had glowed red-hot.
I could have told them all of it.
I could have told them of the fear. Not so much the fear of being wounded or killed, more the fear of failing to act. The fear of fear itself.
Throughout history, every soldier has asked themselves the same questions: What will I do when the time comes to fight? How will I perform in the face of the enemy? Shall I kill, or be killed? Shall I be courageous, or will I let down my fellow men?
In the modern British army, much of the officer training is designed to make young men, and young women, behave in a rational and determined manner in extreme conditions and when under huge stress. Command is what they are taught, the ability to ‘command’ when all hell is breaking loose around them. The ‘command moment’ it is called, that moment in time when something dramatic occurs like an ambush, or a roadside-bomb explosion, the moment when all the men turn and look to their officer – that’s you – waiting to be told what to do, and how to react. There’s no one else to ask. You have to make the decisions, and men’s lives will depend on them.
The training also teaches teamwork and, in particular, reliance. Not reliance on others, but the belief that others are reliant on you. When push comes to shove, a soldier doesn’t stick his head up and shoot back at the enemy for his Queen and Country. Instead, he does it for his mates, his fellow soldiers all around him who will die if he doesn’t.
My biological family might have considered me a loner, but I was not. Members of my platoon were my chosen family and I had regularly placed myself in extreme danger to protect them from harm.
Eventually my luck had been bound to run out.
Killing the enemy with joy and gusto might lead an onlooker to believe that the soldier places a low value on human life. But this would be misleading, and untrue. The death of a comrade, a friend, a brother has the most profound effect on the fighting man. Such moments are revisited time and again with the same question always uppermost: could I have done anything to save him?
Why him and not me? The guilt of the survivor is ever present and is expunged only by continuation of the job in hand – the killing of the enemy.
‘You’re not very talkative,’ my mother said. ‘I thought that soldiers liked nothing better than to recount stories of past battles.’
‘There’s not much to tell you, really,’ I said.
Not much to tell, I thought, that wouldn’t put her off her dinner.
‘I saw you both on the television today,’ I said, changing the subject, ‘at Cheltenham. Good win in the novice chase. Shame about Pharmacist, though. At one point I thought he was going to win as well.’ I knew that it was not a tactful comment, but I was curious to see their reaction.
My mother kept her eyes down as she absent-mindedly pushed a potato round and round her plate.
‘Your mother doesn’t want to talk about it,’ my stepfather said in an attempt to terminate conversation on the topic.
He was unsuccessful.
‘Your head lad seems to think the horse was nobbled,’ I said.
My mother’s head came up quickly. ‘Ian doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ she said angrily. ‘And he shouldn’t have been talking to you.’
I hoped that I hadn’t dropped Ian into too much hot water. But I wasn’t finished yet.
‘Shouldn’t have been talking to me about what?’ I asked.
No reply. My mother went back to studying her plate of food and my stepfather sat stony-faced across the table from her.
‘So are the horses being nobbled?’ I asked into the silence.
‘No, of course not,’ my mother said. ‘Pharmacist simply had a bad day. He’ll be fine next time out.’
I wondered if she was trying to convince me, or herself.
I stoked the fire a little more. ‘Ian Norland said it wasn’t the first time that your horses haven’t run as well as expected.’
‘Ian knows nothing.’ She was almost shouting. ‘We’ve just had some bad luck of late. Perhaps there’s a bit of a bug going round the stable. That’s all. It’ll pass.’
She was getting distressed and I thought it would be better to lay off, just for a bit.
‘And Mrs Kauri doesn’t need you spreading any rumours,’ my stepfather interjected, somewhat clumsily. My mother gave him a look that was close to contempt.
I also looked at my stepfather and I wondered what he really thought of his wife still using the name of another man.
Only when the other children at my primary school had asked me why I was Thomas Forsyth, and not Thomas Kauri, had I ever questioned the matter. ‘My father is Mr Forsyth,’ I’d told them. ‘Then why isn’t your mother Mrs Forsyth?’ It had been a good question and one I hadn’t been able to answer.
Mrs Josephine Kauri had been born Miss Jane Brown and was now, by rights, Mrs Derek Philips, although woe betide anyone who called her that in her hearing. Since first becoming a bride at seventeen, Josephine Kauri had worn the trousers in each of her three marriages and it was no coincidence that she had retained the marital home in both of her divorces. From the look she had just delivered across the kitchen table, I thought it might not be too long before her divorce lawyer would again be picking up his telephone. Mr Derek Philips may soon be outstaying his welcome at Kauri House Stables.
We ate in silence for a while, finishing off the chicken casserole that my mother’s cleaner-cum-housekeeper had prepared that morning and which had been slow-cooking in the Aga all afternoon. Thankfully there had been more than enough for an uninvited guest.
But I couldn’t resist having one more go.
‘So will Pharmacist still run in the Gold Cup?’
I thought my stepfather might kick me under the table, such was the fury in his eyes. My mother, however, was more controlled.
‘We’ll see,’ she said, echoing the major from the MOD. ‘It all depends on how he is in the morning. Until then I can’t say another word.’
‘Is he not back here yet, then?’ I asked, not taking the hint to keep quiet.
‘Yes,’ she said without further explanation.
‘And have you been out to see him?’ I persisted.
‘In the morning,’ my mother replied brusquely. ‘I said I’d see how he was in the morning.’ She swallowed noisily. ‘Now, please, can we drop the subject?’
Even I didn’t have the heart to go on. There were limits to the pleasure one could obtain from other people’s distress, and distressed she clearly was. It was not a co
ndition I was used to observing in my mother, who had always seemed to be in complete control of any and every situation. It was more usually a state she created in others rather than suffered from herself.
As Ian Norland had said, something very strange was going on.
I went for a walk outside before going to bed. I had done something similar all my life and the loss of a foot wasn’t going to be allowed to change my lifestyle more than I could help it.
I wandered round the garden and along the concrete path to the stables. A few security lights came on as I moved under the sensors but no one seemed to care and there was no halting shout. There was no one on stag here, no sentries posted.
Not much had changed since I had run away all those years before. The trees had grown up a bit and the border of bushes down the far side of the house was less of a jungle than I had remembered. Perhaps it was just the effects of the winter months.
I had loved that border as a child and had made no end of dens amongst the thick undergrowth, fantasizing great adventures, and forever lying in wait for an unseen ‘enemy’, my toy rifle at the ready.
Not much may have changed in the place, but plenty had changed within me.
I stood in the cold and dark and drew deeply on a cigarette, cupping the glowing end in my hand so that it wasn’t visible. Not that anyone would be looking, it was just force of habit.
I didn’t really consider myself a smoker, and I’d never had a cigarette until I first went on ‘ops’ to Iraq. Then that had changed. Somehow the threat of possibly developing lung cancer in the future was a minor one compared with the risk of having one’s head blown off in the morning.
It had seemed that almost everyone smoked in Afghanistan. It had helped to control the fear, to steady the hand, and to relieve the pressure when a cold beer, or any other alcohol for that matter, was strictly against standing orders. At least I hadn’t smoked opium like the locals. That was also against standing orders.
I leaned against the corner of the house and drew a deep breath of smoke into my lungs, feeling the familiar rush as the nicotine flooded into my bloodstream and was transported to my brain. Finding the opportunity for a crafty fag in hospital had been rare but here, now, I was my own master again and I revelled in the freedom.
A light went on in the first-floor room above my head.
‘Why the bloody hell did he have to turn up? That’s all we bloody need at the moment.’
I could clearly hear my mother in full flow.
‘Keep your voice down, he’ll hear you.’
That was my stepfather.
‘No, he won’t,’ she said, again at full volume. ‘He’s gone outside.’
‘Josephine,’ my stepfather said angrily, ‘half the bloody village will hear you if you’re not careful.’
I was quite surprised that he would talk to her like that. Perhaps there was more to him than I thought. My mother even took notice of him and they continued their conversation much more quietly. Annoyingly, I couldn’t hear anything other than a faint murmur, although I stood there silently for quite a while longer, just in case they reverted to fortissimo.
But sadly, they didn’t and, presently, the lights in the room went out.
I lifted the leather flap that covered the face of my watch. The luminous hands showed me it was only ten thirty. Clearly, racehorse trainers went to bed as early as hospital patients, even on Saturday nights. I was neither, and I enjoyed being outside in the dark, listening and watching.
I had always been completely at home in darkness and I couldn’t understand those who were frightened of it. I suppose it was one thing I should thank my mother for. When I was a child, she had always insisted I sleep with my bedroom lights off and my door firmly closed. Since then the dark had always been my friend.
I stood silently and listened to the night.
In the distance there was music, dance music, the thump, thump, thump of the rhythm clearly audible in the still air. Perhaps someone was having a party. A car drove along the road at the bottom of the driveway and I watched its red lights as it travelled beyond the village, up the hill and out of sight.
I thought I heard a fox nearby with its high-pitched scream but I wasn’t sure. It might have been a badger. I would have needed a pair of army-issue night-vision goggles to be sure, or better still a US military set, which were far superior.
I lit another cigarette, the flare of the match instantly rendering me blind in the night. Out in Afghanistan I’d had a fancy lighter that could light a cigarette in complete darkness. Needless to say, it hadn’t accompanied me on my evacuation. In fact, nothing I had owned in Afghanistan had so far made it back to me.
An infantry soldier’s life at war was carried round with him in his back-pack, his bergen. Either that or on his body in the form of helmet, radio, body armour, spare ammunition, boots, and camouflage uniform. Then there was his rifle and bayonet to carry in his hands. It all went everywhere with him. Leave a bergen unattended for even a second and it was gone, spirited away like magic by some innocent-looking Afghan teenager. Leaving a rifle unattended could be a court-martial offence. Everything and anything would ‘walk’ if not tied down or guarded.
The Taliban have described the British soldier as a ferocious fighter but one who moves very slowly. Well, Mr Taliban, you try running around with seven stone of equipment on your back. It was like carrying your grandmother into battle, but without the benefits.
I wondered where my bergen had gone. For that matter, I wondered where my uniform had gone, and everything else too. Thanks largely to the dedicated and magnificent volunteers of the CCAST, the Critical Care Air Support Teams, I had arrived back in England not only alive, but less than thirty hours after the explosion. But I’d woken up in the Birmingham hospital, naked and without a foot, with not even a toothbrush, just a pair of metal dog-tags round my neck, embossed with my name and army service number, an age-old and trusted method of identifying the living, and the dead.
There had been a letter to my mother in the breast pocket of my uniform, to be posted in the event of my death. I wondered where that was, too. My mother obviously hadn’t received it. But there again, I hadn’t died. Not quite.
Eventually it was the cold that drove me inside.
I went slowly and quietly through the house so as not to disturb the human residents sleeping upstairs or the canine ones asleep in the kitchen. In the past I would have removed my shoes and padded around silently in bare feet, but now, as I could have only one bare foot, I kept my shoes on.
Good as it was, my new right leg had an annoying habit of making a metallic clinking noise every time I put it down, even when I moved slowly. I didn’t sound quite like a clanking old truck engine, but an enemy sentry would still have heard me coming from more than a hundred paces on a still night. I would have to do something about that, on top of everything else, if I was ever to convince the MOD major.
I went up the stairs to my old bedroom. My childhood things were long gone, packed up by my mother and either sent to the charity shop or to the council tip just as soon as I had announced I wasn’t coming back.
However, the bed looked the same and the chest of drawers in the corner definitely was, the end now repainted where I had once stuck up bubble-gum cards of army regimental crests.
This wasn’t the first night I had been back in this bed. There had been other occasional visits, all started with good intentions but invariably ending in argument and recrimination. To be fair, I was as much, if not more, to blame than my mother and stepfather. There was just something about the three of us together that caused the ire in us to rise inexorably to the point of mutual explosion. And none of us were very good firemen. Rather, we would fan the flames and pour petrol on them in gay abandon. And not one of us was ever prepared to back down or apologize. Nearly always I would end up leaving in anger, vowing never to return.
My most recent visit, five years previously, had been optimistically expected to last five days.
I had arrived on Christmas Eve all smiles, with bags of presents and good intent, and I’d left before lunch on Christmas morning, sent on my way by a tirade of abuse. And the silly thing was, I couldn’t now remember why we had argued. We didn’t seem to need a reason, not a big one anyway.
Perhaps tomorrow would be better. I hoped so, but I doubted it. The lesson of experience over expectation was one I had finally begun to learn.
Maybe I shouldn’t have come, but somehow I had needed to. This place was where I’d grown up and in some odd way it still represented safety and security. And, in spite of the shouting, the arguments, and the fights, it was the only home I’d ever had.
I lay on the bed and looked up at the familiar ceiling with its decorative moulding round the light fitting. It reminded me so much of the hours I had spent lying in exactly the same way as a spotty seventeen-year-old longing to be free, longing to join the army and escape from my adolescent prison. And yet here I was again, back in the same place, imprisoned again, this time by my disability, but still longing to be in the army, determined to rejoin my regiment, hungry to be back in command of my troops, and eager to be, once more, fighting and killing the enemy.
I sighed, stood up, and looked at myself in the mirror on the wardrobe door. I looked normal, but looks could be deceptive.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and removed my prosthesis, rolling down the flesh-coloured rubber sleeve that gripped over my real knee, keeping the false lower leg and foot from falling off. I slowly eased my stump out of the tight-fitting cup and removed the foam-plastic liner. It was all very clever. Moulded to fit me exactly by the boys at Dorset Orthopaedic, they had constructed a limb that I could walk on all day without causing so much as a pressure sore, let alone a blister.
But it still wasn’t me.
I looked again at the mirror on the wardrobe door. Now my reflection didn’t appear so normal.
Over the past few months, I suppose I had become familiar with the sight of my right leg finishing so abruptly some seven inches below my knee. Familiar, it might have been, but I was far from comfortable with the state of affairs and, every time I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror without my prosthesis, I was still shocked and repulsed by the image.