An Officer and a Gentlewoman

by Heloise Goodley

  But it wasn’t a normal everyday life that I wanted.

  At the conclusion of the Junior Term the Commissioning Course went into hiatus, releasing us back into the outside world for three weeks of unbridled freedom away from the inspecting glare. Three weeks freed from the horrors of the parade square, unshackled from our ironing boards. Three weeks without spade and rifle. Three weeks of slouching, putting our hands in our pockets, leaning against walls and wearing the devil’s cloth (unironed). Three weeks to kick back, unwind and let the bad habits creep back in.

  Except I couldn’t.

  I’d changed.

  On the train out of London, I sat by the window, watching London Bridge and Canary Wharf flicker between gaps in the city. Small raindrops splattered against the glass, forming long stuttering streaks as the train brushed past them. A group of teenagers were in the carriage, enjoying the last of their Easter holiday. They were a co-ed mixture of young boys and girls with all the complex sexual and social interplay that goes with that age of angst. Boisterously showing off, I found myself irritated by their lack of discipline. I tutted with contempt as they put their skateboarding trainers on the train seats and rolled my eyeballs at the loud music they subjected the carriage to from their mobile phones. I’m sure I was oblivious to this sort of out-of-control disorder before Sandhurst, happily shielding myself behind the spread of a Financial Times.

  At my destination I found my car in the car park and hopped in. I retuned the radio to listen to the news on Radio 4 rather than the latest pop music I was now completely out of touch with on Radio 1. I drove the short distance to my parents’ home, where my father greeted me on the doorstep as he always does, coming out with a cheery smile and a peck for each cheek. As he did so I caught myself drawn to his footwear. Glancing down at his feet I was shamed by the scruffy state of his shoes, a scuffed pair of well-worn collapsing brown loafers that would probably have been rejected by a London tramp, but my father can’t part with them – had they ever been polished? (I would never have the heart to personally berate my father for his choice in footwear and, unaware of their scruffy inappropriateness, he chose to wear this favoured pair again when visiting me at Sandhurst, where the sole finally gave up and fell off as he crossed the parade square.)

  The Sandhurst conditioning was working. I was starting to be re-engineered. My standards and expectations were changing and, as time passed, I found I had developed a low tolerance for dithering and inefficiency. I became intensely frustrated by people who dawdled in the street, irate with ‘Sunday drivers’ dilly-dallying at traffic lights and roundabouts and irked at the lack of urgency in listless supermarket checkout assistants. The army is all about rapid reaction and urgency, it’s about responding quickly and making decisions in a split second. And with the breakneck pace of life at Sandhurst, stepping off the roller-coaster at the end of the ride was a comedown that left me feeling as though everyone else was missing out and just didn’t get it.

  From the day I started Sandhurst I stopped being late too. Unless someone had died en route I would always arrive five minutes early, whether fashionable or not, because somewhere at the back of my brain the muscle-memory was fearful of the press-up punishment lateness would incur. The London norm to meet friends in a bar an hour after you arranged to now felt plain rude.

  As I crossed the threshold into my parents’ home, my father was already bombarding me with questions about life at Sandhurst, racing ahead of me into the kitchen to switch on the kettle.

  ‘So what’s your room in the Officers’ Mess like?’ he fussed. ‘Do you have someone cooking your meals and cleaning your room for you? Oh how lovely. I bet the food is good. They say an army marches on its stomach you know.’

  My father’s view of the forces was stuck in a time warp, still back in the day when the Empire was strong and officers could buy their commissions. A time when army officers were stationed in India and the Far East, flitting between cocktail parties and dinner nights, countering malaria by drinking plenty of gin and tonics.

  ‘No Dad, I don’t live in an Officers’ Mess, it’s Sandhurst,’ I said. ‘I’m just a scrote in training, no one cleans my room for me. In fact it’s us who pretty much clean the whole Academy.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, taking two mugs out of a cupboard. ‘So what rank are you now then? Are you a Captain yet?’

  ‘No, I haven’t even commissioned yet, Dad. I’m only an Officer Cadet. I’m the lowest of the low. A worm. I’m not even an officer yet. I won’t be one until I commission in December and then I’ll only be a second-lieutenant.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said again, a little disappointed. ‘It won’t take you long though, will it? And then when will you be a major? Major Goodley sounds pretty good.’

  I gave up. My parents didn’t get it, but bless my father for trying. Major was a decade away, so far off that I couldn’t even comprehend it. I couldn’t even comprehend what second-lieutenant would be like and the responsibility of soldiers, let alone major.

  He handed me a mug of steaming tea.

  ‘And how are you getting on? Are you showing all the other girls how it’s done?’

  ‘No, Dad. It’s not like that.’

  My father had been used to school report cards full of A’s and prizes on Speech Day. Hearing that his little girl was nothing special to the army was something I didn’t have the heart to confess to him. How was I to explain that so far at Sandhurst merit seemed to be based on the shininess of my shoes and the ability to put one foot in front of the other on the parade square? It was all such a different world, and one I was starting to realize people on the outside couldn’t comprehend.

  If my return to the outside civilian world had felt different, my return to Sandhurst would bring differences too, because having survived the horrors and challenges of Junior Term we had now earned some stripes. We knew how to play the game and were beginning to fit the officer mould. We were no longer bottom feeders languishing at the base of the food chain, no longer the new greenhorns in the herd, wet behind the ears, fearful and naive. As we moved into Inters, we would be treated like four-yearolds rather than three-year-olds, given a little extra pocket money and a later lights out. It was a small but significant step up. We were not quite the playground bullies but comfortable enough to no longer need to hide in the library at break-time. I knew my way around. I still couldn’t march and polish but I knew how to disguise it. Unlike my first day of Junior Term I now had friends and coping strategies.

  As we progressed from Juniors to Inters, we physically moved too, out of our rooms in Old College and into New College. While not as dreamy and architecturally impressive as its older neighbour, the vast redbrick warren of New College was just as imposing. The college consisted of a collection of outstretched buildings all linked by one long continuous corridor, which boasted to be Europe’s longest; something which late at night in my socks was not contested. Downstairs, these corridor walls were covered from floor to ceiling with dark-green glazed tiles giving a Victorian classroom feel to the whole building and its stone floor clacked suitably loudly at the approach of authority. Our accommodation rooms were upstairs above the offices and study rooms, and not much different to the ones we’d left behind in Old College. Part of growing up meant that our rooms were no longer subjected to the same level of scrutinizing inspections as before, and as I unpacked my belongings again, disregarding locker layout and showcasing my toiletries, I recalled the twisted knot of apprehension that had sat in my stomach as I unpacked in Old College just four months earlier. Those first-day nerves, new career nerves, holy-cow-what-have-I-done nerves that I felt just a term ago someone else had now. Because while we set up home in our new rooms in New College the vultures circled again at the Grand Entrance to Old College, welcoming in the latest batch of new recruits, fresh-faced and wide-eyed, nervously carrying their ironing boards and cleaning products up Old College steps.

  The next intake in the Sandhurst sausage machine.

  Poor
sods.

  With New College came new people too as we left some of our tormentors behind.

  By the time we reached the end of Juniors, SSgt Cox had taught us everything she knew. Her knowledge was all imparted. We could now make our beds, iron our uniforms, polish doorknobs, pick up litter, march (ish) and shine our shoes (well, not me, but everyone else could). And she had reached the end of her useful life because SSgt Cox wasn’t actually a real soldier, not of the gun-wielding, bayonet-between-the-teeth, steely-war-fighting kind; outside Sandhurst she was an administrator in the SPS (Staff & Personnel Support). What we needed now was a real warrior, someone who had seen the whites of the enemies’ eyes, someone who had fired a rifle in anger, someone who had actually done what we needed to be taught. SSgt Cox had successfully delivered us into the military but her midwifery duties were now over and we were untied from her apron strings and deposited into the care of a real infantryman, a guardsman to be precise: CSgt Bicknell – the sympathetic softie who smuggled chocolate biscuits into our skill-at-arms lessons when SSgt Cox had banned them.

  CSgt Bicknell’s arrival was a revelation in our lives and he soon became the hero of our little world. His approach was less about messing us around with Sandhurst nonsense (though that didn’t cease) and more about making sure we knew what we needed to in order to not embarrass ourselves in front of soldiers when we finally commissioned (infantry tactics, not just the latest gossip from Celebrity Big Brother). A professional soldier nearing the pinnacle of an impressive career, he had joined the army at the young age of seventeen and made it his life (he would have joined at sixteen if he had not still been wearing fixed braces), and was now in his thirties with the benefit of years of experience behind him. He was a tall, jolly man with rosy cheeks, a great sense of humour and a comic chuckle, which would ripple down the corridor from his office. Always immaculately turned out without flaw, he had served with the Coldstream Guards in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan and had a glistening rack of campaign medals and true tales of gritty combat to tell. He had guarded the Queen at Buckingham Palace, taught the Jamaican Army, trekked the Papua New Guinean jungle and topped his peers at every stage of his career ascension. But at no stage in this illustrious army career had he been prepared for the peculiarities of girls. From the day he signed the enlistment forms as a tender schoolboy recruit, to patrolling the streets of Basra and Armagh, to standing outside Buckingham Palace with a bearskin on his head, at no stage, never, for one single moment, had he considered that joining the army would put him in command of girls. Hormonal, emotional, sensitive girls. And after twenty years in a masculine, frontline, war-fighting environment, he wasn’t prepared for it, and was soon to receive a crash course introduction to the specific delicacies of female psychology. Forget time-of-the-month, ‘does-my-bum-look-big-in-this?’ quandaries, Eleven Platoon were thirty girls, living together, under pressure and there was only so much gratitude chocolate biscuits could buy.

  CSgt Bicknell wasn’t the only new man in our lives as we started the Intermediate Term. While we unpacked boxes in our rooms and tentatively explored the new surroundings, a fresh figure hovered quietly in the shadows. Watching. Silently observing each one of us. And then, with the incisive exactness of a heart surgeon suturing a vein, he accurately sussed each one of us out. This wasn’t a man of great physical stature, or many words, but his sheer presence changed the way the world moved around him. A sighting of him on the parade square horizon would stiffen sinew, silence birds in the trees and bring blades of grass to attention on the polo pitch. Utterly professional, with remarkable shrewd sagacity he was the new Imjin Company Sergeant Major, CSM Mockridge. A living legend.

  He was a rifleman by heritage (and later left Sandhurst to go on to be the regimental sergeant major of a Rifles Battalion) and his gift for soldiering and clear, incisive mind had seen him rapidly rise through the ranks. He had an angular jawline, with a narrow face and the hair on his head was a thin dirty blond colour. He wasn’t tall like CSgt Bicknell and the other guardsmen who populated Sandhurst, but his shoulders were broad and strong and he had earned himself the nickname ‘the Lung’ for his superhuman physical abilities. He regularly ran the ten miles to work each morning and the ten miles home at night, with boots on his feet and a heavy bergen on his back, bringing his beloved Jack Russell, Trigger, with him, sometimes tucked under one arm as the little dog failed to keep up with his demanding pace.

  ‘He’s slacking on me again, Miss Goodley. Slacking,’ he’d chortle as he trotted through the Academy gates; Trigger looking sheepish in his grip, longing for the basket under his desk.

  A quiet personal man, little was actually known about him by the cadets and this intriguing mystery added to his legendary aura. In the eight months I knew him I never discovered where he was from, whether he had children or was married. Various rumours abounded that he was the millionaire part-owner of a luxury car dealership in London’s Mayfair; others said that he had served in the French Foreign Legion; while some had heard that he had been in the special forces but chose not to wear the badges. Any of these could have been true.

  To me he simply became the single most impressive man I have met in the Armed Forces. He was an utter inspiration, and someone whose judgement I trusted implicitly. I would have contentedly followed the man over broken glass and off a cliff if he had told me that was the way to go. He commanded the utmost respect, and had the true gift of being able to give a monumental bollocking without losing it. When enraged, his anger could be a storm to shelter from but when it passed you didn’t find yourself walking away filled with contempt thinking he was an unreasonable idiot, but instead ashamed of yourself for having let him down.

  But with the ‘bonjours’ came ‘au revoirs’ and, as we moved into New College not everyone in Imjin Company was there to unpack their bags. Some had enjoyed their taste of freedom outside the Academy too much and chose not to return. The break between Juniors and Inter was the point in the Commissioning Course when most people bolted. In Eleven Platoon one girl left us, quitting the digging-crawling routine to start a life of accountancy exams and Tube strikes in London (I did try to warn her). She was free to go. The army wasn’t for her and she’d given it a good shot. Outwardly, we were saddened to say farewell but inside we felt smug. Smug that, as people left, it gave credit to those of us remaining, hacking it out. Bailing when things got tough reinforced that Sandhurst wasn’t easy and gave greater credence to those of us left in the game.

  As the Junior Term had come to a close, I was left considering the value of what we were being taught at Sandhurst in light of Jo Dyer’s death. Aside from all the cleaning, polishing, marching inanity, the tactics felt dated. I wasn’t a military tactician but I could tell that the plans we were making to defend the south of England from an invading Russian Motor Rifle Brigade were not the contemporary tactics that would get us around the streets of Basra or Sangin. What did we do if the enemy weren’t in tanks advancing in straight lines? What about suicide bombers? And IEDs like the one that had killed Jo Dyer? The British Army was at war, but not the Cold War, not with the Russians, relic Russian weapons yes, but not the hoards of armour in a Russian Vanguard. I thought Russian relations are warmer these days. Over Easter leave I had consoled myself that with Juniors complete the army were now content with my ironing and bed-making skills and could start teaching the really important stuff: hearts-and-minds and counter-insurgency, wars about people and clashing civilizations that would all surely start on our move to New College. And so with this in mind three weeks into the Intermediate Term I packed my bergen once more, ready to deploy into the field again: on a First World War trench-digging exercise in Norfolk.

  One standard I had discovered at Sandhurst was that anything you had yet to do was going to be the worst experience you’d have at the Academy. And listening to exaggerated war tales from battle-worn cadets in the intake above us, exercise First Encounter was built up into Operation Near Death; horror stor
ies of cadets collapsing from exhaustion, being hospitalized with trench-foot, or sectioned with sleep-deprived delirium made for effective scaremongering as we stuffed clothing and sleeping bags that wouldn’t be used into our bergens.

  The exercise plan was simple.

  With Norfolk’s turkey farmers and mustard makers under threat from advancing enemy we would find a suitable spot on Thetford training area and dig a line of trench defences, just like those dug by our great-grandfathers along the Western Front. Extra spades and picks were packed along with plenty of Redbull and Pro-Plus, because in reality the exercise was actually less about our ability to dig a hole in the ground and more a painful experiment in sleep deprivation.

  The excitement about exercise First Encounter (which soon became renamed Worst Encounter) was that it was taking us somewhere new; this time we weren’t going back to the hideousness of Wales or the misery of Eeyore’s Gloomy Place, because Worst Encounter was in Norfolk, an area of the British Isles renowned for one especially gracious quality: it is flat. As a pancake. No horrendous hills, no seemingly insurmountable mountains. The maps we were given barely even had contours drawn on them. There was not a knoll, mound nor pimple in sight, just field upon field of arable sugar beet and brewers’ barley, growing in a nice diggable sandy loam. And it was now May, so having cried with cold on my previous two excursions into the field I was looking forward to the promise of more balmy conditions; the prospect of being able to feel my toes and not cracking an icy crust from my sleeping bag as I woke for stag.