There are times as a woman in the army when you have to sadly let go of your femininity, cast it to one side, and forget it. When you’re shoulder deep, digging a trench, salty sweat trickling down your spine; when you’re puffing up a hill with your bergen strapped to your back, dragging you down; when you’re on your stomach, crawling through the mud, your rifle cradled in your arms, waxy combat facepaint smeared across your face – in these situations any urge to be a girl gets lost in the rough, because sometimes being a lady in the army is just not possible. French manicures and beauty regimes have no place on military training areas. And on exercise there were no mirrors, no hair straighteners, no tweezers or shine control. After four days of living in a woodblock, you have to ignore the dirt tucked deep beneath your fingernails, forget about the windswept frizzy hair matted to your head, and ignore the absence of make-up and dignity, because joining the army means sacrificing girliness. To the army girl, perfume, lip gloss, mascara and style become abandoned relics. And on exercise, standards can’t help but slip, as there are no showers, no razors, no waxing strips nor mirrors. As you wash with a flannel from a mess tin of tepid water there is no cleanse, tone and moisturize routine, because ‘you’re not worth it’.
The appalling reality of how horrific this had become was then unceremoniously revealed to me when the Gurkha enemy started firing and I would leap to the ground, my body armour crushing to my chest, squeezing out a warm puff of noxious air from the depths of my clothing. On exercise I smelled and looked like a tramp. And at the end of each exercise, the evidence of how far girly standards had declined, swirled around the plughole, as dirt and grass mingled in a soapy whirl, draining away my lost femininity.
When men put on an army uniform they become more attractive, women swoon after them, and even the most average Joe Bloggs develops something about him when wearing uniform. A bit of Richard Gere from An Officer and a Gentleman. A sexy masculine authority. But when women put on the uniform it has the opposite effect. Even Cheryl Cole struggles to make combat trousers sexy. They’re baggy, shapeless and unflattering; they obliterate feminine curves, because the military uniform is cut for the male form. Despite 10 per cent of the army now being female (that’s approximately 10,000 girls) we still all wear the same clothes as the boys. Clothes not designed for hips and breasts.
On our feet the footwear was equally graceless. No soft, calfskin Italian style, because army boots are big, thumpy, Doc Marten clodhoppers, which rub mercilessly, leaving weeping blisters and then dry calloused heels. And after six months of wearing them, I could no longer stand in my former towering City high heels, as my toes had been allowed to comfortably spread and they now protested at being squeezed back into a tight leather point. And although this may have been saving me from Victoria Beckham’s bunions, it was another nail in the coffin of my femininity.
There is nothing attractive about being a girl in the army. Nothing sexy about the uniform. No class or elegance. With my hair gelled and scraped back on my head, baggy combat pyjamas hiding my feminine curves and clumpy boots on my feet, the girl had gone. Banished. Her loss mourned. Which is why any rare occasion there was for us to dress as girls was grasped with overstated excitement. Nights out, dinners, parties, balls, our girliness would fight to the fore, and the masculine military environment at Sandhurst actually exaggerated my femininity. Out of uniform, I embraced florals and pastels like never before. Pretty dresses and jewellery. Reds, pinks, silk and lace. I honed in on them. I lapped up copies of fashion magazines and luxuriated in the pleasure of ‘dressing up’. This bid for girliness was at its most extreme after I returned from Afghanistan, when, for a month, I would barely leave the house without perfect hair and make-up, having been deprived of a single girly day for four uninterrupted months in the desert.
So while on exercise girly standards slipped, out of uniform they became flawlessly upheld, with great effort going into the preparation for a night out, because it became a treasured treat; like a lazy Sunday lie-in or the taste of home cooking, it was something we yearned for and missed. I wanted to be a girl again and break from the army mould, express a bit of my individuality and feel feminine. So, as we returned from Exercise Worst Encounter, I scrubbed the war away. I rinsed the Norfolk sands from my hair and scoured Thetford’s dirt from under my nails. Lip balm was smeared over cracked lips and intensive moisturizer soothed onto dried skin. I selected an outfit to conceal the patterns of bruising on my limbs and applied make-up to mask the darkened circles under my tired eyes. Transformation complete, the tramp had been converted into a lady again. Ready to party.
And Sandhurst knows how to throw a party.
The commissioning ball held at the end of the course is rated by Tatler magazine in the top ten events in the social calendar. And during the course of the year, there are plenty of other smaller parties, formal dinners and charity fund-raising events, providing a balancing yin to the hard-working muddy yang of the rest of the commissioning course. All of these required us to morph back into ladies for the night, as officerly social decorum at these functions called for the girls of Eleven Platoon to be girls, to look pretty, act with grace, beguile, charm and forget that only hours earlier we may have been shooting to kill on the rifle range or thrusting the cold metal tip of a bayonet into a bloodied sandbag. So with a ball gown on, we converted easily from Mr Hyde to Dr Jekyll.
When it came to organizing these parties, boy-girl stereotypes were adhered to fiercely, with the girls of Imjin Company typically tasked with arranging the decor, food and party theme, while the boys were responsible for the provision of alcohol. So on the last Saturday of term, as I carefully strung up bunting and helped lay out plates of nibbles in the cricket pavilion, the boys had gone on a gin binge in the nearest Camberley off-licence. Using one litre of spirits per person as their provisioning metric, they were loading trolleys with value vodka and never-heard-of branded Belgian beers, aiming to maximize quantity with no regard for quality in ensuring a fairly toxic and eventful evening.
Officer Cadet Peters was with me inflating balloons and flirting outrageously with one of the boys from Twelve Platoon in her young, naive and unsubtle manner.
‘Urgh,’ she said, stretching up to pin a balloon to the ceiling. ‘I can’t quite reach, can someone lift me?’ The Twelve Platoon object of her desire instantly took the bait, putting down the beer cans that he was loading into the fridge and coming to her aid. ‘Can you just lift me up so I can attach this balloon?’ she asked, touching his arm and looking doe eyed at him.
‘Of course,’ he said, putting his hands around her waist. ‘You just tell me when you’re ready.’
‘You’ll have to be very strong,’ she playfully teased, flicking her hair over her shoulder. ‘Let me know if you can’t handle me.’
I cringed as I listened to them.
They carried on like this for a few minutes. Him lifting her up, she coquetting in his arms, getting closer and closer to him. Nothing more intimate was going to happen between them with me there in the room like a lemon, but she was lining him up, ready to pounce later that night as the benefits of the boys’ alcohol ratio kicked in under the disco lights. He had a girlfriend at home of course, and he wasn’t going to leave her for Peters, but the boys did strange things at Sandhurst and Peters would be an innocent victim. Filling in for those lonely nights he spent away from his real girlfriend.
In the all-boy companies these parties could be a bit Band of Thebes man-heavy, but in Imjin we had a ready-made mixed party crowd. The boys would then supplement this by inviting every girl they’d ever met, using the Academy backdrop as a means to impress the ladies, plenty of whom would have shunned their advances in the past, but now couldn’t resist the opportunity to be on the Sandhurst guest list. As well as the uniform, actually being at Sandhurst also enormously elevated the boys’ kudos and ‘pulling power’. Dating an army officer still holds considerable cachet among the fillies of a certain social set.
My jealousy
would simmer slightly at the sight of these ‘civvy’ girls, with their freshly highlighted hair and salon blow-dries, their unblemished, smooth skin and florid complexions. At a party these spectres at the feast would teeter at the bar in heels my feet now rejected, flicking manes of rich thick hair with polished, manicured nails. I envied them. I envied their femininity. I envied that on Monday morning they wouldn’t have to be on parade. That on Monday no one would be inspecting their boots. That on Monday they wouldn’t even be wearing boots. I was jealous because on Monday morning as I scraped and gelled my hair back into a bun and put my uniform on, they would still be girls, retaining their femininity. Because unlike them, for me, being a girl had now become just the preserve of my weekends; it was a hobby like the weekend dress habits of a cross-dressing transvestite.
Now we were in New College there was more interaction with the other Platoons too, and more mixing with the male officer cadets. In the first five weeks of Juniors, it had been a punishable offence to be seen talking to one of the boys. A press-up-enforced gender apartheid was imposed. I was once severely chastised by Captain Trunchbull for accepting the hand of a male cadet who offered to assist me to my feet when sitting on the ground in an outdoor map-reading lesson. Rebuked not only for holding his hand as he helped me to stand up, but also for accepting the help of a man. And for the first five weeks the only people I actually spoke to were female: SSgt Cox, Captain Trunchbull, Sgt Walker and the thirty-two other girls of Eleven Platoon. In a bizarre twist I’d joined one of the most masculine organizations in the world and found there to be only women in it. Sandhurst had become the most female-dominant environment I’d ever been in; my school days had been mostly boys, at prep school I was the only girl in my class, I’d read a science degree at university and worked in the male-dominated field of banking in the City. I was used to being a woman in a man’s world and it never bothered me. Suffragettes chained themselves to railings so gender would be irrelevant in my life decisions. So when I joined the army, I wasn’t fazed about being a female in the minority. Indeed I believe I had previously benefited from positive sexual discrimination in the City. Having a girl on the team in a bank brought a welcomed dilution to the testosterone and egos. My boss at HSBC found that bringing a girl along to the meeting table diffused tensions when the men began to lock horns. With a girl present, the ugly head of male bravado was less likely to surface and real business could be discussed (and my bottom patted patronizingly in the lift). Indeed this downplaying of testosterone worked in the army too. The effect of the girls’ platoon in Imjin Company was to reduce the competition between the two male platoons, and they became mutually supporting rather than trying to outdo each other, unlike the rivalry that existed between platoons in the all male companies.
Tellingly, I have never experienced sexism in the military, despite the machismo nature of the army. For an old and traditional organization, the army is actually quite progressive in its attitude to women and I genuinely believe that it recognizes the benefits of women in its ranks. If you are a competent, capable female you will have as equal and fulfilling a career as a military man, because despite the infantry frontline ban, doors in the military are wide open for women and there is far less of a glass ceiling than I ever felt in the City. And if motherhood is on your agenda then the MoD is definitely a sympathetic employer, offering an unrivalled maternity package that my City friends balk green-eyed at.
Anyway, much of what they were trying to teach us at Sandhurst is already innate to women. Cleaning and ironing are traditionally women’s chores, while women are naturally more organized and tidy than men. Attention to detail, subtlety, organization, multitasking, smartness of dress: in all these, women have the advantage.
But finding your identity as a woman in the army, as in any male-dominated environment, can be a complicated and thorny process of trial and error, and, as I commissioned from Sandhurst, I still hadn’t found the balance I am now comfortable with. Conducting yourself as a female in a man’s world, you run the risk of being either too girly and not taken seriously, or too blokey and being seen as a fool. Many girls try to be ‘one of the lads’, attempting to match the boys at their own game, competing with them in the gym and then the bar. I unfortunately have the biceps and alcohol tolerance of a gnat so this tack would never have worked for me. When I first started working in the City I considered taking up football, not because I had any interest in the sport, but so that I could take part in 90 per cent of the conversations of my colleagues, but then I realized that it wasn’t my place to try to compete with them, because I was not one of the boys and there was no requirement for me to be so.
Being able to be comfortable and successful in a man’s world is down to the individual and for this precious girls need not apply. There is no space for marshmallow pink, fluffy softness among the hairy chests and belching. With men, crying, blubbering and stamping-of-feet have no currency, because for a job in a man’s world it is only puddle-jumpers who will be accepted, girls who are happy to jump straight in, feet first, mindless of the mud.
*
So there is no sexism in the military, but what about the sex?
Well, there were couples at Sandhurst. Three of the girls in Eleven Platoon arrived at Sandhurst with their boyfriends and all three completed the commissioning course with relationships intact (and strong press-up muscles). Others arrived with boyfriends outside the Academy but with the pressures and demands of the course these relationships soon fizzled out. Gill was different. Her boyfriend wasn’t at Sandhurst and wasn’t even in the military, a rarity for an army girl. She and Rich had met at university and went on to marry after Sandhurst and start a family together soon after (so she isn’t even Gill any more but New).
Other, more transient, relationships also blossomed and withered inside the Sandhurst pressure-cooker, as Cupid blithely fired arrows, fuelling the rumours that the army thrives on. Indeed the number of girls applying to Sandhurst increased markedly when Princes William and Harry attended the Academy. Presumably as some thought they could catch a prince’s eye somewhere between the assault course and parade square.
If it could be found that someone still thought you attractive when you hadn’t washed for a week and had mud, sweat and facepaint smeared across your cheeks then there were powerful grounds on which to start a romance. The boys saw the girls at their absolute low; forget bed-head and morning breath, at Sandhurst the sex kitten was stripped back and exposed, no make-up or styled locks, our feminine curves were masked in boyish combats and there was no scope for a sexy hip-flick on the march. Because when it comes to attracting the attentions of men in the military, the army girl is faced with a tricky quandary.
At the Academy you are surrounded by men daily, muscular, toned, handsome eligible men, that civilian girls beyond the gilded gates and barbed-wire fence would love to sink their manicured nails into. But these men are all colleagues, beyond the bounds of career decency. Flirtatious flutterings have no place on the parade square and the army girl is unflatteringly dressed up as a tomboy, not an inviting female seductress.
Late one Sunday evening after eight months at Sandhurst, I was signing back into the Academy still dressed for the weekend when one of the boys entered the corridor beside me.
‘Ooo. You scrub up well,’ he commented, as he looked me up and down.
What?
I’d been there for eight months and he’d never seen the real me, never peeled back the military mask and seen the girl beneath.
‘Er, thanks,’ I said. ‘I guess that was a compliment.’ I looked at him with a wry frown. He wasn’t someone I knew. He wasn’t in Imjin Company and I couldn’t tell if there was an ulterior meaning in his remark so I received his compliment with suspicion.
‘Of course it was a compliment. You girls don’t get much chance to be ladies in here, do you?’ he said as I passed him the pen. ‘Sometimes we boys forget how different it must be for you.’
‘Well, yes you’re righ
t,’ I said, warming to him slightly. It was like living a double life I suppose. I had a split persona.
‘I don’t think I’d like the thought of my girlfriend going through Sandhurst,’ he said, signing his name in the signing-in book.
‘Really. Why not?’ I asked.
‘Well, it’s not very ladylike, it is? Wearing the uniform and being out on exercise. She’s too fragile and feminine for that. And I probably wouldn’t fancy her if she was in the army. No offence, but no one wants to go out with an army girl.’
‘Oh,’ I said, a little put out by his hard words.
As we started to walk down the corridor, I thought about his prejudice. I wondered whether the thought of a robust girl who could succeed at Sandhurst was unattractive to him because in his eyes she had lost her femininity or if in fact he felt it threatened his masculinity. If a girl could do it, somehow Sandhurst lost its rugged notion.
As we reached the end of the corridor he held the door open for me, his chivalry saved for my civilian persona.
‘Thank you,’ I said as I walked through it, my heels clicking against the tiled floor on the other side as I began to walk away from him. I wondered whether he would dump his girlfriend if she decided to join the army. If he loved her it shouldn’t matter what she did for a living. I am still the same person now as I was when I worked in the City, only my job has changed. I look the same; I have the same personality and character. In fact I’m much fitter and happier now. And in his compliment to me I had just proved his perception of the lost femininity wrong. As he disappeared behind me I seethed slightly; this narrow-minded view bothered me. It seems that at Sandhurst the selection may have been rich, but the pickings were poor. Perhaps he was just being young and naive. In my army career I have met plenty of young male officers with this prejudiced opinion, only to bump into them again years later and find that they have married a military girl.
An Officer and a Gentlewoman Page 17
