Soldier's Daughters

by Fiona Field

  After a few days Michelle really began to struggle. She took almost twice as long as Sam to get her kit up to scratch or arrange all of her issue kit ready for inspection, or any damn task they were set, but her worst failing was her total inability to bring her drill shoes up to snuff. Bulling boots was a skill she couldn’t master. Luckily Sam could and had, so as soon as she’d sorted out her own stuff she rocked across the corridor to sit on Michelle’s bed with a duster, the boot polish and Michelle’s drill shoes. And while Sam’s duster-encased finger traced minute circles all over Michelle’s toecaps, her friend got on with ironing her shirts, or de-fluffing her beret with sticky tape, or cleaning the skirting board of her room with a toothbrush.

  ‘You don’t need to do this,’ protested Michelle as it approached midnight and Sam was still working on her mate’s boots.

  ‘I do, I owe you. You got me through the first weeks of prep school. What goes around comes around.’

  When they’d first run into each other, back when they were both seven-going-on-eight, her initial impression of Michelle had been far from favourable. Sam had been sitting on her bed in her two-bed dorm at boarding school on the first day, feeling abandoned and bereft after her father’s perfunctory departure, when a tall, skinny and noisy girl had thundered in.

  ‘But I wanted that bed,’ she said by way of greeting, glaring at Sam.

  Sam felt irked. She’d got here first, this was her bed and she wasn’t going to be pushed about. But even though she made her mind up to stay put she also felt intimidated.

  Then the girl’s father arrived. ‘Now, now, Michelle, I’m sure the other bed is as nice.’

  ‘But it’s not by the window.’

  ‘Honestly, Michelle,’ said her mother, who entered the room a second after her father, ‘does it really matter?’

  To Sam’s amazement Michelle turned, gave her mother a vile look and then said, ‘Of course it matters,’ in such a withering tone that Sam felt a surge of embarrassment at having witnessed the scene. She pushed herself further up her bed and as far into the corner as she could, clutching her teddy like a shield in front of her. How could this girl treat her mother like that? thought Sam, who, not having a mum, longed for one more than anything in the world.

  After this they barely spoke to each other for a couple of days; Sam thinking Michelle over-confident, brash and annoying, and Michelle categorising Sam as wet, shy and a waste of oxygen. But then, when Michelle caught Sam crying with homesickness even her, rather stony, heart softened and tentatively she gave her room-mate a hug.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you’re the normal one here, missing your folks and everything, unlike me. Isn’t that a good thing?’

  ‘I suppose.’ Sam sniffed and tried to dry her eyes. ‘Don’t you like yours, then?’

  ‘Dad’s all right.’

  ‘What about your mum?’

  ‘She’s not my mum. My mum ran away a few years ago and left me with Dad.’

  Sam didn’t know what to say. She wondered if being left behind – not wanted – was worse than having a mum who’d died.

  ‘But even so, don’t you mind being away from home?’ Sam sniffed.

  ‘Nah,’ Michelle said robustly. ‘Can’t stand my step-mother so I’m thankful I don’t have to see her, the mean cow.’

  The idea that Michelle had a step-mother, and one who seemed to be wicked to boot, was somewhat thrilling. And it explained the exchange between Michelle and Mrs Flowers that first day.

  ‘What about your folks?’ Michelle asked.

  ‘Dad’s always busy working and Mum’s dead.’

  There was a short silence that followed that announcement. Then, ‘Sorry. Do you miss her?’

  ‘Never knew her, but I know I’d have liked to have had a mother.’

  ‘I miss mine. I wish I knew why she walked out.’

  ‘You’ve no idea why?’

  Michelle shook her head. ‘Dad won’t talk about it but maybe, if he hadn’t married Janine, Mum might have come back.’

  ‘Do you see her?’

  ‘Who, my real mum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s sad.’ Sam reckoned that was really sad; sadder than having a dead mum. Poor Michelle.

  From then on loud, brash, brave Michelle took Sam into her protective care and stuck with her through prep school; making her laugh, making her face her fears and frequently making her late. Oh, and getting them both into trouble when Michelle’s pranks went a bit too far, but Sam also knew that without Michelle her experience at prep school might have been very different and a lot less happy. Now it was pay-back time and just as Michelle had kept her head above water at St Martin’s, at Sandhurst it was Sam’s turn to be Michelle’s life-saver.

  2

  Despite their best efforts, despite the fact that they always thought they had brought their rooms and uniforms to a state of perfection, they still got shouted at. They got shouted at for being scruffy, shouted at for being late, shouted at for breathing loudly and yet, because everyone was always getting shouted at for the same things, it was, bizarrely, almost funny.

  After the first few weeks they were all so exhausted neither Sam nor Michelle knew how they managed to function at all, but function they did. Everyone in their intake at Sandhurst had been turned into zombies by the relentless pressure. And it wasn’t just the endless inspections – there were route marches, PT sessions, lectures to listen to, essays to write, and the transition between any of these activities invariably involved a change of clothes and sometimes yet another snap room inspection to check that, having changed uniforms at lightning speed, your room was still a showpiece. Sleep was a luxury and, like every other cadet, Sam got used to managing with five hours a night, often less, so staying awake in lectures, which took place in warm, cosy classrooms, was a complete mission.

  ‘Whatthehelldoyouthinkyou’redoingLewis?’

  Sam was so startled her bum actually left the hard plastic seat she was sitting on.

  ‘Sir?’ she gasped, her heart hammering with horror at being caught sound asleep in a lecture on military law. A dry subject and a warm room had proved a fatal combination. She stared at the angry face of the instructor, inches from her own. She could smell mint on his breath and a bubble of crazy hysterical laugher threatened to escape.

  ‘You were sleeping, Lewis,’ he snapped.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Is my lecture boring you?’

  It had been. Tedious was the only word to describe it but Sam knew a big fat lie was in order. ‘No, sir, of course not. I’m a bit tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Not getting your beauty sleep,’ he sneered.

  Sam knew that her kit might be immaculate, as was her personal hygiene, but other than that she looked a complete mess. A comment Michelle had made a couple of days before leapt into her head.

  ‘It’s all very well being as fit as a butcher’s dog but I wish I didn’t look like one as well.’ Which, considering how pretty Michelle was with her fine bone structure and clear skin, had begged the question that if Michelle thought she looked rough, how bad did the rest of them look?

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn a hint of make-up or moisturised her skin. Her hands were calloused and her nails broken and chipped. Her hair, too long to be off her collar, was scraped back into an unbecoming knot, and her lip was swollen and split from when she’d slipped on the assault course earlier in the week and hit her face. Beauty sleep? Who was Captain Philips kidding?

  ‘So,’ he said, not waiting for her answer, ‘to make sure you don’t drop off again, maybe you’d better stand at the front here. Don’t want you missing any more of my lecture. I didn’t spend hours preparing it for it to be wasted.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The other cadets all sent Sam looks of support and sympathy as she made her way to the front of the classroom and stood next to the whiteboard, swaying with exhaustion. Of course, standing out in
front of the class also meant she couldn’t take notes so she’d have extra work to do, copying up somebody else’s.

  ‘Bastard,’ said Michelle, as they ran back to their accommodation to change into PT kit for the endurance run that was next on the agenda. ‘You can copy my notes. I did them extra carefully so you can read them. Best handwriting and everything.’

  ‘Thanks, hon.’ Michelle was a good friend.

  Their first term at Sandhurst edged towards Christmas and a fortnight’s leave. Before they all departed there was a dinner night for their intake where the officer instructors all arrived in myriads of different regimental mess kits, turning the evening into a parade of peacocks. And then the final event of each and every term – Sovereign’s Parade – the commissioning parade for the senior term. As Sam stood on the parade square in front of Old College, immaculate in her number one dress uniform, a high-necked, navy-blue suit with white collar tabs, gleaming white belt, white gloves and black drill shoes bulled to a mirror finish, and watched the top intake march past the saluting base before going up the steps and through the doors of Old College, she knew she wanted to be commissioned more than anything in the world. Sod how tough it all was, stuff the sleep deprivation, and bollocks to the hard work, it would all be worth it for that moment.

  ‘What you doing for the Christmas leave?’ asked Michelle. ‘Going to your gran’s as usual?’

  Sam nodded. ‘Now I’ve left school and I’m grown up, Dad isn’t entitled to a quarter any more so he lives in the mess. I can’t really go and stay with him there, can I? Anyway, I think he’s going skiing with some friends.’

  ‘Can’t you go too?’

  ‘I think I’d rather be with Gran and Grandpa. It’ll be more normal. And after a term at Sandhurst I could do with a dose of normal.’

  Not, thought Sam, that holidays had ever been really normal, not since she could remember. When they’d lived in Germany, she’d been palmed off on other families on the patch. It had been OK but she’d always been conscious that she was a guest in someone else’s house so it had been difficult to really relax, not like you could in your own place with your own toys and belongings. Then they’d moved back to England and shortly after that she’d been sent to boarding school. Sometimes she went to stay with her maternal grandparents but sometimes her father took leave and she’d go and stay with him in his quarter for a week or so. But, of course, with him being posted on a regular basis, on several occasions ‘home’ wasn’t the same ‘home’ as it had been on the previous visit, so she’d arrive at a strange house, on a strange patch with strange neighbours and unknown children in the play-park. Her belongings might have been unpacked into this new bedroom but it never felt like her room; her room was the one she shared with Michelle at boarding school and then later the one at her public school. That was the constant that didn’t change in her life, that was home. The place she stayed with her father was just a house.

  Right now, the calm normality of her grandparents’ cottage held far more appeal than a skiing holiday with her father. It might be in a village in the back of beyond, where the only social life took place in the local pub and where the average age of the customers had to be topping fifty, but the thought of having two weeks during which she could eat, sleep and relax and not be shouted at seemed heaven on earth. Besides, her grandparents would smother her in love and cuddles – and she could do with a dose of that too.

  From the first day of her second term, Sam knew there was a distinct but subtle change in her intake’s training. For a start, they were no longer the junior term. The new intake’s cadets were the ones who were the focus of the opprobrium of all the directing staff. Sam’s intake was treated a smidge more like grown-ups. There were slightly fewer pointless changes of uniform every day, they had more time to themselves, there were fewer show parades, fewer inspections. And they could only feel sorry for the new cadets who were being put through what they had survived. Sorry, but also a little smug. After all, they had survived it… well, they had but some hadn’t.

  At the end of their first term there had been casualties: the cadets who had been told they were never going to make the grade; not committed enough; not clever enough; not fit enough… And the outstanding cadets were already being promoted. OK, the promotions were to meaningless unpaid cadet ranks but these promotions did bestow kudos because it meant the DS had recognised and acknowledged who was ahead of their peers. Sam was amongst the chosen ones and was now an officer cadet lance corporal along with two other colleagues. At the other end of the scale, Michelle was on a warning.

  ‘What’s that all about?’ asked Sam when Michelle had exited her company commander’s interview ashen and close to tears.

  ‘He said I don’t pay enough attention to detail.’

  ‘Oh, hon.’ Sam gave her a hug.

  ‘And he said I question authority.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘But some of the stuff we have to do is bonkers. Pointless.’

  ‘I know, but it’s the way it’s done here. Once we get commissioned it’ll all be different. Just suck it up for the next few months and stop asking why.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Michelle, despondently.

  ‘When will your warning be reviewed?’

  ‘Four weeks.’

  ‘You can do it,’ said Sam. ‘Head down, work hard and don’t question orders.’

  ‘But this is what I said to my dad. I was only obeying orders isn’t a good argument.’

  Sam laughed. ‘The DS aren’t asking you to shoot unarmed civilians – they’re seeing how far they can push you.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And why not take some initiative? The DS like that. They want to see us being proactive – you know, leading from the front.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Sam scratched her head. ‘Look, Arnhem Company ran that talent night. How about doing something like that?’

  ‘The talent night was pants.’

  It had been embarrassingly awful but it wasn’t the point: the point was that Arnhem Company’s cadets had taken it upon themselves to try to entertain everyone else. ‘So organise something that isn’t. Look,’ said Sam, ‘if you sink your father will have been proved right. And if that happens you’ll have to go home and live with him and your step-mother and eat humble pie.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Michelle leaned over and gave Sam a big hug. ‘OK, Dettingen Company is going to have a party. And it’s going to be the best ever.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Sam.

  ‘When?’ said Sarah, the cadet most likely to win the sash of honour. ‘When are we going to do this?’

  She, like the rest of Michelle’s colleagues, was lounging around in one of the battered leather armchairs in the cadet mess anteroom.

  ‘This party has got to be on a weekend when everyone’s here,’ said Kim. ‘We don’t want it to be a flop because half the others are away on exercise. Hang on, I’ll get the programme.’ She shot out of the room to the noticeboard, which had the copies of Academy orders and company daily detail which together mapped out their daily, weekly and termly routines.

  A minute later she was back with the green A4 sheets. She flopped back into the chair and began leafing through the pages.

  ‘Nope, nope, nope,’ she said as she scanned the weekly programmes and saw which platoons were being sent off on adventurous training or on exercise. ‘Eureka. Got it. Oh, and it’ll be Valentine’s weekend.’

  ‘It’s written in the stars,’ said Michelle. ‘So what’s the theme to be? Vamps and Tramps? Shipwreck?’

  There was a chorus of catcalls.

  ‘You think of better,’ she said, sulking.

  ‘Films?’ suggested Sam.

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ said Michelle. ‘All the lads’ll pick characters from The Bridge on the River Kwai or The Longest Day or A Bridge Too Far. Honestly, they’ll all turn up in uniform and what’s the point in that?’

  ‘But that’s exac
tly the point,’ said Sam. ‘You know what men are like when it comes to stuff like dressing up: they’ll only do it if they can do it easily. If we make it too difficult they’ll bail out.’

  The others agreed. ‘And anyway,’ said Sarah, ‘we can all glam up. We can be film stars. Sam can come as Scarlett Johansson. She’s little and blonde with enviable knockers.’

  ‘Oi,’ protested Sam, throwing a cushion across the room, despite the fact that what Sarah said about her tits was true. Even in a top-of-the-range sports bra, running was always uncomfortable because of her boobs and army uniforms had never been designed with an hourglass figure like hers in mind.

  Everyone else laughed but then the cadets began to discuss who they would come dressed as.

  Michelle realised she was completely outnumbered in her objection to the theme and joined in. ‘On that basis I shall come as Nicole Kidman. Isn’t she hugely tall?’

  ‘Good shout,’ said Kim. ‘Tall and gorgeous. She’s yours.’ Michelle preened.

  ‘Well, I’m going to use a year’s supply of cam cream and come as Princess Fiona in ogre mode,’ said Sarah.

  There were hoots of derision but there was a definite air of excitement in the mess as the cadets discussed the arrangements.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Sam. She grabbed a notebook. ‘We need a committee. Michelle, as it was your idea, I vote you to be chairman. All agreed?’ She looked around the anteroom. ‘Carried. And I’ll take the minutes.’ She began to write notes as the cadets came up with ideas thick and fast.

  Later, when they were returning to their rooms, Michelle turned to Sam.

  ‘We don’t really need a committee, do we?’

  ‘No, probably not. But now we’ve got one, and you are chairman, it makes it all rather official. And it has the added bonus that if I’m going to do my job properly the minutes need to be published. And that way the DS will know exactly who is responsible for the idea. If not, someone like Sarah is bound to get the credit just because she’s Sarah.’