An Officer and a Gentlewoman (2 page)

The whole scramble had taken less than ten minutes.

It was a slick and well-rehearsed operation. The entire focus was about getting to the soldier and saving his life, bringing him back to the field hospital at Camp Bastion where he stood a good chance of survival. Soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan are guaranteed to be at the hospital within ninety minutes of wounding, most make it within forty-five, some as quickly as fifteen. Medical emergency and saving lives are the absolute priority here, money and resources are no object.

I strolled back to the JOC comforted by the knowledge that help was on its way and the soldier, though injured, would be OK. Inside I flicked on the kettle, watching BBC Breakfast television on the British Forces Broadcast Service (BFBS) while I waited for it to boil. As I poured the boiling water into a paper cup a radioed update arrived: the soldier’s status had changed from ‘Category Alpha’ to ‘Category Echo’. He had died.

My body went numb.

Slowly stirring my coffee with the plastic teaspoon, something between my stomach and chest turned over. Just like that. I had been in Afghanistan for less than forty-eight hours and already a British soldier had paid the ultimate price. I had never met him. I didn’t even know his name. I knew nothing about him, but it struck me. I continued to watch Sian Williams and Bill Turnbull on their red sofa talking about the recession and snow that were bringing the UK to a standstill. Somewhere back home someone else was probably doing exactly the same routine as me: sipping a fresh cup of coffee and watching the early morning news, getting ready for the day ahead. Except they were about to get a knock on their front door that would shatter their lives and change it for ever. A mother, father, wife, sister, brother, daughter, son, grandparent, friend. Things would never be the same for them. He was gone. Another solemn hearse travelling through Wootton Bassett.

Death is routine in war, but these were the emotions I was not trained for. I had never been so close to death. The Royal Marine was the first of nineteen soldiers to die in my four months in Afghanistan. Each of the nineteen repatriated home in coffins draped with a Union Jack. Each remembered in prayers uttered by the padre at vigil ceremonies, the whole of Camp Bastion gathering, heads lowered, looking at boots in the dust. Each death was saddening but they became a fact of life out there, as British soldiers paid daily with life and limb.

Outside I watched the helicopters return, and wondered how I had come to be in this corner of a foreign field. Just two years earlier I had been a suited civilian, commuting to a desk with the rest of the rat race. Now I was actually at war. Not part of the gritty infantry combat on the ground, but still here, smelling it, tasting it, feeling the emotions that newspapers, books and television screens simply cannot convey.

As the coffee passed through me I walked across the dirt road to one of the Portaloos in the line of blue phone-box-like Tardis (or ‘Turdis’). I locked the door behind me and held my breath as I
lifted the lid to reveal the horrors within. Inside the Portaloo the plastic walls were covered with graffitied gallows soldier humour and I smiled to myself as I sat down and read the comment on the door in front of me: ‘Thank you for your application to RMAS’. RMAS – the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, the British Army’s officer training academy.

That was how I had got here.

I had managed to go through life in the right order. I worked hard at school, got GCSEs, A-levels and went to university, where after three years of avoiding serious responsibility I graduated and took a job at a bank in the City that paid well and made my parents proud. I bought sharp suits, wore power heels, sat finance exams and spent two hours of my day at the clemency of London Transport on the Underground, commuting to a desk in the shiny glass and chrome of Canary Wharf.

It was utterly soul destroying.

I went along with it for a while and played the City game. Squandering my enviable wage in bars and clubs on the King’s Road, soaking up the bright lights of London with little to show for it. At university I’d known no alternative. All the big, powerful City firms had come through on their milk round, seducing us with flash PowerPoint presentations and sharp pinstripe suits, and we students clambered over one another to be there. To be plied with their free booze, queuing to schmooze potential bosses and slip CVs to the recruiting girls. And I allowed myself to be swept along like everyone else, as these big names brought big promises. Investment banks. Management consultancies. Accountancy firms. Insurance brokers. Law firms. What these companies propositioned was temptingly sweet: the offer of a
student-loan-busting starting salary and juicy joining bonus. It was what everyone wanted.

Wasn’t it?

I interviewed with a few and after a couple of rounds of
sweaty-palmed
cross-examinations, secured a job with an investment bank. And so, with the ink barely dry on the dotted line, I cashed my first giddy pay cheque as graduation mortar boards were being flung into the air. I felt ready to start working life. I’d had enough of lectures and exams, and I wanted to start doing something other than just learning and running up debts. Of course I would miss the irresponsible, laissez-faire, carefree student life, but not the essay deadlines and baked bean meals. I packed up my poky student digs, to find an even pokier flat in London which I moved into, unpacking my belongings into clever IKEA storage solutions in a bijou box room, ready to start my new City life. A grown-up life. A life of smart suits and shirts. A life of Oyster cards and Underground maps. A life of fiddling with cufflinks and understanding the
Financial Times
. With my final exams out of the way, furrowed brows, bleary eyes and caffeine became replaced with client meetings, ticking deadlines and even more caffeine. It was a whole new world. A world without daytime television and duvet days spent sleeping off hangovers. A world that didn’t stop for sport on a Wednesday afternoon nor care for my late essay excuses. It was a world of client dining and corporate dinners, not cheese on toast. It was a world of money and finance inside the Square Mile. Of backstabbing and office politics. It was a heartless world filled with pretension and greed, because what wasn’t revealed in the flashy milk-round presentations, nor handed out with the corporate freebies was that in return these big firms wanted my soul; and ‘what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’
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I hated it. I lacked any passion for it and slowly the life began to seep out of me as I became trapped. I was wasting the best years of
my life caught in a City spiral. Waking each morning from a disturbed night’s sleep two hours earlier than my body wanted to, to join the rest of London’s commuters, fighting delays on the District Line, so I could be tied to a desk, staring square-eyed at a computer screen all day bored by Excel. The coveted job: it turned out I didn’t want it. But what did I want? I didn’t want to be here, I knew that, surrounded by grey drudgery, in a grey City with grey depressed drones. I didn’t fit. I couldn’t settle down. I used to have energy, drive and ambition. Now I craved daylight and a bit of variety.

As the months rolled into years I began to realize that there had to be more to life than spending eighteen hours in the office enslaved by a highly paid job. I felt as if I was staring at the blank wall of a dead end, but what were the alternatives? I was tired of living for my holidays, weekends and the hope of escaping beyond the M25. But I wasn’t qualified to do anything else. If I wanted to move on I’d have to land on a snake and slither back to the start, before climbing the ladders up to where I wanted to be. I would need to retrain but it was a leap I was increasingly prepared to make. I was single and unattached, and I was free to make that leap; I had no commitments and no baggage. No serious boyfriend, no mortgage, no pulls or ties. I started considering my options, and the choices available to me. Which doors were still open and which were now closed? Sitting on the train to a client meeting I scrolled through my BlackBerry and looked for Life Plan B.

Four years after this highly paid despair set in, I found myself seated at a dinner next to some ghastly hedge fund manager, listening to him braying about his assets and how fabulous he was. The arrogant buffoon bored me to pains with spiel of how much money he had and spent; the costs of private dining in Scott’s, how eye-wateringly big his bonus was, that he’d just bought his second Ferrari and an expensive new kitchen despite being uninterested in cookery. Everything about his life revolved around money, and he
was happy because he was making it and flashing it. As I listened to him I realized that his heart was beating to market movements, they were his raison d’être, while my heart didn’t so much as flutter to the FTSE. And he wasn’t the only greedy, contemptuous tosser at the table; I was surrounded by them. People whose priorities in life focused solely on pecuniary gains. People who were driven by materialistic competition, by the greatness of their wealth and an insatiable thirst to make more money than their neighbour. Their pallid lifeless faces, overworked bloodshot eyes and thinning stressed hair revealed that their bodies as well as their personalities were destroyed by their jobs. For these investment bankers and fund managers, bond traders and brokers, their measure of success in life was money. But what is money? Bob Dylan said something along the lines of a man being a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed, and in between he does what he wants to do. And I knew I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do, and I’m not convinced everyone else was either.

But I felt compelled to persist because of my privilege. I should have been grateful for what I had. Many of my fellow students weren’t swept up in the university milk rounds. The City has a reputation as a ruthless hire-and-fire world and, as a woman with a job in a bank other than at the secretary’s desk, I’d broken through the glass ceiling. But I wasn’t grateful. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to compete. I didn’t care about the flashier car, bigger house or five-starred hotel. I didn’t want a basement conversion in Fulham, Michelin-starred meals or bespoke suits. I wanted to break free from it all and do something completely different with my life. I wanted to run away and join the circus, but what is the educated girl’s circus?

I wasn’t afraid of long hours and hard work. And I was happy for my job to become my life. I wasn’t put off by having to hold my own in a testosterone-filled environment, but it had to be worth it. And right now it wasn’t. I would love to lay claim that in 2006 I sensed the approaching economic apocalypse and recessional doom, that I
was running away from pending fiscal tragedy but I didn’t. That was pure luck.

There was another dinner guest that night who didn’t fit in either. But he didn’t seem to care. Robyn was the younger brother of our host, in town fleetingly before heading to Iraq. He was incredibly confident, exuding vitality and an excitement for life. Upbeat and intrepid, his ruddy, tanned face had a healthy complexion at odds with the rest of us City folk. He was fresh, bright-eyed and energetic. His eyes sparkled with a cheerful joie de vivre because he wasn’t spending his days shackled to a desk like the rest of us. His different, refreshing perspective was the result of a career choice that didn’t involve fighting District Line delays, sacrificing your soul and sucking up to arrogant humourless clients. His days weren’t spent surrounded by hideous capitalist greed and dreadful brash bankers, because he was in the Army and had a different Zen.

Later, over coffee, between dull discussions of offshore banking and first-class lounges, Robyn entertained with exciting stories of his life in the military, his time in Kenya, Brecon and Basra. Listening to him I realized what work should be about. He relished what he did, with a thrilling zest and zeal. His job seemed so varied and exciting and he had a passion I lacked. He did a job he clearly loved and I was envious. Very envious. As the wine bottles emptied, we clambered into a taxi to continue the night at a Mayfair club. Sitting in the back of a black cab watching the lights of London whizz past me, my life whizzing past me, I listened to Robyn regaling us with a story about his time as a cadet in training at Sandhurst. As he talked on, delivering another humorous punchline, he leaned towards me and casually tapped my knee.

‘Héloïse,’ he said with a cheeky grin, ‘you should join the Army.’

‘Really? Oh no I don’t think so. I’m not suitable for that sort of thing.’

‘Not true. You’d be surprised,’ he said, leaning back into his seat. ‘You strike me as exactly what the Army are looking for.’

The Army? It was something I had never before considered. Were there even women in the Army? Weren’t they all butch lesbians? I knew no one in the Army. I knew nothing about it. But I’d had enough of the City and knew I had to get out, and with that innocent throwaway comment from Robyn the die was cast.

When I left school most of the Army was still off limits to women and joining had simply never been presented to me as a career choice. The RAF recruited boys from my school, but that was it, just the boys. At university I had met a few students who were in the OTC,
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but they weren’t cool and the idea of spending your weekends cold and piss-wet through when you could be warm and sleeping off a hangover was a simple decision for my student self to make. But now, staring down the barrel of a bleak unfulfilling City existence, I was curious.

Still thinking about Robyn’s comment the following week I ventured to my nearest Army Recruitment Office, tottering down High Holborn in my suit, having sneakily escaped from the captivity of my desk with some mumbled excuse about a client errand. As I stood on the pavement outside, I gazed up at the posters hanging enticingly in the window. Images depicted soldiers looking wary in combat face paint, driving tanks across open plains and marching proudly with bearskins perched on their heads. Each had that twinkle in their eyes I lacked. It all looked very different to my average day in the office. I pushed open the glass door and stepped in, instantly feeling out of place in my suit among the forces uniforms. A young soldier in combats approached me and offered his help. He started by asking my age, never a good opening line with a woman, especially if it is to lead to an ageist rejection, because unfortunately at twenty-seven, he informed me, I was
already too old for most of the Army’s career opportunities.
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And with that the wind was blown from my sails. Any small fantasies I had had of swapping sharp suits for marching boots crumpled, withered and died. I was too late. But what the recruiting soldier had failed to identify was that my plummy accent and tertiary education might make me eligible for a career as an officer rather than a soldier, and my abject ignorance of the Army’s apartheid structure meant I didn’t realize either. As I walked back out, stepping into the pedestrians of High Holborn, the glass doors closed behind me and the opportunity was missed.

Months passed and I continued to look for alternative uses for my life, keeping my eyes wide open and prejudices at bay. I now felt galvanized to make the change but was lost for what to do. I knew that when I reached old age it would be the things I didn’t do in my life that I would regret rather than the things I did, and right now I had to do something else. Thanks to my City salary I’d paid off my student debt, I had qualifications to fall back on and a small property investment. I was free to try something completely new. But now with a blank sheet in front of me I had no idea how to fill it. The world was my oyster and it was more daunting than the most important client meeting.

But my interest in the Army didn’t go away and, as if fate was hunting me down, I bumped into Robyn again on the Tube.

He chuckled at my naivety. ‘I meant for you to apply to Sandhurst,’ he said. ‘Not join as a “Tom”.’

I gave him a look that showed I was still a little less than understanding.

‘It’s where the Army do their officer training,’ he offered. ‘It takes a year. And at the end of it you get the Queen’s Commission and go off to command the soldiers.’

He was still very enthusiastic about me joining and convinced I’d be perfect for the military. So a week later, on his recommendation, I found myself on the doorstep of an address in
Greenwich, where I could be successfully channelled into the Army’s recruitment system. Inside I sat waiting in a foyer that had all the bland, sterile charm of a dentist’s waiting room, with a corner stack of tattered old magazines and a floor of rough blue carpet tiles. I flicked through an old copy of
Soldier
magazine as I waited, reading with curiosity advertisements for ‘ballistic underpants’ (saving Ryan’s privates) and ‘1,000 mile socks’. I was here to meet the woman responsible for London army officer recruitment. After a while a soldier in uniform showed me to her office where she welcomed me with a nod and motioned for me to sit in the low chair opposite her desk. Her manner was formal and gruff as she interviewed me, and seated above me at her desk her size was exaggerated from my low perspective. I was surprised to discover that she had actually been in the Army herself and even more shocked when she asked me whether I had a boyfriend, because, ‘Everyone knows that Sandhurst is widely acknowledged as the country’s biggest dating agency.’