An Officer and a Gentlewoman (21 page)

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 right,’ 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.

There are some advantages to this lost femininity. When I get up in the morning, I don’t fling open my wardrobe doors and sigh at the choice and decision to be made, because there is only one option. I don’t waste time each morning styling my hair or applying make-up and instead set my alarm clock for the last possible safe minute. If I’m having a ‘fat day’ it doesn’t matter, because underneath my combats no one can tell. And if I want my soldiers to take me seriously, it helps that they can’t check out my ass.

And not all of the girls were interested in men anyway. In Eleven Platoon we had one unconfirmed lesbian. By unconfirmed, I mean she kept her sexual orientation to herself, but we all knew, and she now happily has a girlfriend. So despite the army’s stereotyped reputation, our ratio of one in thirty seems fairly average for gay and lesbian numbers in the society we serve. Lesbians and gays
have been openly accepted in the British Armed Forces since the ban on serving homosexuals was uneventfully lifted in 2000.

However, despite the firm establishment of women in the military, there continues a debate over their place and role. Many feminists see the continued exclusion of women from close-combat roles as one of the last bastions of sexual discrimination. At present women in the army are prohibited from serving in the forward echelons of the infantry and cavalry, where the job of close-up killing tends to be done. The officially stated reason for this surrounds the impact that a girl would have on the close-knit fighting units who do this task rather than any physical inability; the idea is that having a girl around in this small macho club would upset the balance and unfocus the mind. Although this debarring of women is not a globally held view as women currently serve in the infantry in countries like New Zealand, Denmark, Germany and Israel, but many civilized societies continue to find the concept of mothers, wives and daughters in the thick of battle unpalatable. Women are viewed as the more vulnerable sex and the idea of them thrusting a steely blade into another human being for a living doesn’t sit well. As givers of life, it is felt we don’t have the right to take it.

But none of the girls in Eleven Platoon had aspirations to get close up and kill anyway. None of us felt a need to break down this barrier to equality and take up arms. The infantry boys could keep their miserable crawling, digging and hiding in holes; for us the infanteering was just a necessity to get through Sandhurst and not a lifestyle choice. We ran around on exercises with guns and honed our shooting on the range but it was not what we joined the army to do. Only one third of the army is infantry, leaving the rest available to the girls – engineering, teaching, policing, intelligence gathering, communications, helicopter flying, logistics, bomb disposal and much, much more. I didn’t join the army to go eyeball to eyeball with the Taliban (though it could happen), and the choice of alternatives was endless.

But it was a choice we had to start thinking about, because while it felt like the end of Sandhurst would never come, it was at a very early stage that we had to start considering where we wanted to go when we did eventually commission and had to set our designs on a future army home. With a third of the army off-limits to the girls this narrowing of choice should have meant for an easier decision, but it wasn’t. While we’d all made the decision to join the army, what regiment or corps we actually wanted to join became a fluid, moving target as the year wore on.

In the first five weeks of Juniors, between room inspections and drill square humiliation, we had received presentations from each of our options, but I was so tired at this stage that my attention was focused more on fighting with my nodding head and drooping eyelids than absorbing any of the information I should have been, and my only lasting memory of this was the presentation we received from the cavalry.

For their presentation the cavalry had booked the most opulent of Old College’s function rooms, the Wellington Room, which was situated at the front of the college. It had huge, towering windows which overlooked the parade square, offering views of the Queen Victoria statue and ornamental rowing lake. Inside, the walls of the Wellington Room were covered in elegant damask wallpaper over which hung rare gold-framed oil paintings of battle scenes, while in one corner of the room sat an impressive carved marble bust of Wellington himself, presiding over the room’s events. It was in stark contrast to our Victorian schoolroom surroundings in New College and befitting of cavalry comfort and consuetude.

We attended these presentations as a platoon and although no one in Eleven Platoon was eligible to join the Royal Armoured Corps or Household Cavalry we still had to attend. On the day, we arrived early from the infantry presentation, another which the girls’ platoon had pointlessly attended, gathering quietly in the corridor outside to wait for our time to go in. Waiting patiently
we could hear cavorting laughter and guffawing coming from the other side of the double oak doors, like listening to the inner sounds of a gentlemen’s club. The cavalry are an odd bunch. This collective of Flashman Army units are old and very traditional, still clinging to their glory days in Victorian battle with names like Hussar, Dragoon and Lancer. The typical officer has been bred from very good stock, with a top class private education, inherited wealth, a personal income and often land and a title too (both Princes William and Harry joined the Household Cavalry). Traditionally these swashbuckling types rode horses, but today they caper around in tanks, on Salisbury Plain or the Canadian prairie. Unfettered by financial constraints, cavalry officers are notorious for quaffing vintage champagne like water and wearing full black tie to dinner every night of the week in the Officers’ Mess.

Waiting in the corridor outside the Wellington Room we heard the laughter eventually stop, and a latch clicked as the doors were flung open, revealing a floppy-haired gentleman, clad in burgundy cords and glossy leather riding boots. On his top half he wore a mustard-coloured heavy knit woollen jumper complete with elbow patches and tugged threads.

‘Ladies!’ he boomed at us. ‘Come on in.’

And with a bowed flurry, Captain Flashman outstretched his arms and welcomed us inside. We filed past him through the doors for what we knew would be another pointless forty-five minutes of boyish bravado and a DVD of tanks to a Vangelis soundtrack, wishing we could just be allowed the sleep we so desperately needed instead. Inside the Wellington Room two further swashbuckling cads waited to greet us in equally vulgar cords and knitwear combo, their backs to a video projection of Challenger II tanks blowing smoke and dust across a German plain.

‘So, ladies,’ said number two Harry Flashman, clasping his hands together with a clap. ‘Well, I guess none of you are actually
allowed to join the cavalry, are you? So you won’t get to know us by day, but by God I can tell you, you’ll want to know us by night.’ And at this he put his hands on his hips and thrust his pelvis towards us with a ‘Woof!’ (OK, all right, the ‘woof’ bit isn’t strictly accurate, but the rest of his toady smugness genuinely occurred.)

One of the best examples of the differences between girls and boys in war at Sandhurst occurred on Exercise Dragon’s Challenge, the next of the middle term’s exercise thrashings.

Dragon’s took us back on the coaches to Wales, but this time, with restrained relief, we weren’t going to be staggering up the howling Black Mountains of Long Reach, or advancing to certain death across the ridgelines of Brecon, because Dragon’s was to be our first foray into urban warfare (FIBUA) (Fighting In Built-up Areas) and would bring us out of the country and into the town. Into a mock West German town to be precise.

Cilieni village was a purpose-built, pretend hamlet of concrete buildings clustered around a church with a tall watchtower, from where the instructors could watch us breaking and entering in house-to-house combat. These bleak grey concrete chalets were constructed in the style of West German architecture and grouped together they smacked of the ugly communist dourness of a charmless ski resort. Steel shutters firmly covered up glass-less windows and, at the village’s far eastern edge, the carcass of a burnt-out tank sat rusting under a cherry tree. This was to be our playground for the next five days, and play we would, because FIBUA turned out to be awesome fun. Like Quasar or
paint-balling
, it was the stuff of boy soldier dreams. The rough and tumble shoot-’em-up of boyhood war games played out at the bottom of the garden. We ran around with guns, leaping over walls and diving through windows in search of the enemy lurking around each corner and firing off loads of ammunition. We stormed houses with an SAS thrill, kicking down doors and
lobbing in grenades, covering our ears and waiting for the smoky bang before charging in shouting and screaming with rifles to automatic, blazing the room with hot brass like a Sylvester Stallone character – our coolness marred only by the plastic safety glasses we had to wear.

The boys beamed as all their war fantasies came true and once we girls had got used to the concept of hurling ourselves through open windows and scrambling over corrugated-iron roofs, the inner tomboy burst free giggling. FIBUA was new and novel. It involved none of the slogging advances to contact, no death marches, or round-the-clock trench-digging, and it felt like playing a game, almost a sport. We snuck up to doorways, scurried down back alleys, crept through trap doors and loft hatches, armed with an ‘urban assault kit’ (ladder) and grappling irons, breaking and entering, clearing from room to room, house to house, seeking out surrendering Gurkhas. If it wasn’t played out in a mock-up German village it would even have been relevant. And, unlike all our previous exercise experiences, FIBUA brought us indoors, so there was no lying in a muddy wet hole on stag trembling as the snow fell, or shivering in our sleeping bags as the wind whipped over us, because on Dragon’s we were sheltered inside buildings, away from the harshness of Wales, in relative comfort and with dry pants on.