An Officer and a Gentlewoman (5 page)

I woke shortly after five o’clock on my first morning at Sandhurst instantly regretting the folly of decisions that resulted in my being there. My alarm clock rang out a digitized bleep that couldn’t be ignored, so I crawled out of bed and the sheer enormity of what I’d done overwhelmed me like the January frost encrusting the parade square outside. Suddenly the prospect of ironing a work shirt, putting on a suit and enduring whatever delays the District Line had in store wasn’t so unappealing. Outside it was still pitch black and would remain so for a further three hours until the bleak winter dawn, but already lights were flickering on in windows across Old College as the Sandhurst inmates began their day. I would happily have swapped my night of fretful sleep and the twisted knot of apprehension weighing heavily in my stomach for all the stresses of my old life that Monday morning, but there was no time for me to dwell and rue, because in the echoing corridor voices could be heard shouting with urgency.

‘Get on parade!’

I shuffled around my room, putting on slippers and dressing gown, drifting bleary eyed into the stark fluorescent lighting to line up for the ‘water parade’, something that was to become ritual over the next five weeks.

I couldn’t believe I was actually here.

‘Shit.’

I had arrived at Sandhurst the previous afternoon in my small Volkswagen Polo. The car was crammed with belongings – ironing board, crates of cleaning products, sports equipment and things I misguidedly thought would be useful – leaving a small space on the passenger seat for Deborah who was coming along to check out the men under the guise of moral support. She successfully distracted me on our drive south with jelly babies and Girls Aloud’s
Greatest Hits
and, before I knew it, I had driven through Staff College Gates and taken directions to park on the parade square.

I found an empty space, pulled on the handbrake, switched off the ignition and gulped in a deep breath. Inside my chest my heart began a gut-wrenching thump as I realized my vision had become overwhelmingly obscured, for there in front of me rose the intimidating splendour of Old College. A striking piece of military architecture, its sheer scale and grandeur were truly terrifying. Magnificent tall Doric columns framed the portico of the Grand Entrance, which was keenly watched over by Mars and Minerva, the gods of war and wisdom. And on either side of the main entrance steps sat six polished brass cannons that had been captured from the French at the Battle of Waterloo. It was enormously impressive and the building’s imposition reminded me of a dictator’s palace, where indeed the corridors and rooms subsequently proved to house a number of malign despots too.

By the time I reached the main entrance my nerves had me in a full, cold sweat despite the bitter January chill. At the top of the steps stood a tall impressive man in exceedingly smart uniform, his shoes polished to mirrored perfection, brass buckle and buttons gleaming in the winter sun. He stood with proud poise, every vertebra extended to the fullest, his chest puffed out, exuding gravitas and importance. Towering over me, he swallowed my tiny palm as I shook his strong bear paw of a hand. Welcoming me to the Academy he ushered me inside. A seasoned warrior with a chest of campaign medals, this was one of the most senior
soldiers in the British Army, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst sergeant major; a man to be equally respected and feared.

Once inside I joined a queue of other fresh-faced, apprehensive individuals while Deborah gathered with parents and the Academy commandant for biscuits, tea and a welcoming address, frantically waving away people who mistook her for another one of the new recruits and thought she was in the wrong place. I joined the tail end of a queue and stood silently in the corridor, waiting my turn to register, shifting my weight uncomfortably in my heels, as I felt awkwardly out of place. I listened to the only noise echoing from those high corridor walls – the icy sound of metal-tipped boots clacking on the worn stone floor as another stiffly smart uniformed man paced back and forth with slow foreboding.

Clack … Clack … Clack.

I thought about turning to flee.

Standing in the still silence of that corridor, I felt as though I was about to be thrown into the lions’ den for a conclusive mauling. This was the calm before the storm. The sergeants circled the queue, eyeing up their new prey like vultures picking off the lame. And as soon as check-in was complete, they gathered the new recruits up, and marshalled them away, herding them along the warren of corridors and staircases that led to the rear of the College.

As we stood quietly in the queue, one sergeant pointed his shiny brass-tipped pace stick at the chest of a wide-eyed suited young man, barely older than a boy. ‘Wave goodbye to Mummy and Daddy,’ he said. ‘You’re all mine now.’

Dawdling and happy to wait my turn, I eventually reached the front of the queue, which had wound its way inside a formally decorated room where a desk was positioned, behind which sat a stern-looking lady, also in uniform, hunched over sheets of paper and name badges.

‘Name?’ she snapped at me, without looking up from her pieces of paper.

‘Héloïse. Héloïse Goodley,’ I said, forgetting that the army don’t use first names.

‘Miss Goodley.’ She ran her pen down the page, hovering over the names until she found mine. ‘Imjin Company. Yellow badge.’ And with that she crossed my name from her list and the sergeant next to her handed me a yellow pin badge with the name ‘GOODLEY’ printed on it. I took it and vacantly looked around the room for where I should go to next.

‘Follow Staff Sergeant Cox,’ she chipped, with a karate-chop point of her hand, directing me towards another woman now standing by the door and dismissing me to make way for the next person in line. And with that I was swept up, chivvied through a side door and bundled back onto the parade square to get in my car and move it away from the grandeur at the front of Old College and around to the functioning business end at back. Away from the imposing columns and cannon to the rear quarters. Away from the calm and formality of the grand portico, and the polished, pressed perfection of the Academy sergeant major, to my new life. To board the Sandhurst roller-coaster. And there would be no stopping, no let up and no going back. I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye to Deborah who, having drained her china cup of tea, had to find her own way back to London, wandering through the streets of Camberley until she found the train station. She left me a lasting voicemail message of encouragement and luck on my mobile phone.

There is significance to this arrival at Sandhurst, walking up Old College steps and through the Grand Entrance, since the next time cadets do this is amidst great pomp and ceremony eleven months later when they commission from the Academy into the army as officers. Until then the doors are closed and the steps strictly out of bounds (unless maybe you’ve attended a
fancy-dress
party in roller skates, it’s dark and no one is looking).

Over 800 cadets a year walk up Old College steps and assemble for the commissioning course; split annually into three intakes
(the mustard-keen straight-from-university crowd tend to join in September, while the sunshine intake go in January when the big field exercises fall in the summer months and the laissez-faire faction take the plunge in May having avoided the previous two). Each intake is sorted into three infantry style companies of ninety, named in memory of famous battle honours. My Commissioning Course, the first of 2007 (CC071), would be named in recognition of post-world-war encounters at Malaya, the Falklands and my own easy company, Imjin. Ahead of us were Ypres, Somme and Gaza for the bloodbaths of the First World War and Normandy, Burma and Alamein, a reminder of the ferocity of the Second World War.

For me, as I walked up those steps the umbilical cord was cut; over the next few months I was about to be delivered into the military and my midwife for the traumatic process was a female staff sergeant, the pugnacious SSgt
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Cox. On the whole, senior ranking female soldiers are a frightening breed. They joined the army in the days when women didn’t and have tenaciously fought their way to the top of their game, repeatedly fighting to prove their worth. This has hardened them, stamping out all empathy and compassion, the ideal prerequisite for effectively inducing civilian girls into the military at Sandhurst.

Those first few days at the Academy became a total blur and my memory of them is selectively imperfect. I found myself gripped by the shock of capture amidst a haze of finding my way and uncomfortably wading out of my depth as the Sandhurst machine rapidly cranked into action, dragging me disorientated with it. The conversion from civilian to soldier is a painful one and the initial five weeks are particularly hard. They are designed to mimic the basic training that thousands of young men and women recruited into the soldier ranks undergo at various training establishments around the country annually; except soldiers admirably complete a full fourteen weeks of the ceaseless hell.
This initial basic training involved a strict draconian regime of continuous harassment and borstal-like practices. Discipline would be harsh and sleep at a premium, as our days were consumed by hours of toil: cleaning, ironing, scrubbing and polishing.

It was intense and deeply dispiriting.

My femininity was stripped away from me, as tailored suit was replaced with drab khaki coveralls (until my uniform would be issued), my long hair was scraped and pinned back into a face-liftingly tight bun, while jewellery, perfume and make-up were gravely forbidden, consigned to my civilian persona, which would not be seen for a while.

I was one of thirty-two girls who started Sandhurst that winter, assembled together into a platoon known as Eleven Platoon. We comprised a motley collection of predominantly university graduates, some school-leavers, ex-serving soldiers, two foreign cadets and me.

I was the only military debutante among this number, everyone else having either attended the Officer Training Corps
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at university, the Army Cadet Force,
3
Welbeck
4
or served with the Territorial or regular army as soldiers. I had no prior military experience and in those first five weeks I was enormously disadvantaged, relying heavily on the kind patience and generosity of the others to guide me.

We represented a broad spectrum of individuals, from plump to petite, wealthy to working class. Almost a foot in height separated the tallest and shortest among us. There was a wide range of physical abilities too, with no common physique on display to typify the Army girl. Some could run the mile-and-a-half
army fitness test in just eight minutes while others took over twelve. But what was quickly apparent was that we all shared a common courage and mental resolve. A tenacity and a will to keep going. Those that didn’t wouldn’t survive.

Initially everyone was very friendly, in that way people are when they join a new group. Slightly false and overly keen to quickly make new friends. I went around introducing myself, shaking hands and hearing everyone’s name, later forgetting them all, and thankful for the nametags that we had to wear. Despite the high concentration of women in close proximity there was no time for bitchiness at Sandhurst. We all had to get along together over the next year or we would fall apart, and if there was someone you didn’t like it was just going to make life harder.

The indignities of this basic training saw my humanity stripped to its bare essentials, as life became a daily struggle for survival under the oppressive regime. Almost every action seemed punishable as I became moulded from a carefree civilian into a soldier. We marched everywhere, even inside, up and down the corridors, slouching was forbidden, no hands in pockets, no leaning against walls, only speaking when spoken to; being late was the most grave of offences. Press-ups were the favoured tool used to teach most of these lessons, and as the weeks went by I got quite good at them.

As well as years of beating men at their own game SSgt Cox had been further hardened by her northern roots and Hull upbringing. She implemented a painfully strict reign and the first of her repressive rules was the banning of chocolate and mobile phones. The implication of doing this to a group of girls was catastrophic, and with the joy of texting and the serotonin release from a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut unattainable, morale quickly plummeted. This became further compounded when we realized that we were interned at the Academy for five long unremitting weeks until we could demonstrate the requisite standard of marching skill to
‘pass off the square’ and would be allowed home for the first time.

Although not very tall in stature, SSgt Cox more than compensated for this with a powerful punch and terrifying pitch in her raised voice, which could make hounds whimper and hide. Her uniform was always pristine and immaculately pressed, her boots (though only about a size three) were polished to perfection, while her dark hair was always gelled flawlessly to her head, and wound up at the back into a firm bun, with never a stray hair free to flutter in the breeze. A career spent surrounded by men in the army had sharpened her tongue to a razor wit too and she could cut down any male who dared to stand in her path. And years of military marching had given her a masculine gait, with any trace of a feminine hip swish eliminated, leaving a boot-crashing stomp.

I was petrified of SSgt Cox. When whipped into a rage she was as terrifying as a baited bear, and in those first five weeks I gave her plenty of reason to become angered. She ruled our every waking and sleeping hour. In her presence the platoon maintained a fretful watch, desperately not wanting to incur her wrath and avoiding her attentive glare at all times. So like a lightly sleeping monster, we tiptoed carefully around her in the shadows, not wanting to draw attention nor awaken her from her moments of calm to be punished with yet more press-ups.