An Officer and a Gentlewoman (3 page)

An interesting recruitment pitch.

Above her computer screen sat the evidence from which she made her claim – a photograph of the husband she herself had ensnared there. But she seemed to think I possessed the qualities sought in a Sandhurst hopeful and completed the requisite forms, stamped the paperwork and sent me packing with a glossy brochure and date for my first officer assessment.

Unsure exactly of what I had just done, I stood on Greenwich Station platform waiting for the next train back into central London with Status Quo’s lyrics circling around in my head: ‘You’re in the Army now/Oh, oh, you’re in the Army now.’

The next step on the road to Sandhurst was to attend a ‘selection briefing’: a two-day filter held at Leighton House in the little town of Westbury on the edge of Salisbury Plain, the Army’s heartland. Set in forty acres of parkland straddling the main road from Bournemouth to Bath, Westbury camp is surrounded by tall,
moss-clad stone walls and comprises a collection of cheerless redbrick buildings around a handsome Georgian mansion called Leighton House. Originally the residence of the Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire, the property was requisitioned by the War Office at the outbreak of the Second World War for convalescing soldiers and it is here now, among the assault course and trout lake, that the Army Officer Selection Board seek out the enigmatic qualities of army leadership.

I arrived nervously on a Monday, and reported to the Camp Guard Room. Inside, a pinched, smoke-aged man with a wrinkled-up face ticked my name from his list and handed me a vehicle pass and directions. I climbed back into my car and made my way over the speed bumps that dotted the road winding its way through the camp, and entered the car park at the far end. I found myself a parking slot and gathered my bag of belongings, then carried it across the gravelly square to a set of shabby squat buildings and dumped it on a bare spring bed in an open shared room. Paint was flaking from the walls, mirrors were cracked and in the corner a chest of drawers was missing handles; it felt distinctly unloved. The room that the toilet occupied was even still painted in the bright cobalt blue colour, last popular in the seventies, and not updated since. Everything about Westbury felt frayed and underinvested, nothing like the shiny glass and chrome newness of Canary Wharf. But I wasn’t here for an assessment of the interior decor.

Ahead of me lay a day of briefs, discussion groups, aptitude tests and my first taste of army food, abrasive blankets, cold showers and wholly unnecessary shouting. For my time here I wouldn’t be known as Héloïse, nor even Miss Goodley, I became just a number, and was handed a yellow bib with it on to wear over my suit. I became number one, and the first to be called forward for everything. There were seventy other potential hopefuls along with me at the selection briefing, representing a cross section of serious wannabes: serving soldiers; career changers like myself and floaters looking for something to do after graduating from university. Among them there
were plenty who were even more unsuitable for military life than I felt. One, a Malaysian mathematics PhD student, barely had a grasp of the English language, and had been sent to try to join the army by his university careers advisor, in what was probably last-bid desperation. Another, a tiny, painfully thin, fragile girl, who couldn’t have fought her way out of a wet brown paper bag, refused to eat anything but the cereal bars she had brought with her, and cracked to tears under the slightest examining pressure.

As number one I was first to be called forward for my interview with the Colonel that afternoon and after being directed along a series of corridors I came to a small room where a man in uniform was waiting for me. He looked old and weary and as I entered I felt as though I was distracting him from the books and disarrayed papers that were piled high on his desk. As I took a seat on the plastic chair opposite him I didn’t recognize his rank, and didn’t understand the military rank structure, so my overfriendliness and casual manner were instantly construed as a rude lack of deference. Paying me no welcoming compliments, he took a yellow folder from the pile beside him and opened the cover of it, quietly perusing the paperwork inside, which I guessed to be my application form.

‘Hmmm. I see you were house captain at school,’ he finally said after a long silence, looking up at me for the first time. ‘And how was that?’

What? House captain. That was almost ten years ago. I was twenty-seven now and had done plenty of more significant things since leaving school. It may have been a relevant question for a recent school leaver or university student, but I barely remembered it now.

‘Oh I loved it,’ I said, stretching my memory back and looking for some relevant tangent to joining the army. ‘I really enjoyed the responsibility of looking after the younger girls,’ I added, grasping at a potential crossover skill for an officer.

‘Hmm,’ he said, before going quiet again and looking back down at my file.

‘And I see you played first team hockey at school too. Jolly good,’ he said without enthusiasm, still not looking up from my papers. ‘And what about now? What sport teams do you play for now?’

I was flattered that he was still impressed by my distant school-day glories but I didn’t have time to play for sport teams any more. I was at the mercy of my City employers now, shackled to my desk for eighteen hours a day. There wasn’t any time in my life to put on shin pads and race across the AstroTurf, as much as I would have loved to have done so.

‘Regrettably my current job doesn’t allow me the time to commit to sport teams any more,’ I said, knowing he wasn’t going to warm to my response. ‘I like to run a lot though,’ I said, trying to smooth over my lack of team spirit.

‘Oh.’ He nodded. Giving no emotion away. I could tell he didn’t like me. There was no rapport between us and as I left with a last-ditch attempt cheery smile I wasn’t confident he’d seen in me what Robyn and the Army recruitment woman had.

That night we slept on our squeaky iron-sprung beds in bleak dorm rooms of six, listening to the sound of others snoring. In the morning, I tiptoed along the long draughty corridor with my wash bag and towel to the showers at the opposite end, shivering or scalding under its temperamental drip. It certainly wasn’t the accommodation of client expense accounts.

I spent two days at Westbury, being put through my paces. My mental aptitude and physical abilities were scrutinized, my political acumen tested and grasp of English examined. And although I might not have impressed the colonel, the Army liked what they saw and I passed, receiving an invitation to come back for the Main Board assessment a few months later.

So far I had kept all this discreetly to myself. Such an enormous career U-turn was likely to draw strong views from my friends and family. A daughter in the Army was hardly something my mother
would be boasting about in the staff room at the school she taught at in Kent and it would take me over a decade in the army to climb back to the City wage I was currently on. Joining the army was not a decision to be taken on a whim, but, honourably or naively, I believed there to be more to life than the disproportionate sums of money I was being paid and a life surrounded by material greed. So I continued to proceed with the recruitment process in secret, deciding to tell friends, family and my employers if or when I was successful.

By now it was summer 2006, the hottest on record, and as I enjoyed lazy days in the sunshine, passing the few months until my second assessment at Westbury, headlines began filtering into newspapers of the intense fighting soldiers were embroiled in in Afghanistan. It had been three years since the second Gulf War had started and words like ‘car bomb’ and ‘Baghdad’ on the news channels were becoming so trite the public consciousness barely registered, but Afghanistan was supposed to be a low-level peacekeeping mission not a full-blown scrap. The words of war in the media were beginning to change as reporters brought our attention to Sangin, Kajaki and Musa Qala, where soldiers were holding their own in ferocious fighting in relentless Taliban attacks. The baton in the war on terror had been passed and al-Qaeda’s central front was shifting from Iraq to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, as I spent summer evenings drinking Pimm’s with friends by the river in Putney, I somehow failed to register the connection between Robyn, my trips to Westbury, what I was signing up for and the photos of mentally and physically shattered soldiers with thousand-yard stares spread across the pages of the
Sun
newspaper. Somehow they didn’t apply to me. I was joining a different army. The ferocity of war and the fact that the British Army was now fighting two of them was completely lost on me, because no number of embedded journalists in their blue-flak bulletproof vests can truly bring war into our living rooms; the full gritty reality is kept comfortably at a distance.

The months eventually passed and I was back down to Westbury for the full four-day Army Officer Selection Board (AOSB, not to be confused with ASBO!). This time the bar had been raised, the standard was much higher and the testing more demanding. It costs £100,000
4
to recruit and train an Army officer and the selection process is scrupulously thorough and equally equivocal. The aim of AOSB is to assess for the mystical officer quality, the potential to command and lead soldiers after a year of Sandhurst moulding. And despite making it to university and fumbling my way into a City job, I wasn’t sure whether I actually had this essence of officership. I could hold my own in a boardroom, but what about on the assault course?

The first morning started with a fitness test. A running, press-ups, sit-ups, heaves test. The army is pretty keen on being fit, so it was no surprise that those who failed would be eliminated in the first round, packed off home again. The bus that brought people from the train station even waited around ominously to make the return trip. Again wearing the bizarre combination of suit, heels and a netball bib with my candidate number on I spent the rest of the day frantically being assessed with essays, interviews and exams. Then after another squeaky and
snore-filled
night’s sleep, I swapped my suit for ill-fitting green overalls and gathered with the others outside for the ‘outdoor command tasks’. These involved trying to negotiate a number of different
Crystal Maze
-style timed challenges using barrels, ropes and planks, all slippery wet from the misty rain. We worked in teams of eight and, as people found themselves precariously suspended at the end of a plank, every muscle straining as the clock ticked down, true personalities emerged unguarded for the assessors. Not all the tasks were apparently even achievable and I hoped to God this was true as we disastrously dropped our petite, pint-sized
comrade on her head whilst offering her forwards to bridge a gap six feet above a muddy puddle.

Next to the assault course for a sort of Crufts meets
Krypton Factor
affair, where there were tunnels to scurry along, windows to dive through, walls to scramble over and ropes from which to swing. All against the clock in the fastest time possible. There is only one way with which to successfully approach an assault course, and that is at pace without thought, hurling yourself at each obstacle mindless of the consequences. Any consideration or hesitation will add unnecessary seconds on the clock and you’ll still reach the finish line in the same amount of pain with equal bruising. For added effect the rain came down hard that afternoon and as I stood there shivering, rain dripping from the end of my nose, my T-shirt sticking, cold, wet and clammy to my skin, I questioned my motives for wanting to run away from the City; maybe it wasn’t so bad to be clock-watching in a warm, dry office after all. I knew I wanted to change my life but now, with wet pants, broken nails and muddy feet, I was considering less gritty career alternatives. Perhaps after four years in the City I was too soft and precious for the Army. Maybe it was too late for me to roll up my sleeves and get stuck in with the rough and tumble. Could I really swap the flat-lining heart rate of fiscal exertion for the high pulse of physical exertion?

Since the events of September 11, army recruitment has been on the rise, whether it is the notion of fighting Blair’s war on terrorism or the fact that there now is a tangible war to fight at all, as opposed to killing time in Germany, sitting out the Cold War and waiting for the Russians. The global recession has also contributed to an increase in recruits. Every year over 4,000 hopefuls attempt the selection challenges at Westbury, hauling themselves around the assault course and doing press-ups in the rain. Competition is fierce. Which is why, two days later, I was astonished and relieved to receive a brown manila envelope ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’ congratulating me on successfully being selected. I had secured a
place at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS) and would start next winter.

Until now, I had still kept the whole process a secret, unconvinced that I would actually be selected and make the radical career leap, but I couldn’t conceal it any longer and had to tell my parents. My brother and I chose to share the parental wrath and selected a common day on which to deliver the bad news. So, as Tristan arrived home with a tongue piercing, I phoned to tell them that I was throwing away a perfectly respectable City career to enlist. There was a deathly silence at the other end of the phone while my father pulled himself together, but as a daddy’s girl I soon won him over and he became more preoccupied with my brother’s swelling mouth. My father is of the generation where people joined a company for life and reaped the pension reward at the end of it, and with the army now to be my fourth employer he hoped my career flip-flapping soul search might finally be over, plus he knew that the military pension is still a good one. My mother, ever savvy and in touch with today’s youth, was more worried I was a lesbian (I’m not) than about the potential dangers a military career could put me in. No one in my family had ever been in the armed forces, with the exception of my grandfather who fought in the army during the Second World War and never spoke of it. My parents didn’t have military acquaintances either so their understanding of what I was letting myself in for was rather limited, as was mine.