I
turned left out of the hospital gates and began walking. Perhaps, thought, I would see where I had got to by the time I became too tired to continue.
“Tom,” shouted a female voice. “Tom.”
I stopped and turned around.
Vicki, one of the physiotherapists from the rehabilitation center, was in her car, turning out of the hospital parking lot. She had the passenger window down.
“Do you need a lift?” she asked.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“I was going to Hammersmith,” she said. “But I can take you somewhere else if you like.”
“Hammersmith would be fine.”
I threw my bag onto the backseat and climbed in beside her.
“So they’ve let you out, then?” she said while turning in to the line of traffic on Roehampton Lane.
“Glad to see the back of me, I expect,” I said.
Vicki tactfully didn’t say anything. So it was true.
“It’s been a very difficult time for you,” she said eventually. “It can’t have been easy.”
I sat in silence. What was she after? An apology? Of course it hadn’t been easy.
Losing my foot had, in retrospect, been the most straightforward part. The doctors, first at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan and then at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham, had managed to save the rest of my right leg so that it now finished some seven inches below my knee.
My stump, as all the medical staff insisted on calling it, had healed well, and I had quickly become proficient at putting on and taking off my new prosthetic leg, a wonder of steel, leather and plastic that had turned me from a cripple into a normal-looking human being, at least on the outside.
But there had been other physical injuries too. The roadside bomb had burst my eardrums and had driven Afghan desert dust deep into my torn and bruised lungs, to say nothing of the blast damage and lacerations to the rest of my body. Pulmonary infection and then double pneumonia had almost finished off what the explosion failed to do.
The numbing shock that had initially suppressed any feeling of hurt had soon been replaced by a creeping agony in which every part of me seemed to be on fire. It was just as well that I remembered only a smattering of the full casualty-evacuation procedure. Heavy doses of morphine did more than inhibit the pain receptors in the brain—they slowed its very activity down to bare essentials, such as maintaining breathing and the pumping of the heart.
The human body, however, is a wondrous creation and has an amazing ability to mend itself. My ears recovered, the lacerations healed, and my white blood cells slowly won the war against my chest infection, with a little help and reinforcement from some high-powered intravenous antibiotics.
If only the body could grow a new foot.
The mental injuries, however, were proving less easy to spot and far more difficult to repair.
“Where in Hammersmith do you want?” Vicki asked, bringing me back to reality from my daydreaming.
“Anywhere will do,” I said.
“But do you live in Hammersmith?”
“No,” I said.
“So where do you live?”
Now that was a good question. I suppose that I was technically, and manifestly, homeless.
For the past fifteen years I had lived in army accommodations of one form or another: barracks, Sandhurst, officers’ messes, tents and bivouacs, even in the backs of trucks or the cramped insides of Warrior armored cars. I had slept in, under and on top of Land Rovers, and more often than I cared to remember, I had slept where I sat or lay on the ground, half an ear open for the call of a sentry or the sound of an approaching enemy.
However, the army had now sent me “home” for six months.
The major from the Ministry of Defense, the Wounded Personnel Liaison Officer, had been fair but firm during his recent visit. “Six months leave on full pay,” he’d said.“To recover. To sort yourself out. Then we’ll see.”
“I don’t need six months,” I’d insisted. “I’ll be ready to go back in half that time.”
“ ‘ Back’?” he’d asked.
“To my regiment.”
“We’ll see,” he had repeated.
“What do you mean ‘We’ll see’?” I had demanded.
“I’m not sure that going back to your regiment will be possible,” he’d said.
“Where, then?” I’d asked, but I’d read the answer in his face before he said it.
“You might be more suited to a civilian job. You wouldn’t be passed fit for combat. Not without a foot.”
The major and I had been sitting in the reception area of the Douglas Bader Rehabilitation Center in the Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, London.
Part of Headley Court, the military’s own state-of-the-art rehab center in Surrey, had been temporarily closed for refurbishment, and the remaining wards had been overwhelmed by the numbers of wounded with missing limbs. Hence I had been sent to Queen Mary’s and the National Health Service.
It was testament to the remarkable abilities of the military Incident Response Teams, and to their amazingly well-equipped casevac helicopters, that so many soldiers with battlefield injuries which would in the past have invariably proved fatal were now routinely dealt with and survived. Double and even triple traumatic amputees often lived, when only recently they would have surely bled to death before medical help could arrive.
But not for the first time I’d wondered if it would have been better if I had died. Losing a foot had sometimes seemed to me a worse outcome than losing my life. But I had looked up at the painting on the wall of Douglas Bader, the Second World War pilot, after whom the rehabilitation center was named, and it had given me strength.
“Douglas Bader was passed fit for combat,” I’d said.
The major had looked up at me. “Eh?”
“Douglas Bader was passed fit to fight, and he’d lost
both
his feet.”
“Things were different then,” the major from the MOD had replied somewhat flippantly.
Were they? I wondered.
Bader had been declared fit and had taken to the air in his Spitfire to fight the enemy simply due to his own perseverance. True, the country had been in desperate need of pilots, but he could have easily sat out the war in relative safety if he had wanted to. It had been the weight of his personal determination that had eventually overcome the official reluctance to allow him to fly.
I would take my lead from him.
We’ll see,
indeed.
I’d show them.
“Will the tube station do?” Vicki said.
“Sorry?” I said.
“The tube station,” she repeated. “Is that OK?”
“Fine,” I said. “Anywhere.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Home, I suppose,” I said.
“And where is home?”
“My mother lives in Lambourn,” I said.
“Where’s that?” she asked.
“Near Newbury, in Berkshire.”
“Is that where you’re going now?”
Was it? I didn’t particularly want to. But where else? I could hardly sleep on the streets of London. Others did, but had I gone down that far?
“Probably,” I said. “I’ll get the train.”
M
y mind was working on automatic pilot as I negotiated the escalator up from the Underground into Paddington mainline railway station. Only near the top did I realize that I couldn’t remember when I had last used an escalator. Stairs had always been my choice, and they had to be taken at a run, never at a walk. And yet here I was, gliding serenely up without moving a muscle.
Fitness had always been a major obsession in a life that was full of obsessions.
Even as a teenager I had been mad about being fit. I had run every morning on the hills above Lambourn, trying to beat the horses as they chased me along the lush grass, training gallops.
Army life, especially that of the infantry officer at war, was a strange mix of lengthy, boring interludes punctuated by brief but intensely high-adrenaline episodes where the separation between living and dying could be rice-paper thin. With the episode over, if one was still alive and intact, the boredom would recommence until the next “contact” broke the spell once more.
I had always used the boring times to work on my fitness, constantly trying to break my own record for the number of sit-ups, or push-ups, or pull-ups, or anything-else-ups I could think of, all within a five-minute period. What the Taliban had thought of their enemy chinning it up and down in full body armor, plus rifle and helmet, on an improvised bar welded across the back of a Snatch Land Rover is anyone’s guess, but I had been shot at twice while trying to break the battalion record, once when I was on track to succeed. The Taliban obviously had no sense of sport, or of timing.
But now look at me: taking the escalator, and placing my bag down on the moving stairway while doing so. Months of sedentary hospital life had left my muscles weak, flabby and lacking any sort of condition. I clearly had much to do before I had any hope of convincing the major from the MOD that I could be “combatready” once more.
I
stood at the bottom of the steep driveway to my mother’s home and experienced the same reluctance to go up that I had so often felt in the past.
I had taken a taxi from Newbury station to Lambourn, purposely asking the driver to drop me some way along the road from my mother’s gate so that I could walk the last hundred yards.
It was force of habit, I suppose. I felt happier approaching anywhere on foot. It must have had something to do with being in the infantry. On foot, I could hear the sounds that vehicle engines would drown out, and smell the scents that exhaust fumes would smother. And I could get a proper feel of the lay of the land, essential to anticipate an ambush.
I shook my head and smiled at my folly.
There was unlikely to be a Taliban ambush in a Berkshire village, but I could recall the words of my platoon color sergeant at Sandhurst: “You can never be too careful,” he would say. “Never assume anything; always check.”
No shots rang out, no IEDs went bang, and no turban-headed Afghan tribesmen sprang out with raised Kalashnikovs as I safely negotiated the climb up from the road to the house, a redbrick-and-flint affair built sometime back between the World Wars.
As usual, in the middle of the day, all was quiet as I wandered around the side of the house towards the back door. A few equine residents put their heads out of their stalls in the nearest stable yard as I crunched across the gravel, inquisitive as ever to see a new arrival.
My mother was out.
I knew she would be. Perhaps that is why I hadn’t phoned ahead to say I was coming. Perhaps I needed to be here alone first, to get used to the idea of being back, to have a moment of recollection and renewal before the whirlwind of energy that was my mother swept through and took away any chance I might have of changing my mind.
My mother was a racehorse trainer. But she was much more than just that. She was a phenomenon. In a sport where there were plenty of big egos, my mother had the biggest ego of them all. She did, however, have some justification for her high sense of worth. In just her fifth year in the sport, she had been the first lady to be crowned Champion Jump Trainer, a feat she had repeated for each of the next six seasons.
Her horses had won three Cheltenham Gold Cups and two Grand Nationals, and she was rightly recognized as the “first lady of British racing.”
She was also a highly opinionated antifeminist, a workaholic and no sufferer of fools or knaves. If she had been Prime Minister she would have probably brought back both hanging and the birch, and she was not averse to saying so loudly, and at length, whenever she had the opportunity. Her politics made Genghis Khan seem like an indecisive liberal, but everybody loved her nevertheless. She was a “character.”
Everyone, that is, except her ex-husbands and her children.
For about the twentieth time that morning, I asked myself why I had come here. There had to be somewhere else I could go. But I knew there wasn’t.
My only friends were in the army, mostly in my regiment, and they were still out in Afghanistan for another five weeks. And anyway, I wasn’t ready to see them. Not yet. They would remind me too much of what I was no longer—and I wouldn’t be able to stand their pity.
I suppose I could have booked myself into an army officers’ mess. No doubt, I would have been made welcome at Wellington Barracks, the Grenadiers’ home base in London. But what would I have done there?
What could I do anywhere?
Once again I thought it might have been better if the IED explosion, or the pneumonia, had completed the task: Union Jack- draped coffin, firing of volleys in salute, and I’d be six feet under by now and be done with it all. Instead, I was outside my mother’s back door, struggling with a damned artificial foot to get down low enough to find the key that she habitually left under a stone in the flower bed.
And for what?
To get into a house I hated, to stay with a parent I despised. To say nothing of my stepfather, to whom I had hardly spoken a civil word since I had walked out of here, aged seventeen.
I couldn’t find the damn key. Perhaps my mother had become more security-minded over the years. There had been a time when she would have left the house unlocked completely. I tried the handle. Not anymore.
I sat down on the doorstep and leaned back against the locked door.
My mother would be home later.
I knew where she was. She was at the races—Cheltenham races, to be precise. I had looked up the runners in the morning paper, as I always did. She had four horses declared, including the favorite in the big race, and my mother would never miss a day at her beloved Cheltenham, the scene of her greatest triumphs. And while today’s might be a smaller meeting than the Steeplechase Festival in March, I could visualize her holding court in the parade ring before the races, and welcoming the winner back after them. I had seen it so often. It had been my childhood.