Authors: Barney Campbell
Tom noticed that there were splodges on the paper, some old ones that were dry and some new ones his own eyes had made. Fearing for the letter’s survival, he folded it up into its envelope and hugged it to his chest. Tears were now streaming down his cheeks, and he ran back to the house, scratching himself on thorns, running, running through the dusk’s purple towards the light of the kitchen door, which was already being tapped by moths. He hurled the door open and threw himself into Constance’s lap, where he stayed for an hour crying his eyes out. He didn’t feel very brave at all.
Leonard’s financial legacy was not impressive. They were able to stay – just – in the house, and while they weren’t ever exactly poor, Tom was denied the holidays and treats that his classmates had. But he was very popular at his primary school, where he always came top of the class while managing to be one of the chief mischief-makers. Constance was sad that she wasn’t able to afford to send him away to boarding school, but while Tom accepted having to go to the Henry VI Comprehensive in Chatham, a low, sprawling, prefabricated structure whose grim facade hid some excellent teachers, Constance seemed dumb with embarrassment every time she had to admit to one of her old friends that he wasn’t at an independent school. Tom, however, true to form, settled in without a problem. He was still the same old Tom, still climbing trees just out of curiosity to inspect the birds’ nests at the top, still unfailingly generous-spirited to all who met him, and he fitted in with his new classmates with consummate ease.
Due to the combination of his father’s charm and his mother’s brains and ability to work hard, Tom eased into Cambridge, securing a place to read English at Sidney Sussex College. When he put the phone down after hearing his A-level results he hugged her, almost lifting her off the ground. ‘Thanks, Mum. If it wasn’t for you this would never have happened.’ Constance was thrilled. As he ran off with his lurcher Zeppo through the woods to go and tell Sam she flopped into a chair.
So far
, she thought,
Tom’s doing all right
.
Three years later, after his final week at Cambridge, Tom took the entrance exam for the army. To his great relief he passed; he had made absolutely no provision for anything else. Halfway through July, after a month of helping on Sam’s farm, he got his results: he had got a first. To celebrate, in August he left with his girlfriend Cassie Foskett to travel around Europe by train.
He had always felt insecure around Cassie; he couldn’t ever really believe that she was going out with him. They had been in the same college at Cambridge and had shared tutorials since the start. It was only at the end of the first term that Tom had summoned up the courage to talk to her properly outside a tutorial, over-engineering a meeting in a coffee bar to talk through ‘bits of Austen that he was having trouble with’. She humoured him, and Tom soon found that behind a cool, fierce exterior lay a warm smile and an infectious, cackling laugh.
She was funny, Cassie. She seemed to Tom otherworldly, almost timeless, indefinable. She was a chameleon, both in looks and character. Sometimes she would wear floaty dresses and put flowers in her hair as though she was at Woodstock – what she wore around her college friends, when Tom thought she was at her most liberated and best. Sometimes though, when she was with friends from other colleges who knew her through the octopus-like public-school network that permeated the university, she would dress and act differently: immaculate hair and expensive, fussy clothes combined with a haughty, icy air. He didn’t mind this, but it puzzled him. As he got to know her better, it meant that Tom always felt that just when he was on the brink of really understanding her she would slip away from him.
Halfway through their second year on a warm March day they were lying on the banks of the Cam sharing the
earphones to an iPod, listening to ‘American Pie’. The lyrics woke Tom out of his slumber near the end of the song. He brought himself up onto his elbows and looked at Cassie. She was asleep, or dozing, and he wondered how on earth he was going out with her. Messy hair tumbled over her face. She couldn’t have looked more beautiful, and he lay there transfixed. He was right there, right next to her, and his arm could feel the soft, near imperceptible rises and falls of her chest, but he still didn’t know what was going on inside her head, what exactly she thought of things, how exactly she saw herself. How she saw him. When he got close to her she always slipped away into the mist. Always turned away at the last moment.
She opened her eyes, green and soft, and stretched like a cat.
‘What you looking at?’
‘Nothing. Just trying to work you out. Riddle wrapped inside an enigma.’
She laughed almost derisively, and then her expression switched into sweetness and innocence. ‘More chance of getting the theory of relativity than of getting me. Sorry, buster.’
He looked hurt.
‘Don’t worry, silly. It’s not an insult. I just don’t think you need to worry about it. I love you, you know. And anyway I don’t understand you and I don’t lose any sleep about it.’ She smiled and stroked his cheek. ‘Come on. Lie down. Chill.’
In the third year they didn’t see as much of each other, as she lived out of college in a flat with some of her public-school friends and they both busied themselves with revision for their finals. Sometimes she asked Tom to house parties, invitations which he always found reasons not to accept as he found her friends quite intimidating – cocaine addicts
dripping with privilege who would at best barely register and at worst baldly resent his presence. But they still shared tutorials, and Cassie spent a lot of time with him in college, occasionally accompanying Tom on visits to his mother.
A further complication was her parents, whom he found almost unbearably awkward. Her mother Lavinia at least talked to him, although as if he were an interesting curio rather than a realistic marriage prospect. Her father Jeremy, on the other hand, a successful QC as short of charm as he was long of wallet, acted as though Tom’s sheer presence in a room with Cassie sullied his daughter’s character. Still, Tom was unfailingly polite, and while he would occasionally, even often, make Lavinia laugh, he had no such luck with the old man, who was obviously desperate for Cassie to get her act together and ditch him at the first opportunity.
All this meant that throughout their final year, while Tom found himself falling more and more in love with her, the fear was growing within him that he would never be able to keep her, that she would slip from his grasp. But over that post-university, pre-army summer he had Cassie all to himself for four weeks.
And he loved Europe, being taken around all the great cities, churches and museums by Cassie, who seemed to know everything about everywhere they went. Tom had not been on many holidays and was initially embarrassed about his ignorance, but she laughed it off and took to her role as his guide and teacher with huge enthusiasm. Tom had never been happier, but sometimes at night when they were both drunk or when he looked at her during the day across a stuffy train he thought he could see something. What was it? Sadness? Coldness? Blithe indifference? But then she would look at him, remember herself and smile, blink sparkle into her
eyes, and all his worries receded until the next time he caught the look.
Their travel plan was simple. Bouncing around cities and towns that took their fancy in guidebooks, they plotted a rough circle, going south through France into Switzerland, down into northern Italy, up to Austria and then beginning the route home from there. They stayed in dingy youth hostels and used the money they saved to go to the best restaurants in town. It worked like a dream.
One night, money nearly exhausted, they stayed in a hostel down a back street in Graz, with domestic arguments from nearby tenements and barking dogs a discordant lullaby as they tried to sleep. Tom, sweating in the late-summer air, lay in the dark watching a decrepit fan wheeze its way around above them. He heard her quietly crying.
‘What’s wrong, Cass?’ he prodded unhopefully.
‘Nothing,’ she stonewalled.
Tom sighed, picked up his book and tried to read by the bright moonlight; he would wait this one out.
Suddenly she sprung up onto her knees. ‘It’s just … What are you doing, Tom?’
‘Um …’
‘I mean, look at you for fuck’s sake.’ Tears streamed down her cheeks, mixing with her mascara to form black streaks that clung to her cheeks in the pale darkness. ‘You’ve just got one of the top firsts at Cambridge University and you could walk, I mean walk, into any job out there. You would be snapped up, tomorrow, by anyone, and instead you’re joining the army. The army?’
‘But I’ve always wanted to join the army.’ Tom tried to take in what was happening. All he could think was that her father had put her up to this.
‘Look, Tom, we’ve all heard about the fucking army. Army
this, army that. Well great, I’m sure there are some great guys in there, but look at you, Tom.’ That was the second time she had said that, and he fought down his anger.
‘What do you mean, look at me?’
‘I mean just that, Tom: look at you. You’ve got a brain the size of a planet, friends who love you, a mother who’s devoted to you, and you’ve got two arms and two legs, and you want to go and piss it all down the drain just to fulfil a childish fantasy.’
‘It’s not childish, Cassie,’ he bleated.
Gaining momentum she went on. ‘Oh shut up, Tom. Treat yourself as a grown-up for Christ’s sake. What are you going to do in five years’ time if, and that’s a big if, you ever get through this Afghanistan stuff, probably with some kind of drink problem and an inability to engage with anyone who hasn’t been in the sodding army, and that’s assuming you’ve even got any legs to walk on. No one, Tom, is going to care about it because deep down they’ll know that while you were dicking around they’ll have got themselves set up for life.’
‘I don’t know if I want that life.’ He suspected, deep down, that Cassie had a point.
‘Yes, you want that life, Tom. Why are you going to waste it?’
The street lamp outside flickered and the fan shuddered from a power surge as Tom’s throat went dry.
You know what – bugger it
. He decided to fight fire with fire.
‘I’m not wasting my time. Yes, I could go and work for whatever twats those tossers at all the milk-round events fawn over. I could go and make friends with a calculator and a spreadsheet instead of real human beings. But I’d look at myself in ten years’ time, Cass, with a massive, massive regret that I hadn’t done the army. It’s a young man’s game; anyone
can be a banker, anyone can hang out with a calculator whether they’re seventeen or seventy. If I don’t do this now, Cass, I’ll never do it.’ He stopped, knowing this was only going one way, what she was about to say. It was her only logical move. And he wouldn’t have an answer.
‘If you do this, you lose me.’
‘Well Cass, I can’t expect you to stand it. If you want to go, just go. I can’t stop you.’ With that, Tom realized that she would go; he’d lost her for ever. At least her parents would be pleased, he thought bitterly. He sighed. ‘Come on, let’s tidy up your face.’ He rummaged in his rucksack for a T-shirt, crumpled it up and dabbed at her eyes. ‘You look like one of the living dead.’
She giggled just for a moment but then hardened and pushed his hand away.
‘We’ll talk about this in the morning,’ he said. ‘We need to sleep on this.’
She lay down again, the argument dying as quickly as it had started. Tom never heard her stir the whole night; he just kept looking at the fan.
They didn’t talk about it in the morning. For the next four days they limped back through Berlin, then Strasbourg, then Paris, more out of polite obligation to their original plan than any enthusiasm. Tom thought about suggesting a detour through the First World War battlefields but thought better of it. Probably not quite the time. Back in London they split at St Pancras, Tom to go home for a final week before Sandhurst and Cassie going on to a festival with some friends.
Waiting in the queue for her cab, Tom looked at her as she scribbled down his Sandhurst address. The late-afternoon sun bounced off high windows above them and lit up her hair. He knew that she’d probably only write him one letter at Sandhurst. He knew he’d never see her again.
She got into the taxi and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Bye, Tommy. Take care, please take care.’
‘I will, don’t worry.’ He felt completely alone.
‘I’ll write.’
‘Please; it’ll be such a boost.’
He leaned into the taxi and pressed twenty pounds into the driver’s hand.
‘Tom, don’t be ridiculous …’
‘No, I insist. I’m not going to be spending much in the next year or so, am I?’
He gently closed the door, smiled at her, turned and walked away. He didn’t look back. Cassie watched through the rear window as the taxi pulled away, willing Tom to turn his head. He didn’t. If he had, she would have seen him crying.
A week later Constance took Tom to start at Sandhurst. Her battered old Ford Focus heaved with the paraphernalia that he had been instructed to bring, from twenty wooden coat hangers to shoe-cleaning kit to an ironing board that was so large it could fit in the car only if Tom removed his headrest and almost crouched in the footwell. Leaving the house was a frenzy of nervous laughter with Zeppo trying to jump in the car with him, Tom fretting about not having all his kit and Constance worrying about whether she was wearing a smart enough dress.
Sam came to wish him goodbye.
‘Well boy, I wish your old man was here for this. Best of luck.’
‘Thanks, Sam. I hope it’s not going to be too bad.’
Sam flashed his teeth in a throaty laugh. ‘Oh, it’ll be worse than anything you could possibly imagine. But then, just when you think you can’t go on, you’ll start to love it. You’ll make friendships that you’ll never lose. Oh, one thing. You could have bothered to get your hair cut.’
Tom’s face went pale. ‘Oh bollocks! Mum, we need to go to a hairdresser. Right now.’ He felt his hair. ‘Oh God, they’re going to crucify me.’
In the car on the slog around the M25 it felt like he was off to live in Australia for the rest of his life. Tom’s throat was dry, and the closer they got to Sandhurst the more monosyllabic and terse he became with Constance’s eternal questions
and worries. She kept glancing over at him, her eyes sad with losing her son and having an empty house again.
At Sandhurst Constance was ushered straight into tea with the commandant, the general who commanded the academy, while Tom unpacked the car. The boot had jammed shut, so he had to wrestle the ironing board out through a window. He was sweating in his suit and getting into an ever greater panic. As he trudged up the steps to Old College laden down like a pack animal, two colour sergeants, rampant in their service dress, death-stared him. They knew that while the parents were having tea they could torment their new prey with impunity.
‘Fuck me, wha’ the fuck is this? Fred fuckin’ Karno’s Army or wha’?’
‘I give ’im five days before he runs away screaming.’
‘Nah. Two, max. Ah Christ, just look at that hair. I’ll bite it off for him.’
Tom finally got all his kit into his room and went to find Constance. They went outside together, passing the now silent vultures, and walked to the car in the afternoon sun. She kept finding excuses to touch him, straightening his tie or flicking bits of dust from his shoulder, and he felt himself welling up. After a strangling farewell hug he watched the car wheeze away, not even daring to imagine what a state Constance would be in that night at the house. What had he done? He tried to harden his heart and took a deep breath but found nothing in there. He waited till the car disappeared from sight, gave one final, unnoticed wave, turned and walked up the steps back past the vultures.
‘Eh, wee man, why so fuckin’ weepy? Eh Trev, ah think he’s greeting.’
‘Yeah well, Robbie, if I had a suit like that I’d cry.’
‘Two days. Max.’
Tom turned to face them. Might as well be polite. ‘Good afternoon, Colour Sergeants. Nice day for it.’
The Scottish one looked at him aghast. ‘Eh son, speak when ya fuckin’ spoken tae, ya lippy cunt. We were talking aboot ye, not tae ye. Now FUCK OFF!’
That night in Tom’s platoon lines the same man, Colour Sergeant Robbie Laidlaw, the midwife of their army careers, introduced himself. He cut an immediately impressive figure. Hovering just above six feet, with crew-cut black hair splashed at the temples with grey, beneath his immaculate uniform both his arms were sleeved in Japanese-style tattoos. Broad Glasgow accent soft in conversation, when he raised his voice to admonish or to bark a drill command on a parade ground he seemed to rise to six foot six. He had crow’s feet laughter lines at his eyes, and back in his battalion had already been marked out as a superstar. At battalion he got on well with the officers – he liked their self-deprecation and their keenness to help the young soldiers – but when he was posted to instruct at Sandhurst he swore not to show this fondness; the harder he treated these kids the more he would be helping them in the end. He was going to push these boys, and push them hard, but only so they didn’t get themselves killed when they eventually got into the
ulu
. And certainly so they didn’t get any of their lads killed.
Laidlaw filed them all into a classroom and made them sit in a circle and introduce themselves. When his time came, Tom mumbled. He was rather intimidated by the rest of the platoon, half of whom seemed already to know each other from private school or university. He hoped that his shaking legs wouldn’t show under the cavernous green overalls. He noticed two of them catch each other’s eyes and barely suppress smirks when he told them about Henry
VI Comprehensive. Cambridge got their attention though. Typical.
Always the same with public-school boys, Tom thought: their ears are trained to filter vast amounts of information and names and schools, ignore 95 per cent but prick up immediately a famous name or establishment is mentioned. This signifies to them that the speaker might be worth knowing. So Tom wasn’t surprised when later that night, as they were all sorting out their kit in the way that Laidlaw had told them to, the smirkers put their heads round the door and introduced themselves.
‘Hi, mate,’ said one, tall, thickset, with raven-black hair and a rugby player’s jaw, whose burly appearance was offset by his spectacles. ‘Will Currer. You haven’t got any spare coat hangers, have you?’
‘Ignore him.’ The other one, just shy of six foot and with an easy drawl, grinned. ‘The stupid bastard didn’t follow the instructions on the packing list.’ He held out a hand with a signet ring on the little finger; clearly he had ignored Laidlaw’s instruction to remove all jewellery. ‘Clive Hynde-Smith. Right, now that Jock maniac’s buggered off, I’m going outside to have a smoke. Want to join us, mate? Tom, isn’t it?’
They chatted happily outside on the fire escape, Tom fielding their questions, perfectly friendly ones at first glance, but each concealing a probing dart designed to work out exactly how to take this Cambridge boy.
The next day they had their heads shaved, and in their boiler suits their homogenization was now complete; they had lost the final visible distinction between them. The routine quickly established itself. They slept on the floor so that they didn’t crumple their beds for the 4 a.m. inspection. When they woke they would parade in the corridor, sing the national anthem, do forty press-ups and then drink a litre of
water without drawing breath. Someone always then vomited. They would then go back into their rooms and crawl all over the floor with Sellotape wrapped around their hands to remove any dust before Laidlaw inspected. This he did wearing white gloves, and when he wiped something, if the glove came away with dust on it he would calmly tell the occupant to trash his room.
‘What do you mean, trash my room, Colour Sergeant?’ Tom asked on his first inspection, instantly regretting doing so.
‘I mean turn yer bed upside doon and rip yer clothes off the shelves so yous learn how to fucking tidy it properly, yous fucking twat. Here ye go, I’ll start yous off,’ Laidlaw screamed as he chucked Tom’s immaculate drill boots out of the window into a patch of mud. He watched on as Tom then dutifully turned his bed upside down and pulled out his drawers and emptied them on the floor.
They were exhausted. They would sleep standing up or sometimes even as they marched. And they marched everywhere in a group and never, ever by themselves. They ate, drank, pissed, crawled through mud, breathed each other’s breath and ironed their clothes till 2 a.m. together. This lasted for days. Tom would wake at 3.45 just to lie in silence for the precious few minutes of the day he would have to himself and despair. Maybe Cassie had been right.
Slowly though, all the hardship began to fade away. Knowing grins and in-jokes, shared torture and common slang became their glue, and as they saw each other pushed to the brink of mental and physical collapse, so all barriers crumbled. Each of them was at some point laid bare in front of everyone else, bare to their souls and buttocks. They could hide nothing from anyone, and Tom realized that he knew these men better after mere weeks than he did most of his university cohort
after three years. They would bicker, laugh and chatter like a tribe of gorillas picking nits out of each other’s hair. They became very fit, developed extraordinary stamina and could sleep within five seconds of being told to do so.
Cassie’s letter, when it came, was as bloodless as Tom had expected it to be. He found it in his pigeonhole after the platoon got back from a ten-mile march, and while the rest of them showered and fought over the washing machines Tom sat on his bed and stared at the envelope. He sniffed to see if there was any perfume on it. None. Resignedly he started to read. It was nothing he hadn’t already heard tens of times before in his idle faraway speculations. She hoped he was well, that he was being treated nicely and had made lots of friends. It was as though she was writing to someone in prison. She was really enjoying her new job at a hedge fund in London. Tom didn’t even know what a hedge fund was. She had loved Europe and all the time at Cambridge but reckoned it would be best for them to move away from each other, at least for the moment; her new job might take her to New York. Who could say? She’d no doubt see Tom again, but with travel and the rest, who knew when?
Tom read it without a flicker, walked out of his room and pinned it to the noticeboard, already half full, that Laidlaw had put up for such letters.
As the months went on and the cadets learned more, Sandhurst became less like a penal institute and increasingly like a dressing room before a boxing match. They were being primed and honed for their soldiers and to get on the ground. Every lecture on leadership banged this home to Tom, every range session or final assault of a company attack came with the exhortation, ‘Come on, Mr Chamberlain. That cunt’s just killed your fucking mate! Shoot him where it hurts, in his fucking Taliban FACE! In the FACE! In the FACE!’
Their generation had, amazingly, been picked to go and fight in the hardest place, in the hardest fight since Korea. And in Afghan, Helmand. And in Helmand, they had to be in the worst area, the most
kinetic
base. The most contacts. All the cards had to fall exactly in to place.