By the time we moved again, to Chivenor in 2010, I was myself again; I’d got my sense of identity back. But when we got here I knew nobody, I didn’t have a job, my mood dropped and I put on even more weight. We’ve always been quite lucky with married quarters until we got here. We’ve not had the best, but some people have had far worse. You learn to fight for normal things, like getting the cooker working. The house we had in Tidworth was great but when we moved here it was a horror story. The place was infested with dog fleas, and one of my daughters got infected and nearly ended up in hospital. The house had to be fumigated three times, and all the carpets ripped out. George was getting ready to go to Afghan and I was having to fight to get our house up to a basic standard of cleanliness. It was a low, low time.
Pre-deployment is always a bad time, for everyone. If a marriage is going to break up, it would be at pre-deployment. You both need to be very strong to get through. One day you are a normal family; the next you have been told the dates of the tour that’s coming up, and your emotions kick in. You feel you have to do lots of things with the kids, because you may never do them again. Then afterwards you think: Why did we spend all our money doing that? It’s great to go out for a big slap-up family meal, but next day you find out that the car needs fixing.
As it gets closer, he’s not interested in family life. He can’t be there for us, because of the nature of what he’s doing. He’s now a WO2 and he was very stressed out during his last pre-deployment. I understand, but it’s hard. The children don’t understand, and it’s much harder for them. You have to put a front on the whole time, and you are worn out before he has gone.
During George’s last pre-deployment we had lots of family chats about what Daddy is going to do, what he’s going to wear, how many letters we can send. We planned what we would put in the boxes to send out to him. But I knew they were feeling it. Georgina, who was nine at the time, didn’t sleep much in the month before he left. Isla, who was seven, understood more than she had ever done when he’d been away before. It was hard keeping them steady. You can’t plan ahead, because you don’t know what life will be like in a year’s time. I protected them by switching the TV news off. I didn’t lie to them, but I just fed them the information I felt they could cope with.
We’ve learnt how to handle R & R, but it’s not always easy. The important thing is to get it late in the tour – get the worst of the tour over. Then we get away and pack things in. We live for the moment while he’s here, scooping the kids up and going to somewhere like Alton Towers. We both think that we’d be stupid not to enjoy it. But George also knows he can talk army to me, to get it out of his system. We don’t do it in front of the kids, but when we are together he can go over it all; I have my own take on it, and can join in. We constantly chat about what is going on out there.
When he goes back after R & R there’s a very low point. Even though he only had five weeks left to do last time, those weeks seemed to go very slowly. At the back of your mind you know that bad things can happen right up to the last day.
What saved me during the last tour was the choir.
Our eldest son, James, was just three months old when Kenny went to Afghanistan the first time as a front-line company medic, and I was pregnant with Joseph. When I said goodbye to him I had no idea what he was going to – nobody did, as Afghan was unknown territory. We weren’t married and I had no support from the welfare set-up, because we weren’t living on a patch. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel, but it felt bad. I thought about him not coming back, and James and my new baby growing up without a daddy. I tried not to think such black thoughts, but it’s only human.
The worst thing was that when he got to Brize Norton he rang me to say he had been stood down for two days. He came home. Then he went again. Then it happened again. Over four days he was gone, came back, gone, came back. Every time we said goodbye I was in pieces. In the end I said, ‘Please, just go. If they stand you down again just stay at Brize – don’t come home. I can’t keep doing this.’ I was very distressed. I was hormonal, I guess, because of being pregnant and still breastfeeding a baby, but it felt like a kind of torture.
My worst crisis in all my time as a military wife was during that first tour, when James had a febrile convulsion and was rushed into hospital with suspected meningitis. I phoned the military welfare number, but communications were really poor because we had only just gone in to Afghan. The welfare people got a message to a padre who was out there, and he managed to get a message to Kenny. But there were no phones on the ground, and he was, of course, distraught. A female reporter from The Sun lent him her satellite phone, so we owe her a big thank you. I was in total turmoil. I remember shouting at him down the phone, ‘You’re not here!’ There was nothing he could do except try to calm me down, and of course I understand that. But emotion overtakes you, and it was my first experience of him being away and completely out of reach. It was another few weeks before he was able to ring again.
All my friends and family were civilians, and they had no idea what it was like. They couldn’t understand that you can’t just pick up a phone. I wrote letters, sometimes two a day, but I made sure I numbered them, because they were delivered to him in batches.
When he came back I only had a few hours’ notice that he was on his way. After touching down at Brize Norton, he drove through the night to our flat in Exeter. I kept opening the curtains and looking out, listening for the car. Then out stepped this man with a huge beard. I barely recognised him. He’d lost weight and was very thin. At first he found things strange, and the smallest of noises startled him. The baby crying was very hard. He’d seen children badly injured out there, and I think it hit home that he had his own family now.
He had nightmares for a while, and I was scared. I didn’t know what to do. Now they have TRIM, and they get counselling. But they didn’t then. He never remembered the nightmares the next day, but they woke me.
I first met Kenny in a nightclub in Exeter. He was based at Taunton and I was working. We moved in together into a flat pretty soon, but we didn’t see a lot of each other – we were like ships passing in the night.
We were engaged by then. I gave up work when I was pregnant with our first baby. Kenny was nearing the end of his medic’s course by then, and he’d moved to different draft placements, most of which were in Devon, so he commuted to our flat. I was at my sister’s house, watching TV, when we saw the planes smashing into the twin towers in America. I phoned Kenny, who was working in A&E in Haslar Hospital in Portsmouth, and said, ‘I think you’ll be going to Afghanistan.’ I was right: he went soon afterwards.
Just after our second son, Joseph, was born, Kenny was given five days’ notice that he was going to Iraq. After his tour in Afghanistan we both knew we should be married before he went away again. I felt I wanted to be his wife if he was going somewhere so dangerous. It made things much easier in terms of the support I could get. The first time he went to Afghan all the newsletters and information were sent to his mum in Kent, because she was his next of kin. More than that, I wanted to celebrate our commitment to each other, and I suppose at the back of both our minds was the fear that he might not come back.
So we organised our wedding in three days, which is fast even by military wives’ standards. We had great help from a naval chaplain, and we were given a special licence from the Bishop of Exeter, who interviewed us over a cup of tea and custard creams. Amazingly, we were able to marry in a church near our home in Exeter. Everyone rallied around: a lady from the congregation decorated the church in flowers, I went shopping with my mum and found the perfect dress, which luckily didn’t need to be altered, and my mum and dad bought it for me. Friends and family paid for bouquets and photographs, and the three little bridesmaids