It wasn’t as if she had been a naive spinster. There was little to be naive about growing up in the cobbled backstreets of Burton-upon-Trent, in the shadow of the breweries and the Marmite factory with their rich, overpowering smell of yeast. Mary had been one of four sisters with a father who had a serious problem with both alcohol and employment. Too much of one, none of the other.
To say her family was dysfunctional would satisfy only the most unimaginative of sociologists. It wasn’t dysfunctional, it was a disaster. When her father was drunk but still capable, which was often, he would inflict on Mary and her younger sisters, but particularly Mary, the most appalling suffering and indignities. Fuck anything at hand today, for tomorrow would bring oblivion. By contrast, her mother lived not for today but for the afterlife, being utterly devout. She was also stubbornly blind and deaf, a woman who never saw, and never heard, who refused to believe in the presence of evil even when it was sitting at her breakfast table. Life for Mary, even as a nine-year-old, was already a bitch.
When she was eighteen, shortly before she was about to go to university, her father had come home with a drinking mate, someone to whom he had lost a substantial and ridiculous bet. Mary was supposed to be the payment. As the two men had stumbled through the front door, she had fled through the back in her bare feet. She never returned. University was out and within six months, in desperation, she had ended up at the only warm place on the High Street that would welcome her, a recruiting office, so she had joined the Army. It didn’t take them long to recognize the raw but irresistible talent of their new recruit. Soon it had been Sandhurst where sheer persistence had made her runner-up for the Sword of Honour, and simple excellence had put her at the top of the academic order of merit. Then it had been Blandford (top of the troop commander course). 30 Signal Regiment at Nuneaton. Germany. Angola. Bosnia. Northern Ireland. Namibia, where she had helped plug an election structure into the creaking southern African country even as she was being shot at by rebels. No postcards home, not from here, even if there had been anyone to send them to. Then Ethiopia, coordinating food drops. Training for life, and for death. She’d discovered the stench of death in abundance on the flood plains of Bangladesh, a country which, in her view, should never have existed, and probably wouldn’t for much longer if the sea levels continued to rise. Signals were ‘teeth-arms’, at the cutting edge of every major military encounter, and she had been there, anywhere there was a challenge, at the edge. Sometimes too near the edge.
Yet in the armed forces a woman is inevitably a target. A target of fun, and occasional abuse, of discrimination and desires. Mary Wetherell was more of a target than most, because she was not only cropped-blonde with a figure that was athletically feminine, even in mud-washed fatigues, but she was also remarkably determined – hell, in order to survive a father like hers, you had to be. She asked for no favours, nothing more than the chance to stand and compete upon that most elusive of hallowed plots, the level playing field, and the Army was an equal opportunities employer, or so the recruiting officer had told her.
It hadn’t worked quite like that. She never seemed able to shrug off the fact that most of her colleagues were men with unfair advantages like university degrees, while in turn they never seemed able to accept that she was as good as or often better than them, or to forget that she had breasts. No one ever stopped noticing that she was a woman, whether under instruction on the Staff Course at Camberley, in the officers’ mess at Rheindahlen or stuck in the middle of the fratricide of Bosnia. If she eased up and was too friendly with the men, they regarded her as a regimental recreation centre, yet when she refused the first offer of a drunken fondle on a Friday mess night they called her a frigid little feminist. Bike or dike.
Never just plain Captain Mary Wetherell.
Her Commanding Officer was a particular problem. Lieutenant Colonel Abel Gittings was a very modern warrior with an OBE and MBE to show for it. That’s what you get when you fight all your campaigns at what they call the ‘politico-military interface’ inside the Ministry of Defence rather than on a battlefield. A filthy job, he’d been known to say, surrounded by cigar smoke and politicians, but somebody had to do it. He’d fought with such skill in the Directorate of Military Operations that they’d promoted him to be Military Aide to the Chief of General Staff. You weren’t going to get much farther away from the bullets than that. Chances were he’d probably survive to become a general, once he’d finished his tour as CO of Mary’s regiment. Yes, a very successful soldier, was Abel Gittings.
Didn’t stop him being a prick, of course, and it took a totally unambiguous prick to wander over to Mary’s Troop Sergeant during an exercise on Salisbury Plain to enquire whether the troop was ‘taking care of their little lady, making sure she’s tucked up at night, got her bed socks on’. A few patronizing words that in a fleeting moment had destroyed all the respect she’d sweated so hard to build.
When he and Mary were alone, his eyes said it all. They wandered over her like a route march through the Brecon Beacons, marking every turn and undulation, and rarely making it as far as her own eyes.
One evening in the mess she had joined in a game of ‘tunnels’. Simple rules. Pile all the soft furniture into the centre of the room to form the tunnel. Then two teams, one at either end. The object was to force your way past each other in the narrow and dark confines of the tunnel, run back to the starting position and down a pint of whatever was on the list before the next member of your team took over. A relay game of high spirits and considerable quantities of alcohol. When it had come to Mary’s turn, Gittings had arranged for himself to be her opponent, intent not so much on pushing past her in the tunnel as grabbing and fondling every last soft bit of her. His hands were all over her, half an arse and a full raw nipple, and when the buttons started popping she’d decided she’d had enough, even from her CO. She’d left him with a fiercely bloodied nose. Yet he’d thought it great fun. Later he bought her a drink at the bar and quietly propositioned her. ‘Swift and Sure, my girl. Swift and Sure!’ he’d whispered, expropriating the Corps motto.
She told him in the most lurid terms to shove his active service up his own tunnel, and had been overheard. After that it was never going to be the same between them.
Two months later the Regiment was sent on its second tour of duty in Bosnia. An O Group was called and troop dispositions were announced. Bosnia was prime posting, a real war, everyone wanted in, and Mary’s troop was to be sent again.
Without Mary.
Her troop was to be deployed under the command of a different officer, and Mary was about to be reassigned. As Families Officer. She was out of the loop, sidelined, humiliated. Nothing wrong with her performance, the adjutant had told her later when she’d kicked down his door demanding to know what the fuck was going on. It’s simply that the CO thinks it’s time for you to move on, take the next step. As a Families Officer? Anyway, Bosnia was inappropriate for her. That’s the term he’d used, ‘inappropriate’. She hadn’t needed an Army field manual to translate. Inappropriate for a woman. After all, the men had to keep their eyes on the enemy, not on her arse.
Gittings had confirmed these details in the mess after dinner one evening, elaborating with a few more lurid descriptions of what he thought the most appropriate position for a woman like Mary should be.
It was, of course, unprofessional for Mary to respond in the way she had but, even in hindsight, the sweet-sour pleasures of the moment hadn’t lost their freshness. She would for ever cherish that look of bewilderment in his alcoholic eyes – her father’s eyes – followed by the first flush of pain in the moments after Gittings had hit the floor. She had bloodied and bent the CO’s nose once again, and broken a tooth for good measure, but this time without the covering screen of the tunnel. She’d thumped him out in the open, in full view of the entire mess.
‘Was that swift and sure enough for you, sir?’
The matter couldn’t be left there, of course, but Gittings decided against a court martial. His bloody nose had quite