Just been driven to the hospital to have post-op check and thankfully all doing OK. Stitches trimmed then new dressing applied and it was on the way back home that I suddenly became a tourist in my own country. The route took us through Ascot, Windsor and the Great Park, through Eton and along the river in Datchet and watching the acres of orange, red and gold that the autumnal air had kissed onto the previously green trees was breathtaking. It was as if I'd never noticed before what an exquisitely beautiful land England is or realised how priveleged I am to live here.
I wonder what Afghanistan looks like in the autumn. Being a northern hemisphere country their seasons follow ours and by all account the winters are dreadful. One soldier who had been out there last year said it was just like the Somme.
Sleep was fitful last night and although I managed to arrive in the Land of Nod the dreams were terrifying. I was flying over the ground at high speed, and obviously under my own steam, when I became embroiled in a swirling, suffocating, blinding sand storm. I was whirled around and around and couldn't breath at which point I woke up with a start and decided to try and break the imaginative flurry with a glass of milk. My secret and very anoraky collection of railway journey books has come in very useful lately.
When I set the alarm the previous night I actually felt brave enough to set it to the Today programme and so it was that my day began with someone explaining that Afghanistan wasn't as bad as we're being led to believe and that soldier's are, by and large, a bunch of people who like to moan and complain because that's what keeps them going. Also the reason we may have some shortages in areas like helicopters is because we plan 40 years ahead and it was always assumed the next war would be multi-fronted and mega and not strategic and localised. Oh and apparently the reason the Americans don't have problems is because they can change practice and tactics more quickly than us, because they do that well. With incredulity I listened and couldnt help but think if we had always been planning for big and not little wars shouldn't we have too many helicopers?
It takes twice as long for an injured British soldier to be transported to a casualty station than it does an American.
I have to consciously hold on to positive thoughts otherwise my brain spirals out of control. C always wanted to be a soldier from when he was the smallest boy. He would dress up as Captan Scarlett or a Thunderdbird, and as I was a mother who disapproved of toy guns, charge around the garden with a stick to the fore in his hand, yelling wildly at anything real or imagined.
From the age of 2 he was continually trying to escape. The first time I discovered he wasn't playing in the hall but had in fact taken a chair to the large Victorian door, undone both locks and safety chain, and left the house, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I eventually found him sitting cross legged in my neighbours kitchen watching her washing machine, or 'she-sheen' as he called it, going round and round. On another occasion when he was playing with his father, brother and neighbours in the back garden, he picked his moment to slip off camera, climb over a wall and through the next door house to freedom in the form of the railway station. My then husband was ashen as he carried him home. C told me many years later that he had broken out of his prep school on his first day and had been found by the Headmistress in Sainsbury's - strangely enough the school never told me. I was quite jealous of mothers who complained their children were too clingy.
There's a photo on the piano taken just after we moved into our little house. I look very posh in an evening dress because I'm going to a ball at the Cafe Royal and H is one side of me in a T shirt, smiling. R is on the other side looking sweet in a duffal coat with ribons in her hair. But to the front is C, wearing a frogman's diving helmet thrusting a pirate's sword vetically into the air looking every inch like a wierd paramilitary. He was 11.
When he was 13 he joined the Army Cadets and never looked back. He did in fact end up as the Lord Lieutenant's cadet, which is the highest he could be. I remember being distraught when he announced aged 15 that he didn't want to do A Levels, but wanted to join up as a boy-soldier. To think my Grandfather used to boast that no one in our family had ever fired a shot in anger. Mercifully he was prevailed upon by school and indeed the Army to do his exams and apply to Sandhurst for Officer training - which is why I'm sitting here to day writing this blog.
Thank you for all your kind messages of support.
Speak soon. A soldier's Mum x
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