in the military is transient. I will meet Summers briefly again after I am sentenced and sent back here to the prison as a DUS – a detainee under sentence – a convict. The others have become just names and fragmented memories to me. But here for a short time we are still soldiers and so we treat each other in a soldierly fashion. We share tobacco, play cards, nominate people to get the brews and abuse each other verbally. Abuse between soldiers is most often an expression of solidarity; in fact, it’s the main expression of solidarity. Soldiers cannot always guarantee an opportunity to die for each other, but they can always rip into each other and this process reinforces the bonds that the army wants to see: men who can say anything to each other and still coexist. The trick is to never bite at someone’s abuse, just have a go back or shrug it off. Any other response is weakness and will be rounded upon and must be rounded upon and should be. Never, ever bite when you are baited. This is our culture; the only stable thing in our unsettled lives is that ours is an abusive, masculine and transient world.
I was sent here to be silenced, having performed my own small acts of dissent. My incarceration was malicious revenge from my bumbling superiors for having dragged them through the mud. I have outed them in public, a taboo that breaks all the rules. I have questioned what is going on in Afghanistan and this is my punishment. The military is meant to be a silent leviathan but they have bitten. The ripples my actions have caused ruin the illusion of efficiency, strength and accountability, and of grim-faced adherence to duty at any cost.
The problem is that as much as they would like to think it, I don’t work for them anymore. Nevertheless, I am afraid, as they want to send me down for years – my own officers have assured me of this with confidence. I have a life and I want to get it back. This time on remand will come off any later sentence. But what, I ask myself, if it is years? The charges against me indicate a punishment, which may stretch for tens of years, if they have the balls. The only thing that keeps me playing cards, and not giving in, is my view that I am right to defy them. I am right, they are wrong – fuck them, fuck the toffs and the politicians and the army.
When my fellow prisoners ask me what I’m here for I tell them. Brows furrow. ‘Talking to the media? Can you get done for that? That’s bullshit, mate, you’ve been stitched up!’ And it’s true, this has never happened with regards to Afghanistan: my protest was public and my detention rests within a legal grey area. I argue it is unlawful. But the law here is solely interpreted by my captors to suit their immediate needs. There were once two charges for disobeying orders but these were dropped weeks ago, a judge confirming they were removed in a hearing. There are five more charges being considered. These charges are either dead or not yet born. They don’t know what to do with me, because I am attacking them with all the bloody-mindedness they instilled in me and I am doing it well. ‘They don’t like the sunlight,’ my legal man said of the coverage. ‘It makes their slime dry up.’
The first place I remember is a cottage in Norfolk. My father is from a place near there. A place so small it is called Smallburgh. He is a wild-looking giant with a beard. He was dyslexic when the condition was called stupidity and had a head for maths and a penchant for practical things. In those days he was a long-haired, earring-wearing truck driver and this upset my maternal grandmother who didn’t send my mother to grammar school in order to bag that kind of man.
My mother is a small, fierce Yorkshirewoman who wandered far from home. After divorcing her alcoholic RAF husband, she and my father met and not long after had my brother and, eighteen months later, me. Though my father tried on their first date, he was rewarded with a slap in a lay-by. A story he still repeats happily and unasked. We lived in Norfolk amid leafy lanes and pretty countryside, until we went north. The move cost us my Norfolk dialect and the price of a truck. We ended up near York, my mother’s home.
I outgrew school by the time I was eight years old, the boredom of classrooms and the struggling teachers gave me nothing I wanted. As soon as I left that cage to be home-educated I began to read and write, and have never stopped. I spent those years clutching a book or paper and pencil. I have heard some people suggest that this made me a misfit but sometimes things defy unpacking for having been lived; that’s to say I am unsure if my unusual schooling contributed to my decisions.
My brother left school a year later and we lived in our little rural village. I knew no other way. We learned about what interested us, which was everything. The history and nature in the valley formed a foundation for what I love today: the quiet, the rural and the old.
I was a sensitive kid and grew my hair long, feral and scruffy, and I stropped when people mistook me for a girl. I was a little know-it-all until I grew bigger and smarmier, and clever with it. My brother and father were more outdoorsy and robust while I was bookish and introvert from early on. It took me many years to learn to accept the outdoors as they did and later to love it – the cold, the heat, the physical work. I wrote stories and read books about adventure and war and heroes and kept my own company. I tormented my brother with my smart-arse little brother act. With no school there was no sense of hierarchy drilled into me. I would not defer to adults or bigger kids. I sometimes made a point of fighting with the older, stronger kids, and I’d gouge and punch and bite. Although I tried and kept trying to beat them, I almost always lost – but they remembered me.
Once, after we left school, a man from the education authority visited our house to check our progress but we set our cat on him and said nothing as it nestled and moulted white fur on his black suit. This and the written work I had assembled once I left school saw him off. I shuttled piles of filled exercise books down from my room for him to appraise, even as the old tom pawed his lap with predatory eyes. He did not return. My life after this was played out in long summers with no school to hamper my education.
The landlord of our small village was a barrister whose forebears had, allegedly, won the valley in a card game many years before from a drunker, richer, even more bloated landlord. It was here that I first experienced the power of class, though I did not understand those rigid tiers which had shaped my life. The striking thing about the people up on the hill, apart from their utter detachment from reality, was that while wealthy they were stuck trying to keep up with the real aristocracy, the real old money, whom they courted over dinners cooked by my mother.
The most condescending term for the working class would better fit these specimens: aspirational. ‘Oh, you’re so lucky,’ the lady of the manor had once told my mother, betraying her schema, ‘you can wear cheap earrings’. They pumped out three long-limbed, horse-faced daughters and finally a son whom they referred to simply as The Boy.
After living there for years we were ejected, homeless. The landlord sacked my father one day for recalcitrance unbearable in a peasant. After my father had explained that he could not be sacked by him because he did not work for him, the barrister sacked my mother more successfully. The experience of being cast out was in keeping with centuries past.
There was a hearing over the eviction, which my mother attended. It did not go unnoticed that the landlord and the judge chatted on first name terms and discussed how hard it was to get ‘good domestic staff’. After that we moved from job to job: forestry, farming, even working on a fox hunt in a house next to the pens in which the hounds would sing out the evening. In the hunting season the red-coated toffs would lord it up sipping drinks and haw-hawing astride their hunting horses, while the rural workers would doff their hats to the bastards. As I grew, my dislike of those divisions grew with me. The arrogance of the hunters seemed as inappropriate and odd as the willingness of the hunt followers to defer to these people. After a year or so we moved from the hunt to another town.
For a while I became an army cadet and enjoyed it. It was the only local club that appealed to me and so I spent two evenings a week marching around the tennis courts of a school with a bunch of other cadets
