Category Archives: army

December 31, 2012 · 11:03 pm

Awards Are Awesome…And…

I have mixed feelings about all awards, not just bloggers awards.,

We’ve just had the New Year Queen’s Honours list announced in this country, and as usual the people who’ve had successful careers – many of them having made pots of money – have had the top honours and titles. At the bottom of the list were the people who deserved the top awards – people who’d loved and fostered 150 children, someone who’d worked teaching oldies how to keep fit for 57 years, a solitary SPCA worker, who’d rescued countless animals…

When it comes to bloggers awards my feelings are mixed too… not, I hasten to say, because the wrong people get them! But when I was ten my father sent me to a convent school. The nuns were mostly French and Belgian, but the bane of my life was not a nun, but a bigoted Irish maths teacher – the only person there who was not a nun.

She made up for it by being far more religious than the rest of them put together, so that even in the middle of long division she’d stop us all to stand up and recite the Angelus. Everyone loved it, because we stopped doing maths for about five minutes!

I had three strikes against me as far as she was concerned. I was hopeless at maths. I wasn’t a Catholic  – and secretly refused to pray as she instructed,  for my non-Catholic parents – I just didn’t believe they were going to end up in hell and pits of flame.

The third strike and final nail in my coffin came in the middle of a maths lesson when I became so angry at hearing history being twisted, and how beastly we Protestants had been to the “puir” Catholics like Guy Fawkes who’d tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and other famous plotters, that I rebelled.

I stood up to answer back with Bloody Mary’s burnings, the Borgia Pope’s poisonings and the Spanish Inquisition’s torturing and burning. (Thanks to my grandmother’s book shelves I had all the information at my finger-tips.)

I got no further than the Inquisition, because she clapped her hands against her ears and cried out in her thick Irish brogue to the rest of the class: “Oh what a pack of Protestant lies!”

No-one spoke to me for a long time after that. The worst thing was the regular and ritual public humiliation of being picked for teams of rounders and netball. The nuns would choose two girls to pick their teams. One by one the team leaders pointed to their best friends, their next best friends, the people who weren’t any good at games, and finally I was left – to tag onto one or other team. Always last to be chosen – if you could call it that – the most unpopular girl in the class.

This preamble is actually about Awards!

I was bowled over by the generosity of Stephanie at http://kokopellibeefreeblog.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/acknowledging-the-acknowledgement/ and oawritingspoemspaintings   who each gave me an award on my first day back at the office – I mean blogging! I love reading about people’s awards, and learning things about them, and reading the blogs that they nominate.

I totally get what a great idea it is, what a gift it feels to those who receive the awards, and what a gift too to the blogging world, as we are given the opportunity to explore new blogs we otherwise wouldn’t have come across.

Like everyone else, I’m always tickled pink when someone thinks of me too, and it’s always rather moving to read what others have to say about one’s blogs. The generous recognition from fellow writers, and from what feels like family is very precious.

But when it comes to dealing with awards, my heart sinks, and I feel overwhelmed. I’m so kack-handed that my computer skills are zilch, and I simply can’t work out how to deal with the technical side of it all.

But the real nub of the matter, is that I flinch from trying to pick just a handful of deserving blogs from all the lovely blogs I read. I hate to think of people feeling they’ve been left out of the netball team, or left at the end of the queue… whenever I give a child a birthday present I give all the other children a present too.

I know we’re all adults, and presumably well-adjusted, integrated ones! But I simply don’t want to choose between blogs – some of which I read for their spiritual content and profundity, some for their humour and wit, some to live vicariously and savour life on the farm, or in the country, or exploring churches, or growing and cooking food, some for their glorious photography, or poetry, some for their quirkiness, intelligence or thoughtfulness, others for information I’d hate to miss, and others to share their insights, challenges and be awed by their courage.

Some I follow just because the personality of the writers is so gentle, good and sincere, that the world feels a better place for knowing that they exist. Each blog has its own perfume, and each one is so unique. In fact, I love you all!

So since I don’t want to fulfil the conditions of the awards, it’s not fair to accept them either.  So I must say thank you, but no thank you, for all the reasons above.

And as I step back from the awards, I want to thank the many generous and wonderful bloggers who have gifted me not just with awards, but with kindness and friendship and encouragement… if I start to name you, I will be doing what I dread, I might leave someone out! So congratulations to you all, my wonderful blogging family, and a happy new year of living, writing and blogging!

PS  There was a sequel to the story of the maths mistress. Thirteen years later, feeling like the cat’s whiskers in my expensive fitted green uniform, high heeled court shoes, and painted nails, fresh from London, I sashayed into the first school I’d been invited to speak at in my new job  on the Army Team of Lecturers. It was in remote country, and I was puzzled, because the children didn’t seem to be the right age group, and it was a shabby, run-down rather sad place. I wondered why I’d been invited.

The head mistress who greeted me and my film operator was a faded, vulnerable, and anxious middle-aged woman with an Irish brogue. I suddenly realised it was my old adversary, Miss Cummins. Intriguing as the coincidence seemed, I refrained from recognising her, and reminding her of her glory days in the upmarket school where we’d first met. The reversal in our fortunes seemed too painful to gloat over. I discovered that revenge was not sweet at all.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

I know it’s politically incorrect to dislike lettuce, but so it is for me. I don’t mind iceberg lettuce, love cos lettuce in Caesar salad, but arugula and all the fancy fashionable green leaves leave me cold. Unfortunately arugula has 70 per cent more calcium than iceberg, 50 per cent more magnesium, 40 percent more beta-carotene and sixty per cent more vitamin C. And since I have a generous neighbour who gives me the overflow of arugula from her garden, I feel I should accept fresh organic nutritious food, and behave myself!

I’ve now found a way of enjoying it. After reading that soup is the most efficient way of absorbing nutrients, I’ve created what I call green soup. Take one chopped onion sauted in butter, or leave it out and just use a leek, plus a stick of celery, some broccoli if you have it, and a potato for thickening purposes – all chopped.

Gently fry them in butter or oil. Then add some chicken stock and simmer until soft. Wash and tear the lettuce leaves, and put this with plenty of parsley and celery leaves into the blender with a cup of milk. Whizz till they’re blended, then pour this bright green mix into the soup, whizz the whole lot, and re-heat. (I don’t use parsley stalks as they can taste bitter.)

Season with salt and pepper. I usually add nutmeg, and sometimes a taste of sugar makes a difference, especially if there’s lots of lettuce. I add and leave out all sorts of different green vegetables, including asparagus. It always tastes fresh and delicious, served hot or cold. Sometimes there’s more celery in it, sometimes more leeks, sometimes plenty of broccoli – they all work. This is more than enough for two.

Food for Thought

The final piece of reaching for authentic power is releasing your own to a higher form of wisdom.                                                                                                                                 Gary Zukav,  born 1942.  Author of ‘Dancing Wu Li Masters’ and ‘The Seat of The Soul’. Popular and regular guest on Oprah Winfrey’s show.

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November 5, 2012 · 9:16 pm

A Soldier’s Life is Terrible Hard -Part 11

By popular demand, another instalment of a soldier’s life!!

After my somewhat chequered career as a recruit I set off for officer cadet school with the rest of my intake – all eleven of us who had surfaced from the forty other applicants.

I learned later that it was no coincidence that the Colonel happened to come past the transport as we left, looking keenly at me! Oblivious to the impact I had had on various unfortunates at the depot, I discovered that officer cadet school was just like going back to boarding school, only better – I got paid!. As the youngest, and just out of school, I probably found it easier than the rest who had enjoyed their freedom. But to me, regular study periods, meals in the dining room, putting on uniform every day, was just more of the same.

Cadet school was set in a camp left behind by the Canadians after D –Day. Our nearest neighbours were the TB patients in the next door sanatorium. No potential there for hobnobbing with the opposite sex. The camp was surrounded by silver birch woods, which stretched for miles to the nearest village, and on still June nights I would wake to hear nightingales singing in the moonlight.

The only difference to boarding school was the hours spent on the huge parade square being drilled by a tiny sergeant major, less than five feet tall, whose mighty voice echoed not just around the parade square but on and beyond to the main Portsmouth road. As the eleven of us wheeled and drilled, and right formed, and fell into line, came to a halt, and about turned, a line of lorry drivers would pull up on the side of the road to watch us for their amusement, while they ate their sandwiches.

Thus it felt all the more humiliating, when dreaming about the un-read pages of the timid love letter stuffed hastily into my battledress top to read in our break, that I missed a step, failed to hear the word of command and carried on marching in the opposite direction when the rest had about turned. Love letters – or what passed for them – were a fairly scarce commodity at cadet school, as we might as well have been in a nunnery, we saw so few men or even boys.

The highlights of each term were the invitations to the house of an elderly couple who invited batches of Sandhurst cadets and us girls to hear talks on Moral Re-Armament. Their house just missed being stately, their servants were helpful, their food was heavenly, the worthy talks were utterly boring to frivolous young women, but the chaps might be interesting, we hoped. They never were, but hope always sprang eternal.

Apart from the daily morning parades, and the hours spent perfecting our drill and learning to shout commands that one day would be directed at our platoons as we took them on parade, we spent a great deal of time in lectures on arcane subjects like pay scales, army regulations, map-reading and leadership.

No rifle drill for us, but instead lectures from a series of university lecturers on constitutional history, current affairs, scientific trends and something called Clear Thinking, which involved logic, and fallacies and syllogisms – all considered necessary for a well-educated officer back in 1957!

Constitutional history was taught by the scion of a famous German intellectual family who’d escaped Hitler before the war, but the name of this gentleman was so long that generations of philistine and irreverent cadets just called him ‘Footy’, which he pretended not to know. He also pretended not to know that we never listened to a word he told us about constitutional history and the balance of power between the Commons and the House of Lords, but sat instead endlessly practising our signatures, or planning what to wear on our next trip to London.

Scientific Trends was taught by another mid-European lecturer, only unlike Footy who’d grown up in England, this very gentle man had a very thick accent and a deadly monotone. He showed films to illustrate the scientific trends, and as his lectures were conducted in the cadet sitting room, where there was a film screen, we just curled up in an arm chair in the dark with a bar of chocolate, and usually dozed off.

The rest of the syllabus was devoted to giving us an understanding of life, and the background many of our future charges came from, so we visited a Lyons Swiss roll factory to see what life on a conveyor belt was like, attended a Petty Sessions where we saw sad souls parade before the magistrates, and I felt like a voyeur, and worst of all, went to the Old Bailey. The day we were there we watched a murderer condemned to death, after a crime passionel. His voice after sentence had been passed was like the rustling of dry leaves.

The most challenging part of officer training was the two days I spent in the cook house, discovering how hard life really was. My worst crime was to leave the potatoes so long in the potato peeling machine that they came out the size of marshmallows. The kindly cooks who actually had to deal with this catastrophe, covered up for me, and my copybook was not as blotted as it might have been.

A handful of lectures on strategy and army organisation at Sandhurst were memorable for the lunch breaks when we mingled with the Sandhurst cadets. My most lasting memory is going for a punt on the lake, and it sinking, and my partner in this exploit – John Blashford-Snell, who has since become a famous explorer who did the first descent of the Blue Nile, explored the whole Congo River, and the Amazon, shooting many rapids unscathed – had to wade ignominiously back to shore, towing me sitting on the end of the leaky vessel.

The one thing I did master while at cadet school were the steps to the Charleston, then back in fashion. I perfected the knock knees, pigeon toes and tight sideways kick by holding onto the back of my chair in the lecture room as we waited for the next lecturer to arrive. I practised my dancing until I was foot perfect, and by the time we Passed- Out was acknowledged as top of the class by my peers in this  useful social accomplishment.

At the end of this gruelling training, interspersed with dances, parties and uniformed guest nights – when we practised the solemn ritual of Passing the Port – you Never lift the decanter from the table and only slide it in the coaster from right to left so it goes around in a circle, using Only the right hand – five of us emerged as second lieutenants. And now reality hit us.

Second lieutenants, we discovered, were despised by all, except new recruits. Everyone knew we hadn’t the faintest idea of what we had to do, from the regimental sergeant major down to the newest corporal. We were saluted, and called ma’am, but we knew that behind this ritual was the thinly concealed contempt of ‘old hands’.  Wet behind the ears, my father would have called us.

Many of the old hands had been through the war, like my motherly platoon sergeant who told me they knew D-Day must be in the offing, when they had to give up all the sheets from their beds, so that the huge new detachments of American soldiers  arriving nearby could have the sheets on their beds! And in the end, it was my platoon sergeant and the company sergeant major who taught me what I needed to know. Which seemed to be mostly to do what they told me!

Their commands varied from: “Here’s the pay books to sign, ma’am”, to: “Time to inspect the recruits, ma’am”, to: “Time to have your tea ma’am”. My requests varied from: “What shall I do now, Sergeant Major?” to: “D’you know where Private Smith is ?  She hasn’t made the tea yet.” A soldier’s life is terrible hard…

And as I re-assured my second, and non-military husband who feared that I was the Commanding Officer of our new establishment, he didn’t have to worry – the CO Thinks he runs the place – but it’s the regimental sergeant major who always does. He was very satisfied to be the regimental sergeant major.

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

‘Sumer is a-cumen in’ slowly, while the asparagus is a-cumen in quite fast. I love it as a meal in itself. Melted butter of course, is the classic accompaniment to it, but I also love this delicate and delicious Japanese style sauce.

You need one teasp of dried mustard, one teasp of hot water, one egg yolk, one tblesp of dark soy sauce, a teasp of finely chopped fresh ginger (you could use dried) and a quarter of a teasp of salt. Mix the mustard and hot water to a thick paste, then add the rest of the ingredients and stir well. Arrange the blanched asparagus on a platter and pour the sauce over. Serve within three hours. I like it lukewarm.

Food for Thought

There is so much in the world for us all if we only have eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it to ourselves.

Lucy Maud Montgomery 1874 – 1942   Canadian writer whose evergreen Anne of Green Gables series of books have enchanted generations of children since they were first published in 1908`

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October 6, 2012 · 11:14 pm

Writing for Survival

I fancied being a poet when I was eight, but unfortunately my uncle came home to my grandmother’s house, from prisoner of war camp. He didn’t know anything about children, but thought he did about poetry. So he drummed into me rhyme and rhythm and metre and blank verse and I quickly realised that if this was how you had to write poetry, I wasn’t poet material.

He was also the unfeeling brute who, when he found me streaming with tears over one of my grandmother’s Victorian children’s books about a child dying of starvation in the East End, called ‘Froggie’s Little Brother’,  said, “well, don’t read it”. (‘Froggie’s Little Brother’ is a hilarious classic for anyone who wants to study minor Victorian horror stories.) But I digress, as they say in Victorian prose!

My writing life didn’t actually begin until I was fourteen, and was obliged to enter a writing competition at school, part of the annual arts festival. I also went into for clay modelling and made a bust of my father, which looked so like Field Marshal Montgomery that I entered it as Monty. But obviously the judges didn’t think so, for Monty was unplaced.

My short story was a different matter. I had an idea, but was terrified people would laugh at me, so I made a bargain with God that if I wrote the story which was about a fictional incident in His Son’s childhood, He must guarantee that I win. God obviously agreed, and kept his side of the bargain, and success was very sweet.

My writing career then went into a period of latency, ‘ my wilderness years’ I suppose you could call them, and it wasn’t until I was 24 and a young captain at the War Office that my talents flourished again! I was part of a team of six lecturers sent out to talk to schools about the army, and we roamed far and wide across the British Isles with a driver who was also a film projectionist.

After each talk we had to write an account of what the head master was like, what the school was like, how receptive the audience and so on, as a guide for the next lecturer in a couple of years. I found my predecessor’s notes so scrappy as to be useless, so conscientiously wrote a full, honest and un- expurgated account of every school and their sometimes objectionable head-masters or bossy head mistresses for my successor.

Shortly before leaving the army to get married, one Friday afternoon as I left a school outside Gloucester, I found to my dismay my colonel from the War Office waiting by my car. I couldn’t get my uniform hat on because I’d had my hair done in a huge bouffant style in order to go to a hunt ball that night, so I was carrying it. I expected trouble: a, because I wasn’t wearing my hat and therefore was improperly dressed, and b, because he was there!

It turned out that he wanted my reports. I immediately went into collapse, and wondered why – I thought I was up to date – what was the problem that he’d come all this way from London to collect them. “Oh,” he said nonchalantly, “they go all round the office – they’re damn funny – the general always reads ‘em, worth a guinea a minute he says, and he wants some more!” I thankfully handed over another batch, completely mystified as to why my serious reports should be so entertaining. He didn’t even notice I wasn’t wearing my hat!

Shortly after this I embarked on a life of penury and drudgery, and discovered quite soon that I was going to have to make some money in order to feed the two children who had arrived so promptly. Realising that I’d better get organised before I was really destitute, I scanned the local South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s main English newspaper. The only things they didn’t have on the women’s pages were recipes, so I cheekily offered them a cookery column. I knew nothing about food, but I liked eating, and they didn’t ask for my credentials.

Writing a cookery column seemed the height of literary achievement to me. Six weeks later, the next literary peak I scaled was to become a temporary feature writer. I became a permanent one, and then eventually Woman’s Editor. But I had never learned to write, and apart from discovering that you had to start with an arresting first paragraph in order to grab your readers, I knew nothing about journalism or writing.

I just had to bluff, and from reading the good women’s pages in the English newspapers, I learned that there was a style of writing for feature pages which was different to writing on news pages. I found it quite hard to write a straight news story because my “voice” or writing style would break through the boring facts, so I always ended up being a columnist and features writer. But none of this taught me anything about writing. I had to work that out for myself.

The one thing I did learn about writing back then, was that it was no good calling on a “muse”. Newspapers aren’t interested in the dramas and vagaries of “muses”. They just want working journalists who can stick to a deadline and just do it. It was wonderful training. I had to write, rain or shine, in sickness and in health, through chronic fatigue syndrome and divorce, children’s chickenpox and school holidays. And so to this day, thanks to this training, I have never had “writers block”.  More’s the pity some might say!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

There was a piece of fresh salmon in the fridge left over from the previous night. It was too big for one, but not enough for two. So I made one of my favourite recipes, quick, simple, and good enough to serve to friends. This time it was just us.                                     Simply melt a generous knob of butter in a pan – I use a frying pan, and add to it a good cupful of cream, and half a cup of finely grated Parmesan cheese. Stir till the cheese is melted. Then just add the chopped up salmon pieces, lots of chopped parsley, salt and freshly ground black pepper, and serve on some pasta, with more Parmesan if wanted. I used tagliatelle .

Food for Thought

Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.                        By Don Miguel Ruiz. The First Agreement from his book ‘The Four Agreements’.

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September 27, 2012 · 10:16 pm

A Soldier’s Life is Terrible Hard!

Too tired after Tai Chi to discover what I think today, so here’s a story instead… a soldier’s life is terrible hard, said Alice – when Christopher Robin went down to the Palace! It didn’t seem that way to me when I joined the army at eighteen.

I’d left school, and was mooning around at home not knowing how to get myself to university. I didn’t think I was pretty enough to be a model, or clever enough to be a nurse, so uni seemed the only option; until the day my military father came home and told me he’d made an appointment for me with the local recruiting officer. To say I was flabbergasted would be only a partial description. I was also deeply depressed, but consoled myself with the thought that at least I’d be earning money so I could buy books and records and bury myself in them.

So I signed up, and went off to be tested to see if I was officer material. And there I had a pleasant surprise – though I was the youngest, everyone else was young and full of fun – life began to look up. So when I continued to drive my parents mad dreaming around the place waiting for the date to join up, and my father would utter with relish threats like: “they’ll wake you up when you join the army”, and: “you’re going to get the shock of your life when you get there”, I wasn’t too worried.

I got there on the wrong day, just as I’d got the dates wrong all my life, taking half term holidays when every-one else was at school, arriving to catch the plane as it landed the other end, taking a train to Chester instead of York, or Birmingham instead of Cardiff. Everyone had given up meeting me off trains, because it was so unlikely that I’d be on the right one.

So my unheralded arrival at the depot caused great consternation, and several anxious conferences I discovered later. It was decided to park me with the recruit company which was already half way through its training. The quartermaster resolutely refused to issue me with a uniform, because it would screw up her account books, but was prevailed upon to allow me a pair of shoes in order to do all the marching I was about to embark on.

Not knowing the procedure, when they took me to the quartermaster’s stores, I took fitting my shoes as seriously as though I was in Russell and Bromley buying some fabulously expensive gear. I pinched the toes, checked the heels, worried about the width, and walked up and down trying several different ones for size, while the quartermaster’s staff looked on in dumb disbelief, and allowed me to get away with it, since I was obviously away with the fairies! Later I discovered that it was just a question of saying your size and taking what you were given. Innocence was bliss…

I was then escorted to the barrack-room, with a corporal helping me to carry my stuff. As we neared the entrance, I heard the clatter of seventy pairs of shoes thundering along wooden floors, and can still remember my subconscious thought, “ Oh, they must have taken the carpets away for cleaning”…

Since the Quartermaster – a fearsome figure – had dug her toes in over my uniform, I had to trail around at the end of the squad in my red raincoat, the only thing I’d brought with me. Every time the Colonel – another fearsome figure – saw my red mac, it was worse than a red rag to a bull, because she then trounced the Adjutant for the incompetence of everyone down the chain of command who hadn’t issued me with uniform. Thus, unbeknown to me, I became famous or rather, infamous throughout the depot.

Meanwhile I solemnly got on with the job of being a recruit, with a lot of help from my fellows, who thought I was going to be a clerk or a cook like them. Since I was out of sequence with the other officer cadets, I was in with a room of diverse and fascinating girls, some escaping the slums, some escaping their parents, others escaping an unhappy marriage, or a cruel employer. There were also two girls from the Gorbals, the notorious Glasgow slums, whose speech was salted with curses and swear words – most of them new to my ears.

One night, after another exhausting day of “by the right, by the left”, right wheeling, left wheeling, right form, and lectures, with the same programme on offer the next day, I got tired of their strident voices and obscenities keeping us all awake while we tried to get our much needed sleep.  So I said very crisply in my pukka Queen’s English, down the length of the barrack room – “Good Bloody Night”. There followed a deafening silence and I went straight off to sleep.

At lunch-time the next day, a deputation from the barrack room came to me, and asked me very seriously not to be corrupted, and start using bad language. They gently told me I’d been brought up properly, and they didn’t want me to be influenced by people who didn’t know any better!I promised them I’d be a good girl, thinking of my father, and wondering if he would think I was getting that shock to the system that was going to wake me up!

Because I’d muddled up my dates, when I emerged as a fully fledged recruit, my fellow officer cadets were still some weeks behind me, so I was a spare wheel. They invented a temporary rank for me, and I was called a Senior Private. I had the job of marching the new recruits to the cookhouse, which was no sinecure, because you had to remember the right military words of command, shout them loud enough for a long column to hear, and get them timed for the right feet to come to a halt in sequence.

My counting was a shambles, so they stumbled instead of coming to a brisk halt, and the worst time was when we’d reached the cook house and I couldn’t remember the word for Halt! Finally, as they were in danger of piling up against the door, continuing to march with no word of command to halt them, I shouted “Stop!” in desperation, and I could hear them all muttering things like, “we didn’t get the right foot… she didn’t give us the right command… what’s wrong with her”… responsibility is a terrible thing, I would have told Alice.

By now I was in a new barrack room with all the tough old hands, and one morning in the first week, someone dropped their highly polished shoes for parade, and exclaimed: “Shit”. There was a heavy intake of breath around the room, and then silence. She turned to me, and said “I’m sorry”. “Why apologise to me?” I asked in amazement. “Because we all decided we wouldn’t swear when you came into this room,” she said!

My poor father would have been sadly disappointed – coddled and protected, when was I going to wake up! Well, that’s another story! But a soldier’s life was terrible fun!

Food for Threadbare Gourmets

Feeling chilled after getting back from Tai Chi on another cold night, I decided to spoil myself as I collapsed into bed. Hot chocolate flossied up with some orange essence drops, since I hadn’t got a fresh orange, some drops of vanilla essence, and a tot of kahlua. I slept like a top.

Food for Thought

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.               Virginia Woolf   1882 -1941  renowned  writer who pushed the boundaries of literature.

 

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