Читать книгу Wherever You Are: The Military Wives: Our true stories of heartbreak, hope and love - The Wives Military - Страница 11

Emma Hanlon-Penny

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 looked perfectly coordinated, despite one of them coming from Kent and the others from Devon. James and Joseph were our pageboys: my sister carried Joseph down the aisle. An uncle polished his white Skoda and decked it with ribbon, and we had a buffet reception, and then a lovely meal and stay at a hotel, all generously given by my family.

It was like a wedding that had been years in the planning, and we were thrilled. The best man even managed to get a £2.50 flight from Belfast, too! We didn’t have time for pre-wedding nerves, and it was, thanks to all our family, the cheapest wedding ever. And it was a perfect day.

Then, after all the rush, Kenny was stood down on the day he was due to fly out. We’d already said goodbye and he’d gone; then he came back again. I was worried it would be the same on/off scenario we’d had with his first tour to Afghanistan, but this time he stayed at home.

When Lily was born 16 months after Joseph we were still living in the tiny flat in Exeter, all of us sleeping in one room. Joseph had serious allergies and eczema from only nine months old and I was constantly up in the night changing his bandages because he was swollen and infected. It was hard, so it was a great relief to move to married quarters in Chivenor when Lily was five months old. It meant leaving my family and friends, but the house felt like a palace in terms of size.

When Kenny was drafted to Scotland I got permission to stay here, because James needed extra help in school and it can take ages to get that established in a new place. It was tough, because it was over a ten-hour-long trip for Kenny, and if he came home for the weekend he’d be here for 24 hours and then he’d have to go back.

I have made great friends here, but it took a little while. My neighbour was my window to the other wives. I didn’t have much time to socialise because Joseph needed so much extra time: he has multiple allergies and I have to be very careful with his diet. It has become easier as he’s got older, because he can do a lot of his creams himself, and he knows the consequences of eating the wrong things. When he was five he had chicken pox, and the spots became badly infected and he had to be put on a drip in hospital. Luckily Kenny was not overseas, but he had to be brought back from his drafting to look after the other two while I stayed with Joseph.

While we were at the hospital with Joseph, who was very ill and not conscious, a padre turned up, wearing a dog collar. I freaked when I first saw him, but he’d heard that we needed support and he’d come to see if there was anything he could do. I’m not religious, but he asked if we would like to pray and I thought: What have I got to lose? The next day Joseph opened his eyes and started to get better.

Kenny went back to Afghanistan in 2010, and that was a horrific tour. There were so many casualties to the unit: it lost 14 men. This time there was a long build-up to him going, and because he had been in Scotland, back to Chivenor and then on to Taunton, all in around two years, we had had very little time together. Lots of the wives I knew at Chivenor had moved on, which is one of the problems all military wives have. I didn’t know anyone well enough to just pop round and say, ‘I’m having a rubbish day.’

I struggled with pre-deployment. It’s really hard – almost as hard as when they are actually out there. They’re away a lot for training, and then they are back but they’re not with us at all. They detach from the family; they become almost robotic. They become what they are: marines, soldiers, airmen, whatever their job is. The job becomes them, and we’re somewhere on the sidelines. They have to get into that frame of mind but it creates huge tensions. It’s as if you are separated for a whole year, although for the first six months they are technically here, and at least you know they are safe. You understand what the training is doing and you support it. But it isn’t easy.

The pre-op was bad. Sometimes, he’d arrive here late Friday and have to leave by Sunday lunchtime. The children didn’t feel they had much time with him, and neither did I. In our marriage we have spent so much time apart, but it has made us stronger: when we are together we just want to sit together on the sofa cuddling.

There were only two Royal Marines who deployed from this estate on that tour, including Kenny, which made it hard, as all the welfare was centred on Taunton. I made the effort to take the children there for the social things like barbecues and families’ days that were organised, because it helped them to be with other children who had their fathers away.

Kenny was based at Kajaki, a village in the south famous for the Kajaki dam, which powers hydroelectricity for a lot of the country. It used to be a very dangerous area, but by the time he went there it was safer; plus the British were pulling out and handing over to the US Marines. This time the kids were old enough to understand more about the war, and therefore to be worried. But knowing that Kenny was going to be near the lake made by the dam helped me reassure them. We bought him a fishing rod before he went and we looked at pictures of the lake on the Internet, finding out about edible fish. I focused on that for them, building up a picture of Dad fishing in the lake rather than Dad on patrol with a gun, or Dad dealing with people who had been hurt.

There was a bad moment when he phoned to say he was in hospital at Camp Bastion, but thankfully he just had vomiting and diarrhoea. We look back and giggle about it, but the moment you get that phone call, everything stops.

James was nine when Kenny was in Afghanistan the last time, just at the age where he’d become obsessed with his father’s job. It’s a boy thing, I suppose. He bombards me with questions. He’s very aware of what’s happening. I didn’t tell the children that Kenny was going out with front-line patrols, but it’s very hard to protect them from the media all the time.

R & R is always tricky. The way I deal with it is to make sure we go away. For Kenny’s last R & R I booked us all into a beautiful hotel near Oxford. We picked him up at Brize and drove straight there. I wanted the kids to have the experience of seeing him come through the double doors at Brize. I warned the staff at the hotel that we’d be arriving quite late and he’d be in uniform: not everyone likes to see men in uniform, and I didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable. But they were great about it.

At breakfast the next morning he was so jumpy. They had big metal lids over the hot food, and every time one banged he jumped. Again, we laugh about it now, but at the time I was reassuring him.

When we went for a walk he was scanning the treeline, and he’d suddenly say: ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a bird.’ Then he’d turn and look behind us.

It made me on edge. I felt as though I was walking down a dark alley with someone behind me. There we were, in this beautiful place, but he wasn’t there. I was glad to have him physically home, but I didn’t really have him at all: he was still out there.

I’m pleased he didn’t switch off, because he had to go back and it was better that he stayed in the zone, but it’s not easy living with it.

During R & R there just isn’t time to cram in seeing all the people who want to see him. I just want to switch the phone off and keep him to myself, but you do have to think about how others feel.

Coming home is also a tricky time. You know it should feel great, but there’s a big readjustment to make. It drives you crackers. When they are away you have to be very independent. I’m very self-sufficient, I can do DIY, I know more about how cars work than Kenny does. You can guarantee that as soon as he’s away, something’ll go wrong: the washing machine, the dishwasher, the car – all military wives agree it’s sod’s law. Then they are back and you have to learn to share again.

To him, when he gets back, everything seems so cluttered, with the kids’ stuff everywhere; when they are away they live with a minimum number of possessions. Life with children is chaotic, completely the opposite of an ordered military life, and that takes him a while to get used to.

Also, while he was away I’d shielded him from news about his mum, who had terminal cancer. She told me things she didn’t want Kenny to know while he was out there, and I phoned her regularly to support her. Not long after he got back he had to face the fact that the doctors were giving her only three months to live, although she survived six months after his return. It was terrible for him to come back from a tour and then face that.