Unconquerable: The Invictus Spirit. Boris Starling

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      In case of fire, sailors were supposed to wear a rebreathing system called Chemox. Speed in getting the equipment on was vital, so this was one of the crucial drills they practised. The first four men to the zone were to start putting on firefighter uniforms, the next four there were to help them. Stephan was one of the second four, so he began helping his friend, Joe.

      Chemox used canisters full of chemicals. Stephan slotted the canister into the apparatus. There was a flash and a bang, and suddenly the canister was alight and was spewing toxic fumes and black smoke and flames into Joe’s mouth and down into his lungs. He was screaming and Stephan and his colleagues were tearing the gear off him as fast as they could. But the apparatus was hard to undo, and in their desperation they got in each other’s way. Even so it only took a few seconds, but a few seconds is a long, long time when a man is yelling for his life.

      ‘It was screaming like I never heard before, it was awful.’

      Joe was put on a helicopter and medevaced to hospital. Amazingly, given how horrific the incident had been, he recovered.

      Stephan was not so lucky.

      The vast shopping centre of Westfield Stratford City is almost empty at 9.30 in the morning. Most of its habitual clientele are either at work or still asleep. For Maurillia Simpson, 9.30 is the end of her day rather than the beginning. She works in the control room which ensures the security not just of the mall but also of the Olympic Park next door, and this week she’s on night shifts.

      ‘Simi’ – everyone calls her Simi – was born and brought up in San Fernando, Trinidad’s largest city, but for as long as she can remember she wanted to be in the British Army. There was no specific reason for this, no father in the services or anything like that – no father around at all for that matter, since Simi was brought up by her mum, a pre-school teacher, and her seamstress grandmother.

      In 1985, the Queen came to San Fernando on an official visit. Simi was 10 years old at the time and her school was one of those chosen to line the route. Along came the Queen, smiling and waving the royal wave.

      ‘I was convinced she was waving at me!’ Simi says. ‘Absolutely convinced. So I shouted, “I’m going to live where you live one day!”, and the next thing I remember is this bang on the back of my neck from my teacher, trying to get me to shut up!’

      Simi left home at 16 and went to Cascade, a suburb of Port-of-Spain, where she worked menial jobs and lodged with a family who became more or less her surrogate parents. She passed the exams for the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force, but never got the call to begin training. But she was undaunted: those twin dreams of being in the British Army and living where the Queen lived still burned fiercely in her.

      She landed at Heathrow on a freezing February day in 1999. ‘This shows you how green I was, since I was dressed in shorts, T-shirt and shades. I had no idea where England was. I thought it was another part of the Caribbean, a quick island hop away, just like home. Then I looked out of the window of the plane and there were all these people in thick coats and you could see their breath in the cold air. I refused to get off the plane! “This is not England,” I said. “Yes it is,” the crew said. I wanted just to stay in my seat till the plane turned round and went back to Trini again. But of course I couldn’t do that. Eventually the crew gave me about six spare blankets and I wrapped them all around me and shuffled into the terminal. I was staying with my auntie in Southall, and when I got there the first thing I said was, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

      ‘“Tell you what?”

      ‘“Tell me that this place is so darn cold.”

      ‘“I thought you knew!” she said. “It’s not exactly a secret.”’

      The very next day Simi went to join the British Army, swaddled in as many layers as she could find in her aunt’s house. The nearest recruiting centre was miles away in Edgware, Barnet, but she found it, and by the time she returned to Southall that evening she had signed up to be a driver and communications specialist for the Royal Logistics Corps – contingent on passing basic training, of course.

      She was 24 years old and this was her life’s dream. That evening, Simi was the happiest person in London.

      It wouldn’t always be as easy, of course. ‘The culture of the Army was very hard,’ says Simi. ‘There are times when you have to defend who you are and where you’re from. When I joined I was the only black female in my regiment and I was older than the other NCOs [non-commissioned officers]. They couldn’t understand what I was doing there or why I wanted to be there.’

      Perhaps paradoxically, things got better in combat zones, where there’s always a certain purity to life: there are only two types of people out there, the ones trying to kill you and the ones trying to keep you alive. Simi did three tours of Iraq with 2/8 Engineer Regiment, including the invasion in 2003 and the final troop withdrawal in 2009. She ‘felt a real purpose’ out there, particularly when it came to the humanitarian side of aid work and infrastructure reconstruction – water, electricity, schools, bridges. She was also an object of curiosity for many Iraqis, who had never seen a black woman before and ‘always wanted to touch my hair and my skin’.

      And she had her fair share of near-misses too. One night she led a 12-vehicle resupply convoy to the Black Watch regiment near Amarah, south-eastern Iraq: ‘Black Watch were undercover, so you get to a certain distance and then they call you in on the radio. I saw a soldier come out. He must have been a sergeant major or a staff sergeant. He waved his hands, signalling us, so my commanding officer told me to verge off into the desert. After we’d gone a little way they came on the radio and told us to stop immediately and don’t move. He hadn’t been signalling for us to go that way – he was trying to tell us it was a literal minefield! My commanding officer said, “Private Simpson, put the tyres of the truck exactly where I tell you, just like you learned in training.” At that point I thought: “Why did I have that dream when I was seven years old?”’

      But that was small beer compared to the moment in Basra on Simi’s second tour in 2007, when she saw two mortar shells flying towards her. She just about had time to shout ‘Incoming!’ before the mortars hit the wall next to her, bringing it down on top of her.

      ‘I didn’t know if I was dead or alive. I started to sing an old gospel song, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”, the one my surrogate mum used to sing to me in Cascade. I was thinking of her, I was trying to say goodbye.’

      Buried under the rubble, her songbird voice cracking through effort and fear, Simi forced the words out.

      His eye was indeed on the sparrow, because even as she sang, Simi could hear voices, colleagues calling her name: ‘“Simi,” they were shouting, “we’re not going to leave you, we’re going to dig you out.”’

      Having survived the worst that Iraq could throw at her, Simi figured – perhaps understandably – that her next deployment to Germany would be easier. She was sent there in 2010 before a tour to Afghanistan and threw herself into training: she was always efficient, always on time, never late.

      Just for one day, she should have been late.

      Just once wouldn’t have harmed. Just once might have saved her. She was coming back to base on her bicycle one night, bang on time as usual. Even a few seconds late would have changed everything.

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