Wherever You Are: The Military Wives: Our true stories of heartbreak, hope and love. The Wives Military

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СКАЧАТЬ ahead, because you don’t know what life will be like in a year’s time. I protected them by switching the TV news off. I didn’t lie to them, but I just fed them the information I felt they could cope with.

      We’ve learnt how to handle R & R, but it’s not always easy. The important thing is to get it late in the tour – get the worst of the tour over. Then we get away and pack things in. We live for the moment while he’s here, scooping the kids up and going to somewhere like Alton Towers. We both think that we’d be stupid not to enjoy it. But George also knows he can talk army to me, to get it out of his system. We don’t do it in front of the kids, but when we are together he can go over it all; I have my own take on it, and can join in. We constantly chat about what is going on out there.

      When he goes back after R & R there’s a very low point. Even though he only had five weeks left to do last time, those weeks seemed to go very slowly. At the back of your mind you know that bad things can happen right up to the last day.

      What saved me during the last tour was the choir.

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. СКАЧАТЬ