EX-TEFL TEACHERS DON'T MAKE GOOD SOLDIERS - PART 4

Eighteen months is a long time, even for an accomplished procrastinator. I suspect the inordinate length of time that elapses between expressing an interest in an Army career and actually getting to the Regular Commissions Board in Westbury is all part of the cunningly devised system, a conceit designed to evaluate whether procrastination’s evil step-sister, self-doubt, is going to rear her ugly biscuit and separate some wheat from the chaff. I must admit that, by the time I arrived at the forbidding, barbed-wire encircled compound in rural Wiltshire, the officerly wind in my sails had diminished to a gentle zephyr, having peaked at gale force eight during the trial run in Beaconsfield three months previously. After that brush with the spontaneously combusting Colonel, I had suffered a motivational relapse and was simply going through the motions, driven only by a determination to show that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, I wasn’t a capricious bottler who gave up on things as soon as the first altocumulus undulatus began to form in an otherwise cloudless sky.

It didn’t help that I’d recently become entangled with an untamable Andalucian gypsy girl who had unaccountably resolved to train her amorous flamethrower upon my unsuspecting person and, more than once, made me lose all sense of time and direction. The thought of being awoken at 2am not by her affectionate longings but by some mustachioed, criminally insane Sergeant Major eager to aggressively harass me into wading across a swollen river inside the next fifteen minutes filled me not with an overpowering urge to sing Jerusalem, but an unwholesome, morbid dread. But stand and fight I must, lest my reputation be forever sullied.

If Beaconsfield had revealed a snapshot of a state school triumph of hope over plausibility, Westbury wasn’t any more convincing. The Sergeant Major charged with administering us presumably came from one of the Scottish regiments, judging by the ill-fitting tam o’shanter that perched atop his balding pate. When he started talking I thought it judicious to listen, if only out of an antiquated proneness towards politeness, but the rest of the motley gaggle of state school delusionists exhibited a healthy distrust of authority, and continued chatting obliviously as if still attending morning lectures in the Student Union bar. Only when the Sa’rnt Major started braying and turning crimson did he receive the full attention of the gathered cross-section of redbrick intelligentsia, even then receiving resentful glares from several parties there present clearly unaccustomed to being told what to do.

The news that I was, at 25, the oldest candidate, and therefore the “Chairman of the Mess”, filled me with a pathetic pride mixed with a nagging anxiety. Whilst I would get to be in command during the last evening’s “mess dinner” (with the right to use a gavel and everything), a certain spotlight would be projected onto me that I wasn’t altogether sure I was going to relish. My suspicions were confirmed over the next three and a half days - I was singled out for relentless and severe scrutiny every step of the way, and under such duress, I have to admit I cracked. A couple of weeks after my soulless display, I received a pithy rejection letter full of simmering resentment signed personally in heavy ink by the Colonel in Beaconsfield. Looking back, it isn’t difficult to pinpoint the reasons for my botched misadventure.


PART FIVE TO FOLLOW SHORTLY…