The numbing shock that had initially suppressed any feeling of hurt had soon been replaced by a creeping agony in which every part of me seemed to be on fire. It was just as well that I remembered only a smattering of the full casualty-evacuation procedure. Heavy doses of morphine did more than inhibit the pain receptors in the brain-they slowed its very activity down to bare essentials, such as maintaining breathing and the pumping of the heart.
The human body, however, is a wondrous creation and has an amazing ability to mend itself. My ears recovered, the lacerations healed, and my white blood cells slowly won the war against my chest infection, with a little help and reinforcement from some high-powered intravenous antibiotics.
If only the body could grow a new foot.
The mental injuries, however, were proving less easy to spot and far more difficult to repair.
"Where in Hammersmith do you want?" Vicki asked, bringing me back to reality from my daydreaming.
"Anywhere will do," I said.
"But do you live in Hammersmith?"
"No," I said.
"So where do you live?"
Now that was a good question. I suppose that I was technically, and manifestly, homeless.
For the past fifteen years I had lived in army accommodations of one form or another: barracks, Sandhurst, officers' messes, tents and bivouacs, even in the backs of trucks or the cramped insides of Warrior armored cars. I had slept in, under and on top of Land Rovers, and more often than I cared to remember, I had slept where I sat or lay on the ground, half an ear open for the call of a sentry or the sound of an approaching enemy.
However, the army had now sent me "home" for six months.
The major from the Ministry of Defense, the Wounded Personnel Liaison Officer, had been fair but firm during his recent visit. "Six months leave on full pay," he'd said."To recover. To sort yourself out. Then we'll see."
"I don't need six months," I'd insisted. "I'll be ready to go back in half that time."
" ' Back'?" he'd asked.
"To my regiment."
"We'll see," he had repeated.
"What do you mean 'We'll see'?" I had demanded.
"I'm not sure that going back to your regiment will be possible," he'd said.
"Where, then?" I'd asked, but I'd read the answer in his face before he said it.
"You might be more suited to a civilian job. You wouldn't be passed fit for combat. Not without a foot."
The major and I had been sitting in the reception area of the Douglas Bader Rehabilitation Center in the Queen Mary's Hospital in Roehampton, London.
Part of Headley Court, the military's own state-of-the-art rehab center in Surrey, had been temporarily closed for refurbishment, and the remaining wards had been overwhelmed by the numbers of wounded with missing limbs. Hence I had been sent to Queen Mary's and the National Health Service.
It was testament to the remarkable abilities of the military Incident Response Teams, and to their amazingly well-equipped casevac helicopters, that so many soldiers with battlefield injuries which would in the past have invariably proved fatal were now routinely dealt with and survived. Double and even triple traumatic amputees often lived, when only recently they would have surely bled to death before medical help could arrive.
But not for the first time I'd wondered if it would have been better if I had died. Losing a foot had sometimes seemed to me a worse outcome than losing my life. But I had looked up at the painting on the wall of Douglas Bader, the Second World War pilot, after whom the rehabilitation center was named, and it had given me strength.
"Douglas Bader was passed fit for combat," I'd said.
The major had looked up at me. "Eh?"
"Douglas Bader was passed fit to fight, and he'd lost both his feet."
"Things were different then," the major from the MOD had replied somewhat flippantly.
Were they? I wondered.
Bader had been declared fit and had taken to the air in his Spitfire to fight the enemy simply due to his own perseverance. True, the country had been in desperate need of pilots, but he could have easily sat out the war in relative safety if he had wanted to. It had been the weight of his personal determination that had eventually overcome the official reluctance to allow him to fly.
I would take my lead from him.
We'll see, indeed.
I'd show them.
"Will the tube station do?" Vicki said.
"Sorry?" I said.
"The tube station," she repeated. "Is that OK?"
"Fine," I said. "Anywhere."
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Home, I suppose," I said.
"And where is home?"
"My mother lives in Lambourn," I said.
"Where's that?" she asked.
"Near Newbury, in Berkshire."
"Is that where you're going now?"
Was it? I didn't particularly want to. But where else? I could hardly sleep on the streets of London. Others did, but had I gone down that far?
"Probably," I said. "I'll get the train."
My mind was working on automatic pilot as I negotiated the escalator up from the Underground into Paddington mainline railway station. Only near the top did I realize that I couldn't remember when I had last used an escalator. Stairs had always been my choice, and they had to be taken at a run, never at a walk. And yet here I was, gliding serenely up without moving a muscle.
Fitness had always been a major obsession in a life that was full of obsessions.
Even as a teenager I had been mad about being fit. I had run every morning on the hills above Lambourn, trying to beat the horses as they chased me along the lush grass, training gallops.
Army life, especially that of the infantry officer at war, was a strange mix of lengthy, boring interludes punctuated by brief but intensely high-adrenaline episodes where the separation between living and dying could be rice-paper thin. With the episode over, if one was still alive and intact, the boredom would recommence until the next "contact" broke the spell once more.
I had always used the boring times to work on my fitness, constantly trying to break my own record for the number of sit-ups, or push-ups, or pull-ups, or anything-else-ups I could think of, all within a five-minute period. What the Taliban had thought of their enemy chinning it up and down in full body armor, plus rifle and helmet, on an improvised bar welded across the back of a Snatch Land Rover is anyone's guess, but I had been shot at twice while trying to break the battalion record, once when I was on track to succeed. The Taliban obviously had no sense of sport, or of timing.
But now look at me: taking the escalator, and placing my bag down on the moving stairway while doing so. Months of sedentary hospital life had left my muscles weak, flabby and lacking any sort of condition. I clearly had much to do before I had any hope of convincing the major from the MOD that I could be "combatready" once more.
I stood at the bottom of the steep driveway to my mother's home and experienced the same reluctance to go up that I had so often felt in the past.
I had taken a taxi from Newbury station to Lambourn, purposely asking the driver to drop me some way along the road from my mother's gate so that I could walk the last hundred yards.
It was force of habit, I suppose. I felt happier approaching anywhere on foot. It must have had something to do with being in the infantry. On foot, I could hear the sounds that vehicle engines would drown out, and smell the scents that exhaust fumes would smother. And I could get a proper feel of the lay of the land, essential to anticipate an ambush.
I shook my head and smiled at my folly.
There was unlikely to be a Taliban ambush in a Berkshire village, but I could recall the words of my platoon color sergeant at Sandhurst: "You can never be too careful," he would say. "Never assume anything; always check."