Never Broken Read Online Free Page A

Hamish, who is three years younger, and the twins, Josh and James, who were born five and a half years after me, it was a male-dominated household and I was very much a tomboy. Pride in those who served in the Military had been instilled in us as both my mum, Ann, and dad, Mac, had met in 1973 at RAF Leconfield, near Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where Dad was an aircraft technician and Mum was a dental nurse. Throughout my childhood I’d spend hours playing ‘Armies’ with the boys at the bottom of our garden at Bourne in Lincolnshire, before we later moved to a village in Cumbria. I’d chase my brothers and friends with plastic guns, rolling around in the mud. Holidays and after school were taken up with adventure games, which moreoften than not involved plastic guns. Mum and Dad bought me Barbie dolls but I wasn’t interested and instead loved my Knight Rider pedal car.
    Day-to-day, home life was very traditional but Mum loved the outdoors and weekends would be spent orienteering and walking in the countryside, although probably, with hindsight, my parents were desperately trying to tire out four boisterous kids! Dad had a way about him that now I’ve been in the Military I recognise. He never needed to shout at us and underneath he was a big softy and a fantastic father, but when he told you to do something you knew you had to do it. His was a quiet authority that didn’t need a raised voice to make you act on it. Every weekend he would say: ‘Right, go and tidy your room.’ We’d all go and do it and then we’d wait and he would come up and inspect our efforts. The basis of it was personal discipline and taking care of your belongings but ‘room inspection’ is fundamental to Basic Training in the Army, so even as a child I was completing the first stages of my very own training.
    Dad was also incredibly clever with his hands and he made us a go-kart he had fashioned from an old Silver Cross pram, powered by a two-stroke engine. We’d whiz around the local park and were the envy of the kids in our village. Then, one year, we had a flood in our home and the insurance company replaced all the downstairs floorboards and carpets. Dad used the wood to make the biggest treehouse you’ve ever seen, with all mod cons, including the old, ruined downstairs carpet, which he dried out. It was a good eight feet off the ground so I had to climb up to it from a long rope ladder and it was entirely carpeted.
    My parents never pushed me to conform or become moregirly, instead encouraging me to be myself, so when I insisted on joining the Boy Scouts at fourteen years old, with two other girls, they supported me completely. My brothers were joining and when I found out all the brilliant things the Scouts did, I said, ‘Well, I want to be a Scout, too.’ I didn’t see why girls couldn’t do something which was so much fun, so I was accepted, along with two other girls from my village, as the first female Scouts in our troop. We kayaked in the Ardèche in France and went rock climbing; I even got a badge for tug-of-war. Back then, joining the Scouts as a girl was very unusual but even as a little girl, I was very much one of the boys and so when I joined the male-dominated environment of the Army I felt totally at home.
    At sixteen I took a job working in Waterstones bookshop following my GCSEs. I wasn’t a nine-to-five sort of girl, though, and I yearned for a more exciting life, beyond the isolated community in Cumbria where my family lived. Desperate to spread my wings, a career in the Armed Forces appealed as a way of seeing the world and getting paid for it too. My parents were delighted and really supportive as they’d had great careers in the forces and thought I had exactly the right temperament and personality to do well. Crucially, Britain hadn’t been involved in any conflicts for years; Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t major crisis spots and most people had no idea where they were. So, at the age of