Soldier's Daughters Read Online Free

tough it all was, stuff the sleep deprivation, and bollocks to the hard work, it would all be worth it for that moment.
    ‘What you doing for the Christmas leave?’ asked Michelle. ‘Going to your gran’s as usual?’
    Sam nodded. ‘Now I’ve left school and I’m grown up, Dad isn’t entitled to a quarter any more so he lives in the mess. I can’t really go and stay with him there, can I? Anyway, I think he’s going skiing with some friends.’
    ‘Can’t you go too?’
    ‘I think I’d rather be with Gran and Grandpa. It’ll be more normal. And after a term at Sandhurst I could do with a dose of normal.’
    Not, thought Sam, that holidays had ever been really normal, not since she could remember. When they’d lived in Germany, she’d been palmed off on other families on the patch. It had been OK but she’d always been conscious that she was a guest in someone else’s house so it had been difficult to really relax, not like you could in your own place with your own toys and belongings. Then they’d moved back to England and shortly after that she’d been sent to boarding school. Sometimes she went to stay with her maternal grandparents but sometimes her father took leave and she’d go and stay with him in his quarter for a week or so. But, of course, with him being posted on a regular basis, on several occasions ‘home’ wasn’t the same ‘home’ as it had been on the previous visit, so she’d arrive at a strange house, on a strange patch with strange neighbours and unknown children in the play-park. Her belongings might have been unpacked into this new bedroom but it never felt like her room; her room was the one she shared with Michelle at boarding school and then later the one at her public school. That was the constant that didn’t change in her life, that was home. The place she stayed with her father was just a house.
    Right now, the calm normality of her grandparents’ cottage held far more appeal than a skiing holiday with her father. It might be in a village in the back of beyond, where the only social life took place in the local pub and where the average age of the customers had to be topping fifty, but the thought of having two weeks during which she could eat, sleep and relax and not be shouted at seemed heaven on earth. Besides, her grandparents would smother her in love and cuddles – and she could do with a dose of that too.
    From the first day of her second term, Sam knew there was a distinct but subtle change in her intake’s training. For a start, they were no longer the junior term. The new intake’s cadets were the ones who were the focus of the opprobrium of all the directing staff. Sam’s intake was treated a smidge more like grown-ups. There were slightly fewer pointless changes of uniform every day, they had more time to themselves, there were fewer show parades, fewer inspections. And they could only feel sorry for the new cadets who were being put through what they had survived. Sorry, but also a little smug. After all, they had survived it… well, they had but some hadn’t.
    At the end of their first term there had been casualties: the cadets who had been told they were never going to make the grade; not committed enough; not clever enough; not fit enough… And the outstanding cadets were already being promoted. OK, the promotions were to meaningless unpaid cadet ranks but these promotions did bestow kudos because it meant the DS had recognised and acknowledged who was ahead of their peers. Sam was amongst the chosen ones and was now an officer cadet lance corporal along with two other colleagues. At the other end of the scale, Michelle was on a warning.
    ‘What’s that all about?’ asked Sam when Michelle had exited her company commander’s interview ashen and close to tears.
    ‘He said I don’t pay enough attention to detail.’
    ‘Oh, hon.’ Sam gave her a hug.
    ‘And he said I question authority.’
    ‘Well…’
    ‘But some of the stuff we have to