Cardboard Offices and the Cadets

Long before the tent and the burglaries there had been the early signs of how my mind worked. In primary school I got caught sniffing Tipp-Ex — not even the thinners, just the ordinary correction fluid every classroom kept in a pot. It sounds almost innocent written down, a small thing, but it was the first visible sign of something that would keep looking for ways to alter the inside of my head. I was shy, blonde hair, blue eyes, and still the girls paid attention. I would not French-kiss them as often as they wanted. I never tried in lessons unless it was maths, art or geography. While other boys played with wood and hammers I built offices out of cardboard and started clubs and associations complete with membership cards. Weird kid. Already trying to impose structure on a world that kept refusing to give me any. The membership cards were important. They were proof that something belonged to a system I had made.

The same instinct showed up later in the cadets — Hendon Sea Cadets, then Parachute Regiment cadets, then RAF. These were not games or hobbies. They were survival strategy. Structure sought out by a child who had none at home. Discipline chosen because it was better than chaos. Training that taught me how to operate, how to endure, how to function inside systems while remaining fundamentally outside their protection. The prodigy mind that had done chemistry at five and Morse at six was still looking for systems it could understand and operate inside. The cadets gave me uniforms and rules and a temporary sense that someone was counting on me to turn up. That was more than most of the houses had offered.

A Brigadier of the Territorial Army came to the care home last year just to meet me and shake my hand. He did not have to. He wanted to. That visit sits in the same line as the cardboard offices and the cadet uniforms. Something in me has always tried to build order even when the world around me was pure disorder. The Brigadier’s handshake was recognition of that thread running through the years.