I remember when I was about seven years old the two of us walked up to Harrowby Crag in the middle of a snowdrift. I was quite scared because it was coming on thick but he insisted we were going to build a snowman. He always walked so fast I found it hard to keep up and the snow was so thick that I soon lost sight of him. I stopped to get my bearings and as I looked around me everything seemed wrong. When people write about snow in books it’s always a magical thing, soft gentle flakes, a world turned white, but I didn’t feel magical as I stood there that day. Instead I felt like I’d been transported to another planet, a cold, hostile world. I wanted to run, to get back to the house, light the stove and get warm, but back then I did whatever he told me to do and he had told me we were going to build a snowman so I started walking in the direction he had gone. In the end the snow got too thick to see and we had to turn round and go home. The next day we saw that some of the sheep in the next field had perished in the blizzard. I remember Sarge being sad that morning, said that he’d just wanted me to have fun and ended up nearly freezing us both to death. I told him that it was okay, that I liked the warm and he liked the cold, and then he smiled and said, ‘That’s right, pet.’

It’s strange but I’d forgotten all about that night until now. Funny what you remember when you’re trying to forget.

As I write this I can see the photo of the dead mother in the desert poking out of the top of his book. A few days ago I would have said it was her who made sure I didn’t come to harm in the blizzard that night, that she was protecting me from above. Now I know the truth, I know it couldn’t possibly have been her, but I still believe there was something watching over us that night, some all-seeing eye. He would go mad at me for saying this but I like to think it was God. That’s right. God. The thing that I’m not meant to believe in, that’s the root of all evil, all suffering and war. ‘A bloody fairy tale with no hope of a happy ending’ – that’s how he used to describe religion. But just cos he didn’t believe in God it doesn’t mean he or she or it or whatever doesn’t exist, does it?

I think back to the day the vicar came to buy the eggs, the fear in the eyes of the man I once called Sarge. He made it seem like the vicar was a bad man when really it was the other way round. He feared the vicar because that quiet man represented everything he hated: truth, stability, God. I saw those things in the vicar that day and it didn’t scare me because those were the things I craved more than anything, to have proper guidance, not as an elite soldier but as a girl, a normal girl.