‘Don’t worry. Everyone’s very relaxed round here. No formality.’

‘Perhaps . . .’

Still he looked anxious, so I said, ‘Tell you what. I’ll run you into town and we can buy you some new stuff at Marks and Sparks.’ I saw him hesitate, and explained, ‘That’s a chain store. Good cheap clothes. Have you got money?’

He produced his wallet, opened it and fished out some notes. ‘This is enough?’

He had two fivers and two ten-dollar notes.

‘Is that all you’ve got?’

He nodded.

Jesus! I thought.

‘Zheordie, you must understand. In the army, now, we do not get paid. Five months, no marney.’

I stared at him. ‘In that case, we’ll get you something.’

‘No, please. You should not pay.’

‘Not me – the system. There’s a fund for this sort of thing. I can square it away.’

I dived into my room in the sergeants’ mess to pick up a chequebook. Thus equipped, we drove into town and got Sasha kitted out with a lightweight, dark-blue blazer, grey slacks, a pair of black moccasins, a couple of shirts and a tie. The bill came to nearly £200, but I knew I could recover the money from Bill Tadd, the quartermaster.

By 5.30 we were back in camp, and I realised that to Sasha it was already 8.30 – so I suggested that he had a shower and got his head down for an hour before I came back and collected him for supper.

The meal went fine. There were one or two young ruperts about, but we two sat in a corner of the dining-room and no one bothered us. Sasha’s new gear did him proud. He couldn’t help preening himself a bit, shooting the cuffs of his pale-blue shirt and brushing invisible bits of fluff off the sleeves of his blazer.

As we chatted it became apparent that he’d had quite a lot of fighting experience – more than I had. One of the pictures on the wall was of the Jebel Akhdar in Oman, where the Regiment had won a famous victory in the fifties, and it set him reminiscing about Afghanistan, where he’d been posted for a year in hellish conditions. The mountains, he said, looked very similar – but in contrast with the heat of the Gulf, the winter cold in Afghanistan had been horrendous.

Towards the end of the meal, though, our conversation became rather stilted. Several times Sasha didn’t understand something I’d said, and he seemed to be preoccupied with his behaviour, eating his cheese carefully and often glancing round. So I proposed we go out for a couple of beers and his mood lightened again.