Her horses had won three Cheltenham Gold Cups and two Grand Nationals, and she was rightly recognized as the "first lady of British racing."

She was also a highly opinionated antifeminist, a workaholic and no sufferer of fools or knaves. If she had been Prime Minister she would have probably brought back both hanging and the birch, and she was not averse to saying so loudly, and at length, whenever she had the opportunity. Her politics made Genghis Khan seem like an indecisive liberal, but everybody loved her nevertheless. She was a "character."

Everyone, that is, except her ex-husbands and her children.

For about the twentieth time that morning, I asked myself why I had come here. There had to be somewhere else I could go. But I knew there wasn't.

My only friends were in the army, mostly in my regiment, and they were still out in Afghanistan for another five weeks. And anyway, I wasn't ready to see them. Not yet. They would remind me too much of what I was no longer-and I wouldn't be able to stand their pity.

I suppose I could have booked myself into an army officers' mess. No doubt, I would have been made welcome at Wellington Barracks, the Grenadiers' home base in London. But what would I have done there?

What could I do anywhere?

Once again I thought it might have been better if the IED explosion, or the pneumonia, had completed the task: Union Jack- draped coffin, firing of volleys in salute, and I'd be six feet under by now and be done with it all. Instead, I was outside my mother's back door, struggling with a damned artificial foot to get down low enough to find the key that she habitually left under a stone in the flower bed.

And for what?

To get into a house I hated, to stay with a parent I despised. To say nothing of my stepfather, to whom I had hardly spoken a civil word since I had walked out of here, aged seventeen.