Fraud and integrity

During the Pandemic, Major General Nick Welch was found guilty of fraud by mis-using the army education allowance. This is intended to be used to provide continuity of education in boarding school to the children or military personnel when they have to move regularly for work. He was sentenced to prison and court-martialled. Such failures of behaviour befitting an officer were exceptionally rare. There was to much to lose. You colleagues are also your friends in the army. It is a way of life and it was just not the way things were done. To me, the idea of an officer being imprisoned is almost unthinkable. I can only think they would become an outcast. Perhaps the general genuinely made a mistake about the rules, or perhaps he thought they could be bent at his level, but ignorance in the army, as elsewhere is no excuse, particularly at a high level and whatever the case there is no question he was made an example of.

My father claimed this educational subsidy. I boarded at Royal Russel school in Croydon, near London from the age of 10 when my parents lived in Germany.  I moved schools due to bullying and had to board at a school when my parents were living walking distance away, in Andover.  I saw them at the weekends. I didn't mind the school.  I liked the day girls. The mistresses were strict and although I had a lot of catching up to do, and thus had to drop German, the work was fine.  I practiced piano.  To help me catch up, the RE teacher, who was also the headmistress took me on a private trip to a mosque I think somewhere in London.  She was nice to me, said red was my colour.  She also taught English and would crane her rather scrawny neck forward over the pulpit-like desk the teachers used and dictate adverbial clauses of manner and other mysteries to us, which I never understood.  We even had a real Mam'selle, like in books, from France. She was very French with a mysterious scar that ran down one cheek and mostly hidden by Mam'selle's dark bob.    

Although as fifteen years olds we still had to go down on our knees in the gym every day to pray in assembly, while the adults stood, on summer days serving tables were brought out on to the lawn and we had our lunch sitting on the grass.  It was a lovely tradition.  But I was bullied again at this school, ironically by the children of soldiers who had got in to board through the same allowance. I became a day pupil for the last term or two until I finished, but my father then had to pay the full fees.