‘This is my way forward,’ Ben Ford told his mother as he signed up for army
It was their youth that shocked: boy soldiers, barely adults at just 18, yet now returning from the war in Afghanistan in flag-draped coffins. The recent toll – 16 in less than three weeks, almost one-third of them 18-year-olds – this week unleashed an unprecedented emotional response at the loss of such young lives in a conflict that began when they were still children.
But today one mother still stands by her decision to allow her “baby” to go to war, even though he would never come back. “Yes, they do look like boys,” said Jane Ford, fingering his cap, belt and the bullet casing saved from the gun salute at her own son’s funeral. “But ask any of the guys who are 18 and who are out there now. They class themselves as men. Certainly, Ben did.”
Such sentiment about age detracts from the true heroics of sons like hers, Private Ben Ford, the first of the six 18-year-olds this conflict has claimed.
He fought, and died, an equal. So she hates the way his life is now condensed into that bald statistic – “the first 18-year-old to die” and, as he was until this month, “the youngest”.
“It is as if his life is now defined by how and when he died, rather than the way he lived it,” she said.
“And Ben being so young, it has a sting, too. Others judge you. People have said to me, ‘Fancy letting him go’. Fingers point, like you’re a bad mum for letting him go. I didn’t let him go. I let him do what he really wanted to do.
“So, you do feel stigmatised. And the other mothers of 18-year-olds who have died, they may feel the same. But if theirs were anything like my lad, you couldn’t have stopped them”.
Trooper Joshua Hammond (died July 1), Private Robert Laws (died July 4), and Riflemen William Aldridge, James Backhouse and Joseph Murphy (died July 10), have all made that final journey along Wootton Bassett’s high street this month, drawing more teenagers than ever to the streets of this Wiltshire town to pay tribute to their schoolboy heroes during their repatriations.
Campaigner
But with the youthfulness of the mourners comes a jolting realisation. These young men were just 10 years old when the attack on New York’s Twin Towers precipitated the chain of events that has now torn apart so many homes in villages, towns and cities across the world. Jane Ford finds it chilling. “You can’t quite believe that what happened in New York, what happened in London with 7/7, would come here, right into our home in Chesterfield.”
Ben was just 12 and a pupil at Newbold Green comprehensive when 9/11 happened. “He was sat there,” she said, gesturing toward a leather chair in the sitting room of their semi in Chesterfield’s Newbold area. “He was fascinated with the plane flying into the building.”
His sister Emma, then 10, was screaming at him to switch channels but he refused. “He was asking me what terrorists do. I said ‘Blow things up, like you’ve just seen’. He went very quiet, and that night, unusually, he didn’t want to go out and play with his mates,” she said.
Ben was a “Woofer”. At 16 he joined the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters. But he died a Mercian, his beloved regiment, to his disgust, having been amalgamated two days before his death, caused when his Wimik Land Rover was blown up in Lashkar Gah, Helmand, on September 5 2007.
“Civvie Street wasn’t for Ben,” said Jane, a former credit controller at a paint company. She and his father, Trevor, a maintenance team leader with Sheffield city council, didn’t know which to fear most — if he joined up, or if he didn’t.
Pasted into his remembrance book is a photograph of him, aged 18 months, peeking out of a sandbag wall at a military museum in Norfolk. The caption reads: “The British Army’s youngest recruit”. He screamed when they left. “We visited three times. He loved that place,” said Jane.
The path that led Ben to the army is all too familiar. The pits had gone, and industries moved away from this Derbyshire market town. Chesterfield’s terraced rows and estates have proved fertile recruiting ground.
The wages, the glamour, the girls – “he has piercing blue eyes which the girls love,” said his mother, lapsing momentarily into the present tense – all created a buzz to being a Woofer. He made inquiries with four mates, though only two actually enlisted.
College was not an option. Ben’s disdain for education was evident even at nursery. When confronted with the nursery vocabulary of “piggy-wiggy” and “woof-woof”, Ben pronounced his teacher “stupid”.
Though at Newbold Church of England junior he was consistently near the top of his class, it was all to fall apart after he started at his comprehensive. By 15, he was playing truant regularly. “They can’t teach me anything, Mum”, he moaned.
“I have no idea how he spent his days. I know he wasn’t out thieving, or hanging out with druggies. I think he probably came home and watched TV.”
He quit school as soon as he could. Two and half days working for a landscaping firm, (“it’s for the brain dead”), followed by two hours as a packer with a local toiletries firm (he walked out over a dispute), was the sum total of his paid employment. Only at his funeral, when his family and girlfriend, Natasha Petts, were joined by more than 200 mourners, did his parents learn of another Ben. An elderly neighbour recounted how he picked up her paper each day, fetched in her milk and put the kettle on for her. A lonely old man told how he dropped by for chats and to make him a sandwich.
Then, in April 2005, he announced to his mother, “I’ve done something”, before leading her to the army recruitment office. “They greeted him, so he’d obviously been in once or twice before,” she said. Waiting for her were his papers, ready for her signature. He must have noticed the flicker of doubt that crossed her face. “Don’t argue with me, Mum,” he pleaded. “This is my way forward. I can’t do anything else. This will be my life now.” She signed. He was 16.
“I had one or two people say to me, ‘You’re never going to let him join up, are you? It’s not a good idea’. But when they are so headstrong, you’ve got no choice,” she explained.
His certificate of enlistment jostles for wall space with photographs, including two of him in action, taken 36 hours before his death. How can she bear them, knowing he had just 36 hours to live? “It’s pride at seeing him in action. You can’t dwell on how he died,” said Jane, now a campaigner trying to shame the government into promising more money to better equip troops like Ben.
“If all you are going to do is wallow in how and when he died, then you’re in danger of forgetting who you’ve lost.”
Ben was not a letter writer. A weekly phone call was the most Jane could expect when he was posted to Afghanistan. He wanted to protect her, so chat was about his great tan, and could she send him some “top shelfer” magazines in the next parcel? But he always promised her he would come home.
“On TV, when they break the news, they are always in full uniform, aren’t they? And they take their caps off,” said Jane. Her two men were in suits. But she knew, instinctively.
Headstrong
When he was repatriated, his coffin was the last of four to be unloaded. It goes in order of rank, then age. “And, mentally, you’re repatriating your baby. But, in reality, you don’t bring anything home with you that day, because he’s taken to a hospital in Oxford, for a postmortem. I couldn’t watch it this week. I knew exactly what those mothers were going through.”
She brings down a suitcase. Inside are Ben’s cap, belt, the bullet casing from his funeral, his Afghan medal, his Nato medal, and two union flags, one of which covered his coffin during repatriation, the other his coffin at his funeral.
“We bought the case specially. I didn’t want to store them in a box. You know, from a box to a box,” she said. “It’s the first time I’ve looked at them since he died,” and her eyes filled up.
“People say they’re too young at 18. But you really can’t compare them to an ordinary 18-year-old. They’ve been through so much already. They’re men. And they’re 110% brave,” she said. And think not just of those who have died, she said, “but the many, many more who have suffered appalling injuries”.
Then she sighs. Ben’s sister, Emma, 17, enrolled at Army Training College on what would have been his 19th birthday, two weeks after his death. As a clerk with the Adjutant Corps, she can in future be posted as a “female searcher”.
On the list of preferences she has ticked the boxes “Infantry” and “Out of England”.
