The further tragedy of unknowing

Margaret Evison spent Easter 2009 with her 26-year-old son Mark, who was about to go to Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. They walked around her garden talking about death in a general sort of way; Mark was worried that he might make a mistake which would lead to someone else dying. ‘He did not discuss the possibility of his own death.’

A month later, she returned from the newsagents to see a casually dressed man outside her house ‘apparently loitering with some intent’. He explained that he was a major in the Army and asked if they could talk inside. Two days after that, Evison was being driven to Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham when an ambulance sped by with a police escort. Inside was Mark.

He had been shot while out on patrol in Helmand. The consultant — stuffy and formal — tells her that Mark’s brain stem is ‘probably gone’. She sits by his bedside with his sunburned feet strapped with flip-flop marks poking out from under the blankets. The next day they switch off the machines that have been keeping him alive. ‘I watched the spirit leave Mark in less than a second as his face changed and his lips tinged blue.’

In part, Death of a Soldier is a record of Evison’s grief. But it’s also an account of a mother trying to find out how her son died — and, more specifically, trying to get some answers out of the Ministry of Defence.

As she notes in a style that is all the more devastating for its dryness:

Surprisingly, I found that the great institutions of state, politics and the law were the smallest of all when it came to allowing understanding and the simple sensitivities of human life.