An Officer and a Gentlewoman: the Making of a Female British Army Officer by Heloise Goodley: review Needless to say, it was a shock. The conversion from civilian to soldier is a painful one and the initial five weeks are particularly hard. No chocolate, no mobile phones, no make-up, no alcohol, a day that began at 5.15am with a compulsory litre of water and a rousing chorus of all six verses of the national anthem. Cheerfulness seems to be the quality that enabled her to endure the sometimes intolerable emotional and physical rigours of her training. She was a little older than the other 31 women of her intake, and the only one with no military experience. Demoralised by the fact that, "as a military virgin I was pretty terrible at all the important stuff: marching, saluting, shoe shining, weapon handling," she considered giving up. But her morale was raised by the discovery of an unsuspected talent for navigation (British Army officers, she notes, are notorious for being incapable of reading a map), and on she slogged, through increasingly gruelling exercises in Norfolk, Wales and Salisbury Plain (where her breakfast was cooked by former Blue Peter presenter Andi Peters as part of a Celebrity Masterchef challenge) towards the glory of commissioning and the Sovereign's Parade. Goodley is unduly modest when she fears that her personal experiences were insufficiently interesting to make a book. She is a vivid, energetic writer (though with a talent for malapropism, remarking that she travelled the world during her gap year and "never once kept an account of it for prosperity." Her copy editor, if she had one, should retire with a bottle of whisky and a gun.) The trouble with this memoir is, in fact, that it is not personal enough. There is a chapter promisingly titled "Women at War," a passage on sex and the Army, and brief accounts of her time in Afghanistan, but Goodley is still a serving officer and the dabs of self-censorship are all over her text. She reveals that the basis for this memoir was her Sandhurst diary - obligatory, and regularly checked by the directing staff - for which she received a prize. "The accolade was much mocked at the time," she notes. None of the boys wanted the honour. In fact, this is a jolly good yarn, as far as it goes. The restrictions under which it was (presumably) written lend a tone of constraint to the sections that ought to have been most resonant - a marked contrast to the rackety candour that distinguishes the writing of ex-officers such as Patrick Hennessey, of The Junior Officers" Reading Club. But we know so little about the experience of women in the Army that Goodley's memoir is a valuable starting point. Jane Shilling's memoir The Stranger in the Mirror is published by Vintage An Officer and a Gentlewoman: the Making of a Female British Army Officer by Heloise Goodley 320PP, Constable t £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £16.99, ebook £11.14)