Change me | into Hypnosis | Open DMs

This was all arranged in a matter of weeks, and it had gone largely over my head. I assumed, of course, that the Army, the cadet service, the colonel, and my Dad had agreed on this – even though my Dad had told me he opposed the idea.

I did not go back to school to say goodbye. I simply disappeared. I put my handsome white shirts with the stiff high collars in a box with the school ties and the long socks.

Some of my mates called me at the house, wondering what was happening, but I was unable to reply; they had been told at school that I had moved to another school, at short notice. As I was the son of diplomats, this was not uncommon. I guess they just moved on.

When this happened, I had been in the colonel’s house on the Army compound for just over three months.

I had applied for this kind of life, thinking it was a temporary thing, a kind of internship, a chance to learn some new cadet skills. It made sense also because Dad was going to be away a lot, so why not find a kind of foster family and do some cadet training at the same time?

Initially, I had been shocked with what was expected of me, and I had struggled to keep up. I could not be a good student and a good house-cadet at the same time. My grades suffered, the colonel was unhappy, his son got demerits at school and at cadet drill for uniform flaws and they were my fault, and so on. Something had to give. So when I was told that my school duties had ended, I actually felt relieved. Now I could meet the cadet challenge. It was very much what any 15-year old boy might feel, a chance to prove himself, to excel, suprise his elders. If this had been a football team, I would have been on the training pitch every day, all day. 

I had walked away from that phone call with my Dad, not really thinking about what he had meant (and not really understanding what it all meant to him, his son abandoning him for a uniformed life of service).

At the risk of getting ahead of the story: Dad wasn’t my parent anymore. When I had enlisted in the cadet service, and signed my name and sworn an oath, I had officially joined the Malay Army, and was now subject to military law. As I was under 16, the Army had, in a very real legal sense, adopted me. The Army had appointed the colonel as my legal guardian.

I had never realised that that was the consequence of my joining up; neither had my Dad realised that, when he agreed to having me posted there, under the colonel’s wings, he had formally given me up for adoption. Only when he found that the colonel had taken me out of school, and that there was nothing he could do about it, did the reality of that sink in. This was the beginning of a long legal battle, of which I was not aware. I will save the outcome for later in this story.