Name : Jenny Verity Godly.
Age : 32
Sex : Female
Hired on as : Medic
Also bloody good at : Driving and fixing mechanical things
Branch : Formerly of the Royal Green Jackets, hired on the with the Yanks as the UK was in as she so poetically puts things 'shit state mate' and the offer of a ride out to the 'colonies loike' was too good to pass up.
Appearance : Picture,
another picture,
got the picture yet?Personality : Jenny is fairly happy if a bit brusque, sarcastic and has a typical british habit of both black humor and in 'taking the piss' out of people she likes. She likes a joke and a laugh, sometimes a little too much. She can be a little quiet at times and withdrawn when she feels the need, observing carefully rather than involving herself in the world. She is loyal to those she cares about fiercely and is happy to fight and defend that which she cares about. Including of course her own values, which are exceptionally important to her.
Background : The inner cities in the seventies were a harsh place to grow up. England was in some very deep economic doldrums. Strikes were commonplace, with the three day work week and the repression of the miners by the conservative government,a general malaise and a large amount of poverty.
It was fortunate for Jen that she grew up the youngest daughter of five children of a family who owned their own small business. Her father was a mechanic who had learned his trade whilst stationed in Germany in the British Army. He had started his family late and knew he would have to retire sooner than he would like due to various health conditions and so insisted on teaching each and every one of his kids all that he knew. Not only as this would help to keep them off the streets and the family afloat if the 'bad times' continued, but it would give them skills they could always fall back on later in life. Real practical knowledge that even if it wasn't applied to a career would still come in very, very handy for them over the days and years of their lives. Jen learned partially from her father and also partly from her older brother Oscar.
Through it all Jen's mum was very supportive. She was from a family of poor Irish immigrants, she well understood the wit and wisdom in her husband insisting that the kids learned all they could growing up. She was always a strong woman, firm and immutable in her values and beliefs. All four of her girls and her one boy were all told 'Find your own path. My path is my own, yours needs to be yours. Be who you are, who you want to be, never live for others.'. Also instilling in her children a very strong moral core, a deep understanding of the need for community, care and mutual aid towards everyone who deserved it. To judge others by their acts, by their deeds and not any kind of other arbitrary nonsense. That actions are what count in the world and that all the pretty words didn't make a 'hapeth of a difference' if the intent and outcomes were detrimental to others. These values would often lead to trouble with 'authorities' for the family, yet they would always stand together and use reason, logic, rhetoric and plain facts to state their case. Sometimes they would even come out on top for all of that.
When Jen left school she found herself, though an accident of following a friend, someone whom she secretly loved more than a little, into a performing arts course for two years at a local technical college. She passed out of this with a deeper understanding of herself and the world, but that the world of the arts wasn't so much for her. She went on to a period of flitting about from job to job, never quite settling until she found herself being pushed by the woman she was flatmate's with into taking an apprenticeship with the local St. Johns ambulance service with her.
This lead to a number of years of on and off the job training, ambulance driver soon became 'paramedic' as the terms changed and there was a further round of evening classes and learning. Jen had always been a quick study and enjoyed the process of acquiring new skills and aptitudes and so threw herself into any optional qualifications she could that came up or were offered.
The war was a background thing for Jen for quite a while, it wasn't till things started to become really bad that her family was pulled in. Her brother was called up and wound up working as a combat engineer after being rushed through basic and continuation training. The draft was a rude shock. It was wrong, it was dead wrong. It should be the individual's choice of whether or not to 'serve' not up to some bureaucrat in a wood paneled office in Whitehall who only ever saw numbers, not even names, let alone faces. It was preposterous and laughable that anyone else had the authority to make that sort of decision for her brother or for anyone else.
Her sisters were called up, one by one, later on that year. There were dark murmurings in the inner cities that this 'draft' was mainly affecting certain areas, Brixton in London was a battleground for several weeks with a weakened and beleaguered police force trying desperately to keep order against a rising tide of social unrest. This rapidly spread out to other area's of London and then on to Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Portsmouth, Brighton, Southampton and many other major cities. In many cases deaths were involved in quelling the unrest. Many of those arrested were given the option of long terms of hard labor or a three year term of service in the armed forces. This included two of Jen's sisters.
When Jen was called up a few months later she took the government to court. Challenging their Jurisdiction. Though all her arguments were correct and true the state could not afford to ever admit this. Giving Jen a win would have opened the floodgates to thousands of others who would use the same arguments. She was railroaded, imprisoned for several months until she was finally sent on to basic training.
In basic Jen did very well indeed, learned everything she was taught and more, earning plaudits from her instructors, yet her opinions and values did not change and she constantly landed herself in trouble by standing up for herself in the face of orders. She then found herself in continuation as a battlefield medic. This, given her past experience wasn't a huge surprise.
She found herself in the Royal Green Jackets in the remote Scottish highlands. The fighting had been fierce in Norway the previous year and the unit she had been assigned to was still significantly under strength and undergoing build up and re-training while waiting for re-deployment where they would be able to do some good.
The rest of the war was somewhat of a blur. Deployments and battles, wounded and dying comrades in arms. Helping as best she could. Nights of terror, days of blood and bone. Flash and blast and heat and light. The dying of the light. The end of the world as we know it.
She lost the rest of her platoon to a Spetznaz ambush, only surviving herself due to quick thinking and extreme sneakiness. She arrived back to find her HQ a ruin and the front line shifted at least five miles in the wrong direction. She hooked up with two members of black watch and a member of the special boat service and the four of them walked back to friendly lines.
Jen was discharged on mental health grounds and sent back to a shattered England for a few months. What was left of the land of her birth was horrifying, sickening, heart rending. Jen fell into a depression. Her parents were dead, her brother and one of her sisters killed in action. The other of her sisters who had been serving had picked up some kind of very nasty bio agent during one of the pushes into Poland and was blind, deaf and paralyzed all down one side of her body, the other sister was looking after her. Jen paid them one visit then couldn't go back. She had seen enough, seen too much.
She couldn't stay in England. She couldn't stay in the UK. She had to get away.
The recruiter had caught her in Plymouth. The yanks were looking for service people, anyone who had useful skills beyond just holding a gun. They were offering a boat out and a plot of land back in the US. The only drawback was having to give service for a few years. More blood and bone and the smell of cordite and smell of terror. Only this had the promise of land at the end of it.
A real gamble in this age, but work was hard to find even for her, food was something that happened if you were lucky, clean water if you were really bloody lucky and a safe warm bed at night if you were the spawniest bugger on the bloomin' planet.
Jen felt like she was selling a part of her soul as she signed the paper. She was going to America.
Jen quote : "What does not kill us, makes us stranger. I'm pretty bloody strange, so I must have been not killed. A lot. Its quite worrying how many times this must have taken place to the point that when I think about this, late at night when everyone is snoring around me, I can hear my brain blood barrier slowly disintegrating. Literally breaking down as I listen to it. So I try not to think about it anymore. Its like trying to not think about pink elephants, bloody impossible. The fuckers keep showing up asking if they can blag a fag off of yer to fritter away the afternoon. Wankers."
