Still Falling

Is this the WRVS...today?

It is immediate and engaging. I picture is as a mini-play...a sort of Talking Heads. Maybe it's because the structure is visually a little confusing. There is the odd typo still (isn't there always?) eg 'Gurkha's' doesn't need the apostrophe.

I think the theme has got 'legs'.

The narrator's voice is quite retro, almost Woosterish in places, 'rather' - 'off you pop' a tone sometimes at odds with the swear words (no, don't mind them at all, though I would happily 'pass' on the 'seminal fluid' :))

But this is recognisably the modern army too, black labrador and all, according to my limited understanding of it. My husband was an army officer when I met him, but his army days are long behind him now.

'No stripes, no pips, no manners.' I like the clean concision of that. To perfect the logic of this neat image - the ranking moving downstairs as it were, might it be no pips, no stripes, no manners.

Your writing has a high likeability. Without more, it's hard to know if you're building to a crisis that's still humorous but challengingly topical or not. Best of luck with it.

I like it! I'd have liked a short explanation of who and what you are and how you came to be attached to the army and exactly what your role is. Volunteer welfare worker? Civilian administrator?

I take it btw that if not directly autobiographical this is based on personal experience. Like James Herriot or Gervase Phinn - they were a vet and a school inspector respectively but wrote from a fictionalised point of view.

I didn't notice any particularly offensive vocabulary, but I have a daughter who was an army officer so I am used to a certain amount of profanity! The dialogue seemed about right for the characters in your story.

A glossary of army slang might be useful. Not just AGAI but other expressions that aren't immediately obvious to non-military persons.

All the best

Mary