THIS Sunday, 32-year-old Joanna Davies and her toddler son Jamie will spend Christmas Day with Joanna’s in-laws, who are travelling over to Northern Ireland from their native Shropshire.
However, Joanna’s husband James will not be there, although he has pre-recorded a very special DVD through which he will deliver his Christmas message to his precious family.
That’s because James is a sergeant and bugle major in 2nd Battalion The Rifles (2 Rifles) and is currently on a six-month tour of Afghanistan, and isn’t due to return to the battalion’s base at Abercorn Barracks in Ballykinler, Co Down, until next spring.
And pregnant wife Joanna – her second baby is due at the beginning of next month – is just one of the regiment’s “Army wives” currently living in Northern Ireland, doing her best to get on with daily life, looking after her child, and separated from her partner at the most special time of the year.
“I’m sure that Christmas day is going to be emotional,” she says, her accent betraying her Polish heritage. She met husband James in 2005 when she came to England “to learn English as an au pair with one of the battalion families”.
The couple got married two years later, and this will be the first Christmas they have spent apart.
“Quite a bit of the time he’s away anyway,” Joanna says of life as a military wife, adding that the women get used to it “as much as one can get used to it.”
She continues: “It’s not a lifestyle for a clingy partner. I would say it becomes more demanding when one has a child, because that is an additional concern. Whenever it is just the two of you involved, then you have separate lifestyles whilst he is away. Since I have had Jamie he is the entire focus.”
Joanna says that she and many of the women with young children send scrapbooks and photographs out to their partners to keep them up to date with a lot of ‘firsts’ that they are not there to enjoy in person.
“We are quite lucky nowadays, commun-ications are so easy via the internet. It’s not instant, but I can still send him an email. I find it difficult that I can’t ring him whenever I need to. The phone always has to be charged and ready to pick up.”
Joanna says that her little son is fully aware about the situation regarding his father’s absence, having now reached “the magical age of three”.
And when I ask her if Christmas this year will be “just another day” due to the fact that James will not be there, she says that she doesn’t have the flexibility to make it that, “as much as I might be tempted”, because “obviously there is a child to consider”.
She says she is looking forward to seeing James’s family and if they are fortunate, they will get a call from the man himself.
“It depends on how things are out there,” she says. “I am sure he will try, but there is nothing certain to be said about it really.”
In keeping with the true spirit of Christmas, she remains thankful and upbeat about her situation.
“I’m still fortunate to have him because this is the time when we think of those who have gone forever, and families that aren’t that lucky,” she says.
Lizzie Bryan, also 32, agrees that “Christmas is a time for families”, and this year, despite being apart from her husband, Major Bobby Bryan, she and son George, who’s just four months old, will be making the most of the season of goodwill with both her and Bobby’s families back in Cambridge, where they are both from.
“This is the first time he’s been deployed since we’ve been a couple,” reveals Lizzie, who has been married to Bobby for just over two years, and met him three years previous to that.
“He went to Iraq in 2007 just before we met each other.”
Bobby had joined the Army as soon as he left university, and Lizzie was well aware of the dangerous nature of his career.
“But at the same time it can’t be your overruling factor – it can’t be at the forefront of your mind on all occasions or you simply wouldn’t be able to get on in day to day life really,” she says.
She says that when Bobby was deployed in September, it was, naturally, “very hard” on all of them. She recalls: “We’d been back in England for my son to be born and it was a very tricky delivery. I had a caesarean section and was particularly unwell afterwards, and so had only been back in Ireland about a week- and-a-half when he was deployed.
“I was only just able to start driving when he walked out the door. I was quite literally holding our new born baby in my arms. When he left, I had that mini meltdown as I think most wives do when they walk out the door.
“Then you start dusting yourself off and I’ve got a very lively baby who keeps me extremely busy which is helping me to get through these times at the moment.”
Whilst the challenge of being a first time mother is more than enough to keep Lizzie’s mind off her husband’s absence, raising her child alone is not the scenario she had envisaged.
“It was always the case that I wanted a baby with my husband and that we would experience this together, and it’s very painful that ...my husband is missing so many of those touching things and developments that a baby goes through, the milestones.
“You can’t help but smile, but then there’s a little bit of sadness that he is missing some of those moments.”
And she admits that “Christmas this year isn’t necessarily happening in my mind, so to speak”, although she and George will be travelling to Cambridge to spend it with both her family and Bobby’s.
She says: “I haven’t actually thought about Christmas – I’m so preoccupied and so busy with the baby, and my thoughts are constantly with Bobby. It’s going to be fantastic to see family and friends, because obviously being in Ireland they are so far away from me, so in that respect I’m very much looking forward to catching up with people.
“But Christmas isn’t a big deal for me this year – we’ll celebrate it next year.
“I’ll have Bobby back, the little one will be at an age where he will be able to appreciate it and my little family unit will be back together.”
She adds: “My husband is my world, he’s my life – and to not have him here with me is amazingly tricky.
“Army wives are very resilient, they will dust themselves off, they will keep going, and they will give their children the best Christmas that they can imagine.”
Fellow Ballykinler Army wife Shellie Bell has already experienced a Christmas without her husband Dave. He was deployed in Iraq in 2006 /2007, and just over two years ago, when Shellie was pregnant with the couple’s third child, Billy, he was in Afghanistan.
“He left when I was about three months pregnant and he come home about three days before Billy was born,” says the 33-year-old Liverpudlian. “He missed the whole pregnancy and it was quite a hard one as well.”
This year, Dave will be in Afghanistan over the festive period, and since he left in September, Shellie has been busy looking after her three sons Jacob, 14, Charlie, nine, and Billy, now two, running the nursery on the Army camp, and helping to provide support to the other wives and partners living at Ballykinler.
In August, she was also one of the ladies involved in the shooting of a special calendar entitled Battalion Belles, which features pictures of the girls in 1940s-style outfits and poses. Money raised from the sale of the calendars will go towards injured soldiers and their families.
Shellie was introduced to her husband-to-be by her brother – who was also in the Army – 15-and-a-half years ago, and they married a couple of years later.
At that stage, Shellie says that Dave’s safety was “something I never worried about” because there was none of the conflict in the Middle East that exists today.
When Dave was sent to Iraq, Shellie and her two older sons were living just outside Blackpool, just 40 minutes away from her family.
“It was bearable because I had a lot of family members around,” she recalls.
“But this time, because we’ve got the little one, it’s not fair on Dave being away and not being able to see his face on Christmas Day – it’s a lot harder this time I think.
“Even the run-up to Christmas – because Dave went away in September, he hasn’t got a clue what the boys have asked for. He’s got no idea what Christmas Day’s going to be like for them.”
Shellie says that generally, when he is away, her husband sends “the odd letter”, but communicates with his family mainly by phone.
“On a good week we probably get one quick five-minute phone call every other day, but on a bad week we can not speak at all - and that’s hard.
“I’m used to Dave going away and not having him around, and I’m used to getting into ‘the zone’ where I’m in a routine with the boys and things. But it’s hearing his voice, it’s just the reassurance that he’s OK, and if you can’t hear his voice then you do just worry an awful lot.”
She goes on: “Obviously when I met Dave he was in the Army and I chose to marry him knowing what Army life was like, and that it takes you away from your family.
“So I would never say to Dave, ‘I hate this life’, because this is the life I chose.”
How does Shellie and the rest of the Army wives manage to muddle through at all times of the year as well as Christmas?
“You kind of live day-by-day hoping that every day passes with no bad news,” she says.
“You plan things for when he comes home and you look forward to that.
“We all joke that we’re ‘in the zone’. You have your first few days when they go away where you just feel really down and sorry for yourself. Then you pick yourself up after your first phone call from them, and you’ve heard his voice and he sounds OK and cheery. It makes you think, ‘right, we’ve got to get on with this’. And you do just get ‘into the zone’ and deal with it.
“The best thing about it is being here, living on this camp. There’s an awful lot of people in the same situation. If you are having a bad day and you just want to have a moan because you miss your husband nobody questions why. They know what you’re going through. When people say they know how you’re feeling, they really do know how you’re feeling.”