I did my fighting when we’d done the first bits of serious armouring in Southron Gaard. We were still using freon can helmets and really primitive technology. We hadn’t actually fought anybody from the mainland, so we didn’t really know what we were doing.
What ended up happening was we were over-cautious: we used the heavier gauge of metal rather than the lighter one, so my whole suit of armour weighed twice as much as it should have done. Being female to start with, and not all that fit, I was slowed down. And things weren’t articulated properly, so everything went creak, creak, creak
. I was basically wandering around in a huge tin can.
Because most of the other fighters at that stage were left-handed, which I’m not, and taller than me, it was a bit not fun
sometimes. But the thing that really stopped me fighting was that the boyfriend with the car went west, so I had no way of getting my armour to fighter practice.