AZI Ahmed’s mother never could understand why her daughter hadn’t bagged herself a husband.

At 26, she was beautiful, eligible, and a great cook with a hearty appetite so she marched her down to the nearest marriage bureau to register her interest in finding her a husband.

“I put down I was 46, divorced with three kids. I knew no one was going to look at that profile,” Azi told news.com.au, saying her mother, who couldn’t read or write English, never knew any different.

“She posted them and said ‘no one is coming forward, I don’t know why!”

The deception was necessary for Azi, who was living a double life playing a good Muslim daughter while secretly training for the SAS — one of the most elite units in the British Army.

“I was living in two different worlds. On the one hand my parents had no idea I was in the army and my mother was trying to find me a husband.”

“I’d have to change into these sparkly outfits, put a scarf on my head and my mother would be telling people I was a good cook. Then I would put my army boots on and I’d be out with the lads again training.”

“Sometimes my feet would be pounding with blisters and my arms and legs would be bruised. Luckily in our culture you cover yourself from head to toe. I was limping but I just held it in.”

“I’d lose my toenails and my mother couldn’t see those …. I was eating like a horse.”

Her time training with 200 men and 11 women in a London barracks is the subject of a new book, Worlds Apart, which documents her journey from the family kebab shop in Manchester in an experimental project which saw women admitted to the unit for the first time.

Having previously worked as an artist, Azi said she was planning on applying for an administration job with the territorial army when she saw a group of women signing up for the SAS and decided to do the same.

“Next minute I’m downstairs in my fitness kit and they’re giving me a beasting around Hyde Park … I realised how unfit I was. The women I was with were so strong I was lagging behind, I was sick.”

“I think the unit itself you’ve got to have a bit of screw loose. Perhaps I’m a bit crazy. I love challenges and felt that I wanted to do something different … It was a bit of naivete as well.”

It was a taboo-busting time for the only Muslim woman in the group that was learning how to work together against a wider debate around whether women should be on the front lines at all.

Her experience saw her marching across the UK’s tough landscape with non-halal ration kits and was complicated even further as the only Pakistani woman in the post 9/11 environment where she learned to hold her tongue because she ‘couldn’t win’ either way.

“We were treated just as bad as the men. We were put in the same boat as them, but it was a very difficult time because it was the first time men were training with women as well.”

“If I hadn’t done this training I could have just shouted out and been a bit of a feminist but having done the training there’s a reason why they put men on the front line. If something happens to men they get aggressive. Women can get aggressive but it takes us longer. Physically, it goes without saying men are stronger. I believe there is a role for women behind enemy lines …. but that needs to be defined by the British Army.”

Despite the punishing regimen, once the 11 women had dwindled to two she said they were tapped on the shoulder and told to leave without explanation.

“Two weeks before we were meant to finish they just told us to hand our kit in and told us the training course is no longer going ahead for women … They stopped it all of a sudden and all of the women coming in behind us they stopped as well.”

“You kind of think ‘oh thank god for that’ but you hand your kit in and you think ‘what are you going to do now?’ It was a bit of a double edged sword for me.”

While she was shocked at the sudden departure, she now looks at the experience as a “privilege” that made her who she is. Since then she has written a book, run for parliament and worked for the army’s central command.

Her only regret is not being able to explain to her parents, who have now passed away, why she would insist on wearing trainers to hide her blackened toenails every day.

“I told my two brothers only recently. They couldn’t believe it.”

Worlds Apart by is published by The Robson Press and will be released in Australia in August.