There was no excitement. It was as though a very tired old man was bestirring himself for a long-expected and unwelcome appointment.

I got back to England on the day of the Munich Conference; the boat was crowded and several cars were broken as they were hauled on board. The French seemed to resent our going.

During ‘peace in our time’ I made my final trip. The Oxford and Cambridge crews were invited to Cannes to row on the bay and I had the enviable position of spare man. Cafe society was there in force; there were fireworks, banquets at Juan-les-Pins, battles of flowers at Nice, and a general air of all being for the best in the best of all possible worlds. We stayed at the Carlton, bathed at Eden Rock and spent most of the night in the Casino. We gave a dinner for the Mayor which ended with Frank and the guest of honour rolled together in the tablecloth singing quite un-intelligible ditties, much to the surprise of the more sober diners. We emerged from some night club at seven o’clock on the morning of our departure with a bare half-hour left to catch our plane. Over the doorway a Union Jack and a Tricolor embraced each other in a rather tired entente cordiale. Frank seized the Tricolor and waved it gaily above his head. At that moment the smallest Frenchman I’ve ever seen rushed after us and clutched hold of Frank’s retreating coat-tails.

‘Mais, non, non, non!’ he screeched.

‘Mais, oui, oui, oui, my little man,’ said Frank, and, disengaging himself, he belaboured the fellow over the head with the emblem of his Fatherland and cantered off down the road, to appear twenty minutes later on the airport, a sponge bag in one hand and the Tricolor still firmly clasped in the other.

This, then, was the Oxford Generation which on September 3, 1939, went to war. I have of necessity described that part of the University with which I came in contact and which was particularly self-sufficient, but I venture to think that we differed little in essentials from the majority of young men with a similar education. We were disillusioned and spoiled. The press referred to us as the Lost Generation and we were not displeased. Superficially we were selfish and egocentric without any Holy Grail in which we could lose ourselves. The war provided it, and in a delightfully palatable form. It demanded no heroics, but gave us the opportunity to demonstrate in action our dislike of organized emotion and patriotism, the opportunity to prove to ourselves and to the world that our effete veneer was not as deep as our dislike of interference, the opportunity to prove that, undisciplined though we might be, we were a match for Hitler’s dogma-fed youth.

For myself, I was glad for purely selfish reasons. The war solved all problems of a career, and promised a chance of self-realization that would normally take years to achieve. As a fighter pilot I hoped for a concentration of amusement, fear, and exaltation which it would be impossible to experience in any other form of existence.

I was not disappointed.

September 3, 1939, fell during the long vacation, and all of us in the University Air Squadron reported that day to the Volunteer Reserve Centre at Oxford. I drove up from Beaconsfield in the late afternoon and discovered with the rest that we had made a mistake: the radio calling-up notice had referred only to ground crews and not to pilots. Instead of going home, I went along with Frank to his old rooms and we settled down to while away the evening.

Frank was then twenty-five and had just finished his last year. We had both rowed more than we had flown, and would have a lot to learn about flying. The walls of Frank’s rooms were covered with oars, old prints, and the photographs of one or two actresses whom we had known: outside there was black-out and the noise of marching feet. We said little. Through that window there came to us, with an impact that was a shock, a breath of the new life we were to be hurled into. There was a heavy silence in the air that was ominous. I was moved, full of new and rather awed emotions. I wanted to say something but could not. I felt a curious constraint. At that moment there was a loud banging on the door, and we started up: outside stood a policeman.