Not a very auspicious start to our war careers.

2

Before Dunkirk

FOR some time we reported regularly every fortnight to the Air Centre at Oxford, where we were paid a handsome sum of money and told to stand by. Then we were drafted to an initial Training Wing. We were marched from the station to various colleges and I found myself supplied with a straw bed and command of a platoon. My fellow sergeants were certainly tough: they were farmers, bank clerks, estate agents, representatives of every class and calling, and just about the nicest bunch of men it has ever been my lot to meet. There could have been few people less fitted to drill them than I, but by a system of the majority vote we overcame most of our difficulties. If ignorant of on what foot to give a command, I would have a stand-easy and take a show of hands. The idea worked admirably and whenever an officer appeared our platoon was a model of efficiency. We never saw an aeroplane and seldom attended a lecture: This was the pre-Dunkirk ‘phoney war’ period, but life was not dull. Soon afterwards I was commissioned on the score of my proficiency certificate in the University Air Squadron, and was moved to another Wing. Here I found myself amongst many old friends.

Frank Waldron was there, Noel Agazarian, and Michael Judd, also of the University Squadron. Michael thought and felt as egocentrically as I did about everything, but his reaction to the war was different. It did not fit into his plans, for he had just won a travelling fellowship at All Souls: to him the war was in fact a confounded nuisance. Although we were officers, route marches were nevertheless obligatory for us; but by some odd chance Frank and Noel and I always seemed to be in the last section of threes on the march. Prominent and eager at the start, we were somehow never to be seen by the end. London, I fear, accounted for more than enough of our time and money. That our behaviour was odd and uncooperative did not occur to us, or if it did, caused us few pangs. We had joined the Air Force to fly, and not to parade around like Boy Scouts. We didn’t bother to consider that elementary training might be as essential as anything that we should learn later, or that a certain confusion of organization was inevitable at the beginning of the war. We rented a large room in a hotel and formed a club, pleasantly idling away six weeks in drinking and playing cards.

Then one day it was announced that we were to move. The news was greeted with enthusiasm, for while the prospect of flying seemed no nearer, this station was notoriously gay and seemed a step in the right direction. There had been pictures in the press of young men diving into the swimming-pool, of Mr. Wally Hammond leading a parade, and of Len Harvey and Eddie Phillips boxing. David Douglas-Hamilton, who boxed for England, and Noel, who boxed for Oxford, were particularly pleased.

I drove down with Frank in his battered old Alvis and reported. We were billeted in boarding-houses along the front. I had never quite believed in the legend of seaside boarding-houses, but within two days I was convinced. There it all was, the heavy smell of Brussels sprouts, the aspidistras, the slut of a maid with a hole in her black stockings and a filthy thumb-nail in the soup, the communal table in the dining-room which just didn’t face the sea, the two meals a day served punctually at one o’clock and seven-thirty.

We found that Nigel Bicknell, Bill Aitken, and Dick Holdsworth had been billeted in the same boarding-house. The way in which they took the war deserves to be mentioned.

Nigel was a year or two older than I. He had been editor of the Granta, the University magazine at Cambridge. From Nigel’s behaviour, referred to a little later, it will be seen that the attitude of Cambridge to the war was the same as ours. He had had a tentative job on the Daily Express, and by the outbreak of the war he had laid the foundations of a career.