Earning as much as five pounds a week, and sometimes more, provided sufficient overflow for acquiring a secondhand bicycle. Arthur Shelton and I rode to Derby or Newark, and one Easter to the Lincolnshire coast, where we shivered all night in a concrete pillbox, before cycling back through seventy miles of rain.
Some of the past was already attractive to recall, or it provided a good enough reason for the destination of Worksop by bicycle, and cut out any uneasiness at knocking without notice on the back door of Mrs Cutts, who had looked after me so well as an evacuee five years before. There was hardly any traffic on the road, and in my solitary way through Mansfield with neither town plan nor signposts I went too far west through Pleasley and the Langwiths before regaining the Worksop road, consoling myself with the thought that even the best navigators get lost.
I must have disturbed her afternoon nap, and had to say my name before being invited in, motioned to step carefully by Mr Cutts who was dead asleep on the sofa. She apologized for the plate of stew being cold, but it was welcome after my long ride. The boy who had been evacuated with me had got into trouble for thieving, and they had sent him back to Nottingham. I sensed her horror at this experience, and a desire to change the subject. Asking about Laura, who had lived in a caravan on nearby wasteground, she said: ‘We used to have a little laugh at how sweet you were on her. She was your first love, we’d say. But they aren’t here any more. A pony towed the family to a site near Chesterfield two years ago. Laura’s a lovely young woman now.’ She had guessed the reason for my visit, and so it was me who switched the topic, by saying I had to go. Mr Cutts did not wake, and she sent me back to Nottingham with an apple and a sandwich in my saddlebag, which I ate by the gateway to Newstead Abbey, unable to decide whether or not my journey had been wasted.
I was a fully integrated workman only insofar as there was little left to learn about the surrounding milieu, so it was time to get out by any means possible. In April 1945 I heard you could volunteer for aircrew with the Fleet Air Arm from the age of seventeen and a quarter, under something called the ‘Y’ Scheme.
It may be worth quoting from the booklet put out at the time: ‘The Y scheme concerns candidates for the General Service branch, who come in as ordinary seamen in the first place, the pilot/observer candidates for the “A” branch (the Fleet Air Arm) who enter as naval airmen … Whichever the branch, the candidate has got to earn his commission in the same way as any other entrant, but to have been accepted by the Y scheme means that he is a marked man and that he will get every opportunity during his service training to prove himself worthy of a commission.’
Getting the morning off work, the first one ever, I went to the recruiting office to enlist, to the regret of my employer and the intense disapproval of my parents. To pass the medical was no problem and, after my preference for the branch of service had been noted, instructions came from the Royal Navy a fortnight later to present myself before an aircrew selection board at 13–15 Nantwich Road, Crewe, the letter containing a railway warrant for May 2nd.
A cadet friend, who had his School Certificate, and had passed all the tests which the ATC could devise, had come back from Crewe a few days before, having been considered the perfect candidate by Mr Pink and other officers. Cadets who succeeded in getting through an aircrew selection board, either for the Navy or the RAF, were entitled to wear the white flash of the Initial Training Wing in their caps, and in ATC squadrons those able to do so were a small and select band indeed.
Everyone expected to see the aforementioned cadet come on parade sporting his white flash, but he had failed, and was too dashed to say why. Since my schooling had stopped at fourteen this seemed ominous for my prospects, and my usual over-confidence was replaced at times by utter pessimism. Being fit and capable did little to abate the anxiety of thinking that failure would finish me off. I had trained obsessively for two and a half years, had diligently taken in what was put before me, and would go to the selection board with high recommendations from those officers who had been my instructors. Hoping there was nothing after all to fear I quelled inner disturbance by a determination to do my best.
I got up at six, even before my father, washed thoroughly at the kitchen sink, and put on my uniform. After a quick breakfast I took a bus to the railway station. Beyond Derby the train ran through the Potteries, whose grimy back-to-backs and smoking kilns made Nottingham seem like a garden-city.
In Crewe it wasn’t far to the large Victorian house where the Navy had its aircrew testing facilities. After the medical came the eyesight test, a matter of picking out numbers made up of dots of a certain colour from a confusing multitude of dots of all colours, to prove I wasn’t colour-blind.
At the selection board itself, standing to attention in front of four elderly (or so they seemed) and urbane naval officers, questions were shot at me such as: ‘If a triangle has an angle of fifty-six degrees, and another of sixty-four, what number would the third angle have?’ I was a little flustered at one point, but managed to give all the right answers. On being asked what sports I liked to play I feigned an enthusiasm never felt, having all my life regarded sport as a waste of time. ‘Cricket and football, as well as’ (which were liked because they could be done alone) ‘rowing and cycling.’
After a meal in the mess I went into a classroom with half a dozen others for aptitude tests, reminiscent of those set for the scholarship exam at the age of eleven, but which by now had lost their mystery. A short time later I was called into an office where a man sat casually filling out a naval identity card. When he handed it to me I assumed he had made a mistake, and then could hardly believe my luck in knowing that I had passed.
Everything had seemed so informal, but perhaps that, I thought, was the Navy’s way of doing things. He gave me three shillings for my first day’s service pay, and said all I had to do now was go home and wait to be called up for flying training on HMS Daedalus at Lee-on-the-Solent near Southampton. I felt as if I was floating instead of walking to the station, and must have opened my wallet half a dozen times to stare at the small red piece of folded card bearing my name, and the number FX643714.
Looking back, that first success of my life was a low hurdle to have crossed, yet it proved to me that I was as good as anybody else, and maybe even better than most. I had wanted to be a navigator (or Air Observer, as it was called in the Fleet Air Arm) but being accepted to train as a pilot, who also had to know about navigation, was no disappointment. A photograph of the time shows me staring into space, eyes glassy as if half blind, my expression suggesting that full sight could be regained should an effort be made to see what exactly is before me.
Almost across the road from the station in Nottingham was a service stores, and even before leaving the counter I had fixed the distinguishing white flash into my cap, to show off on parade that evening, not feeling similarly pleased until my first novel was published thirteen years later.
The war seemed far from over, and I had, as it were, ‘taken the King’s shilling’. The Red Army was fighting in Berlin, and Hitler had, as my mother said when I walked into the house from the factory, ‘Snuffed it.’ Cousin Jack, having put a year on his age so as to volunteer and get into the war before it finished, battled with the infantry against an SS Cadet Training Battalion in the Teutoburger Wald. Another of his brothers was in West Africa, and a cousin who had deserted earlier in the war was riding on a tank towards Hamburg. Peggy had left the Women’s Land Army to join the NAAFI, and put her name down for overseas.