MY CAREER AS a soldier is easily summarised. On receiving my conscription papers I had expressed a preference (as one was invited to do) for the Education Corps, but I was assigned to the Royal Armoured Corps, which is composed of mechanised cavalry regiments of various historic origins and numbered battalions of the Royal Tank Regiment formed in the First World War. I received my Basic Training with the 7th Royal Tank Regiment at Catterick Camp, a huge garrison spread over the moors near Richmond in Yorkshire. Because of my education I was classified as a ‘Potential Officer’, but I withdrew from this category before the end of basic training. After trade training as a clerk I was assigned to the Royal Tank Regiment and posted to Bovington Camp in Dorset. This was (and still is) the Royal Armoured Corps centre for training in driving and maintenance of armoured vehicles, staffed by a motley collection of soldiers belonging to various regiments in the RAC and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. I worked in Bovington as a clerk, rising eventually to the rank of corporal, until I was released in August 1957.
A more detailed account of what my military service was like can be gathered from my novel Ginger, You’re Barmy, published in 1962. The story that links the narrator, Jonathan Browne, his rebellious fellow conscript, the ginger-haired Mike Brady, and Pauline, the young woman with whom they are both involved, is entirely fictional; but Jonathan’s service in the Army follows the pattern of mine closely, and almost every detail of setting and daily life in the novel, many small illustrative incidents, and numerous lines of dialogue, were recalled from memory, beginning with Jonathan’s account of waiting to have a medical examination on his very first day:
We sat round the walls of a warm, stuffy room which smelled of perspiration, wearing only jackets and trousers, waiting to be called in to the Medical Officer. Three soldiers in denims were making some adjustments to the lights. We sat, quiet and depressed, hoping perhaps that the medical might result in a last-minute reprieve, while the three soldiers conducted at the tops of their voices, as if oblivious of our presence, the most obscene conversation I had ever heard in my life. It might almost have been laid on as an introduction course in Army language. It was obscene not only in its liberal and ingenious use of the standard expletive that lingers like a persistent echo throughout any conversation in the Army, but also in its use of words whose obscenity, at that stage, I could only guess at, and in its content: sexual encounters experienced at the last weekend, or anticipated at the next . . .
It may be hard for younger readers to believe now, when various forms and applications of the word ‘fuck’ occur frequently in the casual speech of all classes and are commonplace in dialogue on the stage, in films and in television drama, but up to that time, in my not especially sheltered life, I had very rarely heard, or overheard, the word spoken, so I was as shocked by its frequency in this conversation as by the sexual references. Needless to say, I had never uttered the word myself, and during my service I did not acquire the habit of doing so – one of several ways in which I resisted assimilation to the military subculture.
Basic training, which occupies a substantial portion of the novel, is a stereotyped rite of passage which does not vary much between different military services and countries. Its object is to turn a random collection of raw recruits into an obedient body of soldiers by conditioning: cutting their hair brutally short, clothing them in coarse, ill-fitting uniforms or fatigues, shouting at them, sneering at them, swearing at them, drilling them, marching them, depriving them of sleep by setting absurd but exhausting tasks that last long into the night, like scrubbing khaki webbing clean until it is white and then coating it in khaki blanco again, ironing and pressing clothing into precisely measured squares and rectangles for kit layouts, and polishing the toecaps of boots made of leather never intended to shine into a gleaming glassy carapace (activities collectively referred to in army slang as ‘bull’, a contraction of ‘bullshit’).
All this is faithfully described in Ginger, You’re Barmy, but there was one episode in my experience which does not figure in the novel because it was untypical, indeed possibly unique. The effectiveness of basic training partly depends upon the recruit being deprived of liberty for the duration of the course. We were not allowed to leave Catterick camp until after our ‘passing out’ parade, when there would be a 72-hour leave which we looked forward to with inexpressible longing, and the threat of being denied it by some major failure or misdemeanour and being ‘backsquadded’ (made to do basic training again from the beginning) was the Army’s most powerful sanction for instilling obedience. But due to an ironic coincidence, I was given the unusual privilege of a weekend leave during the course.
In our first year at UCL Mary and I became acquainted with a plump, vivacious young woman a few years older than us called Avril Doyle-Davidson, who had returned to the college after a year’s absence for health reasons to complete a general arts degree. One of her subjects was English, and her father, she informed us, was a senior lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Leeds University. She was a Catholic and a member of the Catholic Society. Mary’s brother Brian, who was still looking for a job, turned up at a Cath Soc hop one evening and spent most of it dancing and flirting with Avril. Whatever sequel there was to that meeting did not last long because he had decided to rejoin the Royal Signals as a regular officer, and in due course he was sent abroad. A couple of years later he returned to England, renewed contact with Avril, wooed her and won her. A wedding was arranged to take place in Leeds on a Saturday morning in September 1955, in the middle of my basic training. Mary was to be a bridesmaid, and had put my name on the guest list. Having nothing to lose, I submitted my impressively printed invitation with an application for leave to attend the wedding and, to my surprise, it was granted – only because it was a military wedding, I’m sure, and because Brian was at that time serving with the Royal Signals in Catterick. But that he knew or approved of my being invited, I doubt.
I was given leave from Friday evening to Sunday morning. It felt great to escape the prison-like atmosphere of basic training, but the weekend was a bitter-sweet taste of freedom, and physically exhausting. Although Leeds and Richmond are both in Yorkshire, travelling between them through the night by train entailed two changes, at Darlington and York, with long hours spent on hard benches in station waiting rooms. I arrived in Leeds at about six in the morning, tired and dishevelled, and was delighted to find that the station had a facility where you could have a bath for the price of a shilling. I was its first customer, and luxuriated in a deep hot tub before getting myself some breakfast and going in search of Mary. She had had a similarly gruelling overnight journey from London, being driven in a van by her cousin Brendan, which in those pre-motorway days took eight hours or more. This arrangement was made partly for the sake of economy, and partly because she had been at work on Friday at a branch of Marks & Spencer in north London, where she was learning about the retail trade by serving behind the counter. I found her with her sister Eileen at the hotel where the Jacob family were staying, trying on their full-length bridesmaids’ dresses, made of a brick-red taffeta about which they had not been consulted and which did not become either of them. I was wearing the starkly plain khaki battledress of a new recruit not yet assigned to a regiment, with no cap badge or other insignia except for a small white felt triangle on the upper arm, reminiscent, it seemed to me, of the pink and yellow triangles homosexuals and Jews were compelled to wear by the Nazis. Nothing could have been less appropriate as a wedding garment. It was a full military wedding, attended by many of Brian’s fellow officers, resplendent in their dark blue dress uniforms, who formed a guard of honour for the bridal couple as they emerged from the Catholic cathedral under a glittering arch of drawn swords. I spent most of the occasion hiding behind pillars and skulking in corners to avoid eye contact with these men, not being sure if I was supposed to salute them, and I had the impression that they thought my presence was in bad taste and were doing their best to pretend that I didn’t exist. When the reception, held at the University, was over Mary and I had some hours alone together, and walked aimlessly about the centre of Leeds. There was nowhere to go where we could sit down except a cinema, in which we spent a few hours watching an unmemorable film before it was time for me to go sadly back to camp, and her to London. The ultimate effect of my brief escape from Catterick was to reinforce my depression at being trapped in the Army.
The fact that I was two or three years older and better educated than the average conscript helped me deal mentally with the shock treatment of basic training, but it also made me all the more dismayed by the prospect of the two years stretching ahead, in which I could see little hope of enjoying and developing the intellectual and cultural interests I had acquired at university – certainly not in the Royal Armoured Corps. At the interview with the personnel officer we all had in our first week I asked if I could apply for a transfer to the Education Corps where I thought my qualifications might be of some use, but he brusquely informed me that it was impossible because of a rule that a soldier could not transfer from a corps that was ‘senior in the line’ to one beneath it. I learned that, as a potential officer, I would take part after basic training in a series of trials and courses, of increasing duration and rigour – ‘Uzbee’ (Unit Selection Board), ‘Wozbee’ (War Office Selection Board) and the Mons Officer Training School – to determine whether I possessed the attributes required of an officer. If I was successful, I would obtain a commission, though probably not in the RAC, since the senior-in-the-line rule did not apparently apply to officers. As an officer I would enjoy a more comfortable lifestyle and escape the coarse society of the barrack room. But the more I learned about the selection process, which sounded like an inordinately long and more exacting version of basic training, though much worse in being competitive and infused with a public-school OTC ethos completely alien to me, the more convinced I became that I would fall, probably at the first hurdle and certainly at the second, for lack of both aptitude and enthusiasm. I was used to doing well in examinations. Rather than allow the military hierarchy to reject me, I decided to resign the status of potential officer.
I was fortunate in finding a kindred spirit in my intake, called Clive Rees, who had just come down from Cambridge with a BA in English, and shared my disaffection with the Army as well as an interest in literature and the arts. I showed him some of my stories and he talked about his ambition to work in films. Clive was my best friend during basic training, though we didn’t have much else in common. He was older, had led a more dissipated life as a student than I, and had an exotic family background which, he told me, included an American great-grandmother who had been raped by a Native Indian. In consequence he had some indigenous American blood in him, a claim that was supported by his complexion and features. When I told him I had decided to withdraw from being a potential officer he said he would do the same. Then to my surprise I discovered that a contem-porary of mine in the English Department at UCL had joined the 7th RTR, in the intake behind ours. Chris Woods-McConville had been an amiable but notoriously idle student who spent a great deal of time in the Union bar and failed to get an honours degree. This did not prevent him being classified as a potential officer, but after conversations with Clive and me he decided to withdraw from the cadre too. When we conveyed our wishes to the callow second lieutenant nominally in charge of our squad he took no action, hoping perhaps that we would change our minds. In due course we were paraded to appear before the 2IC (second in command) of the Regiment along with the other POs for a routine interview designed to wish us good luck with the Unit Selection Board, and had to explain to him, one by one, that we didn’t want to become officers. I was quite glad that I went first since apparently he became increasingly annoyed by this display of disrespect for the honour of a commission. After the interviews we were escorted by the grim-visaged personnel officer to another building where he typed out what was called a ‘Non-desirous’ statement, which we had to sign. Evidently it was not a common enough event to merit a printed form.
Though I felt quietly proud of inspiring this little rebellion, the alternative careers open to us in the RAC were limited. The ‘trades’ of ‘Other Ranks’ in the Royal Tank Regiment were signaller/gunner, gunner/driver, driver and clerk. Our squad had been allowed to get inside a tank one afternoon to discover what it was like, namely claustrophobic and uncomfortable, and I had no desire to repeat the experience even once. I opted for clerk, as did Clive. Chris I think chose driver. The one component of the clerk’s training that might have been useful to me was learning to touch-type properly, but there was so little time devoted to it (the whole course was only four weeks long) that we struggled to reach the very modest word-per-minute rate required, and rather than risk failing the final test I reverted to my own two-finger method, and continued to use it for the rest of my army service, and indeed my life. The rest of the course consisted of copying from a blackboard a few simple facts about army procedure which a bright schoolboy could have mastered in a morning, while the instructors, a couple of cynical and depraved-looking corporals, questioned us about our sexual experience or lack of it, and punished insolent responses by standing the culprit against a door and hurling tennis balls at him.
When the course was concluded we had a 48-hour leave, though a good many of those hours were spent on trains and the euphoria of escape from camp was soon clouded by the imminence of returning to it. We were then assigned to ‘general duties’, which meant menial tasks like shovelling coal, peeling potatoes in the cookhouse and doing the occasional guard, while we waited to be assigned and posted to a regiment in the RAC. Guard was the most irksome of these duties: first the parade and inspection, for which your kit had to be in immaculate order on penalty of a charge if it wasn’t; then the boredom and debilitating rhythm of the guard itself, recalled by the middle-aged hero of a later novel of mine, Therapy:
Two hours on, four hours off, all through the night, and all through the day too, if it was a weekend . . . snatching sleep lying on a bunk fully dressed in ankle-bruising boots and neck-chafing battledress under the glare of a naked electric light bulb, and then being roughly woken to gulp down sweetened lukewarm tea, and maybe some cold congealed eggs and baked beans, before stumbling out yawning and shivering into the night, to loiter for two hours by the barrack gates, or circle the silent shuttered huts and stores, listening to your own footsteps, watching your own shadow lengthen and shorten under the arc-lamps.
The few letters I wrote to Mary in this period that have survived seem to me now embarrassingly sententious. For instance:
So many people have sad frustrated lives because of failure or difficulty on the plane of personal relationships, that we should be very, very grateful for the key to happiness that has been thrust into our hands. Let us clutch it together, my darling and never let go. The years stretch ahead, clouded with uncertainty, doubt and arduous challenge; but only one certainty – the certainty of our love, makes the way clear and straight, even if just as difficult.
Evidently I was feeling deeply apprehensive about the likelihood of long separations from Mary over the next two years if, as was likely, I was posted abroad, probably to Germany, and I was seeking to bind us together in mutual fidelity by this high-minded rhetoric. Paradoxically, when given an opportunity to express a preference to the officer in charge of postings, I asked for the Far East, which would mean no home leave at all as long as one’s regiment was based there. My motive was to try and wring something positive out of military service by broadening my experience, seeing something of the big wide world at the Army’s expense. But what about Mary? I suppose I reasoned that if we couldn’t be together all the time perhaps it would be better not to be together at all, relying on the special nature of our relationship to endure, rather than live from one infrequent leave to another on an emotional see-saw of meeting and parting. After all, it would make no difference to the postponement of our physical union, and might even make it easier to bear. The tales of opportunities for dissipation in the fleshpots of the Orient that circulated in the camp, brought back by soldiers who had served out there, may have influenced this decision. Perhaps at the very back of my mind, scarcely acknowledged, was a Graham Greeneish fantasy that I might lose my virginity in a Hong Kong brothel, and be quickly shriven by a regimental chaplain, without real disloyalty to Mary. I decided not to tell her about my request unless and until it was granted. I was uncertain how she would react, and was relieved rather than disappointed when I was told that there were no vacancies for a clerk in the Far East.
Fate dealt me a very different posting. The sergeant in charge of the clerks’ training course had been impressed by my performance in the final examinations, and took a benevolent interest in me during the tedious weeks that followed. He had me attached to the regimental orderly room doing clerical work, which was infinitely preferable to the fatigues I had been doing. (I took the opportunity to sneak a look at my own file and read the personnel officer’s report on my first interview: ‘Educated up to university level. Thinks too much of himself.’) One day the Sergeant called me into his office and told me that an old friend who was chief clerk at the RAC Driving and Maintenance School at Bovington needed a new clerk and had asked my sergeant to send him a good one. He proposed to nominate me. I asked him where Bovington was, and he said it was in Dorset, about a hundred miles from London. A hundred miles was a comfortable distance for 48-hour leaves, and feasible for a 36. I accepted the offer gratefully. I was assigned to the Royal Tank Regiment and henceforward wore its black webbing, its cap badge with the rhomboid image of a First World War tank, and brown, red and green shoulder flashes, an iconic allusion to the regimental motto: ‘Through mud and blood to green fields beyond’, which Jonathan Browne in Ginger mentally rewrites for the National Serviceman as: ‘Through boredom and discontent to blessed civvy street beyond.’ At Bovington, however, I found ways to mitigate the boredom and discontent.
Bovington Camp is situated on the heathland between Wareham and Dorchester, in the heart of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. The depiction of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge was partly inspired by Bovington Heath. I was not then as familiar with Hardy’s fiction as I became later, when I published several essays about his novels, so I did not immediately register the connection, and the irony that Hardy’s wild and almost primeval landscape was now scarred by tank tracks, and its silence broken daily by the roar of 1,000-horsepower diesel engines. The place had another literary association which at the time meant even less to me. T.E. Lawrence had occupied an isolated cottage called Clouds Hill a mile or so from Bovington Camp, and died in an accident when speeding along the road to it on his Brough Superior motorcycle in 1935. Clouds Hill was donated to the National Trust after Lawrence’s death, but I had not read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the little I knew about Lawrence of Arabia did not draw me to visit this shrine to him until quite late in my service at Bovington, when I found it closed and could only walk round the outside. An NCO had aroused my curiosity by telling me that Lawrence had been billeted in Bovington as a soldier. I thought this must be an apocryphal version of his service in the RAF after the First World War, which I vaguely knew about, and it was not until long afterwards that I discovered the story was quite true.
Lawrence joined the Air Force under the alias of Aircraftman Ross in 1922, allegedly (there is much dispute about his motivation) to write and save his soul, undistracted by the celebrity he had acquired from his exploits in Arabia. He was compelled to leave in the following year when his cover was blown by the press, and enlisted in what was then called the Tank Corps, as Trooper Shaw, at Bovington Camp. According to his letters to various friends at this time, he was miserable there. In one of them he wrote, ‘The Army is unspeakable; more solidly animal than I believed Englishmen could be. I hate them, and the life here.’ He added: ‘and am sure it is good medicine for me’, but there was a limit to how much of it he could take. As a refuge from barrack-room life he rented the Clouds Hill cottage where, in his spare time, he read books, listened to music and worked on the second draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Although in due course he obtained what he described as a ‘cushy’ job assisting the quartermaster, Lawrence was still so unhappy after two years at Bovington that in letters to some influential friends he dropped hints of suicidal intentions, which eventually reached the Prime Minister himself, Bonar Law, securing his release from the Tanks and permission to rejoin the RAF. He purchased Clouds Hill and continued to use it as his main residence until he died. It is a fascinating story, and in one or two respects I unknowingly re-enacted it at Bovington.
Coming from the austerities of the Catterick camp, where we occupied stone-floored Nissen huts heated by a single stove, I was delighted with the superior amenities of Bovington, and wrote jubilantly to Mary shortly after my arrival:
After Catterick it is Paradise. The billets, though not affording as much privacy as I hoped for, are comfortable and centrally heated. The washroom is in the same building and there is always hot water. The canteen, NAAFI and library are within a stone’s throw of the billet. The cinema and church are 10 mins walk away. The food is good . . . I have got a good job in a very pleasant office . . . I should be able to work down here pretty well. There is a Quiet Room in the NAAFI, and I have made friends with the ‘Librarian’ and I think he will let me work there after hours. So you see, my darling I am really very lucky in my posting. The fare home is a bit more than I expected – 16 or 18 shillings. However I shall make renewed efforts to get published. I hope to be home on a 36 next weekend . . .
And there, essentially, in that letter to Mary, I mapped out my future as a conscripted soldier.
The Army had, in effect, made me an embryonic Angry Young Man, though the phrase did not come into general currency until the following year, 1956, when the press agent of the Royal Court Theatre applied it to the author of a new play called Look Back in Anger, and the media found it a convenient label for a whole new generation of English writers who in their different ways took a critical and satirical view of the state of post-war British society. John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, Arnold Wesker, Alan Sillitoe and Colin Wilson were some of the key figures. There was no common ideology uniting them. Although some were sympathetic to socialism, they were rebels rather than revolutionaries, and several of them moved to the right as they grew older. They expressed the frustration and resentment of the lower-middle- and working-class younger generation that the levelling effects of the war and the landslide victory of the Labour Party in 1945 had not fundamentally altered the distribution of power and influence in English society. There was still a self-serving Establishment which controlled opportunities and rewards, as the grammar school beneficiaries of the 1944 Education Act discovered when they left university with their good degrees in their pockets. Of all public institutions, the peacetime Army, with its rigid hierarchy of officers, NCOs and men, and its fetishistic devotion to precedence, insignia and traditions, epitomised this resistance to change very clearly. Jonathan Browne’s view of his situation was very much my own: ‘I dimly perceived that I had been wrenched out of a meritocracy, for success in which I was well qualified, and thrust into a small archaic world of privilege, for success in which I was singularly ill-endowed.’ A year later, on one of my weekend leaves, Mary and I saw the famous first production of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre, and I doubt if any member of the enthusiastic audience delighted as intensely as I in Jimmy Porter’s withering denunciations of the English Establishment – especially as represented by his wife’s ex-officer brother, Nigel.
‘Have you ever seen her brother? Brother Nigel? The straight-backed, chinless wonder from Sandhurst? . . . Well, you’ve never heard so many well-bred commonplaces come from beneath the same bowler hat. The Platitude from Outer Space – that’s brother Nigel. He’ll end up in the Cabinet one day – make no mistake. But somewhere at the back of that mind is the vague knowledge that he and his pals have been plundering and fooling everybody for generations.’
National Service had requisitioned two years of my life – two of the most interesting and exploratory years of any man’s life – and turned it into what at Catterick felt like a prison sentence for a crime I hadn’t committed, filled in prospect with repetitious, unfulfilling duties in mostly uncongenial company, the only thing to look forward to being its eventual termination. But in the relaxed atmosphere of Bovington Camp, which had no regimental identity to maintain, and in its relative proximity to London, I sensed at once the possibility of turning my situation to positive account. I would spend all my spare time from Mondays to Fridays reading and writing, try to make some money from the latter, and spend as many weekends as possible with Mary in London. If I could manage that, I thought, National Service would not be a wholly futile and tedious interruption of the life I desired.
The job I mentioned in that first letter to Mary was that of release clerk. Men from RAC units stationed all over the world who were approaching their release date were often temporarily billeted at Bovington Camp, and my work involved briefing the soldiers and issuing them with the relevant documents. There was some irony in my being given this job when my own release was so distant; but the soldiers I dealt with were very pleased to see me, and I found the work congenial. Soon, however, I was given a new position, that of PRI clerk, assisting the officer designated as President of the Regimental Institutes (i.e. responsible for the welfare and recreational facilities of the camp). He was an amiable but barely competent middle-aged officer, always carrying a riding crop and accompanied by a pair of hunting dogs, who might have stepped from the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, and had evidently been eased out of the cavalry regiment to which he belonged and put in a post where he could do least harm until he could be pensioned off. Captain Pirie (as I called him in Ginger) was also in charge of ‘Admn Squadron’, the administrative unit of the camp, so my new job entailed a move from the central orderly room to another building where I shared an office with a civilian clerk, a polite and friendly middle-aged man, and was subject to much less scrutiny than before. My work consisted mainly of keeping the PRI accounts (I learned double-entry bookkeeping from my civilian colleague), ordering various commodities from condoms to football boots for whose acquisition the PRI was responsible, and putting letters and cheques in front of Captain Pirie for him to sign. The workload was light and I was able to use the upright typewriter on my trestle-table desk for my own purposes.
Behind my back as I sat at the desk was a partitioned-off space, about six feet by twelve, known as a ‘bunk’. There was one in every barrack room, where usually a lance corporal slept, acquiring a little privacy in acknowledgement of his rank, but not much peace, since until ‘lights out’ and for some time afterwards, the air would vibrate with noises: slamming doors, booted footsteps, shouts, groans, oaths, expletives, laughter, insults, smut. The air itself was usually pretty fetid too. I had mentioned to Mary in my first letter from Bovington that the lack of privacy was the only disappointing feature of my situation. In the empty bunk behind my desk I saw a possible solution, one which would greatly facilitate my projected programme of reading and writing. After some months, and when I had established myself as honest and reliable with the officers and NCOs who mattered, I asked if I could move my bed and kit into the bunk and sleep there, thus enhancing the security of the Admn Squadron building, which contained stores as well as offices. This was a specious argument because I had no intention of sleeping there at weekends, but amazingly my request was granted. There was a toilet with washbasins just down the corridor from my office. I thus enjoyed the unusual privilege, as a trooper, of having self-contained accommodation all to myself, where I could read and write undisturbed every evening. The bunk was my Clouds Hill.
During my time at Bovington I produced two long prize-winning essays, a 20,000-word pamphlet about Catholic writers, a number of short stories, and more than half of the first draft of a novel. Both essay prizes were awarded by University College London, and named after nineteenth-century alumni: the John Oliver Hobbes Scholarship and the Quain essay prize. Both still exist, though their regulations and monetary value have changed. In my day they were open to recent graduates, and were on specified topics, which in 1955–56 happened to coincide with my own literary interests. The John Oliver Hobbes, which I won with an essay on ‘The Satirical Novel’, was worth £30 and the Quain, for which I submitted an essay on ‘The Eccentric Character in English Fiction’, was worth £50. There was not much publicity for these prizes and I gathered afterwards that I was the only candidate for the former and had only one competitor for the latter. For that I produced a substantial piece of work some 25,000 words long, spanning the history of the English novel from Fielding, Sterne and Smollett to Aldous Huxley, Ronald Firbank and Evelyn Waugh, not neglecting the influence of Cervantes.
The pamphlet About Catholic Authors was my first monograph, published by St Paul Publications, the same religious press that produced The Question Box, my sixth-form textbook, in a series called Tell Me Father, aimed at young adult Catholics. The concept was to convey information to such readers in the words of a priest responding to questions from them about a particular topic. I owed the commission to Malachy Carroll, with whom I was still in touch, and who had been asked by the Paulist fathers to suggest someone who would write on Catholic literature in this format for a flat fee of £45. The pamphlet was not published till 1958, but was written in the second year of my army service, and bears the ‘Nihil Obstat’ and ‘Imprimatur’ of the Catholic hierarchy, dated October 1957, guaranteeing freedom from heresy and incitement to immorality – the only one of my publications to be thus approved. It was a new venture and only two other titles were commissioned along with mine: Tell Me Father About Living and Tell Me Father About Confession, neither of which was available to me as a model, so I invented my own fictional frame: a bored National Serviceman asks the priest who had taught him at school to suggest some books by Catholic writers he should read, and the rest of the pamphlet consists of the priest’s letters in response. I covered a huge amount of ground in its 64 pages: fiction, poetry, history, biography, even theology, from St Augustine and Chaucer to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and cited scores of books, some of which I had read about rather than read. I took the opportunity to plug Malachy Carroll’s work, and had a diplomatic kind word for The Question Box. By this time I had informed the University of London, of my intention to take up its postgraduate scholarship in the academic year beginning September 1957, and the subject I wanted to study was the development of a distinctively Catholic contribution to English literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so researching and writing this pamphlet was useful preparation for that project. I have no memory of how I managed to get hold of the books I needed for all this writing; presumably I brought them back to camp from home and the Deptford public library on my frequent leaves.
The novel I started writing at Bovington was not about the Army, though it had a National Serviceman among its minor characters, and was not published until 1960, so I will discuss it later. Of the short stories I wrote in this period, the only ones I got published were of a rather pietistic type that found a home in Catholic family magazines published by religious orders who paid me a few pounds for them. But they helped towards the cost of travelling to and from London, where I spent nearly every weekend. I was entitled to a monthly 48-hour pass and on other weekends I was free to absent myself from midday Saturday to early Monday morning unless I was down to do guard duty. I travelled by coach since it was cheaper than the train and my pay at the beginning of my service was only £1 a week. Later I applied to take trade tests for two higher grades of clerk, studying the Manual of Military Law and other set texts on my own, passing with ease, and consequently adding first one stripe and then two to my uniform, and several pounds to my weekly pay.
There was a regular private coach service from the camp to London on Fridays and Saturdays which I used until I met a trooper with a wealthy father who had given him an Austin saloon in which he ferried three or four passengers back and forth to London for a reasonable fee. Either way, it meant arriving back at the camp in the early hours of Monday morning and making do with a few hours’ sleep, but it was worth it. If it was a 36 weekend, I would go straight to the Marks & Spencer in Turnpike Lane where Mary and the other counter staff would be checking their stock to make sure it tallied with the week’s sales, and wait outside the closed doors until she was released.
She was obliged to work on Saturdays, the busiest day of the week for shops, and when I had a 48-hour leave it was frustrating to have to spend most of that day on my own. So I was pleased for that reason, among others, when Mary decided after nearly a year in the M&S graduate training scheme that the retail business was not for her. Though she was being trained for personnel management, and M&S had a name for looking after its employees’ health and welfare, it became evident to Mary that this was only in order to make them more efficient and thus generate more profit for the firm. She had no natural instinct or enthusiasm for business and decided to take up teaching instead, the profession of her mother and sister Eileen (and in due course of every other sibling, including Brian when he retired from the Army). In those days an honours degree was an accepted qualification for teaching in state schools, and Mary had no difficulty in finding a job in a comprehensive school, though she prudently enrolled in a part-time course leading to a Postgraduate Certificate of Education while she was in post. Teaching was her true métier, but the year with Marks & Spencer was by no means wasted. It gave her invaluable knowledge of the world of work that most of her pupils would eventually enter, and also some eye-opening knowledge of the lives and preoccupations of working-class women.
In that respect it was a parallel experience to my army service, which showed me aspects of English society that I might not otherwise have been exposed to, and I was aware that this was useful to an aspiring novelist. My grudge was that it went on for so long, much longer than was necessary for what one learned from it – from a military point of view, as well as my own. A minority of National Servicemen had an interesting and fulfilling time. Some had a genuine enthusiasm for soldiering and exercised it in exotic places, while others found opportunities to employ their abilities usefully or acquire new ones. There was, for instance, a privileged cadre including several famous literary names, like Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn, who were selected to learn Russian in the Intelligence Corps, and spent most of their two years at Cambridge in agreeable anticipation or continuation of their undergraduate lives. But for the vast majority it was predominantly two years of servitude and boredom. The periods of training we received were ridiculously brief in duration: my basic training was only five weeks long, and a couple of sessions on the shooting range were the only occasions when I fired a gun throughout my service. The process of making us into soldiers could have been accomplished much more efficiently in six months of intensive training, and the only reason for keeping us in uniform for two years was to have a cheap standing army. The rhythm of life encouraged idleness and apathy, what was called ‘skiving’, and this had a demoralising effect on regular soldiers as well as the conscripts. From what I observe of the fully professional British Army today, mainly from television reporting and documentaries, it is a much more efficient and effective force than it was then – and less class-conscious.
There were two, almost simultaneous, political events in the autumn of 1956 which put my situation temporarily in a new perspective: the popular revolt against the Soviet-backed Communist regime in Hungary, which began on 23rd October and was crushed by Russian tanks by 7th November; and the Suez crisis, which lasted from late October to late November, when Britain joined with France, in secret collusion with Israel, to try to wrest back control of the Suez Canal after the Egyptian President Nasser had nationalised it. A joint Anglo-French military operation was mounted, involving bombing, paratroops and a seaborne invasion of Egypt. Suddenly, being a soldier in the British Army seemed a real and serious matter, even in the sleepy backwater of Bovington, as men on training courses and some members of the permanent staff were recalled to their regiments. Since I did not belong to any particular battalion of the RTR I was in little danger of being caught up in the action, and in any case it was all over very quickly, as Britain and France withdrew from Egypt under pressure from the United Nations. This misconceived and mismanaged adventure was a political disaster, the true scale of which would take some time to become apparent, but it dismayed many British people while it was happening, for reasons eloquently expressed by the Liberal politician Lady Violet Bonham Carter in a letter to The Times:
I am one of the millions who watching the martyrdom of Hungary and listening yesterday to the transmission of her agonizing appeals for help (immediately followed by our ‘successful bombings’ of Egyptian ‘targets’) have felt a humiliation, shame and anger which are beyond expression . . . We cannot order Soviet Russia to obey the edict of the United Nations which we ourselves have defied, nor to withdraw her tanks and guns from Hungary while we are bombing and invading Egypt.
British Catholics identified strongly with this point of view. We had been brought up to regard Soviet Communism as the enemy of our faith and the Church. Every Sunday throughout the cold war there were prayers at the end of mass for ‘the conversion of Russia’ (whether to Roman Catholicism or to the Orthodox faith which most Russians historically practised was never made clear). We felt a special identification with the Hungarian people because of the heroic figure of their leading Catholic prelate, Cardinal Mindszenty, who had been imprisoned twice for protesting against the oppression of his country, first by Nazism and then by Soviet Communism, and was briefly freed in the Revolution of 1956.
One weekend in the midst of these momentous events, dressed as always when on leave in civilian clothes, I accompanied Mary to a big demonstration in Hyde Park in support of the embattled Hungarians organised by students of the University of London. A speaker appealed for volunteers to join a party which intended to join the struggle. ‘All you need is to know how to handle a gun,’ he said. It occurred to me that even if I were a free agent and reckless enough to volunteer, my two dimly remembered sessions on the Catterick shooting range would not be of much use. Later I read in a newspaper that about twenty students had made their way to Hungary but were turned back at the border. Cardinal Mindszenty was soon forced to take refuge in the US Embassy in Budapest and spent the next fifteen years there, a prisoner once again, and something of an embarrassment to his Western protectors. Years after doing National Service I met Chris Woods-McConville by chance, and learned that he had been part of the task force that invaded Egypt from Cyprus, as the driver of some kind of support vehicle. He said he was terrified throughout the operation, and deeply relieved when it was called off. I believed him. No soldier’s death would have been more futile.
The year turned, and the end of my National Service became imaginable in sharper focus. Counting the months turned into counting the weeks, and then days. Clive Rees, who was due for release at the same time, turned up at Bovington for that purpose. He did not seem to have changed much: still quietly spoken, laconic, still nursing an ambition to be a filmmaker.1 He had spent an uneventful two years with a tank regiment in northern Germany – at least I can’t remember anything specific he said about it, except that one night when he was doing a guard it was so cold that he cried, and he dropped some hints of a louche off-duty lifestyle. He suggested that we should celebrate our imminent release by going into Poole one evening, getting drunk and picking up a couple of girls – he had already ascertained that they were easily found in the harbour-front pubs. I declined, regretting anew that we could never be real friends because of our incompatibility in this respect. I had a different kind of celebration planned, a holiday in Spain with Mary and a couple of college friends, as soon as I was free.
1 He should not be confused (as he is on some internet websites) with the younger Clive Rees who directed When the Whales Came and other movies. At some point in the 1960s I ran into my Clive on a Soho pavement and we chatted briefly. He was working in the film industry, but directed only one film, called The Blockhouse (1973), based on a true story of the Second World War about a group of foreign slave workers in German-occupied France, who were trapped at the end of the war in a concrete bunker and remained there undiscovered for several years, dying one by one. Surprisingly, it starred Peter Sellers. It was shown at some film festivals to appreciative audiences, but panned by critics and never widely released. Sadly, this failure apparently prevented Clive from getting another opportunity to direct.