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National Service Writing

This enormous social upheaval has passed unnoticed into history. Where are the novels, the poetry, the films of National Service?

John Boorman, Adventures of a Suburban Boy (2003)

A writer’s job is to remember for everybody … better than they can remember for themselves.

David Baxter, Two Years to Do (1959)

John Boorman is right to say that national service has not left the kind of cultural residue that is associated with, say, the Algerian War in France or the Vietnam War in America. It is not, however, true that there are no novels, poems or films about national service. The first national service novel – The Dead, the Dying and the Damned – was published by John Hollands in 1956 and the most recent one – Heroes of the Hook, also by John Hollands – in 2013. In between there have been autobiographical novels by David Lodge, Alan Sillitoe, Andrew Sinclair, Leslie Thomas, Gordon Williams and Christopher Wood, as well as a novelistic autobiography by David Baxter.¹ There have been at least four plays, three films and two television comedy series about national service. In addition to this, national service is often dealt with in the autobiographies of eminent men and is the subject of numerous memoirs, often privately published, by those who are not well known.

Writing assumed particular importance for national servicemen. Sending letters home provided them with a sense of association to the outside world at a time when they frequently felt lonely and scared – though they often sought to hide their loneliness and fear from their families when they wrote. Writing autobiographical accounts could be a form of therapy for men who were haunted by the memories of their national service experience. John Hollands believed that the catharsis of writing about Korea helped him to keep his sanity when he returned from the battlefield.² Even for men who never saw active service, writing was sometimes easier than talking. One national service airman told an interviewer that he found it easier to read aloud his memoir of being in the psychiatric ward of a military hospital than to answer her questions.³

In some ways, the problem for the historian is not the absence of writing by national servicemen, but its abundance. So many conscripts have written about their experience in terms that they partly derived from their own reading that, as some national service writers came to admit, they themselves found it hard to dig out the real experience from underneath the layers of literary representation. Alan Sillitoe reckoned that he had reworked the same material about his military service in fourteen different accounts – ranging from articles that he wrote straight after coming out of the air force in 1949, through a novel of 1961 to his autobiography in 1995. In 2000, however, he told an interviewer preparing a radio programme on national service that they would have to go back to sources before ‘a certain literary stereotype developed’.⁴

The first way in which the literary conventions of national service writing can deceive us is by suggesting that the armed forces were always inimical to the written word. Educated conscripts often portrayed themselves as having been isolated among the philistine horde of their semi-literate comrades. William Donaldson, a national service naval officer between Winchester and Oxford, wrote of his basic training: ‘They had never seen someone read a book before. They were like natives watching a white man shave.’⁵ Michael Holroyd, a national service army officer between Eton and becoming a full-time writer, wrote that ‘only in Anthony Howard [the journalist] did I find someone for whom books were a part of life’.⁶ These judgements were unfair. Holroyd and Howard were not only allowed to read and write but actively encouraged to do so by their commanding officer, Brigadier Bernard Fergusson, who was himself an author of military history. Furthermore, the soldier-servant whose services Holroyd and Howard shared, a working-class private, read Simenon and Kerouac in his time off from polishing shoes and pressing uniforms.⁷ As for Donaldson, national service naval officers were required to read and write and, in particular, to keep a journal. Some long-suffering lieutenant commander would read these journals, correct spelling, suppress redundant words (men who had been trained to prepare signals for transmission by semaphore valued concision)⁸ and laugh out loud when a nineteen-year-old who had read too much D. H. Lawrence compared a shoreline to ‘the swell of a woman’s breasts’.

National servicemen belonged to a bookish generation. They had grown up after Allen Lane’s paperbacks democratized reading and at a time, particularly during the war, when there were not many other forms of distraction. Regular soldiers and airmen were less educated than conscripts, but they read slightly more.⁹ Even semi-literate soldiers were sometimes enthusiastic about books.¹⁰ Servicemen, especially regulars, read thrillers and, most of all, westerns – one thinks of the sergeant in The Third Man who admires Death at Double X Ranch. ‘Modern novels’, by contrast, were read by a small, but significant, proportion of conscripts.¹¹

Even during the hellish chaos of basic training, some men managed to snatch a few minutes with a book: ‘read us a bi’ said P. J. Kavanagh’s scouse comrades as he lay on his bed in Catterick with a French translation of Kafka.¹² Once training was over, vistas of unfilled time opened up before many conscripts. A radar operator on night shift in Germany might spend two hours checking his equipment and then, unless the Red Army attacked, have nothing but reading, and writing letters, to distract him until morning. Alan Sillitoe, who had left school at fourteen and whose father was illiterate, had encountered almost no adult books when he joined the RAF. The enforced idleness of thirty-one days on a troopship to Malaya introduced him to reading,¹³ and, on his first night in a radio operator’s hut, he noticed that his predecessor had left a copy of Balzac’s Droll Stories lying on the table.¹⁴ By the end of the year, he had read thirty-six books, recording their titles in his radio logbook. Sixteen months in a military hospital – he had caught TB in Malaya – meant yet more reading, and, by the time he finished Cakes and Ale on the train home, he had decided to become a writer himself.

Getting books was easy. Battered paperbacks were passed around the barracks. Men who were posted overseas bought cheaply printed editions. A scholarly soldier might pick up ‘the new Pelican on Confucianism’¹⁵ from a Tamil bookseller in Singapore. Men passing through Port Said would buy a cheaply printed edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,¹⁶ along with half a dozen dirty postcards and a fake leather handbag for their mother. Many bases had their own libraries,¹⁷ which provided a refuge from the noise and promiscuity of the NAAFI. One conscript reckoned that the library of the training camp at Oswestry contained 7,000 volumes.¹⁸ Men in garrisons around the world found libraries that could get them quite a long way into an undergraduate reading list.¹⁹

Some always intended to use military service for literary purposes and the number of men who kept diaries or letters with a view to writing books was greater than the number who eventually published anything on the subject. Young men of the 1950s knew how previous writers – Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, George Orwell – had turned encounters with violence and squalor into literature. Some of them regarded military service as a source of ‘experience’ about which they could write. John Hollands volunteered for service in Korea to provide him with raw material for his first novel.²⁰ Karl Miller had already written an army short story before he was even called up and looked forward to ‘mooning by a Nissen hut with a book in my hand’.²¹ Malcolm Barker had been a journalist in Brighton before his national service. He kept a diary ‘with the idea of one day writing a book’.²² Peter Duffell was also a trainee journalist in the late 1950s. He actively sought to get called up at a time when national service was beginning to taper off. He did so for partly literary reasons: ‘I simply saw national service as an opportunity for travel and to gain material for these wonderful novels that I was going to write.’ Duffell liked the army so much that he joined the Gurkhas (having been attracted to the regiment by reading John Masters’ autobiography Bugles and a Tiger), stayed on and became a lieutenant general.²³ J. M. Lee was excused military service on medical grounds in 1949 but he kept letters from his friends in the armed forces partly because, as he later put it: ‘I had a plan at the time to write on the Oxford/National Service/provincial grammar school boy theme.’²⁴

Peter Burke was an extreme example of the bookish national serviceman – his father had been a bookseller and Burke fils would, eventually, become professor of cultural history at Cambridge University. He kept a diary during his service as a pay clerk in Singapore. The diary is partly a book about books: ‘Usual day: Galileo, Gide’;²⁵ ‘Rain, Rimbaud’.²⁶ Burke also wrote about writing. He reflected on how he might record his experience. He flirted with the idea of writing an autobiographical novel about his service and repeatedly wrote about how he might use his letters – ‘predominantly extrovert’ – and his diary – ‘introvert’ and ‘a sketch of mental landscape’ – to provide material for the novel.²⁷ References to the ‘unwritten novel of Army life’²⁸ and the ‘shadow novel’²⁹ came to permeate the diary.

Even national servicemen with no literary ambitions wrote. They were posted away from home at a time when letters provided the only means of keeping in touch with their families. Illiterate conscripts would often ask their friends in the barrack room to write something to their parents or girlfriends – a process that sometimes gave the designated scribe an insight into the life of the lumpen proletariat.

Some men wrote home on almost every day of their service and left caches of hundreds of letters. Vocabulary changed in revealing ways. ‘Mummy’ became ‘mum’ or ‘mother’. Men who were on their way to wars in which they would kill and risk death sometimes wrote home in the same terms that they must have used since prep school: ‘the food on board is simply wizard’.³⁰ Many tried to spare parents from knowing the worst details of what was happening to them. On 23 August 1950, men of the Middlesex Regiment heard that they were to be posted from Hong Kong to Korea. After a chip sandwich and a mug of tea, they made out their will forms and wrote to their parents: ‘the composition intended to allay any suspicions at home that we were in any danger’.³¹

Letters from the front line often played down danger. An officer added a brief note to a letter from Korea at Christmas 1951: ‘p.s. we had a bit of a battle yesterday.’³² Trying to recapture his experience of Korea, Robert Gomme recalled: ‘Reading my letters home is disappointing. My parents were so sure that I would be killed that I was careful not to worry them with any mention of the war.’³³ An officer in the marines, about to go into action at Suez, wrote his parents a letter that was designed to ‘give something to take a line from if I was killed’.³⁴ Some letters were deliberate works of fiction. Officers, some of them nineteen-year-old national servicemen, had to write to the parents of men who were killed. The letters – with their stock phrases about how the victim ‘must have died instantly’ – were, as one national service officer recalled, easier to write if you did not know the man concerned well.³⁵

Many men drew on their letters to write later accounts of their national service – some of them were already conscious that their letters would, one day, serve as an autobiographical aide-memoire when they first wrote them’.³⁶ Other men came upon old letters that they had not looked at for years and the uncertainties that sprang from this rediscovery are themselves interesting. At the age of sixty-five, P. J. Houghton-Brown found a collection of undated letters that he had written to his mother when he was a national serviceman from 1955 to 1957. He scoured them for glimpses of his experience as an officer with the Wiltshire Regiment in Cyprus and added some notes from his own memory. However, he wrote: ‘Normally if you set out to write something you have some thought before you start as to where it will all end up, but in this I have no idea. Will memory feed memory?’ Houghton-Brown did not always recall the incidents recounted in his letters and does not always seem to have felt that he had much in common with his nineteen-year-old self – though, unlike many veterans, he did not censor his letters before depositing them in an archive. Most striking of all is an absence from the letters to his mother:

There is no record, for some unknown reason, of the worst thing that happened to affect me personally. I wondered why I had not got my usual cup of tea one morning, only to find my Batman had been shot dead while on patrol that night … We never found who did it. I remember so well the funerals, the coffins, it was all very poignant. I found it difficult to write the letters [i.e. the letters to the families of the dead men].³⁷

Many national servicemen kept diaries, an activity that fitted in well with an obsessive desire to tick off days of service. It is tempting to say that the diary – contemporaneous and apparently written for no one but the author – is the most ‘authentic’ form of national service writing. Certainly some diaries seem to capture the full tedium of military life. One airman recorded the exact menu for many of his meals.³⁸ The most banal aspects of a diary can be revealing. F. N. E. Starkey made regular entries through his school days, his training as a solicitor’s clerk and then during his national service in the RAF. Starkey’s own language changed during his service. Early in basic training he referred to ‘bullshit’ in inverted commas, then, as the profanity of military life stamped itself into him, he used the word without inverted commas. Finally, when he moved into the comparatively civilized world of a clerical unit, he used the word ‘bull’.³⁹

Diaries are not, however, as simple as they seem at first glance. Not all of them were written up every day and few of them, at least very few of those that eventually reached the historian, were written without some thought of how a reader might respond to them. Many men – especially those on active service – made entries several weeks after the events described. Some diaries were deposited in archives only after their authors had typed them up and, often, edited them.

National service pushed a few young men into literary composition because those who claimed to have conscientious objection to military service usually produced brief essays setting out their objections for the benefit of the tribunal that adjudicated on such matters. These often drew on published writers – Michael Randle’s was a ‘rehash of Aldous Huxley’.⁴⁰ The playwright Harold Pinter produced a piece that referred to ‘Jesus Christ, the great mystics and the Dostoevsky’.⁴¹ Later he also produced a fictionalized account of his confrontation with the military authorities – telling his biographer that he had refused to ‘hide under the convenient shelter of pacifist or religious principles’ and that he had stood up to ‘colonels and major generals’ on the tribunal.⁴²

So far as published work was concerned, the pattern of national service writing changed over time in revealing ways. The earliest books and articles were written by well-connected men from privileged backgrounds, usually those who had the contacts needed to get published at an early age. Two of the first national service authors, Tom Stacey and Andrew Sinclair, were Etonians.⁴³ As time went on, national service authors became more plebeian. The characteristic author/hero – Baxter, Lodge, Thomas – was now a pay clerk rather than a guards officer.

Increasingly, such authors were likely to identify themselves as ‘angry young men’.⁴⁴ David Lodge, discussing his own national service novel, remarked that the ‘angry young man’ tag was attractive because it could be applied to both ‘fictional characters and their authors’. Lodge identified the characteristics of the angry young man’s writing as:

gritty realism, exact observation of class and regional differences in British society, a lower-middle or working-class perspective, anti-establishment attitudes, hostility to all forms of cant and pretentiousness, a fondness for first-person, confessional narrative technique.⁴⁵

The national service writer himself became a literary stereotype. Cecil Blacker, an intelligent man but one who affected the manner of the caricature cavalry officer, commanded a training depot for the Royal Armoured Corps at Catterick, the camp in which Lodge’s novel is partly set. Blacker wrote:

Catterick camp in North Yorkshire in the 1950s was the perfect background for the plays which have appeared on television about the horrors of National Service and iniquities of the army generally. The writers had usually failed as soldiers and become embittered; many had tried for commissions and been found wanting. The icy Nissen huts with their stone floors and coke stoves, the bleak east wind and driving rain which whistled round them, the brown-grey monotony of the landscape and the general ghastliness of the camp in those days must have been manna from heaven to these authors as, many years later, they dipped their pens in bile and began to write.⁴⁶

Professional writers, or men who were on their way to being professional writers, came to dominate accounts of national service. This was true even of collected works that claimed to provide representative samples of national service experience. The collection of memoirs of the ‘call-up’ edited by Peter Chambers and Amy Landreth contained one account, presumably ghost-written, by an illiterate and eight by men who were ‘ordinary’ in the sense that they had not attended university and had, in most cases, left school at fourteen. However, there were also two essays by men who had already, in their twenties, published books, one by ‘one of the more intelligently vociferous young journalists in Fleet Street today’ and one by Peter Wiles, who had been born into a working-class family but edited Isis at Oxford and ‘hoped eventually to live by his writing’.⁴⁷

The collection also contained at least one essay by someone whose own self-depiction was a kind of fiction. The biographical notes on John S. Bingham said that he was from Yorkshire – ‘I have lived in Sheffield all my life … and I like it very much’ – that he was the product of a ‘sturdy northern grammar school’ and a ‘family of publicans’, and that he hoped to pursue a career in commerce.⁴⁸ Readers of this account might have been surprised to learn that Bingham had also been a fashionable figure at Oxford (an ‘Isis idol’) who had written a number of short stories.⁴⁹ Another collection, edited by the novelist B. S. Johnson in 1973, consisted of accounts by, or about, twenty-five men of the national service generation, of whom ten might be described as being professional writers – several more were artists or worked in films.⁵⁰

Young men seeking to make a reputation were concerned with the style and form of their work and aware too of the ways in which their writing might fit in with that of writers they admired. The narrator of Ginger, You’re Barmy – who is, like the author of the book, a graduate in English literature – writes a ‘prologue’ in which he says that his initial intention had been to write a purely factual account but that he has been influenced by ‘the insinuations of form’ to produce something more artful and contrived. Lodge himself then wrote an ‘afterword’ to the 1982 edition of his novel, in which he discussed his literary influences and suggested, in particular, that Graham Greene’s The Quiet American had affected his novel. David Baxter’s Two Years to Do was published while Baxter was still an undergraduate, reading English literature and much taken with such matters as the different types of irony in the work of Gibbon.

Most significantly, accounts of national service often blurred the lines between fact and fiction. All writing is partly factual in that no writer can describe anything without drawing on their experience, and almost all writing is partly fictional in that it always involves an element of artifice. Writing about national service, however, presented a particularly striking example of these blurred lines. Other military experiences have evoked ‘pure fiction’: Sebastian Faulks, born in 1953, has written novels about the First World War and the French Resistance; Alexis Jenni, born in 1963, won the prix Goncourt in 2011 for a novel about the French wars of decolonization (from 1945 to 1962). However, as far as I know, no national service novel has been written by anyone who was not a national serviceman.

If no account of national service was entirely fictional, no account was entirely factual either. Peacetime conscripts often regarded their years in the armed forces as crushingly dull and assumed that their stories could be rendered readable only if they were in some way embroidered. Sometimes the consequences of this embroidery can be found in the oddest places. The entry in the Dictionary of National Biography on the publisher John Blackwell contains the following passage:

The details of Blackwell’s military service are clouded in a certain amount of mystery, which he himself encouraged rather than dispelled. It is known that he was trained as a coder, and took a course in Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists at Crail, Fife. At some point in his naval career he was stationed in Turkey, monitoring Russian radio traffic in the Black Sea region, a clandestine operation from which he had to be hastily airlifted by the American military in circumstances that remain obscure. According to family tradition John did not take his intelligence duties altogether seriously, and claimed to have recorded Russian radio programmes for children at half speed and sent them to the Admiralty for analysis.⁵¹

One suspects that Blackwell, sociable and fond of a drink, had told this anecdote so many times that he had come to believe it and, perhaps, also that the author of his DNB entry, David Lodge, had added an imaginative twist to the tale. Lodge wrote of his own novel: ‘the need for a fictional story was self-evident since my own national service experience was almost totally devoid of narrative interest’.⁵²

National servicemen were often conscious of the fine line between fact and fiction in what they wrote. Alan Burns wrote a ‘memoir’ of national service in the first person, though it was in fact about his brother Peter. Alan explained: ‘I tell his story rather than my own for two reasons: my novel Buster covered the same ground so effectively (for me) that I am now unable to disentangle fact from fiction; and Peter’s story is better than mine.’⁵³ Some subjects were easier to approach if camouflaged as fiction. The Conservative politician John Nott broke out of his conventional autobiographical account of national service to include a short story that he had written about a young officer who begins to feel ‘the stirrings of manhood, buried under a Prussian public-school training of eighteen years’.⁵⁴

The frontiers between fact and fiction were particularly porous in the works of those writers – usually men from relatively humble backgrounds – who took longest to get published and who consequently rewrote their material repeatedly. Peter Nichols wrote his play about national service – Privates on Parade – in the early 1970s but he had begun to record his own experience when he first set out as a passenger on a converted Liberator bomber on a frosty morning in late 1945:

I’d decided to send home two parallel accounts of my life abroad; on one hand personal letters with news, gossip and appeals for cash, on the other a properly-written diary, sent piece by piece, a vivid account of my great adventure. Sadly, it is the last that survives. Though jotted down in pen or pencil on whatever paper came to hand, it is clearly meant to be a literary composition, eighty-seven chapters, each with its snappy title – the first ‘Tense present’, the last ‘Prologue.’ The tone changes over the two years and four months but only superficially. Reading it now, one longs for more facts, fewer purple passages.⁵⁵

Nichols began his career as a writer while he was serving with the air force. His first fiction was to adopt the pseudonym of Gene Maxwell. It was designed to sound American – like Eugene O’Neill – and might have been an attempt to distance himself from those English writers – Maugham, Coward, Rattigan – who still cast their shadow over his own style. He later noted that one character in his play Privates on Parade had been based on a real man but one whose ‘reality had been blurred by several attempts to write him down’.⁵⁶

Arnold Wesker’s play Chips with Everything was finally performed in 1962 but drew on an unpublished novel he had written soon after leaving the air force in 1952, which, in turn, drew on his letters. Interviewed in 1970, Wesker described the process thus:

Certainly the characters are drawn from characters in the novel, who are drawn from characters in the Air Force. I’d decided that I was going to write something about square-bashing and so every day I wrote home a long letter to a friend or relative and asked them to keep it and then I assembled them all at the end in chronological order and from those letters created the novel.⁵⁷

In his autobiography, published in 1994, Wesker described a scene in the play and the incident in his own national service on which the scene was based. He then added: ‘I’m using these extracted, highly stylized scenes as autobiographical stand-ins. I’m not even sure if such a scene took place between me and my Scottish hut-mate whose real name was Bill – or whether it was a conversation with myself. Art and experience – the boundaries become blurred.’⁵⁸

Perhaps because national service so often went with a sense of artificiality and performance, theatre was an important element in its recollection. Peacetime conscription coincided with an exciting period in British theatre. During the 1950s, young writers – most notably John Osborne – set themselves up in conscious opposition to the traditionalism of men such as Terence Rattigan, whose plays had often seemed to celebrate military patriotism.

The most privileged and educated national servicemen went to the theatre and understood something about the changes going on it – a candidate for a naval commission in 1956 gave his assessors a mini lecture on ‘London theatre’ that included references to Jean Anouilh.⁵⁹ A larger group went to the cinema: one conscript reckoned that he saw 300 films in the course of his service.⁶⁰ Many British films in the 1950s were just plays projected onto a screen, and works by Coward and Rattigan were quickly translated to the cinema. Some men understood their military service in theatrical terms. They realized that much of service life involved, in one way or another, ‘putting on a show’. ‘Performances’ in the forces could be as funny, and as sinister, as the absurdist plays at the Royal Court. One conscript remembered the ceremony with which Colonel Willie Officer (it was his real name) greeted recruits. They marched into the depot cinema to find:

The band playing the corps march while the curtains slowly drew back to reveal the colonel standing in the middle of the stage on what looked like a large soap box with the Union Jack draped on it. After his rousing address of welcome, the ‘finale’ consisted of playing the National Anthem while the curtains slowly closed in front of the spot-lit colonel standing at the salute on his box.⁶¹

Public school boys often remarked smugly on the ways in which team games or the Officer Training Corps had prepared them for life as an officer but a couple of the shrewder ones (including one who later became a general) said that the most useful aspect of their education had, in fact, been the school play.⁶² At one point, national service officer cadets were shown an old training film in which David Niven played the ‘good officer’ and Peter Ustinov was the ‘bad private’.⁶³ A national serviceman remarked that officers assembling to conduct a court martial looked ‘like something out of Carrington VC’ – a film that had used national servicemen as extras.⁶⁴

Theatre sometimes implied a degree of comedy, and writing about national service was often intended to be comic. Indeed, the notion that national service ought to be funny came to dominate many memoirs and perhaps even memories. A former conscript who was asked by an interviewer whether he had any ‘funny stories’ about national service replied: ‘I suppose it was all a funny story.’⁶⁵ Jeff Nuttall – who became famous as an artist and organizer of ‘happenings’ – describes his military service as ‘funny, ludicrous, archaic … And it was all still funny.’ It ceased briefly to be amusing when he saw his first example of real brutality but then it became a ‘kind of majestic farce’. He laughed when a squaddie was left out standing to attention in the cold until he almost passed out and he laughed when a naive private was persuaded that he was about to be shot and told to write a last letter to his girlfriend. Lewis – a ‘high-grade mongol who should never have got into the army’ – was locked in the cellar to keep him out of the way during a parade. ‘Lonely and frightened in his dark cellar’, Lewis tried to hang himself with a piece of string but the string broke. The sergeant told him: ‘Good job for you you’re so fuckin’ thick.’ And ‘Everybody, including Lewis, laughed about the incident for days.’⁶⁶

The most important films and television programmes about national service were comedies. Carry on Sergeant, which appeared in 1958, was the first and most innocent of the long Carry On series of British films. It was filmed at a real army camp. One hard-bitten real-life sergeant, a veteran of the Second World War, shouted at a private to put his beret on properly and received the reply: ‘I’m with the film crew duckie.’⁶⁷ It also featured some actors who had been national servicemen: Kenneth Williams was both an actor in Carry on Sergeant and a model for one of the characters in Privates on Parade. The Army Game, which described the fate of conscripts, was aired on British television from 1957 until 1961. Get Some In!, about conscripts in the RAF, was shown on ITV from 1975 to 1978.

The end of national service coincided with the beginning of the cultural era known as ‘the Sixties’, which actually lasted from about 1963 until about 1973. This was a period marked by a self-consciously irreverent attitude towards the British establishment, class system, patriotism and history (evident in the satirical reviews of the early 1960s, especially Beyond the Fringe, and in Private Eye magazine) and by the rise of youth culture and the kind of rock music that began with the Beatles. National servicemen were sometimes part of the culture of the time but they seem to have felt that their military experience would not fit easily into the new world they inhabited – most of them either ignored it or played it for laughs.

Those who had already written about national service turned away from their subject. Chips with Everything was Arnold Wesker’s least favourite play. David Baxter was aware that there was something archaic about his own book on the subject, Two Years to Do, almost as soon as it appeared. He had been prompted to write it by a publisher and it attracted considerable attention from people older than himself – it was reviewed in national newspapers and he was interviewed, along with an irate brigadier, on television. However, student newspapers at Cambridge, where Baxter was still an undergraduate, barely mentioned the book, and Baxter himself moved on to other things.⁶⁸ David Lodge occasionally referred to national service in his later novels but the references became brief and dismissive as though Lodge himself was bored with the subject: ‘I have described it in detail elsewhere. So have others. It is always the same.’⁶⁹

By the early 1980s, national service was a non-subject for most professional authors. Books about it were published but there was an increasing sense that it was not the kind of topic that serious writers ought to deal with. Stanley Price wrote novels, stories, plays and film scripts, but his television play about his own national service experience and his relationship with his commanding officer, Archibald Wavell, was never performed.⁷⁰ He composed a chapter entitled ‘The Fucking Army’ for his autobiography but it was removed at the request of the publisher so that the published version has just a few pages on national service, squeezed between school and Cambridge.⁷¹

The disappearance of national service from published books by well-known professional authors does not mean that it has vanished as a subject for all writers. Many national service memoirs have appeared since the 1990s. Retirement, the wish to explain their lives to grandchildren and the rise of desktop publishing encouraged a generation of men to write about their youth.

Some recent national service memoirs revolve around a comparison between the ‘present day’ and the apparently more innocent era of national service. Occasionally it seems as though the angry young men, who resented everything that happened during national service, have been replaced by angry old men, who resent everything that has happened since they left the forces. Berwick Coates published a book in 2009 that was intended as an explicit riposte to the most prominent national service writers of the early 1960s. He presented himself as ‘an alternative voice to those “literary forces” that have a propensity to focus on the bad parts’ and argued:

Firstly, that those vociferous, intellectual critics might be wrong. Secondly, that the abiding impression about national service that has reached us has been conditioned, even totally shaped, by the memories of those very critics, for the simple reason that they were the ones who got into print, into the newspapers, on the radio, and on to the box.

He described his own background thus:

It was the 1950s. A respectable suburban house. No teenage purchasing power. No Top of the Pops. No school counsellors pushing stuff into your head about ‘talking things through’. No politicians droning on about a children’s charter … ‘Young people’ didn’t exist. The world had barely got used to the term ‘teenager’.⁷²

‘Shiner’ Wright in his memoir of national service in the navy – Jack Strop, VD and Scar – writes:

I’m gonna tell yer a story of how it was in the Royal Navy of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. Days when life was simpler. Days when being gay didn’t mean being a ‘fairy’. ‘The Glory Days’, before the roof fell in, when our, now floundering, country was known as Great Britain, respected throughout the world … Yes, a time before decimalization, inflation, greed, laziness, drugs, AIDS, political correctness, racism and now, thanks to our leader, terrorism.⁷³

‘Political correctness’ is often deployed to explain the difference between the ‘present day’ (i.e. some point since 1990) and the period of national service.⁷⁴ A national service medical officer attached to the Black Watch remarked that that ‘pernicious corrosion (political correctness)’ would now prevent the tying of a well-known ‘Cypriot sympathizer’ to a jeep.⁷⁵ An officer who served in Kenya told an interviewer: ‘They were all dead by the time we’d finished with them. You didn’t capture too many Mau Mau; a waste of money. Shouldn’t say that should I, that’s not politically correct.’⁷⁶

Not all memoirs are bitter about the present or regretful for the days of national service. Many are, in fact, marked by an engaging sense of uncertainty and/or self-mockery and this is sometimes true even of writers who start out by presenting themselves as denouncers of political correctness. Authors often recognize that their recollections are uncertain or that they see their youth through a haze of nostalgia. One memoir is entitled Remembered with Advantage.⁷⁷ Another, unpublished, quotes the conservative opinions recorded in a national service diary: ‘At home the basic need is initiative, keenness and enthusiasm for the job of reconstruction as was shown at Dunkirk and after.’ The author then writes: ‘All this expressed in those highly authoritarian and downright tones to be expected of intolerant youth.’⁷⁸

Two partly related things have had an effect on how national servicemen have ‘remembered’ their experience in recent years. The first of these is television. Television came to Britain during national service. In 1947, just one person in 500 lived in a house with a television.⁷⁹ It was so unusual that a middle-class conscript wrote in his diary ‘go to television’ – it is unclear whether this meant that he had been in a studio audience or that he had been to some place with a television set.⁸⁰ By early 1959 television was so ubiquitous that men in a military prison rioted when they were not allowed to watch their favourite programme.⁸¹

Most former conscripts watched television, particularly during their old age. This reinforced their sense that their own youthful experience was forgotten or, perhaps, unimportant. Apart from the comedies discussed above, post-war conscription rarely featured on television. For British television, military life meant feature films and documentaries about the Second World War and re-enactments of even more distant conflicts. It also meant reporting from Vietnam, the Falklands and Kuwait. Finally, it meant ‘reality TV’, in which programmes, beginning with the BBC’s Paras in 1983, purported to show how servicemen lived. Many national servicemen seemed to feel that their experiences could be recalled only with references to television programmes, as though the memories of their own youth were less important than the ‘realities’ of the television screen.⁸²

Television also reinforced the sense that national service should be recalled through the prism of the ‘real conflicts’ that had come later. Even a commando who had fought at Suez came to feel that his own experience was ‘overshadowed’ by the Falkands.⁸³ The British armed forces have become smaller and increasingly prone to define themselves in terms of ‘professionalism’ – the very quality that national servicemen did not possess. The Special Air Service has assumed a particularly important part in Britain’s military self-image and national servicemen often refer to the SAS – as though their own experience can only mean anything if compared to that of ‘real soldiers’.⁸⁴

Emphasis on the full-length national service memoir can itself be deceptive. Only a small minority of national servicemen, even of national servicemen who became professional writers, ever produced such memoirs. More commonly, conscription was recalled in passages in books about other things or in brief exchanges in the course of interviews. For many of the most articulate national servicemen, memories of conscription were eventually reduced to one or two anecdotes that were recycled more for their amusement value than because anyone knew or cared whether they were true. Richard Ingrams, the founder of Private Eye, liked to tell the story of how he had failed to obtain a commission because his commanding officer had said, when presiding over the Unit Selection Board, ‘Shrewsbury’s a soccer school – isn’t it? What did you play?’ and Ingrams had answered ‘The cello, sir.’⁸⁵

Auberon Waugh, a colleague and friend of Ingrams, wrote a fictional account of military service in a novel that was first published in 1960. Later he produced a number of autobiographical recollections about his time in a cavalry regiment during the Cyprus Emergency. Waugh’s military career came to an abrupt end when – attempting to unblock a jammed machine gun on his armoured car – he fired several bullets into his own chest. This incident was horribly real. Waugh almost died and the consequences of having shot out some of his internal organs would plague him for the rest of his life.

As he lay on the ground, Waugh was approached by his sergeant, Chudleigh, and, summoning up what might have been his last breath for a moment of heroic flippancy, he said, ‘Kiss me, Chudleigh.’ Waugh’s bon mot was circulated among his journalistic associates and often provided a title for biographical writing on Auberon Waugh. Waugh himself, however, admitted in his autobiography: ‘The story is denied by Chudleigh. I have told the story so often that I honestly cannot remember whether it started life as a lie or not.’⁸⁶