Adolescence and War

Abstract

When the war finally came and my notion of competing for civil service entry collapsed, I was sixteen. I had to find a job of some sort while waiting for my eighteenth birthday in 1941, when I would be eligible to enter the Royal Air Force as a pilot cadet. There were schemes to keep people occupied while waiting. National inventiveness was directed mostly to relieving the ninety-five per cent tedium in between the five per cent of violent action which is war. Education, gambling, singing, dancing, playing and courting in pubs, theatres, libraries, dance halls and sports fields seemed to make up the social apparatus for avoiding boredom. And we were young. I had little or no idea at the time that a national bureaucratic bottle-neck had been installed, based on the failure of casualties to be as large as anticipated in the official guesses. Fine for the survivors of course, but from a national point of view it must have involved an enormous waste of resources, not least of the presumably precious male talent from grammar and boarding schools where the glamour of flying for the country and against the Nazis had swept through the imagination of a new generation of young men. Perhaps it was unavoidable, given the impossibility of forecasting losses in relatively novel forms of warfare, and in any case many did something useful while they waited to be called to Lords cricket ground which had been commandeered to take aircrew recruits.