ON 21 OCTOBER 1954, I stood at the bus stop opposite my parents’ house waiting for a Midland Red bus to take me to central Birmingham. I was about to embark on a journey that would take me from the comfortable life of a middle class teenager engrossed in education, to adulthood in the rough environment of the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC). As I stood at that bus stop, I reflected that the day was a turning point in my life, and that whatever difficulties lay ahead, they were likely to be of a different nature from anything I had experienced in my life so far. In particular, I was leaving home – not totally perhaps, that would come later, but I would no longer be permanently resident in the family home. I was excited and apprehensive in more or less equal measure.

My first two weeks in national service were at the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) barracks in Aldershot, where I was kitted out with uniform and allocated the number 23083284. My school friend Alan Kirkby, like me interested in languages but unlike me a fine musician, joined up at the same time, with the number 23083283. My memory of those two weeks has mostly gone, but when I try to recall it what comes into my mind is the satirical, but also curiously moving, poem by Henry Reed, written during the Second World War, titled Naming of Parts. This is its first verse:

At Aldershot, I conducted a minor piece of research. One morning, I stood for twenty minutes or so beside the barracks newsagent stall, observing what kind of material the men were buying. I found that seventy-five or eighty per cent of the material that these new recruits – mostly eighteen-year olds – bought were children's comics. I myself had enjoyed comics when I was ten or twelve, but not at age eighteen. Later, I found ample confirmation that the bulk of national service recruits had received a shockingly low level of education.