The coat not only kept me warm, but was something of a status symbol. It reminded people that I had done my national service in the Navy, the proud senior service, while the vast majority of my contemporaries had had to plod through their two years as what we cuttingly called ‘pongos.’ Although I had hardly ever been out of sight of land, except when my submarine was dived, and never heard a shot or saw a torpedo fired in anger, some of these ex-pongos had seen real fighting in the scattered parts of what remained of our empire. Someone in my college had even been mentioned in despatches fighting the Mau Mau in Kenya. Soldiers and sailors alike, we national servicemen regarded ourselves as very much more knowledgeable in the ways of the world than those who had come straight from school. We could usually hold our liquor, for instance, while they were still vomiting about like teenagers – which many of them literally still were. So there was, at least at first, a significant difference in experience as well as age, between us and those who still had their service to come – if indeed they wouldn’t avoid it altogether, which, as it was soon abolished, many of them did.National service was not the only form of class distinction at Oxford.
