At one point, between my registering for national service and receiving my reporting orders, I actually marched into the local Ministry of Labour office and demanded to know exactly when I was to be called up. I thought they had forgotten me. This eagerness to get into the army was only matched, after a short period in uniform, by my eagerness to get out again. I decided that if I were to play my full part in the forces of my country then I ought to be posted to the Army News Service, which produced magazines and handled press and public relations. To this end I wrote to the War Office (on notepaper potently headed the Woodford Times) and informed them of the luck that was about to come their way. Since the primary thing that military life achieves in a conscript is to blunt ambition, this aim was at once thwarted. Its attainment was initially and lastingly damaged, I was later to realise, by my first interview with the civil servant to whom I reported for national service registration, some three months before my actual call-up.
