All Fall Out

My National Service number, allocated at RAF Cardington reception unit almost exactly sixty years ago, still rolls off the tongue without the slightest effort. 2708260, sir. It was something you had to remember in order to get a pass, get paid, or go anywhere. Now it is like having a tattoo. It is always with you.
Not that I'm embarrassed at having been called up. Everyone was called up. Well, most of us were. Rumours of favouritism often hung in the barrack-room air. There was the story of a pop singer who, someone decided, would suffer traumas if forced like the rest of us to march about in the rain on a parade square, and so was excused. And another of a cricketer who was also excused on medical grounds, only to be selected for an MCC overseas' tour instead.
Whether either story was actually true, I do not know. But general resentment at call-up did run deep, and it was not helped by procedures at Cardington. One day the entire week's intake was marched into one of the vast hangars to be given a pep talk on the importance of conscription (the Korean war was just over, but there were bushfire wars all over the place, and the Cold War) and the importance of following orders.
Then they said: 'Hands up anyone who attends or has attended public school.'
Out of the several hundred raw recruits about twenty did so. They were promptly spirited away and not seen again for a week when they emerged bursting with pride with white bands around their brand new caps. POMs, we called them. Potential Officer Material. No one else, it was assumed, could possibly be suitable.
The second command was: 'Hands up if you have played professional sport.'
Again, four or five did, including a couple of amateur boxers and a fast bowler attached to a county second eleven. They were given special postings, too, with an eye to joining RAF sports teams.
The whole effect, of course, was demoralising, and left the rest of us with the sole objective of trying to avoid being posted to Compton Bassett which, rumour had it, was the most severe of the training camps.
I did avoid Compton Bassett, doing my training at Hednesford instead; and I did, in the main, actually enjoy my two-year stint as a telephone operator in the signals section at RAF Worksop. But I cannot use any of that to suggest support for a crackpot private members' bill (proposed by Philip Hollobone, Con, Kettering) to bring a sort of national service, or community service, back on to the political agenda. At the very least, any such scheme would almost certainly be selective (public school pupils excused?), and there is no evidence that boys (and girls?) between the ages of 18 and 26 would (a) actually do it, and (b) return to civvy street refreshed and reinvigorated.
In 2005 I went back to RAF Worksop and met two former service colleagues I had not seen for fifty years. We were there, but RAF Worksop was not. It had closed as an operational base shortly before the Hungarian revolution, and was returned to farming shortly after that. So the three of us stood in the middle of harvest fields listening to skylarks and trying to remember the layout. We walked on a remaining bit of the runway, found where our billet hut used to be, and where the signals section was. And I thought: 'There used to be 3000 men here, Meteor jets, hangars and workshops, mess halls and medical centres, billet sites and sports fields. And now, nothing but skylarks and sky, rabbits and harvest fields.'
National Service belongs to the early Cold War period. It is history, thank goodness.