UNDER MILK WOOD

At a time when I was fulfilling my National Service duties, the clever thing to do during your second year was save as much leave allocation as possible and arrange to go on as many courses as possible. You then called upon these benefits - or 'skives,' as they were called - during your last three months. The idea was that, with judicious use of the skives, you could manage to be away from base for much of your last few weeks of conscription.
My own attempt to follow the mantra was half-hearted, having already used up much of my second year annual leave. But I did eventually go to the camp's education centre to ask the resident Flight Lieutenant if he had anything suitable on his lists. The conversation went something like this:
What did you do in civvy street? Junior reporter on a weekly newspaper, sir. Are you going back to it? Hope to, sir. Well, what sort of course are you looking for? Anything to do with newspapers, sir. (He looks down his lists, and frowns). Don't seem to have anything like that, but there is something about radio. You interested in radio? Yes, sir.
And so it was that shortly afterwards I was in possession of a week's leave pass, a rail pass from Retford to Wiltshire, and a booking on a course called Writing for the Radio. I duly arrived at Devizes, caught a bus to Urchfont, and thus had my first sight of Urchfont Manor, an Elizabethan house converted since 1947 into a residential educational centre. The house was fascinating, the facilities basic, but the food was good and the rest of the people on the course, mainly trendy (or what passed for trendy in 1955) go-getters, older than me and very dramatic and poetic. The course tutor, if I remember correctly, was RD Smith, a BBC Third Programme producer, and very good he was, too. 
The week ticked away in a haze of lectures - I lost all my course notes during a house move only a few years' ago - in aimless dramatic/poetic chatter, playing croquet on the front lawn (and what a vicious game that can be!), and imbibing largely non-alcoholic drinks in the bar. We even broke into groups at one point and wrote a number of short one act plays which were later recorded on one of those enormous Grundig machines with whirling spools, and played back and deftly criticised, in the evenings.
Up to this point it had never actually occurred to me to write a play for radio, books beuing more in my line, and the course changed nothing in that respect. But on the very final night, prior to dispersal the following day, we were all invited to attend the cellar (a sort of social area) that evening in order to hear 'something special.' We all settled into our chairs, and then RDS entered carrying the Grundig, plugged it in and switched it on and said, 'You are going to hear something very good.'
And we did, and it was spellbinding. It was a tape retording of the BBC version of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, which had been broadcast for the very first time in January, 1954, some months after Thomas's death in New York. It was ground breaking, and I have loved it ever since. What is more, I think it cast its spell on everyone else there, too, whether they had heard it before or not.
I shall always be grateful to the RAF for creating this opportunity, and grateful too, to Urchfont Manor, for providing the platform for such an experience. After the course, I never even tried to write a play for radio, but a measure of the course's success is that, ever since then, I have always owned a recording (tape, CD) of Under Milk Wood, and always the Richard Burton version.