‘Moving on to Lytham St Anne’s, an equally dangerous location but less awash with what I might call the refuse of society …’

He chuntered on in the same vein before coming to the main business. The nurse rolled down a white screen.

‘Could some of you men close the curtains, please? Jolly good. Lights, please, Austen.’

The lights went out, and there was the usual outbreak of wolf whistles, quickly silenced as the first slide came up – a technicolour close-up of a syphilitic chancre. ‘Venereal disease can kill,’ intoned the CO, sounding like the voice-over to a Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic. ‘It only takes one false step to give you this’ – the slide changed to a messy study of a face destroyed by soft tumours – ‘or this.’

Deadly silence, and then a crash. Someone had fainted.

Now that he had our attention, the old man rattled through the rest of the repertoire: the shame of gonorrhoea, the horror of herpes, the discomfort of crabs. The cures, it seemed, were even worse than the infection.

‘And now,’ he concluded, sounding quite pleased with himself, ‘fall out for tea and buns.’

We dawdled over to the NAAFI in silence, many of us a little green around the gills. I was more cheerful than most – but then, I have no intention whatsoever of screwing the whores of Blackpool or even Lytham St Anne’s. I shall, as my mother advised me, ‘keep myself nice’.

I think Mum was rather relieved to see me off when I went to basic training – at least as relieved as I was to get away. Our letters (I received one this morning and will reply tomorrow) are friendly but already distant. She tells me that the daffodils are up and there is frogspawn in the pond, that Nicola has been riding and that they’re hoping for a week in Sheringham at Easter. I tell her how busy I am, that I won’t have a long enough leave to make it worth the journey home, that I’m meeting some good chaps and that I’m hoping RAF Reville will give me an opportunity to put my knowledge of anatomy to good use (this was a sop to my father, who still grumbles about me going to art school).

Neither of us shed a tear when I left. For me, it was an escape, and for her, an end to the embarrassment of having me at home, from the duty of dangling ‘suitable girls’ under my nose at parties, from dropping hints about her ravenous appetite for grandchildren. An end to my brother’s ‘off-colour’ jokes about my ‘artistic tendencies’, an end to parrying questions from aunts and uncles about whether I’m courting. An escape from suburban Buckinghamshire and half-timbered houses and Hillman Minxes in the drives. Basic was hell for some, but not for me. It got me fit, and it got me out. It was a gateway to a new world – RAF Reville, a few flat acres on the Lancashire coast, low buildings huddling on strips of grey-black tarmac, surrounded by square green fields, and beyond them the estuary reflecting the dead grey of the sky. The limitless sky, all over us, huge, blank, criss-crossed by planes and geese. Here to serve our country for two years from 1957 to 1959, to learn something useful, to clean bedpans and change dressings and make beds and maybe even save lives. To make friends. To start life.