Sounds good, right? Time to move on. Reminds you of all those old songs about the restless character who hates to stay too long in one place. He meets a girl who falls in love with him, but after a while he hears the old highway calling and so he slings his bed-roll over his shoulder and moves on, leaving the girl to grieve. Dead romantic, eh?

Forget it. Sad, is what it is. Sad and scary. You’re leaving a place you know and heading into the unknown with nothing to protect you. No money. No prospect of work. No address where folks will make you welcome. You’re going to find yourself living among hard, violent people, some of whom are deranged. You’re going to be at risk every minute, day and night. Especially night. There are guys so desperate or so crazy, they’ll knife you or batter your head in for your sleeping bag and the coppers you’ve got in your pocket. There are some who’ll try to get in your sleeping-bag with you, because you’re a nice-looking lad with soft skin and no stubble. And there’s nowhere you can run to, because nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn. You’re just another dosser, and one dosser more or less makes no difference.

Daily Routine Orders 3

I’ve been out tonight. I took the tube down to Charing Cross and walked about a bit. Tour of inspection, you might say. And I found them, as I’d known I would. Hundreds of the scruffy blighters, lying around making the place look manky. I marched along the Strand and there they were, dossing in ail the doorways – even Lloyds Bank and the Law Courts. One cheeky little bugger – couldn’t have been more than seventeen – actually asked me for money. Have you got any change, he says. I looked him up and down and I said, ‘Change? I’d change you, my lad, if I had you in khaki for six weeks.’ It didn’t go in, though. He just smiled and said have a nice night. Cracker up his arse, that’s what he wants. That’d wake him up. That, or six weeks at Strensall.

National Service. That was the thing. It brought ’em all in – the teds, the rockers, the Mammy’s boys. And it changed ’em, by golly it did. In six weeks. There were no teddy boys on that passing-out parade I can tell you, and no rockers, either. Soldiers, that’s what it made of ’em. There were no exceptions.

And that was my mission in life – to turn dirty, scruffy, pimply youths into soldiers. Into men. And I did it, too. Year after year.