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13Our last weekend was however a little fraught. On Saturday nights after lights out matron used to invite the prefects to her room for tea and biscuits on a Saturday night. She was a nice old stick and kind but! Mr Culver and the assistant house master used to be there too. This started at 10pm and went on for a couple of hours. Spending time with the house masters was ok and we could talk about all sorts of things, but we had to be polite to matron and her conversation was boring to the tenth degree. Anyway, on this last occasion after we had finished 4 of us went out for a smoke. We climbed over a wall onto a little lane and were just lighting up when the deputy housemaster went by. He realised who we were and what we were going to do but as it was so close to the end of term, he just told us that we were on our honour to be gated for the last weekend and he would tell no-one. And that is what happened,so my last weekend at school was spent idling away on school premises.Chapter3I arrived at Grantham station in October 1964 and joined the RAF at RAF College Cranwell on 4 October that year. If we passed the course,we would be granted a permanent commission which meant that we were in the RAF until age 55 although we had an option to leave at age 38. We were being trained to be the senior officers of the future. This theoretically put us a notch above other officers, most of whom would be on the supplementary list and had no right to remain in the RAF after they reached 38 years old or after 16 years%u2019 service. They could be transferred to the general list on merit at any point during their first 16 years. However, it did not work out that way, as shortly after we joinedthe RAF accepted university graduates with similar terms of service and accelerated promotion. This led to a certain amount of ill feeling as we had spent 3 years under stiff discipline while the graduates were enjoying life at university, and they knew nothing about the RAF anyway.