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11were caught hitching somewhere and we were all banned from doing it again. Whilst at school I decided that I wanted to join the RAF. I applied for a scholarship to Cranwell but did not get it. Thinking back, that was hardly surprising. I knew next to nothing about the RAF having just read the recruiting pamphlets. Our school CCF was just Army whilst most of the other lads on the selection had been in the Air training Corps and/or had fathers in the RAF. Also, although I enjoyed sports, I was never in a school team. Nowadays I expect that schools would coach children going for scholarships with practice interviews and so forth. If I had got the scholarship the RAF would have paid my school fees for my last 2 years but no one at school or home took much notice of what I was trying to do and I was left to my own devices. The experience was good however and I later applied for a normal cadetship and got it. They then gave me a flying scholarship and so paid for flying lessons. These took place at Fairoaks aerodrome in the school holidays. My first sortie was on 27 August 1963 and I went solo on 7 September after 6 hours 35 minutes. This included 35 minutes spinning in a Tiger Moth. And so, I flew an aircraft on my own before I could drive a car on my own. The weather was poor at that time and the flying club did not give us much priority. Eventually, it had run into term time, so I stopped and went back to school. I did one more trip in the Christmas holiday, but I had been accepted for Cranwell by then and as that meant the RAF would train me as a pilot, I gave up with Fairoaks. When I arrived back at school, I found that I was now a prefect for the last year which had certain privileges. The housemaster had hinted that would happen when he warned me to behave myself one night during the term before. In the lower 6th we had to %u201ctake beds%u201d for the junior boys. This meant patrolling between 2 dormitories to make sure there was no horse play. We could beat offenders with a slipper and did from