Page 16 - Demo

12time to time. I was on duty one Saturday night but had earlier skipped off to a nearby pub for a beer and a smoke and must have stunk of them. Don Culver was wandering about, and he came up to me and so I moved backwards until I was stopped by the row of washbasins. It was quite clear that he knew what I had been up to. I was more careful after that. I needed 2 A Levels to get to Cranwell although I could have joined as a direct entrant with 6 O levels. I also had applied to go to a College of Advanced Technology (CAT) to study aeronautical engineering and was accepted at Loughborough. To go to a CAT, you had to be sponsored by industry and I applied to the British Aerospace Corporation. I had to go to their office in Wadebridge I think and so arranged a couple of days off school and went home. On the train back to London I read the joining instructions and realised I had got the date wrong, and the interviews were now over. So, after a day at home I went back to school. I cannot remember my father being very annoyed about this and it again shows how much we were expected to sort out our own lives in those days. Anyway, the academic qualifications for Loughborough and Cranwell were the same, so I gave up on that path. I had not worked overly hard in the 6th form but was assured of a pass in physics because not only was it interesting, but we had a first-class teacher. The same could not be said of chemistry and maths. Indeed, at some point we asked the headmaster, Mr Stredder, for extra chemistry tuition which he gladly gave. He taught us sitting around his lovely wooden dining table with no apparatus or blackboard,one evening a week, I think. He gave us a greater understanding during those sessions than we got from our proper teacher. Mr Stredder was a chemistry teacher by trade, and I think that he enjoyed teaching. Anyway, after a furious month of revising I took the exams and with some relief passed with a B and 2 Cs. Many people said they were particularly hard questions in maths that year, but my revision had by luck covered them all. Thus, I left Wellington School in July 1964.