The war started when I was at school. I was 16 when the war started and I was very sort of patriotic and I wanted to be a bit of a national hero and all that sort of stuff, you see. So I volunteered for the RAF as a fighter pilot and I really wanted to be a fighter pilot and, in fact, I joined the RAFVR when I was at school, I had a little silver badge on and you strutted around, you know, you learned how to march and all sorts of things and there were various courses. I took an engine to pieces and did all sorts of things like that and learned about, to some extent, about flying and aircraft and so on in the RAFVR when I was at school still. Then when I was, I think, 16 or possibly 17, I forget now, 17, it must have been, I was actually in the RAF. I was suddenly in it and I claimed I wanted to be a fighter pilot but I wasn’t because I’d had an ear operation. I’d had a mastoid operation on this ear and apparently if you get violent pressure changes, you know, zinging up and down fighting in an aircraft, you can have problems so you were not allowed to be a fighter pilot if you’d had a mastoid operation. They didn’t tell me that until I was actually in or I could have stayed at school, see what I mean? So I’d left school, stuck in the RAF without having gone to the sixth form. I missed the sixth form because of this. Oh, I did six months farming and stuff as well, by the way, and, you know, filling up sandbags and teaching old ladies how to put out incendiary fires with Stuart pumps and things, I did all that sort of stuff.

So I was actually 18 when I was actually called up, so I had about a year messing around doing all these things. Well, then, there I was, so I did an intelligence test, which I did reasonably well at, and so I did radar. I went at Cranwell, number one signal school, which is absolutely a great place. I adored Cranwell. It’s the sort of college in the RAF, you know, and it was wonderful. I learned about radar and I learned about radio and communication and stuff like that and I really enjoyed that. It was great. A very civilised place, I mean we acted plays and we had music society, the whole bit, it was very, very nice actually.

Then I got a posting to the Gold Coast and an amazing thing happened. The telegram had a mistake on it. We lived in a road called Courtland Avenue in Mill Hill, which is near my father’s observatory, and the telegram had Portland Avenue on it so I didn’t get it, so by the time I went to Blackpool, which was the place where we did our square bashing and, you know, all the rest of it, I was a week late and I was posted as a deserter. Absolutely. I was more or less handcuffed, I think I was handcuffed actually, the whole bit. Then I explained what had happened and fortunately I had the telegram so I could prove what happened, well, in half an hour it was all sorted out, you see. But anyway everybody else had tropical kit and pith helmets and stuff for the Gold Coast and, of course, I didn’t so I had this extraordinary, I think it was about over a month actually, in Blackpool with nothing to do and I investigated psychical research. I used to go to the mediums and see whether I could see how they faked it, you know. I had an absolutely glorious, I think it was six weeks, doing my own private investigations and I would, because I was in uniform, you see, I was fairly anonymous but they latched on to me very quickly. They knew I was a bit sort of different in that way, I suppose because I kept going back and I used to find out quite a lot about how they tricked people, and we used to play about with, is it called a Planchette Board where you’ve got these letters around and all that sort of stuff? I got terribly interested in all that. I never believed it but my father, I think, did believe it, you see. Although he was a physicist, he was at Cambridge as a physics student and then at Cavendish, and then an astronomer, he actually had a strong sense of the occult and he really believed that spooky things happen in the universe, very much so.