[Q] '43 you get your degree from Cambridge and the decision to have you go to Bomber Command is made by...?

CP Snow, the man himself. He was, of course, a famous novelist, but he was actually a Civil Servant whose job it was to put technical people into the appropriate positions. So he had a long list of these young men who were coming out of the Universities, and he had slots to put us in. Some of us went to Bletchley to do crypto-analysis; some of us went to Malvern to do radar; and some of us went to High Wycombe to analyse bomber operations, and he decided that I should go to High Wycombe. And that was fine - I mean, I would go wherever I was sent - but he wanted to make it sound beautiful and so he gave me an interview where he told me more lies in twenty minutes that I ever heard anywhere else about all these wonderful things I would be doing.

[Q] Was this the first time you had met him?

Yes. He was just... as far as I was concerned, he was just a functionary. I'd never read any of his books, but he described to me this wonderful job I was going into and I would be able to fly with the crews and to have this glorious adventure of taking part in the hardships of the bombing campaign and seeing what was really going on and so on. So I was just bamboozled totally, and I think it was just his novelist's imagination got the better of him. He can't have believed that, he must have known better. But anyhow, I was very happy I was going to such an exciting job. When I got there of course I found that it was nothing but sitting in a dingy office all day long, and I never got anywhere close to flying in an operational bomber.