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we’ve got are to go to an OCTU?”
    “Pre-OCTU, sir.”
    “Yes, but that’s where everyone is supposed to go now after they’ve passed their Selection Board.”
    “Yessir.”
    “Then these chaps are to go to a Selection Board f rom the Pre-OCTU? Extraordinary.”
    “Yessir.”
    “And supposing they don’t pass? They come back here, I suppose.”
    “Yessir.”
    “To Depot Company, I take it?”
    “Yessir. Until such time as they’re otherwise posted.”
    “Just like the bloody Army.”
    “Yessir.”
    *
    “Now I hear we’re to go to a WOSB?” said Stanley. “What do they do?”
    “Psychiatrists,” said Egan. “They tell me they ask you all sorts of questions.”
    “Oh dear,” said Stanley.
    “Then they have all sorts of tests.”
    “Tests?”
    “Yes, intelligence tests and a lot of climbing ropes and solving tricky situations.”
    “Yes, I expect they would.”
    “I suppose it’ll be terribly interesting, really.”
    “I suppose it will,” said Stanley forlornly.
    They were in the last week of their Primary Training. The threat of their coming Selection Boards was another weapon for the N.C.O.s.
    “Five weeks and you can’t do the Leopard Crawl proper!” stormed Sergeant Morris. “Gorblimey, I dunno. Remember, if you don’t pass your WOSB you’ll be back ’ere up Depot Company in Dicky’s Gardenin’ Squad. Next! Windrush! Down! Crawl! Oh, you ’orrible bloody terrible man. Keep your arse-end down, lad!” 
    My Dear Stanley, wrote Mr. Windrush, I am glad to hear that you are to go to an Officer Cadet Training Unit. I doubt if it will be like Sandhurst, to which your uncle Bertram went for a time, but I should strongly advise you not to follow his example in constantly attending race meetings. There was, in addition, some difficulty with a married lady. I’m afraid I’m extremely busy these days with my monograph, but do call if they give you leave. Advise me early and I will send an itinerary. Sarah sends her regards.
                                Your affectionate
                                                      Father.
    A week later. Stanley and the rest of the university intake were being delivered by an officer, two sergeants and five corporals to 652 Brigade Pre-OCTU at Rootbridge . Four three-ton lorries borrowed from the R.A.S.C. bore them and their kit, buffeting through the autumn-lit Kent countryside to their new home. Their kitbags bulged. Steel helmets, cunningly designed to be slightly too large for the mouth of a kitbag, occasionally spilled out with a clatter at bends in the road. Stanley, left with an armful of small kit impossible to cram into his bag, had had to buy a small fibre attaché-case for ten shillings from a lance-corporal.
    The lorries ran through the village of Rootbridge and beyond. The village itself nestled under the escarpment of the North Downs, away from the main London road but with two unspoilt coaching inns to point to its former importance as a halting-place. It was, however, a quiet place now, and genteel, and the lorries whipped straight through it with little more than a shattering scream of a gearbox, and on to the Pre-OCTU, a mile and a half beyond in a large damp wood. They passed through the entrance gates and along narrow concrete roads through the trees, in which innumerable Nissen huts lurked. The place was liberally sprinkled with slit trenches, dug for protection against air attack, making it dangerous to walk between the huts after dark. Everywhere walked cadets, in the idiosyncratic variations of uniform of many different regiments, but all wearing the white shoulder-flashes of their status. Those in denim overalls wore a little white rectangle (known locally as the Rootbridge Medal) announcing their surnames over the left breast pocket.
    The intake dismounted at the Reception Centre and tottered with their kitbags along endless woodland paths to their Nissen huts.