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well-meaning guest lectures. These revealed rather less of military life than the news bulletins and debate programmes to which we were already addicted.
    There was a lot of fuss made over various military traditions, and slightly desperate attempts were made to foster a friendly rivalry between the services. There were rivalries, but they were local, accidental, and very short lived. They absolutely refused to take on an ideological aspect. Particular groups of friends joined particular services. Their preferences and animosities became the preferences and animosities of their service. Dress us as they would in scratchy serge and ill-fitting plastic boots, we were still schoolchildren, and our ordinary loyalties and friendships survived their every experiment.
    It didn’t help, of course, that ‘they’ were our teachers. Uniform did not transform them, though some took it as a licence to behave less well towards us. In crabfat blue or khaki, they were no less themselves than we were. They looked ridiculous. The captain of the navy cadets was our school chaplain, a five-foot tall martinet whose crisp whites had to be ordered specially because the real service had no uniforms that small.
    The cadet experience was entirely without glamour. There was an almost wilful shoddiness to it all. The air cadets played tug-o-war, heaving on their elastic rope. Once the rope was extended, a lever was let go, sending the school’s glider rolling across the sports fields. Sometimes it ended up in the long-jump pit. It never flew. Navy cadets kicked their heels indoors, staring at charts. Once a year they visited the coast and wetted and stained their heavy blue serge trousers in the sumps of a smelly, decommissioned frigate. I had imagined Michel, my closest friend, would join me in the army; they at least took us on night exercises every half-term.
    I knew that Michel came from an Army family. He showed no interest in discussing the connection. He certainly wasn’t bound, through family loyalty, for a service career, as some were. All the same, it came as a surprise and a disappointment when he told me he wasn’t joining me in the Army cadets.
    ‘Well, what are you going to do?’
    ‘Community service.’
    I burst out laughing.
    ‘What?’
    There were a handful of peaceniks and loners among us, and the school catered for these aberrant consciences by sending them off on shopping errands for the local elderly and infirm.
    Michel was too much of a loner to suffer a parade ground – this I understood. But try as I might I couldn’t picture Michel helping the weak and needy. ‘You’re kidding.’
    ‘It’s a way of getting to know people,’ Michel said – a prospector describing a geological expedition; there was no warmth in his vision. ‘It’s good to see how people manage.’
    I imagined him casing every joint.
    Our school cross-country route began with a circuit of the sports fields, then led us along a street lined with ostentatious wooden houses as far as the Margrave, its lead-roofed porch smothered in lilac. Here we turned down a bridleway – tarmac at the beginning, cinders at the end – that took us past an old mill. Though it had been converted long before to an ordinary dwelling, the millhouse was genuine. There was a pond and a race, and a pale scar of stonework in the brick wall marked where the axle of the wheel had spun. For me, the house marked the psychological boundary between town and country. Whenever I passed over the stile and crossed the plank bridge over water canalised between walls of aging, moss-felted brick, a weight lifted inside me. I felt free.
    Michel was a runner. He represented the school in regional competitions. He won cups and shields. The rest of the time he wasted strength and athletic talent on muddy scrambles through farmers’ fields and break-neck, shit-strewn verges. The rumour was our games instructor was making our cross-country courses as unpleasant as possible so as to