Free We Joined The Navy by John Winton

not yet sure that it was worth making a success of. He was apparently suspending judgment on the Navy until it had proved to him that, behind the façade, it provided a satisfying fulfilment. He carried out his duties as well as any cadet in the term but The Bodger gained the impression that he was doing his best only through allegiance to himself and not yet through any allegiance to the Navy. The boy was balanced on an edge. He could make the best type of officer of all, or he could grow embittered later, lose his ambitions and, because he was a forceful and persuasive character, cause others to lose theirs.
    The cadets who had been to day schools, or to schools which do not give their pupils the same early experience of human foibles as the major public schools, found Dartmouth more difficult. Dartmouth seemed to these cadets a series of furious and seemingly pointless rushes from place to place. They were always one of a herd of milling bodies. They were always pestered. They were always late. Their lives had become a succession of sorties from one period of futile occupation to another, the whole mad stampede being carried out at the whim of a group of insane megalomaniacs in uniform.
    Maconochie and Raymond Ball were typical. Maconochie had the further disadvantage that he suffered from illusions of personal grandeur. He had come into the Navy prepared to take it in his stride with his own charm and polished personality. Maconochie considered himself a finished product and found it impossible to accept the Navy’s view of him, as the rawest of raw material. Dartmouth took his self-assurance by storm, trapped him, and exposed the inexperience underneath. The process of destroying Maconochie’s egotism, which Paul had begun almost instinctively in the train on the way to Dartmouth, was completed by the Navy so quickly that Maconochie found himself struggling to maintain his place in the term after a few months.
    Raymond Ball was superficially the same as Maconochie but he differed in one important aspect. Maconochie’s self-confidence was easily shattered; Raymond Ball’s never would be. The Bodger thought him very promising material for that reason. Raymond Ball’s allegiance was, like Paul’s, to himself but unlike Paul’s it would never be to anything else. Raymond Ball would make a successful naval officer until the time came for him to make a choice between the Navy and himself.
    Tom Bowles was in a class quite by himself. Once in twenty years there arrives at a gymnasium a boy whom the trainers and managers recognise immediately as a natural fighter and a probable champion. Similarly at Dartmouth, in about the same period of time, a boy joins the Navy whom the training staff know is the one they have been looking for. Such a boy is the final goal of the interviewing board and the consummation of their hopes, the boy cut out, marked and destined for the highest rewards the Royal Navy offered.
    One last and very small category of Beattys, headed by Dewberry and Spink, allowed nothing to trouble them. They plunged from place to place as they were directed but they neither hurried nor did they fuss. They had already decided that joining the Navy had been a ghastly mistake and nothing now could make it any more so. The Bodger worried about these cadets but saw no solution except to ease them out of the Navy as soon as possible.
     

4
     
    ‘Some time next week you are all going to spend a day in an aircraft carrier. Those of you who want to be pilots, and there are bound to be some, I suppose, will have a chance to see the kind of thing a Fleet Air Arm pilot does. Those of you who don’t want to be pilots will see what you’re escaping. Now I’m not going to try to influence you one way or the other about flying. It’s quite immaterial to me how you end your miserable existences but speaking as a small ship man myself, I personally want to see my grandchildren running round my knees and piping in childish