A Schoolboy's 'War'

At the end of summer term in 1956 I went into the English countryside with the school's contingent in the annual camp of the Combined Cadet Force (CCF). We were virtually cut off from radios and newspapers on a military site run by regular army soldiers. Without warning to us boys almost the entire permanent staff disappeared overnight. Our image of war was a literary conceit forged from the writings of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and their like – in the First World War. The younger boys conjured up visions of a new world war when they might be going over the top into battle.

Later in the year came Israel's invasion of Egypt, in collusion with Britain and France, followed by the withdrawal of the Anglo-French expedition under the condemnatory pressure of the United Nations and particularly of the United States. The Suez affair broke the unquestioning trust among my contemporaries – influenced by a rather conventional and antiquated education we were largely conservatives with a small c – in a benign government doing the right thing for our country. We saw that government had failed to adapt to Britain's changing role in a changing world, where imperialism was no longer meaningful or desirable.