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I received my reply in July and I was thrilled to bits. I was going to be part of history, I was going to fight great battles against evil people and survive covered in glory by being the last man on the gun, or the one who sent the signal that proved to be vital, or do something that save the day.

I still didn't equate battles with War.

Off I went to Wrexham to sit the educational test.

There were about fifteen boys gathered in the Navy recruiting centre, all flushed with the excitement of joining up. There were also a couple of older men in uniform who ordered us around. I wasn't that taken with being ordered around but the thought that this might continue once I had joined up never occurred to me. Yeah, I know, I have no vision, cannot see what's ahead. That's just what my wife says, fifty years later.

We were all told to sit at desks and then we got a lecture from the men in uniform. I didn't know what rank they were because I didn't know anything about the Navy, and even when the said who and what they were it still meant nothing to me. A Chief Petty Officer? What the hell was that. After the lecture, and the usual warnings of exams, no talking, no cheating, we were given exam papers and told we had three hours to finish them.

I finished mine in fourteen minutes.

I looked around. Everyone else was beavering away. I thought I must have made a mistake, missed some pages out or something. I checked all the pages and all the answers. I was done. When Selwyn said the exam was easy, he hadn't been kidding. The first question was a rough sketch of a hammer. It asked, is this a) a chisel b) a screwdriver c) a hammer. And the questions didn't get any harder. After sixteen minutes I stood up and wandered down to where the two uniformed men sat.

One looked up. "Given up?" he asked.

"Finished," I replied.

"What?" the both of them said, as one snatched the papers from me and began to scrutinise them.

I left while they were doing it. I passed, apparently I got one hundred percent. As far as I know, I never met any of the other boys ever again.

The following day Selwyn and me had a right laugh about how easy the exam was. Mam and Dad weren't so impressed. The first hurdle had been jumped and still my enthuiasm for my chosen career remained undiminished.

And they weren't the only ones to be concerned about me joining up. The beautiful Elaine wasn't that keen either, and though I loved her deeply, as only a fifteen year old can, I still had to follow my destiny. She would eventually leave me for Mel and I wouldn't see her again until my service days were over and I was myself, the manager of a swimming pool. She appeared on the balcony one day, looking as lovely as ever, with two lovely girls who looked like twins, but who were born almost exactly a year apart. They would be grown up by the time I saw her again.

School was drifting towards the summer holidays and I had received permission to leave and join the Navy, and my period of not learning anything was coming to an end. Grammar School had been wasted on me. Well, not exactly wasted, I think I am feeling the benefits of it now, fifty years after I left.

It had been a shock to my whole family when I became the first of my generation to pass the Scholarship, as it was then known. On the day I was told the result I raced home to tell Mam and Dad of my brilliance, and was immediately sent out to deliver the message to the rest of the family. Auntie Nora and Uncle Stephen, Auntie Florence and Uncle Wilfred, Granddad, Uncle Arthur and others on Mam's side, then it was to all those who belonged to Dad. I was gone most of the day. Only Uncle Jim didn't give me sixpence. The only problem that year was that, pertaining to my brilliance, , there were more passes of the Scholarship than there had ever been in history from our town, or my school. Either us kids were getting brainier or the exam was getting easier. I have always leaned towards the latter. Dixie, Mike, Zoff, Trevor, Stan, me, loads of us passed and went en masse to ruin the education of more serious students at the Alun Grammar School in Mold. None of us did very well out of it, I don't think. Although I think Stan went on to be a scientist of some kind and Zoff got a decent job, but that was only after he left to join the Met Police, got a hammering, and went back to school to finish off. I remember him getting 4% in an algebra exam once. Still, it's not everyone's subject, algebra. The rest of us did get jobs, though, all except me who just joined the Navy.

And Selwyn, of course, who wasn't from my town, and who I met at Grammar School. He came from some unpronounceable place in the mountains and spoke Welsh. I didn't. Neither did Mam, nor any of my family as far as I knew, but one day I was walking down the main steet with living Dad and someone spat out some Welsh, it's a very spitting language, and off Dad went, babbling like he'd learned the language as a baby. Which, in fact, he had. God, I had some good times with living Dad. He died of a heart attack some years ago after going into hospital for tests. He was halfway through decorating the bedroom he shared with Mam. It took little brother ages before he could bring himself to finish it off.

Selwyn and me spent days huddled together every day, plotting what we would do when we both joined up. We made plans about where we would go, things we would do, people we would meet. To say we had a totally unrealistic notion of what the Navy was all about, would have to be a total understatement. We didn't have a clue what we were getting ourselves into.

I received a letter telling me to go for a medical in Liverpool. Selwyn didn't get his. Somewhere along the line I had overtaken him. I had only ever been to Liverpool once or twice in my life, with Uncle Bill, who built things, he once built a hovercraft for his son, so when I went for my medical, we all went. Mam, Dad, little brother and me. We went on the bus to Birkenhead, then across the Mersey on the ferry, the same one Gerry and the Pacemakers would sing about years later, then to the huge Navy recruiting centre just by the tunnel