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We all traipsed into the foyer, out of which I was ushered whilst the rest of the family went shopping and I was glad that I wasn't with them because Cities terrified me, they still do. All those people charging around like panicked beasts, all that noise, that dirt. I am strictly a small town boy and want to stay that way.

Inside the centre I was weighed, slightly over weight, the story of my life, I had to fill my lungs with air and exhale several times, look at coloured lights until they disappeared, have my hearing tested, my teeth (lots of tut-tutting about them), and do all kinds of other tests which seemed to take hours. Then it was over and I was returned to the foyer, where I found my family nervously sitting on a bench. Mam didn't seem to be very pleased about the fact that I was in glowing health.

That would be at the very end of July, or the beginning of August, because we had broken up from school and I said my goodbyes to everyone who mattered, which was no-one really, because my best friend, Selwyn, was coming with me and I was never very popular with the girls in my class.

About ten days later I received another letter. Joining papers, in fact. Telling me I was to report to the Liverpool Recruitment Centre on the 31st August for transportation to H.M.S. Ganges on 1st September. The 31st was the day after Mam's forty-first birthday. It was not good timing. Not that I gave the date a second thought. I was so thrilled to be asked to join, it was the first ambition I had every had that I had accomplished (I never expected to pass the scholarship, so that was a surprise, and I only took up swimming because Auntie Ada said I needed to do something other than sit in the house and read and draw all day, no-one was expecting anything to come from that). I was going to be a sailor. A member of the Royal Navy. Mission accomplished.

I hadn't seen Selwyn since we'd broken up from school, and I didn't have his address to write. He was, after all, only my school best mate. At home I had cousin Glyn and Gatehouse brothers who I knocked around with all the time. And the members of the Swimming Club, of course. But I expected to see Selwyn on the 31st at Liverpool. Our adventure was about to begin.