Dit On

Like many a young lad growing up in the 60s and 70s, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do when I left school. I just knew that I wanted to do something, yet I didn't know what. My parents were all for me staying on into the 6th form and doing 'A' levels, but by then I had had enough of the classroom and studying. I think that what I craved was a bit of adventure. I couldn't really see myself working in an office, and I already had a Saturday and evening job as a shop assistant in an Ironmongers. It all seemed pretty much the same as my friends were doing, and I didn't really see any of it as a chosen career path for myself, there was no challenge, and it all seemed a bit sheep like doing the same things along with everyone else. 

 Now the previous year my elder brother had joined the Royal Navy. At the time I thought that it was a bit random, as Surrey has never exactly been coastal, so he could hardly have salt water running through his veins. That's by the by, as he used to come home on leave and tell us all about it, and to be quite honest it didn't sound too bad. Also round about that time on BBC1 there was a documentary 'Sailor'. It all looked quite exciting, and not forgetting that the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations were also impending. Now not being one to follow directly in my brother's footsteps I didn't want to go into the General Service, I wanted to work with aircraft. Just like they had shown on that Sailor programme.

So I applied to my nearest careers office, which was in Croydon, and went along for an initial interview. I was subjected to the normal battery of questions, and probably fed the normal line of garbage. For at that time there was a big manpower drain, and it almost seemed as if you could make it to the careers office, you were in. OK, that might be a slight exaggeration, but you get the gist. Well they didn't put me off at the initial interview, so I was invited back for an aptitude test. Out of four people invited I was the only one who showed up, which possibly went in my favour. The questions were fairly simplistic, for example "What tool do you use to put a nail into a wall?", and then you had 4 options, a hammer, a saw, a screwdriver or a chisel. There was also spelling, general arithmetic and a simple logic test.

Needless to say I passed all of that, of which I was duly notified a couple of weeks later. My next task was to go for a medical in High Holborn in London. I don't remember much of that apart from standing in draughty old corridors stripped to the waist. I daresay I was pinched, poked and prodded, made to turn my head to either side and cough. I do remember being checked for colour blindness though as I wanted to be an aircraft electrician. All of this was done during the winter of 1976, I hadn't taken my exams at school, and I had been accepted on my own merit. I couldn't sign up there and then as I was only 15 at the time, and the youngest you could enter the Royal Navy was 16.

So I guess that took a lot of pressure off with the CSEs and GCEs, I already had a job when I left school no matter how my exams went. So I had been passed as medically fit, I was not barking mad nor was I a total numpty, I was in, they had accepted me. I was given my provisional joining date of the 12th July 1977, and told to expect a railway warrant for my trip down to Plymouth. One of the last things that I did before joining the Royal Navy was to go round all of the ships anchored up at Spithead for the Queen's Silver Jubilee review.