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talk with A. L. Smith was the sole criterion for getting me in to Balliol and the University, though I suppose some kind of a report from school was added to it. I cannot remember in the least what we talked about, but at the end of half an hour I was accepted and told to come along as soon as I could get out of the army. I bet the Master of Balliol wishes that he could select his undergraduates in that way now! Competitive examinations covering the whole country, as today, may be the fairest way to judge between vast numbers of candidates, but theold system of personal selection at any rate gave the Master the sort of undergraduates he felt that he could teach.
    In December 1918 the ranks of the army at home were hurriedly combed for clerks to man the demobilisation centres; a student could obviously function as a clerk and the fact that when the centre opened the first man to be demobilised would be me carried no weight with the sergeant. Accordingly I was sent to Shorncliffe Camp near Folkestone for training in the simple clerical routines that were involved. Shorncliffe had been an R.A.F. instructional camp, and there were still one or two aircraft there, derelict in a hangar. I spent hours sitting in the smelly, oily cockpit of a Sopwith Camel, studying the instruments and the controls and making sure that I knew how everything functioned. It was the first aircraft that I had ever had the opportunity to handle and examine intimately, and I made the most of it. I backed it up with a little book by Sayers on the theory of aeroplane construction and by a very comprehensive anonymous booked called
Practical Flying
. All told, I did a lot of aviation study in my last days in the Army.
    We had a mutiny at Shorncliffe, but nobody was shot for it. We were an undisciplined mob of men drawn from all units, with few officers, discontented with our lot and impatient to go home. One day when the Orderly Officer came in during dinner and asked, in accordance with the regulations, if there were any complaints, somebody threw half a loaf of bread at him, and then we were all standing up and pelting him with bread; he ran like a rabbit. We then all formed up in a body and marched down to the Town Hall of Folkestone to find the Mayor and complain formally about the quality of the food. We didn’t get much change out of the Mayor, but we found the Labour candidate in the forthcoming election, who came out and addressed us and said it was a damned shame, so we allwent back to the camp feeling we had struck a blow for freedom. The army dealt with the incident by declaring that our course of instruction was over, and sending us off to our demobilisation centres.
    Aviation pursued me still, for I was sent to Dover, where the centre was a camp on a saddle of land behind the Castle. And there, railed round and let in to the turf, was the stone silhouette of a little monoplane, because this was where Blériot had landed when he had flown the English Channel only nine years previously. Beside that little stone paving the demobilisation centre was set up; I worked there for two days and then walked through it to demobilise myself.
    I do not propose to deal with the three and a half years that I spent at Oxford in any detail, because I was a very ordinary, humdrum undergraduate. I excelled at nothing, won one prize only, which I spent upon a set of drawing instruments and a copy of
The Earthly Paradise
by William Morris, rowed in the college second eight, and took third class honours in Engineering at the end. I left Oxford with a deep affection for Balliol and with a wide circle of friends which still endures, and with the memory of three and a half happy, carefree, and entirely satisfactory years safe in the bag, so that they can never be taken away from me. At the end of them, however, I don’t think that I was noticeably different. Perhaps, like others of my generation, I was already mature when I went there.
    A number of things happened during