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I slunk back to Yorkshire vowing that I would never again attend a job interview without extensive research and preparation. The inevitable rejection letter from Hornchurch arrived a few days later.
"Do not be disheartened that we have rejected you," one sentence read. "You did very well but the standard now required is extremely high."
Decades before word processors and templates with boilerplate text, this was clearly a standard rejection letter that had merely been topped and tailed. I still have the letter and I still think it very condescending. A follow up letter came from the Leeds recruiting office a few days later inviting me back for a further interview. I went, fully intending to give the officer a piece of my mind for deceiving me about my prospects but instead I signed on for four years as a wireless mechanic and he seemed quite relieved about that. Twenty days later I was in – and more than 46 years would pass before I finally took off my uniform!
Nearly forty years after I signed on, I had access to my own personal file. Such access was not authorised; personal files should never be seen by the subject. However, someone who shall remain nameless put the bulging file in front of me when I was working with the Red Arrows at Scampton. She said I might like to look through it and then left me alone for half an hour. There, the very first enclosure, now tattered at the edges and browning with age, was the report of my 1953 visit to Hornchurch. It was by no means as bad as I had always imagined it would be. There were some quite complimentary remarks about my personal qualities, my manual dexterity, and my contributions to the leadership exercises. The final sentence referred to my Northern accent and ended with the words, ‘unlikely ever to become fit for commissioned service.’
But that was not the end of my RAF career!
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