The photograph of the Platoon on parade, with the brewery in the background wafting fumes over us, set me thinking of times past. A small group of us would walk from school to a nearby shooting range for target practice. We had 0.22 rifles slung over our shoulders and an ammunition box between us, and nobody took any notice – can you imagine that happening today!

I attended two summer camps, Aldershot and Wyke Regis near Weymouth. Aldershot was the grimmer, sleeping on a palliasse (I will be impressed if a pupil recognises this word) on wooden duckboards below which was water. I do not remember anybody going down with trench foot. Wyke Regis was much better with a proper bed. We got to deploy explosives (TNT and Plastic) and then set them off. We also had the opportunity of getting a Centurion tank onto a tank landing craft and then propelling the craft across a lagoon.

On a completely different note, we were asked by our chemistry teacher to bring in well-rinsed ‘Sqeezy’ bottles to use in a practical exam (A-Level I think). As we discovered later, the reason was that the school did not have safety pipettes, and the chemicals to be used were acetic acid and chloroform. Even in those days sucking up chloroform into a pipette by mouth was probably frowned upon. Needless to say there was a lot of chloroform vapour in the lab at the end – I slept for hours afterwards!