my idea of a pleasant pastime. Perhaps it was this mental block which led to my final disillusionment and, indeed, to my becoming something of a joke in the Corps. Let me explain.


Cadets were required annually to complete what was termed the ‘EmpireTest’ on the rifle range. This consisted of firing 20 rounds, 5 at the bull, 5 ‘group’, 5 at little cardboard men pulled up and down by a wire contraption and 5 at some other configuration I no longer remember. Scoring was 5 points maximum for each round, and the majority of Corps members managed total scores of around 85 or 90 out of the possible 100. I duly fired my Empire Test but some little time later a signal came from the War Office, to whom the test results were sent, to ask why Cadet Kilpatrick had not completed the Test. The signal went back that Cadet Kilpatrick had, repeat had, fired the Test and that the ‘0’ opposite his name on the Corps return indicated not his failure to take it, but his failure to score any points at all. That must be one record I achieved early in my career.


It must have been about this time that it began to dawn on me that, if I wanted to get involved with this sort of activity, there were better ways of doing it. I had often seen – and envied – undergraduates strolling down the High nonchalantly swinging their flying helmets on the end of their earphone speaking tubes. These were the privileged members of the University Air Squadron and it had never occurred to me that I could possibly be one of them. The Squadron had only 75 flying members, and entry was via a long waiting list. These fortunate young gentlemen had no need to get up early in the morning and shoulder heavy rifles. No. They flew from Abingdon RAF Station at the much more civilised time of the afternoon.


It was not so much the thought of being able to parade down the High with


a flying helmet swinging around as the possibility of opening the throttle of a 180 h.p. petrol engine and handling a control column and rudder bar which made the prospect of getting into the Squadron exciting enough to become, for the time being, my one and only objective. But I was already in my second year and there was apparently little hope of jumping what I was told was a formidable queue for entry.


Now I had grown up in love with internal combustion engines. My older


cousins in Scotland, Tommy and Hugh George, owned their own motorcycles at a time when I was still about twelve years old, and the younger cousin, Hugh, used to let me ride an ancient ex-War Office Douglas, with a two-speed gearbox and belt drive, which he kept at their orchard on Clydeside. This was off any main road, and we were able to fly up and down the steep hill from the orchard to the main Motherwell/Wishaw road without attracting the attentions of the local fuzz. The hill was indeed steep enough to give the belt drive of the old Douglas a few problems, and it was our habit to smear it with treacle provided by my cousins’ mother, Aunt Florrie, to give it a bit of grip.


15


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