Memoirs. William Rees-Mogg

Their house was said to have a rather sad association with Shakespeare. In 1616 he went there for a drinking party, returned home flushed with mulled wine, caught a chill which turned to pneumonia, and died. I do not know whether the story is true.

      We had a splendidly crazy wing commander who was in charge of the course. He was concerned that we should have brightly polished boots, something I was still no good at. He told us a long and rambling story about a Canadian Mountie who was sent into the wilderness to capture an outlaw. It took him three years to find his man and three years to bring him back. Nevertheless, when he returned with his prisoner, he walked into his station with his Mountie uniform impeccably pressed and his boots shining like the sun.

      As the education sergeant when I returned to the Reading headquarters I was not exactly fully employed. Consequently, I arranged to have tutorials on seventeenth-century history at Reading University, for which my tutor was paid three guineas a time.

      I tried, and failed, to teach an illiterate WAAF recruit to read. I taught young officers general knowledge for their officer’s promotion exam. I remember telling them, with all the authority of a nineteen-year-old, that they would acquire an excellent grasp of current affairs if they read The Times every morning over breakfast.

      I drafted a general knowledge quiz to find out what, if anything, they did know. That project had to be dropped when I put the quiz in front of my education officer, who was a squadron leader. One of my multiple-part questions required the candidate to sort biblical characters into the Old and New Testaments. Unfortunately, the squadron leader had not read his Bible. He thought Moses was a figure in the New Testament, and scolded me for setting a quiz which he regarded as unreasonably difficult.

      In the sergeants’ mess we drank our beer and the occasional whisky and soda. I was the only teenager in a group of middle-aged men. They saw my life as quite divorced from their concerns, but we wished each other well.

      The following year, I left the RAF and returned to Oxford University. As a sergeant I fear that I had failed to impress my Commanding Officer. He wrote a reference in my leaving book: ‘Sergeant Rees-Mogg is capable of performing routine tasks under close supervision.’ I only wish that were true.

      It was the autumn of 1948 when I returned to Oxford. I was now twenty. I had had the advantage of two years in the RAF, which had transformed me from a callow recruit to a sergeant in Education. I had kept in touch with Oxford life through my friendship with Clive Wigram, who was himself elected as President of the Union. In the spring of 1948, I came up to Oxford for the last time wearing my RAF uniform with its largely unpolished boots. Clive and I went to watch some college races on the river. We met two delightful girls, both of whom were acquaintances of Clive. The dark-haired one was Val Mitchison, daughter of Naomi Mitchison, the novelist, later to become Val Arnold-Foster; the blonde was Shirley Williams, the daughter of another novelist, Vera Brittain. I remember thinking what a delightful place Oxford was, if one could stroll the towpath and meet such delightful young women. I did not realize that Val and Shirley had already become stars of Oxford society.