ABSTRACT
Each day after an early tea-cum-supper, and after the officers had retired for their pre-dinner drink with the commandant, the thirty or so new recruits in each hut at the Initial Training Camp in Oswestry were required to sit on the ends of their beds, blanco’ing webbing and polishing boots – whilst being read to. After two days the echo was recognisable. This was a bizarre simulacrum of a situation one had met in Victorian domestic novels: the nursemaid reading each night to the children before they settle for bed, whilst the adults dress for dinner. Oswestry was like that: anachronistic but amiable, all in all. Oswestry showed that this process was repeated horizontally right across the country, that there was a huge layer spread over all the counties who, whatever their differences in accents and geographical settings, were brothers of the Hunslet boys because they all shared this lack of opportunity.
