Richard Davenporthines

Well-lived

‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves.

issue 08 October 2011

‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves.

‘Oh no! I’m keeping it for an officer,’ said a girl called Irma when the 17-year-old Alistair Horne made his first determined moves. A little later Horne was being trained as a Guards officer at Pirbright camp, under a troop sergeant with terrifying powers of verbal demolition, well on his way into the pants of girls. One of Horne’s fellow cadets —heir to a dukedom — went to an Oxford cinema where he ‘partially lost his virtue’ to the ruthlessly roaming hands of ‘two beefy Land Girls who molested him from either side’ during a showing of Mrs Miniver. The ducal sprig was distressed by the experience, and under-performed. ‘I kept thinking about Sergeant Brown, and all that stuff about “conduct unbecoming”,’ he told Horne.

These two anecdotes encapsulate the red-blooded gusto of these roistering, stylish memoirs: there is stirring enthusiasm for pretty women combined with a sense of personal rules about what is unbecoming.

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