Stand by Your Beds!: A Wry Look at National Service. This item is unavailable.Stand by Your Beds!: A Wry Look at National Service

As the young conscripts of National Service retire, sit back, and think back, the extraordinary events of two years of their late teens or early twenties, never to be repeated, take on a new life of their own. Tales are shared with friends who found themselves similarly called-up, away from mundane or engaging lives, and forced into situations they would not have envisaged a few years earlier. David Findlay Clark served his National Service in the RAF. He describes with wry humour and sometimes with a degree of quiet drama, some of the boring, stressful, whimsical, ludicrous and exciting events that were packed into two eventful years. The subtle changes from resentment to enthusiasm in some who served their time, and the reverse process in others, are pointed up by the recounting of episodes in dramatic detail. David also outlines the setting and nature of National Service between the years of 1948 and 1963 and comments on some of its effects on the two million young men who, reluctantly or otherwise, went through it. This new edition of 'Stand By Your Beds!' with added Postscript will echo for many National Servicemen their own experience and convey to their children and grandchildren something of the flavour, activities and attitudes that filled those two compulsorily stolen years of their lives.

David Findlay Clark retired from working as a consultant clinical psychologist in private practice and as a Clinical Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mental Health at Aberdeen University some years ago. Dr Clark is a son of the manse who was brought up in Banff and educated at Banff Academy and Aberdeen University. He has written extensively in recent years and a further autobiography, Remember Who You Are, will be published shortly.