T. E. Lawrence, The Mint

PART III

2:  B FLIGHT

I woke up feeling easy. I shall like this place. Today is glorious with sunlight. The runner and I ate a slow breakfast, of service type, and I helped him sweep out the few rooms and passages of headquarters by half-past seven before the first officers showed up. I waited on till just after eleven, when they had leisure for me.

'I've seen you before' said the first adjutant. 'Were you at Depot three years ago?' I admitted it, in a tone which checked his asking more. 'You'll go to B Flight. Just book his particulars, Sergeant Major, and send him down.'

I spent the afternoon shifting kit into Hut 105, and in drawing bedding. There's a corporal in charge of the hut and its dozen fellows. The flight is only fourteen A/Cs, him, and a sergeant: and we all live together in this neat little hut of sixteen beds. It's holidays just now. Holidays sound queer to me: but it seems our reason of existence here is to maintain the machines on which the cadets learn flying, and in August the College shuts down. Most of the irks take their month's leave then. The others do odd fatigues to fill in the empty days.