The Queen's shilling

It must have been coming towards the end of summer when I got a letter from the Royal Air Force careers office in Exeter asking me to come down to see them. They thought they probably had a job for me.

I got the train from Barnstaple to Exeter St Davids and made my way to the careers office where I was seen by a very jovial, pleasant sergeant. He took my personal details, qualifications and all that and then we got on to the job that I was being offered. I asked him what the job was and, laughing, he said he had absolutely no idea. It was called Radio Operator -Voice. That was all he knew. That and the fact that they wanted people with foreign language qualifications.

The next thing I knew I was off somewhere else - I can't for the life of me remember where it was. I was there to do the Modern Languages Aptitude Test (MLAT) for which we had to do a number of language learning tests in Kurdish - vocabulary memory, translation into and out of English, formation of basic sentences, etc. I was later to discover that my result in that test was among the top half-dozen ever.

Early in 1982 I was in - Aircraftsman Criscuolo. By early 1983 the treatment that I'd been handed by some of those with whom I was training made me understand why uncle Tony abandoned the name in the early 1940s and by the time I left for West Berlin at the end of my training in April 1983 I was Junior Technician Crisp. The troubles had reached a peak when I was the only one supporting Italy against Brazil in the 1982 World Cup Finals ... when Italy won 3-2. What a game! Blinding.

Those who had earlier found me somehow objectionable suddenly found me perfectly acceptable and I felt the guilt that grampa must have felt when he 'played the game'. The daft thing is that everyone still called me Marco. I was only ever Marco. The Criscuolo revival has lasted all of six years. I had let him down badly. Very badly. Was the 'problem' just a perceived one? Probably. At the time though I believed it was real.

Incidentally, the job that I couldn't be told about and that I couldn't talk about without afterwards killing anyone whom I told is now described in the Royal Air Force careers brochure in the following terms:

"Intelligence Analyst (Voice) - The RAF will train you to a high standard in at least one foreign language so that you can monitor, collect and analyse radio signals from overseas. You'll use this information to produce reports on actual or potential enemies and their movements."