Giles drove into Bristol the following morning and parked his yellow MG ostentatiously outside the front door of the recruiting office. He marched in with what he hoped was resolution written across his face. A sergeant major from the Gloucesters – Captain Jack Tarrant’s old regiment – stood smartly to attention the moment he saw young Mr Barrington. He handed Giles a form which he dutifully filled in, and an hour later he was invited to step behind a curtain and be examined by an army doctor.
The doctor placed a tick in every box after he’d thoroughly checked this latest recruit – ears, nose, throat, chest and limbs – before finally testing his eyesight. Giles stood behind a white line and recited the letters and numbers on demand; after all, he could dispatch a leather ball coming straight at him at ninety miles an hour, to the most distant boundary. He was confident he would pass with flying colours, until the doctor asked him if he was aware of any hereditary ailments or diseases in his family. Giles replied truthfully, ‘Both my father and grandfather are colour-blind.’
The doctor carried out a further series of tests, and Giles noticed that the ums and ahs turned into tut-tuts.
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, Mr Barrington,’ he said when he came to the end of his examination, ‘that given your family’s medical history, I will not be able to recommend you for active service. But of course, there’s nothing to stop you joining up and doing a desk job.’
‘Can’t you just tick the relevant box, doctor, and forget I ever raised the damn subject?’ said Giles, trying to sound desperate.
The doctor ignored his protest, and in the final box on the form he wrote ‘C3’: unfit for active service.
Giles was back at the Manor House in time for lunch. His mother, Elizabeth, didn’t comment on the fact that he drank almost a bottle of wine. He told everyone who asked, and several who didn’t, that he’d been rejected by the Gloucesters because he suffered from colour-blindness.
‘It didn’t stop Grandfather fighting the Boers,’ Grace reminded him after he’d been served with a second helping of pudding.
‘They probably had no idea the condition existed back then,’ said Giles, trying to make light of her barb.
Emma followed up with a punch below the belt. ‘You never intended to sign up in the first place, did you?’ she said, looking her brother in the eye. Giles was staring down at his shoes when she delivered the knockout blow. ‘Pity your friend from the docks isn’t here to remind you that he was also colour-blind.’
When Giles’s mother heard the news she was clearly relieved, but didn’t comment. Grace didn’t speak to her brother again before she returned to Cambridge.
Giles drove back to Oxford the following day trying to convince himself that everyone would accept the reason he’d been unable to sign up and intended to continue his life as an undergraduate. When he strolled through the college gates, he found that the quad resembled a recruiting centre rather than a university, with young men in uniform outnumbering those wearing subfusc. In Giles’s opinion, the only good thing to come out of all this was that for the first time in history there were as many women as men up at the university. Unfortunately, most of them were only willing to be seen on the arm of someone in uniform.
Giles’s old school friend Deakins was one of the few undergraduates who didn’t seem uncomfortable about not signing up. Mind you, there wouldn’t have been much point in Deakins taking a medical. It would have been one of the rare exams in which he failed to get a tick in any box. But then he suddenly disappeared, to somewhere called Bletchley Park. No one could tell Giles what they got up to there, except it was all ‘hush-hush’, and Deakins warned Giles that he wouldn’t be able to visit him at any time, under any circumstances.
As the months passed, Giles began to spend more time alone in the pub than in the crowded lecture theatre, while Oxford began to fill up with servicemen returning from the Front, some with one arm, others with one leg, a few who were blind, and they were just in his college. He tried to carry on as if he hadn’t noticed, but the truth was, by the end of term, he began to feel more and more out of place.
Giles drove up to Scotland at the end of term to attend the christening of Sebastian Arthur Clifton. Only the immediate family and one or two close friends were invited to the ceremony that took place in the chapel at Mulgelrie Castle. Emma and Giles’s father was not among them.
Giles was surprised and delighted when Emma asked him to be a godfather, although he was somewhat taken aback when she admitted that the only reason she’d even considered him was that, despite everything, she had no doubt he would have been Harry’s first choice.
As he was going down to breakfast the following morning, Giles noticed a light coming from his grandfather’s study. As he passed the door on his way to the dining room, Giles heard his name come up in conversation. He stopped in his tracks, and took a step nearer to the half-open door. He froze in horror when he heard Sir Walter saying, ‘It pains me to have to say this, but like father, like son.’