Our teachers put forward the obvious reasons against invading another country for commercial reasons, as a moral issue. During the debate, bearing in mind the government line, I put up my hand, and said that the moral issues were not always so clear as the speakers had said. Might it not sometimes be acceptable to use armed force to prevent a worse conflict? At the time, I did not know that St Thomas Aquinas was an early exponent of the idea of a ‘just war’. I was torn to pieces by Jack Smith and Brian Stokes, quite rightly. It was my first step towards a more critical approach to political matters.
This did not hinder my later participation in Jack Smith’s weekend activities with the school film society. One of our films featured in a festival of shorts shown in the National Film Theatre, which had a huge poster of me posted above the entrance, acting the part of a sadistic school-prefect. By that time I was in fact a school-prefect (though not at all sadistic). Three of the society’s films, but not this one, are held in the archives of the British Film institute.
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