After surviving basic training sadists, Roger learns to read the signals and crack the codes that will admit him into the RAF's gay underworld.

In this extract Roger describes his experiences as a National Serviceman in the RAF, in the 1950s. Sent for basic training to RAF Padgate, near Warrington, a place which, Roger recalls, was an 'open house for sadists', he says that many of the 18-year-old conscripts never recovered from their experience. Some even committed suicide but Roger thinks he survived because he was a little more street-wise than his fellow recruits.

After Padgate, Roger trained to be a medic and happened to discover an extensive 'gay network', where, once you'd made the initial contact, you could find lots of other gays all over the RAF. Coded recognition signals were used like wearing signet rings on the left 'pinkie' finger, twiddling the ring to indicate interest, putting your hands together to indicate you weren't interested and sliding the ring up and down the pinkie finger to show that you were.

After an interview with a 'strange' RAF Sergeant, who asked Roger if he liked music, he found he was billeted with twenty other men. That night, he heard lots of shuffling about and bed-springs twanging, as well as a hand feeling him under the bedclothes, and later learned that the observant sergeant had selected him to go into that specific billet.

Later working in RAF hospitals, where gay activity was 'rife', Roger soon asked for postings abroad, and he served in Aden, Singapore and Nairobi. His 'gay life' became even busier and included a dalliance with an RAF officer, a dentist, who took him for a romantic stay at the exclusive Tree Tops resort in Kenya. Unfortunately, they bumped into their Commanding Officer and his wife, thus risking a court martial, not for the gay sex, but for the 'crime' of a commissioned officer consorting with an ordinary serviceman.

Roger was born in Norwich in 1937. Evacuated to Swaffham, also in Norfolk, he recalls seeing a lot of bomb damage and explosions of V1 terror weapons. He also remembers having wonderful parents and a very understanding grandmother, Rose, and an entertaining great-uncle Sid.

Roger was called up for National Service and chose to go into the RAF, where he trained as a nurse, eventually specialising in psychiatric nursing once he left the RAF. Roger was partnered to Noel for 41 years, until the latter's death two years before this interview for GLAM.

Roger recalls some ribald tales of the gay life in both Norfolk and London and as well as describing some fascinating characters, like Black Anna, who owned a pub in Norwich until the mid-1970s. Roger also describes how he and Noel became deeply involved in the city's high-Anglican church, St John the Baptist church, at Timber Hill.

The Montagu trial took place in Winchester in 1954. On trial were Lord Edward Montagu, the owner of the Beaulieu estate in Hampshire, West Country landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers and the Daily Mail journalist Peter Wildeblood. They were accused of performing ‘gross offences’ and ‘conspiracy to incite male persons to commit serious offences with male persons’, after two RAF airman were coerced by the police into turning Queen’s Evidence against them. Found guilty, Montagu was jailed for 12 months while Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers were sentenced to 18 months each.

Despite salacious details of the case being splashed across the press and lapped up by a scandal and sensation hungry public, the effect of the trail was to bring the issues of both homosexuality and the law into the public arena, kick-starting a gradual conversation, through the Wolfenden Report, and the movement towards the law being partly liberalised with the Sexual Offences Act in 1967.