Peacetime conscription was, until recently, a feature of many European countries. But the practice is alien to Britain, where it existed for only a short period after the Second World War; the call-up ended in 1960. Over two million men went through national service, usually for a period of two years. Historians, preoccupied with the welfare state and working-class ‘affluence’, have paid little attention to the fact that most men born in the 1930s spent part of their youth in the armed forces. The authors of this book, a large-scale oral history, seek to fill this gap. Given that national service veterans are in their mid-eighties or older, this is almost certainly the last time such a study will be attempted.

The authors seek to address national service as something that affected men’s whole lives rather than as a parenthesis, and as something that had implications for the whole of society rather than just the armed forces. They are particularly keen to record the experiences of working-class conscripts and to counter what their informants consider to be the excessively negative portrayal of national service in earlier works. The use of the word ‘stories’ in the title is significant. Peter Gurney and his colleagues wish to capture the way in which veterans of national service composed accounts of their experiences, even if those accounts were usually unwritten. The interviews on which they draw involved much work on the part of Joel Morley, who did most of the empirical research, though not most of the writing. Often the most revealing feature of these interviews is the awkward, even confrontational, tone. The interviewees sound uncomfortable when invited to describe their lives in terms that make sense to an academic historian. This is particularly true with regard to social class. I came to wonder whether there might have been some point (perhaps in the 1970s or 1980s) when rejection of the words ‘working class’ became a defining feature of working-class identity.

The authors begin by looking at national service in popular culture and how it relates to wider questions of war and the status of veterans. They describe the lives of young men born in the 1930s before they were conscripted, paying particular attention to their families and the impact of