Open Writing

It was early 1941 when the RAF finally sent for me. A great load of us joined at Uxbridge, and after being sworn in, kitted out and shouted at, we were sent to Stratford on Avon by train.

A crowd of us was in one carriage, where one asked another for a light for his cigarette. The answer was, “Afraid not. If I give you a light, we may become friends. Then we may end up flying together. It could then be fatal for us both if you did not have an essential piece of equipment in an emergency.”

Also in the carriage were two fellows, Brian Stoker and Teddy Walsh, with whom I struck up a friendship that lasted for a few postings, but nothing lasted long and it was difficult to make real friendships, since it was also most certain we would be posted to different places.

Brian was a great runner and lived through the war, after which we met once. Teddy was rather older and a married man with a child. Life was more difficult for the married men. They missed their wives and were dreadfully short of money, since most had enjoyed good jobs. For someone like me, almost straight from school, the small weekly pay was more than adequate, and I often loaned sums to friends for a week or two.

After the usual preliminaries of injections (40 bare arms with one syringe and needle for us all - without cross infection), marching and being issued with kit, we went in for various lectures, most of them in the Shakespeare theatre.

The first sticks in my mind. It was by the MO, who warned us strongly against VD, after which we were issued with a condom and a tube of ointment, both of which went into my wallet. There they stayed until the tube burst and made a mess of the wallet. Since then, the mention of Shakespeare or Stratford always reminded me of the VD lecture.

My first day in Stratford taught me a lesson. I was put on unloading potatoes with a couple of Erks (airmen on the staff). Every third word they used was the F or B word, which had never come into my vocabulary. After a few minutes I realised that these words were meaningless to them and merely indicated that they possessed a very limited vocabulary.

To Canada

A short time at Stratford upon Avon was followed by lectures at Scarborough. Then we were loaded onto the cruise liner Windsor Castle en route for Calgary in Canada. In my imagination Calgary was a prairie village with horses tethered to the one bar in town.

Windsor Castle had been converted from a luxury cruise liner into a fast merchant cruiser. It had a number of guns, and we passengers were certainly not travelling in cruise luxury.

After a day and a half out from Glasgow, with low cloud, we suddenly heard aircraft engines approaching. An aircraft broke cloud right above us, and every gun on ship opened up on it. Fortunately they missed, because it was a Whitley sent out to see if we were all right. This was my first experience of friendly fire - but by no means my last.

We landed at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and after UK rationing, it was quite something to sit down to a full breakfast, starting with orange juice and ending with two eggs and liberal butter. As one who did not eat bacon, it was nice to find how popular I was at breakfast time. One of those sitting next to me could always count on an extra rasher.

The five-day journey across Canada on the Canadian Pacific railway was an experience and we ended in Calgary, which was quite a city, although nothing like as substantial as it has become since 1945. Our Elementary Training School was a grass airfield a few miles outside Calgary, which has since become the unrecognisably large Calgary International Airport.

I was allocated to a very middle-aged flying instructor to teach me how to fly Tiger Moths. This he succeeded in doing without too much difficulty, and after ten hours I was flying solo. My first flight was a worry since I had always been afraid of heights. I had never been in an aeroplane before Calgary. Strangely enough, there was never a sensation of height when flying.

Members of my course started getting failed soon. One was too tall and wide to fit in to the Tiger Moth cockpit. Surely that should have been noticed before sending him all the way to Canada. Another was sick the first three times he became airborne, and on the fourth occasion he made his instructor sick.

Saturday nights saw most of us downtown enjoying ourselves with steaks, beers and girls. On one Sunday four of us rented a car and drove to Banff in the Rockies, feeding the bears on the way. Mark Kenny and his orchestra played at the Banff Springs Hotel and were the famous orchestra of the time.

At the end of the course we were split into two groups. The younger, foolhardy fellows were to be trained on fighters. We went east a few hundred miles to Moose Jaw, whilst the older, wiser men went for training on Ansons or Oxfords in preparation for bomber crews. We were beginning to realise that it was very difficult to make friends, because in a few weeks or months we would probably be sent to a different place.

The Harvard was a powerful, radial engine low-wing monoplane with a very noisy Pratt and Whitney engine. Here I was allocated to a tall, good-looking instructor who managed to mix his flying and his social life very effectively.

One day we went up for instrument flying, which meant that I was flying on instruments under the hood for nearly 45 minutes. The hood was then removed and we started ‘beating up’ a small farmhouse. The reason for this soon became apparent when we saw a girl emerge and wave to us.

After some hair-raising low flying my instructor lowered his under-carriage, and we came in and landed in a field alongside the farmhouse. I was told to stay with the aircraft. He disappeared for quite a while. Finally we took off again and returned to the airfield, and I was told to enter in my logbook the fact that we had had two flights with a landing on our base airfield in the middle. Otherwise it would have meant that we had been away from the airfield for much longer than our petrol would have permitted.

Aerobatics, solo flying, night flying, navigating from place to place - slowly we became more and more proficient, although hardly expert.

It had been a great pleasure to find a school friend, Tony Herbert, in the class ahead of us. Since we were in different classes, it was difficult to spend much time together. One night one of the Harvards crashed while attempting to land. Somehow I knew who was flying it. It was indeed Tony Herbert, who was killed - the first of many RAF friends who were killed.