Refugees

 With refugees much in our minds at present, I realise that I have, in my long life, been both the receiver and provider of aid in adversity.

With Russia now intent on overrunning and subjugating the Ukraine, the fear of invasion from hostile forces was as much in the minds of the British people concerning the Nazis in 1940. Hitler's henchmen were then on the rampage, just as Putin's army is today.

In 1940, with my elder brother and sister in occupations that could contribute to the war effort, and my mother working for WVS (Women's Voluntary Service) in London. I, at 15 years old would, she hoped, be one member of the family to survive the probable invasion if I was in a safer country.

An American family from Connecticut in America's East Coast, contacted WVS to ask for an English refugee boy. I was consulted at school, agreed to go, and prepared to leave for a safer land.

With a small suitcase of belongings, I took a train in London to board The Duchess of Richmond liner in Liverpool, thence to sail across the U-boat-infested Atlantic Ocean to disembark in Montreal, Canada.

It was the start of a lonely life in foreign parts, lasting until I was old enough to return to England in 1942 to join the Royal Air Force. 

As a refugee, people in America did their generous best to keep me happy, and certainly safe from Nazi bombs.

Compared with whole families uprooted and with their homes destroyed in the Ukraine, my life as a refugee was one of minor consequence.

That, briefly, was my life as a refugee.

Fast forward through my life in the wartime RAF (written about in my blogs and painted in pictures), TB, the war's end, recuperation (no cure then), medical student (TB again), and on to when I rebuilt a bombed-out house in Fulham, London, to become a landscape painter. 

For painting these landcapes of river and lake scenes, I bought a small pram dinghy and designed and had built a body of a flat-back VW truck in which to house the boat and myself when painting in the countryside. The results were popular.

Fast forward again to 1955 when the Russians invaded Hungary. Refugees, a little like I had been in the war, were pouring into Austria for safety.

With Anne de Goguel, who was well-connected in well-heeled society, we decided to aid these Hungarian refugees.

So, consulting all who might help, we filled my VW "boathouse" van with warm clothes and blankets (mostly new) and set off across Europe, crossing customs borders, and aiming for Vienna.

There we contacted the Red Cross and were told to take our cargo to their warehouse. 

We had not come all that way to do that. So we bought a newspaper to learn that many of those fleeing the Russians were crossing the border at a town called Eisenstadt.

Off we continued, to find a farmyard at the border with many Hungarian refugees trying to keep warm in straw.

Backing the VW into the farmyard we distributed the clothes and blankets directly to those really needing them (there's a moral there). On our way home we took a couple of refugees from the border to Vienna.

So I happen to have experienced both of life as a refugee and, in turn, helped others in much the same situation.

The movement of people throughout the world for economic or oppressed reasons will, sadly, continue for ever. There will always be those who help or are helped - sometimes both. 

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Skylark

 It was in the spring of 1944 that I was posted for operational training to the highest airfield in England, RAF Davidstow Moor, in Cornwall.

I was only an AC2 trainee pilot, waiting for a vacancy to become a fully-fledged pilot in a friendly country where the weather was more conducive to novice flying.

Here, for experience of operations at Davidstow, my only job was to take the second pilot's seat in Warwick aircraft to watch out for the four-engined and powerfully armed German Condor aircraft, based in Brittany and operating over the Bay of Biscay.

Even with our plentiful collection of 303 Browning machine guns, we were no match for the bristling canons on the far swifter German aeroplane.

So my extra pair of sharp eyes being directed skyward were of vital importance when the others aboard the Warwick were looking seaward to locate bailed-out or crash-landed aircrew for whom we were prepared to drop, via parachutes, a specially-made lifeboat slung beneath the fuselage.

The sorties were often long ones, one, as I recall, lasting 9 hours. 

We were each given a box of food and drink guaranteed as fried egg on our return to Davidstow. 

The noise on board from our two Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp, radial engines was enormous. So conversation was impossible without use of the intercom. 

Back on land at Davidstow there were several useless plans to keep me busy, if not happy. But life on the station was generally pretty miserable with poor rationed food and infrequent leave.

As having the lowest rank in the RAF (AC2), I mostly had to keep my sleeping space in a multi-bed Nissen hut clean and tidy, trousers pressed, boots shiny, brass burnished and blankets in perfect "bisquit" form. So leave, if only a day's worth, was a delightful break from the land-based monotony. 

My favourite outing was to take a bike ride to Boscastle, a delightful, small and almost miniature unused inlet harbour on Cornwall's north coast.

On the way there or back I would stop, make for a field of grass, lie on my back and gaze into the blue sky to listen to the song, and watch the hovering flight of a skylark.