Now that I have pretty well finished my Autobiography in Words and Pictures, an event has allowed me to add a postscript to A100 to A102 that dealt with my posting to RAF Coastal Command’s 279 Squadron at Davidstow Moor where I flew as a student pilot being just another pair of eyes in a Warwick aircraft.
I did about 20 hours in various sorties over the Bay of Biscay with a lifeboat slung beneath each aeroplane, ready to drop it to save aircrew who were desperate to survive, having been shot down by German aeroplanes.
It so happened that after the war I was having an exhibition of Aircraft Shadows framed for a show at the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street, London.
The framer was interested in the fact that I had been a pilot in the war and told me that his grandfather had also flown (as a pilot) in Warwick aircraft from Davidstow Moor. Not only that, but at the very same time that I had done so from the same airfield.
I might well have flown with him as the lookout for the German Condor aeroplanes that were faster and much more heavily armed than our Warwicks.
So we checked in his grandfather’s logbook to hopefully find my name as a trainee pilot gaining combat experience in his Warwick.
And there it was - but only as “passenger”.
So had we been shot down and drowned, our gravestone might have had all our aircrew names on it - and “passenger”.
Thank heavens it never came to pass.
