Wings
As a small boy the youths around me wanted to be train drivers. And you could see why. It was an age of steam and steam railway engines that shunted and pulled trains.
There was something wonderful about those powerful mammoths - the smoke, the steam, the boiler fires, the noise, oil, the huge moving parts of steel, and most of all the smell.
What made this smell must have been a combination of most of the above. It was distinctive and exhilarating for small boys.
As much as I loved those steam engines, it was aircraft and flying in them that sparked my enthusiasm for the new-fangled mode of using aircraft for transport and war. Making scale models and flying toy aeroplanes, powered by propellers and rubber bands, were not just hobbies but strong pointers toward the future.
Thus it was that I took every possible opportunity to watch, to learn and to fly heavier than air aircraft. They were still mainly made with wood and wire, with canvas coated in dope.
So when the Second World War arrived, and when I was old enough to join our forces to fight the Germans, it was quite obvious it was the RAF that called.
The death rate in 1942, when I joined up, was so great that our training airfields (mostly abroad in good weather conditions) were chock-a-block. So I was asked to return to civvy street where I first worked as a farm labourer and then at RAF Theale as a prop-swinger - starting up Tiger Moth trainers for aspiring pilots to accomplish their first solo flight.
There being no weather forecasting at the time, an instructor alone would fly up-wind to see if the incoming weather was suitable for first-time flyers.
Unaccompanied, this left the second cockpit empty. Because of my unique position of being both in the RAF and out of it, I was sometimes offered this second pilot’s seat. Thus I learned to fly - a state that was quite natural to me.
So when a flying vacancy occurred in the RAF, I re-joined, now with considerable flying experience.
From then on my progress in the air was straightforward, despite a mighty crash (which is always supposed to make a pilot a better one).
Then came the ceremony in Oklahoma when I was awarded my wings, where the high-ranking officer could only use his left hand with which to pin on this hard-earned and proudly worn emblem.
The pin used penetrated my shirt and drew blood from my chest. But you expect wounds in war.
