LITMIR.BIZ

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I braced myself for the worst. Gently he drew back the sheet…I looked at the broken body and felt curiously unmoved…On my way back to Hornchurch I briefly wondered whether there was not a lesson here: whether I ought to be more careful, stick more closely to the rule books…’ The mood, though, ‘was short-lived’.³⁶

      The number of fatal accidents inevitably increased as the 300 m.p.h. plus monoplanes, far harder to control than the biplanes, and in need of more room to recover if a mistake was made, were fed into the squadrons. At Tangmere, one pilot slid too slowly out of a turn and crashed in front of his comrades. Another time they watched as a pilot clipped the top of a tree coming in to land and burned to death before their eyes. Afterwards, Peter Townsend recorded ‘we had our own methods of restoring our morale. In the early hours of that morning, in the mess, we mourned our lost comrade in our own peculiar way, which smacked somewhat of the ritual of primitive tribesmen. Fred Rosier took his violin and to the tune of the can-can from Orpheus in the Underworld, we danced hilariously round the mess.’³⁷

      Other atavistic instincts were stirring; the impulses to marry, or at least to have sex. The pre-war RAF discouraged officers from matrimony under the age of thirty. This was partly out of parsimony, partly out of considerations of efficiency and the desire to foster a mess-centred squadron spirit. What the service needed were single men free of family responsibilities, ready to move, at virtually no notice, where and when they were needed. Pilots had to seek the permission of their commanding officers before taking a wife. Failure to secure it meant no married quarters accommodation and no allowances. As the year wore on, the number of requests multiplied. On getting engaged to his girlfriend, Annette, Pete Brothers had to appear before Group Captain Dick Grice, the Biggin Hill commandant, who, ‘fortunately…was a very charming chap. He was sitting behind a desk smoking a pipe, and he said, “You’re very young” – I was just 21 – “what if I refuse?” I said in that case it would be very difficult to send him an invitation to the wedding.’³⁸ Grice, an immensely popular father figure with Biggin Hill pilots and staff, laughed and gave in.

      Tim Vigors, on leave from Cranwell, took advantage of a trip to London to look up Kitty, a girlfriend who was staying in town with an aunt. They spent the evening dancing in a club off Regent Street, leaving at 3 a.m. Vigors daringly suggested that she come back for a drink. To his surprise she agreed and they repaired to the Regent Palace Hotel. He was prevented from taking matters further when a vigilant night porter blocked his path, protesting that Vigors had ‘only booked a single and anyway she’s far too young for those kind of tricks’. He ‘tried to remain calm despite the fact that I had never felt so embarrassed in my life. “None of your business!” I retorted. “Come on Kitty, let’s get inside and lock this bastard out!”’ Kitty, however, burst into tears. Vigors gallantly drove her home and returned to the hotel ‘feeling embarrassed, ashamed, angry and frustrated’.³⁹

      Senior officers, too, felt youthful stirrings as the great trial approached. Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the Air Officer Commanding No. 12 Fighter Group covering the Midlands and north, visited his pilots in 616 Squadron at their summer camp at Manston on the Kent coast. A dinner was laid on in his honour in one of the marquees. At the end of the evening the inevitable, well-lubricated games began. One involved climbing up the centre pole, squeezing through a ventilation flap, clambering over the ridge pole and re-entering the tent through the flap on the other side. Several pilots, including Hugh Dundas, did so without mishap.

      Then someone suggested that the AOC should have a go. Very sportingly, he agreed. But he was not really built for that kind of thing. In the course of the passing years his figure had thickened. He got up the pole all right. But he had a terrible job squeezing out through the ventilation flap. We stood below and cheered him on. At last he plopped through and his face, purple with exertion, disappeared out into the night. The tent swayed and the ridge-pole sagged as he struggled across the top. His legs reappeared on the other side. He got half-way and stuck.

      Shouting with laughter, we urged him on and his legs and buttocks wiggled and waggled as he fought his way through that canvas flap. Someone shinned up the pole and helped him with a few hearty tugs. He came out like a champagne cork, grabbed desperately at the pole and descended from a height of about ten feet in a free fall…He accepted a very large, very dark whisky and soda and left us hurriedly before we started playing something else.⁴⁰

      A few days later Dundas was sitting in the mess tent after a morning’s flying when the news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact came through. ‘Teddy St Aubyn, who was sitting opposite me, put down his soup spoon and said in a loud, clear voice: “Well that’s …d it. That’s the start of the …g war.”’ Looking back, Dundas could not say why this pronouncement struck him with such force, given that, as he dryly remarked, ‘Teddy…was not noted as a political pundit or a serious student of international affairs. But I heard his words and knew they were true.’

      The announcement was finally made late on the morning of 3 September, a day that was generally remembered as being exceptionally warm, sunny and redolent of all the promise of young life. At fighter bases the length and breadth of the country the pilots gathered in the mess or clustered round portable radios rigged up at the dispersal areas to hear Prime Minister Chamberlain speak. At Tangmere, the pilots in Peter Townsend’s flight were lying on the grass by their Hurricanes when they were told that ‘the balloon goes up at 11.45’. They walked over to the mess, covered in pink creeper, and waited while the faithful stewards served drinks in pewter mugs. As the broadcast ended, ‘the tension suddenly broke. The fatal step had been taken; we were at war.’ Caesar Hull, a brilliant sportsman and aerobatic pilot who had joined the RAF on a short-service commission from South Africa, was the first to rejoice, repeating, ‘Wizard!’ over and over. He turned to another 43 pilot John Simpson, and laughingly prophesied: ‘Don’t worry, John, you’ll be one of the first to be killed.’ Simpson survived the war. Hull died a year and four months later while attacking a large formation of German bombers. That night, after being released, Townsend and his comrades raced to the Old Ship at Bosham. ‘What a party we had; at closing time, we went out into the street and fired our revolvers into the air. Windows were flung open, people rushed from their houses, thinking the invasion had started.’⁴¹

      At Cranwell, Tim Vigors and his fellow cadets were ordered to the ante-room to hear the broadcast. When the declaration of war came, ‘a shout of excitement rose from all our throats. As one man we jumped to our feet cheering. There was not one amongst us who would not have been bitterly disappointed had the declaration of war not been made.’ The same scene was taking place simultaneously in a classroom in Hull, where Charlton Haw and thirty of his fellow RAFVR pilots were gathered after being called up the week before. ‘A tremendous cheer went out from all of us. We were very pleased about the whole thing. We didn’t think about the danger. We all had visions of sitting in a Spitfire the following day. And then the disappointing thing was we were all sent home.’⁴² In Romford, where he worked in the Ind Coope brewery, another reservist, William Walker, switched off the radio, put on his sergeant’s uniform and walked out of his block of flats. A group of men were digging an air-raid shelter and he offered to help. ‘They said: “No, not at all! You’re in uniform. We can’t let you do that sort of thing.”’⁴³

      Charles Fenwick, who had recently joined the RAFVR, was one of the few to be surprised by the news. He was so buoyed up by happiness that he had refused to believe war could not be avoided. ‘I was in love as only a twenty-year-old can be in love, I was all set for Cambridge, I owned a lovely little car and damn it I was enjoying life. Then this shit-head comes along and puts the lid on everything.’ His first reaction was ‘one of absolute shock, horrified shock…My second reaction was not long in coming. No bloody German was going to hurt those I loved and get away with it if I could stop him.’⁴⁴

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