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had got quite a few hours in the air and perhaps quite a few years of service occasionally reminded the less experienced of these facts, and this led me to lose another shilling. It was announced that we were to get a new Wing Commander as O/C the Squadron’s flying operations. We did not know who it might be, as he was being posted from another Station, and it cost me a shilling when I, again speaking rather idly, commented ‘I wonder if it will be one of my ex-pupils?’ This sort of crack was rather in line with what one or two of the long-serving pilots might occasionally come out with – comments like ‘I’ve got more ink in my logbook than some of you have had petrol in your tanks!’, or even ‘Can I sell you 1,000 hours for a couple of pounds?’


But one line-shoot I eventually got entered in the Line Book completely free of charge. It was at a late date in the War, when the boys in ‘B’ Flight had been operating fairly long flights into the Reich, long as compared with the usual raids on the Ruhr which had been the Squadron’s main role in that last winter of 1944/45. They were boasting to me of their ‘deep penetration raids’ and I quietly said, as I was perfectly entitled to at that time, ‘I’ve penetrated Germany further on foot than you lot have in the air!’ They agreed that was no exaggeration.


It was indeed true, but that is a story for a later page. It got into the Flight Line Book without costing me a shilling.


* * * * * I


t was a cold and beastly few months of operational weather, that last winter of the War. Our corrugated steel Nissen huts with their dozen or so beds were unheated except by a coke stove in the centre with its flue up through the roof. And there was precious little coke. On the coldest of the nights the only technique which availed anything at all in the way of warmth was to use what little fuel we had to heat up the circular stove as much we could, using the fuel at too high a rate for it to last and, whilst there was some real heat to tap, take turns in standing our thin mattresses on end, encircling the stove as closely as possible without touching it. Then it was into bed before the mattress could cool down, with the hope that sleep would come before the cold crept in too. The weather pattern dictated our operations. There were times when there were calls on consecutive days or nights, for daylight raids had begun now that fighters could be based not too far from the front line which had been pushed eastwards as the war on land progressed. Then there would be intermissions of a week or two weeks when the weather kept us idle and frustrated on the ground. In November 1944, I and my crew bombed Dusseldorf on the night of the 2nd, Bochum on the night of the 4th and then nothing until a daylight raid on Julich on the 16th and Munster on the 18th. Between these raids, Margaret gave birth to our second son Colin at the Acland Nursing Home in Oxford,


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