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Oxford or Cambridge, where they were currently members of the respective University Air Squadrons. It had obviously been planned to bring all seventeen of us together, including myself as an ex-OUAS type, for some reason we could not guess. But whatever the reason, the outcome was a happy one. I was a few years out of the age bracket of the others, but I seemed to be accepted right away – not least, perhaps, because I was the only member of the squad with a car, which made five or six of us at a time mobile enough to get to the cinema in Derby or to drinks with the odd housemaster of Repton School. I was soon referred to as ‘uncle’. I wish I had kept a diary, even a minimal diary with just a few names and dates of events, for I can no longer recall the names of all the other sixteen at Burnaston and, later, at Cranwell to which all of us were posted after finishing our elementary training. There was Johnny Nunn; Wilcox; Cecil Aldis whom I met in the 1950s at the Farnborough Air Show wearing Wing Commander’s stripes and following a career in the RAF; Tony Tisdall who was killed early in his operational career, a 6'4" tall and goodlooking Cambridge undergraduate; Rupert Gascoyne-Cecil, whose later exploits are mentioned in ‘Most Secret War’, R. V. Jones’s account of British Scientific Intelligence in the war years and who later became Vice-Principal of Linacre College, Oxford; and Donald Glennie, of whom more anon. Nor can I remember too much of the domestic arrangements of our mess. We must have shared bedroom accommodation, even though it was a fairly large country mansion. Harben and his wife lived in it too, but we had practically no social contact with either of them. Perhaps he felt superior – or inferior. Food was reasonably good and the showers hot. It was a nasty winter. We began actual flying training on Tuesday the 12th December, in our Miles Magister low-wing single-engined monoplanes. The instructors were, some of them, civilians who had been instructing at Burnaston when it had operated as Air Schools Ltd, and some RAF personnel, both commissioned and non-commissioned. My own instructor was Sgt Stockings, and I went solo in the Magister after 6 hours 45 minutes of dual, including my solo test. That was about average. From then on I flew with Sgt Mulholland and finally with Pilot Officer Samson. There was nothing remarkable about the flying training, except that we found it almost impossible, even towards the end of the course, to get our instructors to give us dual in aerobatics. They seemed less than keen, which disappointed all of us. The War, if it was progressing at all, touched us only marginally. The winter weather was ghastly, one of the worst winters for many years, with cold and snow which slowed down our progress and caused us to miss many days of flying. There was one invasion scare early in the new year, when we stood by all one night waiting for German paratroopers to descend on the aerodrome, ready to repel them with rifles hastily issued which reminded me of my OTC days at Oxford.


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