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There were nasty minutes until we made sure that the pupil had survived what could easily have been a fatal crash, for it would have been but little comfort to feel that my own judgement had been, on this occasion, justified. Poor Wrench left the course and flying for him was over.


I carried on with my other pupils to the end of their six-week course, which finished on November 27th 1941, and took off by train for my first week’s leave in Durban.


* * * * * T


he long rail journey down to the coast started from Bulawayo in mid- morning, so it was necessary to fly down to Kumalo, the Oxford SFTS just


outside Bulawayo, to join the train there. Incidentally, the C/O at Kumalo was Group Captain Dalzell, who had been, as a Squadron Leader, the Chief Flying Instructor at the University Air Squadron in my time there. It was he who had written in my first logbook, at the end of my flying with the Squadron, ‘Not a well-kept logbook.’ The comment is still there to be seen and I took it to heart. Future logbooks were somewhat neater.


On the train the coaches were all sleepers with two- and four-bunk


compartments. We lumbered along at a steady but slow pace, pulled by a magnificent Garrard steam locomotive on the 3'6" track, passing through flat and uninteresting terrain, the parched grass and scrub of the typical Rhodesian ‘bundu’. Plumtree was the last township before the Rhodesian border was crossed and on we went through the Protectorate of Bechuanaland through isolated places like Francistown and Palapye Road. What people did who lived there, goodness only knows.


It was not on that first trip but some journeys later that the train was held


up for some hours at Francistown because of some line trouble ahead. I got into conversation with an elderly (he was actually retired) British South African Company policeman by the name of Guppy, who was sitting idly on the station platform with apparently nothing to do. He told me he was in charge of a South African soldier who had deserted and fled up north into Bechuanaland where he had been recaptured and handed over to Guppy for safe keeping. ‘But where is he?’ I asked. ‘Oh,’ said Guppy, ‘he’s somewhere around. There’s nowhere he can go from here, so I’m not worried. What bothers me,’ he continued, ‘is that I can’t possibly put a South African officer in the cell of the local prison here. I’m going to have to give him my bed and I’ll have to use the cell myself!’ The train left Francistown before I heard the end of this story, but the Johannesburg press had it the next day – ‘South African Officer Escapes from


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