revealing. Making money was the easiest thing I had ever done. Our reputation spread to the town, and I found myself dealing not only in cars but in cameras. Some of the chaps went on leave up to the Victoria Falls and all of them wanted to photograph them either with a still or ciné camera, and I knew quite a bit about ciné cameras in particular. My lost £100 was quite quickly recovered – and so was my peace of mind. But making money, more than enough to compensate me for my stupid


car purchase, though it may have calmed my annoyance, gave me no real satisfaction, for I had something of a guilty conscience about making it so very easily. I was obviously naïve enough to think there was something slightly immoral in buying cheaply and selling more dearly, although I suppose we did provide a real service, particularly to the young pupils who wanted a car for a limited period and could do without the trouble and aggro of searching for one and worrying about selling it when they were up against the deadline of posting. So I gave it up.


One particular set of circumstances helped me to make that decision. A little syndicate of three airmen in my own Group clubbed together and bought a Ford from me. They went off the next weekend on a trip to Bulawayo and failed to appear for duty on the tarmac on the Monday morning. The problem was that, when they did arrive later that day, they had to be put on a charge, and I was the officer who had to process it. They wheeled into my office, standing to attention with their caps off, and explained that their new purchase had broken down on the way back in the early hours of the morning. Unfortunately, regulations meant they had to be punished! They had already lost a day’s pay, and I could do nothing to restore it, but I made sure that was the extent of their punishment. They took it with good grace and happily treated the whole episode as a bit of a joke. It simply confirmed me in my resolution to stop being a secondhand car salesman. But I had been a good one, and I had learned a lot, in particular that a dog-collar confers no more trustworthiness than does the Presidency of the United States of America.


* * * * * T 78


ony Gaudioz’s crack about this being the best war he’d been in was all too true of life at Thornhill. And the anonymous airman’s crack at church


parade – ‘Wot about the ******* War’ – was equally pertinent. We were far from danger and strife, far from the discomforts of rationing and clothes’ coupons, far from black-outs and no petrol, even if we were at the same time far from our families and old friends.


So, many of us had a great longing to abandon the pleasant climate, the joy of flying in those latitudes and all the comparative comforts we enjoyed,


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