and looked forward to seeing the green fields of Britain, even if they were occasionally covered with snow. I had been told that I had been posted to Southern Rhodesia for two years and I felt that would be long enough. But they were good times whilst they lasted, full of movement and change, with something new every day even if flying instruction was pretty repetitive stuff.


There was the day when one of my closest friends, F/O Terrill, who had arrived on the Station on the same train as I had, was caught purloining a tin of engine oil in the middle of the night. Lubricating oil was the one thing that, for a time, was rationed and if you owned a car which tended to eat it, motoring could be somewhat limited. Terrill had decided that a pint or two would not be missed and the Station Duty Officer on duty that particular night, one F/O Bancroft, happened to be doing a round of the Askari guards after midnight when Terrill was caught actually on the job. Bancroft reported him. Whether any of the rest of us would have done the same is perhaps doubtful, but that is not meant to criticize Bancroft. Poor Terrill was court-martialled, dismissed the Service, and sent home to the UK. It seems that he managed to get a job as a test pilot with the Blackburn Aircraft company and he was later killed in a flying accident.


There were happier memories to recall. Horse-racing is as much a passion in South Africa as it is in other parts of the world, and the main race of the year, which corresponds there to our Derby or to the Melbourne Cup in Australia, is the Johannesburg Spring Handicap. This occasions a national lottery of immense interest, and simply everyone buys tickets, hoping for the first prize which was £10,000, a real fortune at that time. The Rhodesian Air Training Group recruited an arm of its operations from local ladies, who joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Service (WAAS) and signed up for some period of a year or two. They acted as clerks and time-keepers in the Flights. My own Flight’s time-keeper was WAASie (as they were called) Mrs Chumley, the wife of a civil servant living in Gwelo. The WAASies bought lottery tickets like the rest of us, and it appears that twenty of them agreed to pool all their tickets and to share any prize that might come their way.


The Spring Handicap was run, if I remember correctly, in the month of September and when the great day came in 1943 there was much excitement as everyone gathered round whatever radio was nearest and waited for the race commentary to dash or fulfill their hopes. The excitement grew when we heard that a horse by the name of So Shy was making all the running and reached a crescendo when it passed the post ahead of its rivals, for our WAASie syndicate had drawn a horse and, indeed, its name was So Shy!. The Station went wild. In 1943 £10,000 was a very great deal of money and even £500, the share of each of the twenty participating girls, was not to be sneezed at. The chaos was absolute. Quite a few of the WAASies had put in enough


79


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