LEOPARD-SKIN SOLUTION
April 1956 seemed to be racing by, and still I could not persuade the Air Force to let me in. It was a very odd position to be in. Compulsory National Service was not popular and it was becoming even less so as the mood toward a fully professional army, navy, and air force strengthened.
The rumors grew that by 1960 it would be abolished. All my contemporaries were seeking ways of delaying their call-up until abolition. Some invented maladies that would enable them to fail the medical. Much of a generation claimed to have flat feet, fallen arches, defective vision, or shortage of breath. If they were all to be believed, one would conclude the young manhood of Britain was the unfittest on earth.
And yet I was trying to get in against an oncoming tide of youngsters trying to get out. I went to two recruiting offices in East Kent, and in each the result was the same. The flight sergeant in each welcomed me with something approaching disbelief, a surprise compounded on learning I was not trying to sign up for a whole career but just for the two-year National Service that everyone was trying to avoid.
There was a reason for this. I did not want to spend a working lifetime in a blue uniform if I could not fly. In fact, the RAF was extremely generous in that regard. If you failed the selection tests, you could leave immediately, but I did not know that.
In each office, the senior NCO beamed a welcome, drew out a long form, and began to fill it in. Everything went swimmingly until the query about date of birth. When I gave it, there were several seconds of mental arithmetic, then the sad smile as the form was torn up.
“Nice try, son,” they said. “Come back when you are eighteen.”
It was my father who cracked it. Ashford had an Air Cadet Corps and the corps had a band, and up front marched the big drummer, in both senses. He was a big lad, and jutting out from his chest was the big drum. But he had no leopard-skin tabard or poncho. Everyone knows that the big drummer has to have his leopard skin.
Dad was a furrier, and in his basement store he had a magnificent leopard skin, deposited for safekeeping before the war by someone who had never come back and probably never would. He took it from the chilled vault, trimmed it, backed it with red baize, cut a slit for the drummer’s head, and presented it to the corps.
The drummer was in seventh heaven and the corps commander deeply grateful. The point was, the corps had a patron in the form of a retired air marshal who lived out at Tenterden. He rang my father to express his appreciation. The conversation ended with the perfunctory “If there’s anything I can ever do . . .”
“Well, as a matter of fact, there is,” said my father.
The warmth at the other end dropped several degrees. “Yes . . . ?”
“I have a son.”
“Good.”
“He wants to join the Air Force.”
“Excellent.”
“There’s a problem, Air Marshal. He’s just a couple of weeks too young.”
There was a thoughtful pause, then, “Leave it to me.”
This is where the luck came in, though only later did I discover the story behind the story.
During the war, the air marshal had been a group captain commanding an air base in the middle of Iraq called Habbaniyah. Serving under him was a certain junior officer, a flight lieutenant. In the intervening years, the group captain had become an air marshal retired to Tenterden. The flight lieutenant had become a group captain and director of personnel at the ministry. To this day, I have a fantasy of the conversation between them. Something along the lines of:
“Now look here, Farnsbarns, stop faffing about and send this lad his papers, we’ll say no more about the missing petrol coupons.”
Something like that. Anyway, a week later, my call-up papers arrived. The usual buff envelope headed by the letters OHMS. On Her Majesty’s Service. I was to report to RAF Hornchurch for aircrew selection tests.
I have little doubt no one knew that I had already done that once, and the presumption was that I would fail and that would solve the problem. After all, only about one in a hundred National Servicemen passed. There was a sound reason for this.
Since the end of the Second World War, the procedure had been that those getting their wings during National Service would go back to Civvy Street but remain on the roll of the Auxiliary Air Force, flying at weekends with one intensive two-week refresher course per year.
But it was becoming very plain that weekend warriors were not going to be any match for the Soviet Union’s MiGs and Sukhois if it came to World War III. The economists in London were even then pointing out that training someone to fly fighters—which took two years, anyway—then losing him a fortnight later, was a waste of money.
Awarding a boy a flying scholarship was going to cost the Air Ministry thirty hours in a Tiger Moth at six pounds per hour. From zero to wings on a single-seater jet, even back then, cost over one hundred thousand pounds. The system continued but unwillingly, sustained only by the inertia of all bureaucracies.
The only thing the men in blue could really do was to ensure that National Service trainee pilots were as few as possible and were “chopped” (discarded) for the slightest inadequacy. I had only one ace in the hole. I had been through the Hornchurch tests the previous year and knew what to do and what was expected.
So I took my rail pass and went up there for the second time. I made no mention of the earlier visit and divulged to the interview board only that I had my pilot’s license, but not how I got it. They assumed my father had paid for it and approved the enthusiasm. I also implied I was only a National Serviceman because if I could not fly, I did not wish for a life behind a desk. The two officers with wings nodded at that as well. The one with a uniform unadorned by wings looked glum, but two outvote one.
A week after returning home, I got the last buff envelope. No mention of being seventeen and a half. It had just got lost. I was ordered to report in civilian clothes with one small suitcase to RAF Cardington, Bedfordshire, the “kitting out” base for new recruits, all branches. At last I was in.
I’M JESUS CHRIST
Cardington had once been the base of the barrage balloons that had floated over British cities to deter the bombers of the Luftwaffe. The gigantic hangars that housed them proved perfect for the masses of stores needed to transform a generation of young men from civilians to aircraftsmen.
There was a day of filling out forms, then haircuts. The mid-fifties were the age of the mods (moderns) and rockers (bikers). The former had short hair, wore suits, and rode scooters. The rockers had long, greasy hair, wore leathers, and rode motorbikes. When they met, they fought in “rumbles,” gang fights that consumed the seaside resorts, to the outrage of the citizens. Out in the early May sunshine, rows of service barbers gleefully wielded their electric clippers, reducing everyone to (very) short backs and sides.
There were several thousand young men on the camp, well over 99 percent extremely “bolshy,” a short form of Bolshevik, meaning seriously truculent. After shearing, everyone passed down the long lines of trestle tables in the hangars, to be issued with boots, socks, undershorts, undershirts, shirts, trousers, blouses, and berets. After everyone changed back in the dormitory huts, the civilian clothes were packed in suitcases and mailed home. There was one exception: a very small group destined for flying training and thus immediate junior officer status. There were eighteen of us in a single hut trying to survive the week. Because of the shirts.
All our uniforms were of very scratchy serge, but the shirts were different. Those destined to be airmen, or “erks,” had shirts of the same rough serge. Those destined for officer cadet status were issued shirts in lawn, a type of soft cotton. It was a dead giveaway.
As soon as we emerged for “chow” in the eating hall, it was plain to all that if you really wished to thump an officer, the next two days would provide the last chance. We retired to our hut, and more or less barricad
ed ourselves in.
You could tell very quickly who had been to boarding school and who not. The former immediately grabbed the beds farthest from the door, standard dormitory lore. When the NCOs came in at the crack of dawn to waken the exhausted and fast-asleep youngsters, they would start bed-tipping nearest the door. Those at the far end had a few seconds to wake up and get vertical with a bleary but cheerful “Morning, Sarge.” It helped the day start without a tangle of sheets, blankets, and bed frame. It also meant you did not have to put the whole thing back together again.
The senior NCOs knew perfectly well we were targeted by the rest of the intake and, to be fair to them, stuck fairly close to us. Two days after kitting out, the “soft shirts” were ordered to assemble with kit bags near Main Gate. We were off to boot camp. Even though we were destined for a flying training base, there was still the ritual of twelve weeks of basic training.
That would mean endless polishing of metal buttons, leather boots, pressing of uniforms, marching and counter-marching, rifle drill, running, obstacle courses, physical training, and saluting just about everything but the trees.
A blue bus showed up and took us to the nearest rail station. In the late afternoon, we were decanted from a branch line on a wayside halt in the middle of the wilds of Lincolnshire, at a place called Kirton Lindsey.
As we stood blinking in the sunlight on the platform, surrounded by our kit bags, a small corporal strutted up and planted himself in front of me. I am no giant, but he was much shorter. He wore his flat hat well forward, with the black plastic peak just above the tip of his nose. This meant that to see where he was going, he had to hold himself like a ramrod, extracting the most height from his tiny frame.
Even so, he had trouble glancing upward. I was aware of two malevolent sultanas glaring up from beneath the cap’s peak. Then he spoke in a shrill and outraged squeak. I learned later he was always outraged.
“Do you know who I am?” he screeched.
“No, Corporal, I don’t.”
“Well, I’m Jesus Christ, that’s who I am. And that’s how you’ll bleeding well treat me.”
The tone was set. I had met my first British junior NCO. Corporal Davis.
The twelve weeks of boot camp passed quietly. We polished and marched, attended the gymnasium and the rifle range, practiced with .303 rifles and submachine guns, marched again, polished again, and saluted everything. And there was the drill. Hour after hour of it. Up two three, down two three, general salute, present arms, trail arms, port arms, shoulder arms, left turn, right wheel, halt, quick march. AttenSHUN.
Honestly, we were not a success. Some of us had been in the cadet force at school and pretty much knew the ropes. Others were new to it and quite bewildered. Our course leader was the oldest at twenty-six, with university and a doctorate in chemistry behind him. I was the Benjamin, six months younger than the next youngest.
Our drill sergeant was not the monster of comedy films, but a kindly flight sergeant who treated us like wayward nephews. At that age, everyone over forty seems elderly. He tried so hard to turn us out like the Brigade of Guards and failed nobly. Once, after we had ended up at the edge of the parade ground in a tangle of limbs, he actually burst into tears. It is a terrible thing to see a grown man cry. (Well, it used to be.) Though we had a few shillings a week pocket money, we took him down to the local pub, the First and Last, and got him well plastered.
Finally, there was a passing-out parade and we prepared for the next camp and what we had come for—basic flying training. At this point, we divided. The six trainee navigators went off to one training school and the remaining pilots to another. We spent one last evening in the First and Last, downing foaming pint after pint, singing really bawdy songs, knowing the villagers, wives, and all were listening in the neighboring bar, pretending to be shocked while missing not a word, and laughing their heads off.
Then we were gone, the pilots across country to RAF Ternhill in Shropshire. With the transfer came elevation from cadet to junior officer, specifically acting pilot officer. The reason for “acting” was that if you flunked out, you could still be busted back to airman.
But, failing that, the scratchy serge was replaced by the smooth barathea, the beret by a peaked cap. There seemed to be an almost invisible ring around each sleeve, other ranks had to throw up a salute as you passed and men old enough to be your father called you “sir.” And the pay went up to a staggering twenty-three pounds a week, three pounds basic plus twenty pounds “flying pay.” I would not earn that much again for five years.
I think we all enjoyed our nine months at Ternhill in the lovely Shropshire countryside. Sleeping quarters were in a row of Nissen huts, but divided so that we each had a small bed-sitter, which gave some privacy for the first time since parental home. Eating was in the grand officers’ mess building, with stewards to wait table.
Much has been written to the detriment of National Service, but it accomplished three functions that nothing else could. It brought young men from every part of the country together to meet and share living quarters, travel, adventures, and camaraderie: youngsters who from Kent in the southeast to Carlisle in the northwest would never have met each other. It bonded them together and helped unify the nation.
Second, it also brought together youths from every social group and background and broadened a lot of horizons. It taught those of a privileged background never to look down on anyone else, ever.
And it took millions who had never left the parental home, who would only graduate after marriage to the marital home away from Mummy’s apron strings to an all-male environment where they stood on their own two feet—or else.
The airplane on which we trained was the Provost, made by Hunting Percival, now long gone. It was a bulky, fixed-undercarriage side-by-side two-seater, powered by a single rotary engine. It was stable, docile, and without vice. It introduced us to aerobatics and very rarely stalled and fell out of the sky. I do not recall that anyone was “chopped” on the Provost, though two of our dozen fell ill and had to be retarded until the next course. And two others joined us from earlier courses. We clocked up 120 hours on the Provost before a final flying test and passing-out parade. Then we had a fortnight’s home leave with our parents before reporting to Advanced Flying Training School at RAF Worksop in north Nottinghamshire. At last, single-seat jets.
VAMPIRE
So we reconvened in high summer of 1956 at RAF Worksop, most of us at Retford station, the better off in their own cars. Mike Porter came from Scotland in his hugely admired MG TF sports car, Anthony Preston from his Saxmundham, Suffolk, home in his four-seater convertible MG Tourer, which, as he was the only teetotaler, would soon become the safest way home from the pub on a Saturday night.
There were no more Nissen huts to live in. We were now lodged in the huge officers’ mess, each with a spacious room and each with a “batman,” or personal valet. My own was a civilian who had served at that air base since the war. It felt strange to be looked after by a man old enough to be my father.
There was a first-night dinner in the spacious dining hall; then we all convened in the bar to meet our new commanding officer, the wing commander (flying), and the instructors. Each of us longed for the morning when we would go down to the hangars to be introduced to what we all longed to fly. The de Havilland Vampire.
It was a flight sergeant who finally led us around the corner of the hangar, and there she was. We just stared and almost salivated. We felt we had come so far and passed so many tests, and there she was. A Mark 9 single-seater version.
She crouched low on her stubby oleo legs, canopy back, cockpit open. To us, she exuded power and danger. Short elliptical wings, triangular air intakes, a small capsule of a body, and twin booms to sustain the broad tail. Somewhere inside was the de Havilland Goblin engine, which would throw her through the sky at up to 600 miles per hour.
For years after 1945, the
Vampire, along with her contemporary the Gloster Meteor, had been the principal frontline fighter of the RAF. Although relegated to an advanced flying trainer, she was in essence just the same. The four Aden cannon had been retained only for the purposes of balance and stoppered at the front end. The gun sight had been removed from the cockpit, but that was all.
We circled, we prowled, we approached as the flight sergeant reeled off the statistics. Length, wingspan, weight, takeoff speed, landing speed, maximum altitude over 40,000 feet, way up in the stratosphere.
Finally we looked into the cockpit and marveled at how small it was. Like a tiny sports car of extraordinary power. Then one of us made an interesting remark.
“Flight, it’s got no ejector seat.”
And it was true. The larger twin-engined Meteor had been fitted with the Martin-Baker Mk.4 ejector seat, invented after the retro-airplane. The side-by-side twin-seat Vampire T.11 trainer, designed and built specifically for dual instruction, had it. But not the Mark 9, designed and built long before the Martin-Baker, which would hurl a pilot clear of a doomed and falling airplane and save his life.
“That’s right, sir,” came the sardonic reply from the senior NCO, who would no more fly one of these things than jump off a cliff. “It is the only jet the RAF has ever sent into the sky that has no ejector seat. And no one has ever escaped from a dying Vampire. You either fly in it or die in it.”
We retreated to the mess for a rather silent and thoughtful lunch.
But fly in it we did, aware that, with dinghy pack and parachute strapped to your rear end like the bulbous home of a spider on its backside, you could stand up in the cockpit but never get out. The front coaming of the windscreen would jab you in the stomach before the parachute could clear the back of the seat. Like a champagne cork, you were stuck and could only sit back down again.