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.
And that was while stationary on the apron. In the stratosphere, a 300 mph slipstream would simply bend you back until your spine snapped.
We started on the T.11 dual-control version with the instructor in the left-hand seat (always the left-hand seat for the leading pilot, and the right-hander for the copilot).
It was all learning, a huge curve of new expertise to be ingested and assimilated. And the ground instruction—classroom lessons on aerodynamics, meteorology, aviation medicine, the stresses and strains of G-forces up to six times gravity in the turns and dives, the effects of anoxia, or oxygen starvation, if the breathing apparatus packed up.
And the first twenty flights with the instructor at first doing it all, then slowly handing over to the pupil, procedure by procedure, until he was satisfied his trainee could handle it all. Then the transfer to the Mark 9 and first solo.
I was forty-four days short of my nineteenth birthday when I took a single-seat Vampire off the deck, and I believe I was the first and only eighteen-year-old ever to have done so, all because of a leopard-skin poncho.
I sat on the threshold of the runway, engine idling, asking for clearance for takeoff, waiting for permission, hearing only the low whine of the Goblin behind the small of my back and the sound of my own breathing and heartbeat inside the rubber mask and the silver “bone-dome” helmet; and vaguely aware that my instructor would be in the tower, gnawing his nails with worry.
“Charlie Delta, clear takeoff.”
Slowly forward, with the left hand on the throttle; hear the engine moving up from a low whine to a roaring howl; feel the rumble of the wheels increasing to rapid thuds. Control column neutral, light to the touch. Nose wheel off the tarmac. Ease back. Rumbling gone, airborne.