A year later, having swotted hard at Latin, history, geography, and the hated math and science, I collected my Ordinary Levels, and at fifteen, three Advanced Levels—all in languages.
But Tonbridge, whatever its failings, was academically excellent and, discovering a teacher who had served on the Arctic convoys to Russia and spoke Russian, offered a third language. The choice was Russian or Spanish. I chose Russian on the grounds that it would be much harder than Spanish, which I could learn later.
The summer of 1954 would entail O-Level Russian, and my dad thought some holiday tutelage might help. Somehow he tracked down a pair of Russian princesses in Paris who tutored in Russian and took in young paying guests. Their services were much patronized by the Royal Navy (I think it was a Navy contact who recommended them). So that spring I was sent over during the school holidays to reside for three weeks at their apartment in Paris.
They were the Princesses Dadiani and they were actually Georgian, but pillars of the White Russian community of Paris. They were completely divorced from planet Earth and charmingly dotty. But huge fun.
Their world had more or less stopped when, in 1921, as the White forces lost the civil war to the Red Soviet army, they were evacuated by their father, the last king of Georgia, and arrived with only a suitcase of jewelry in Paris, which was then teeming with refugees from the Russian aristocracy.
Over thirty years later, they were still convinced that the Georgian people would rise any day, throw off the Soviet yoke, and restore them to their palaces and oil wells. The jewels had lasted about five years—they had no taste for economizing—so after that, they took in paying guests. They had a contract with the Royal Navy, who sent them midshipmen and sub-lieutenants, whom they much favored because the Navy paid promptly and had manners.
Their flat was frequented by counts, dukes, and the occasional prince, who either drove taxis or appeared as artists or singers at the opera. They always appeared to be clearing up after a party or preparing for the next one.
At Easter they took me to High Mass at the extremely impressive Russian Orthodox cathedral, which was then followed by the father and mother of all parties. I was plied with incredibly sweet Russian Easter delicacies and a vodka that felt like an explosion in the pit of the stomach.
It had nothing to do with the stuff in a modern bottle shop. It was thick and viscous, and each slug had to be downed in a single gulp, accompanied by Christos voskressiya, or “Christ is risen.”
I never recall any formal lessons in Russian. I and the other three young Navy men simply had to pick it up by listening and asking questions. But I recall the princesses with affection. Those three weeks helped me to get O-Level Russian in the summer exams and, years later, to listen to Russians talking in East Berlin while pretending to understand not a word.
And the following year, in the summer of 1955, which was a very busy time, I would have need of their sofa.
A STEP NEARER TO THE STARS
It must have been a small advertisement in one of the flying magazines that I spent much time devouring, but I do not now recall which one. It introduced me to a new scheme being offered by the Royal Air Force—the concept of the RAF Flying Scholarship. The idea was that if you could pass all the tests, the RAF would pay for a young enthusiast to go to his local flying club and learn to fly to private pilot’s license level. Of course, I applied at once. That was in spring 1955.
The RAF had no intention of wasting its money subsidizing young men with defective eyesight or other flaws that meant they would never fly anyway. The point was to help eager youngsters develop the flying bug and later join up. The first thing that arrived at my parental home in Ashford was a small buff envelope requiring me to attend a thorough medical examination at RAF Hornchurch, a base in Essex. There was also a rail pass.
If I thought the tests would involve just a few minutes with a stethoscope on the chest or some taps to the kneecap, I was much mistaken. Hornchurch was a five-day residential course designed to pull you to pieces and see if the tiniest flaw could be detected. I arrived with a small suitcase, changed into boxer shorts and overalls, presuming myself to be impeccably fit, and then they got started.
For two days, it was just the physical. One after another, young applicants who were not there for the scholarship but, older than I was, were trying to get accepted for flying training, were sent home, disappointed. The medics and the opticians discovered color-blindness, lack of night vision, farsightedness, myopia, or some other eye defect that the applicant had lived with and never suspected.
Others had a shadow on the lungs, fallen arches in the feet, something wrong somewhere, something less than a hundred percent. Day three was dedicated to reflexes, reaction speed to emergencies, dexterity, hand-eye coordination. Day four was for initiative exercises. Two white lines on the parade ground to represent a chasm. Some poles, ropes, and an oil drum. Get the team safely over the gulf.
The last day was interviews in the morning, with time left over to go home in the afternoon. I kept quiet about the languages, for fear they would accept me but for the education branch or even intelligence. Three officers, two with wings on the chest. Bored stiff. All right, lad. Why do you want to fly?
For heaven’s sake. Why did I want to lose my virginity? Because it sounded fun and I was sixteen and life was racing by. But no humor, please. Not in front of a board of officers. So serious answers and an assurance that I had been mad about flying since being plonked into a Spitfire cockpit at the age of five. Several raised eyebrows and one amused grin. Several trick questions about modern fighter planes, which I could answer easily, because I had been studying them for years.
Yes, sir, I had been at Farnborough that day when John Derry, at the controls of the prototype de Havilland 110, had plunged into the hillside. No more grins; some serious sideways glances, but approving. Then dismissed. Cannot salute; no flat hat. But I would have one someday.
Five days later, another buff envelope. Report to RAF Kenley to be kitted out with a flying suit, boots, a leather helmet. Then start at Blue Bell Hill Flying Club, Rochester, in June. One technical problem: school started in May. I could do it, but I needed transport.
Dad came to the rescue again. He bought me a secondhand Douglas Vespa scooter. It was British-built, licensed from the Italian Vespa company, and it was a load of rubbish. It had a kick-start pedal and would cough for fifty kicks before sparking into life. Still, it was my first motorized transport. With a learner’s license and a red L-plate front and back, it was legal on the road. Dad ran me to Blue Bell Hill to get introduced and see what I would be learning on.
It was a silver Tiger Moth, a biplane like something out of the First World War, and the standard workhorse of flying schools back then. Open cockpit, a speaking tube to communicate with the instructor, wind-in-the-hair sort of stuff. Marvelous, intoxicating. The only problem was Tonbridge School. The authorities there had already made plain my passion for flying was juvenile madness. I would never get permission. So I got a shed instead.
Of course it was not on school grounds. It was down in Tonbridge town, on one of those small gardens called allotments, leased for a peppercorn rent by the municipality to those with no garden but who wished to raise their own vegetables. The kindly gardener allowed me to keep the Vespa in it, out of sight and out of the rain.
Back at Parkside for what I hoped would be my last term, I had no more exams to pass, so I was put down for GCE S Levels. The S stood for state scholarship, but it was a forlorn hope. State scholarships were means-tested, and my father could now afford university fees without state help, so it would never be awarded. But no one wanted me hanging idly around. Actually I had another exam in mind—my private pilot’s license. But I would not take that until August 26, the day after my seventeenth birthday. Still, I had thirty hours of prepaid flying tuition waiting for me up at Rochester and could certainly not wait for school to break up. So I amazed Parkside by becoming a cross-country runner.
Until then I had loathed cross-country running, usually awarded as a punishment for some misdemeanor, or practiced by those stringy youths who resembled stick insects. I was still short and stocky and would not start to shoot up until the next year. I regarded cross-country as pure misery. Yet I suddenly started volunteering for it, and not just the five-mile junior run but the eight-mile senior cross. My one condition: I would run alone.
So, twice a week I would don white shorts and a spotless T-shirt and jog out the gates to the street. It took fifteen minutes to get to the allotment shed, where I would put on the canvas flying suit, boots, and leather helmet. Thus disguised, I could putter past the school gates and out on the highway to Blue Bell Hill and its flying club.
After six hours’ dual instruction, I went solo and experienced the intoxication of flying free, high over the winding Medway, looking down on Rochester and its towering medieval cathedral. Up there I could roll and twist among the clouds, turning, climbing, diving, ripping off the helmet, keeping only the goggles to protect the eyes.
In my boyish imagination, I was over the fields of Flanders, circa 1916, in formation with Bishop, Ball, Mannock, and McCudden, with a cheery wave for the French aces Guynemer and Garros, hunting for the Germans Von Richthofen, Boelcke, and Immelmann. I had read all about them, researched
their stories, their victories, and, one by one, their deaths. By the end of school term, I had logged twenty-seven of my permitted thirty hours, saving three for the final tests at the end of August.