When I returned home I had a warm welcome. “That’s it,” said Sandy, “the next time you pull a stunt like that, I’m going to see Fiona.”
She was referring to a mutual friend and the best divorce lawyer in London. But of course, she doesn’t really mean it. Anyway, I agreed that those days really are over, and then a year later . . .
DREAM COME TRUE
It was a very small news item and one might have missed it. Down in the heart of the county of Kent, where I came from long ago, is a grass airfield called Lashenden, just outside the pretty town of Headcorn. Lashenden is the home of several clubs including a branch of the Tiger Club, flying Tiger Moth biplanes, plus a skydiving club and another dedicated to classic aircraft called Aero Legends. The item that caught my eye revealed that Lashenden wished to upgrade all its buildings and facilities and sought donations.
I had an idea and made a call; that was in August 2014. I mentioned the news item to the voice that answered and said I was prepared to be very generous, but there was a condition. The voice replied he doubted it would be possible, but he would ask. Four weeks went by. My seventy-sixth birthday came and went. Then the phone rang. Her name was Andrea.
“Are you free tomorrow?” she asked. “We have one flying in from Duxford.”
I know RAF Duxford; it is the aeronautical end of the Imperial War Museum, a collection of classic and revered warplanes, some still flying. Including a Spitfire. Of course I was available. I had been available for seventy years. So I motored down, parked, checked in, and waited. I was issued a flying suit and a cup of coffee. There was a problem. Morning mist hung over the Weald of Kent, but the sun of our Indian summer was burning it off. Up in Cambridgeshire, where Duxford is situated, the fog was worse. Would old Fred’s luck still hold? It held. The mist lifted, and she took off and headed south, over the Thames and into Kent. She landed just before noon. A Spitfire Mark 9, green-and-brown RAF combat camouflage. And she was beautiful; an icon that had once changed the history of Britain, Europe, and the world. And she had been adapted with a second cockpit for a single passenger.
She taxied into the apron near the dispersal huts and closed down. Her pilot, Cliff Spink, a professional who flies classic warplanes for a living—ex-RAF, of course—came over and introduced himself. “Who’s first?” he asked. There were two donors awarded a flight. I was ready. He nodded and we walked out into the sun.
She was just as I had remembered her from seventy years earlier, when, aged five, I was dropped into an open cockpit at Hawkinge field and became mesmerized by the power and beauty of the Supermarine Spitfire. The long, lean lines, only slightly degraded by the bubble Perspex dome behind the pilot’s cockpit; the recognizable-anywhere elliptical wings, the genius of designer R. J. Mitchell. The four-bladed propeller, stark against the Kentish late-summer sky the same cerulean blue it had been in the summer of 1944. That was when I swore my little boy’s oath; that one day I, too, would fly a Spitfire.
One is older and stiffer than long ago. It took a hefty shove to get me onto the wing, and thence I could step into the tiny rear cockpit. Helpful hands belted on the parachute and then the seat straps. A brief lecture on how to bail out if need be. Unhook the seat straps but not the parachute straps as well. Jettison the canopy, stand, turn, dive. Of course. But that was not going to happen.
Cliff climbed up front, his head disappeared out of sight. I used the seat-height adjuster and rose out of the cavern into the bubble dome itself. The Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, all thirty-seven liters of her, coughed once, then roared and settled down to a throaty growl. Chocks away. A bit more power. She moved away from dispersal and taxied to takeoff. Cliff turned her into the wind and checked with the tower. Clear to take off.
The engine note rose smoothly from low growl to maddened roar and the Spitfire threw herself across the grass field, bumping over the ruts. Then the vibration stopped, the grass drifted downward, clunk clunk, wheels up, a lurch forward as the impediment vanished. Cliff held her low over the field as the speed built up, then hauled back.
A raging climb into that blue, blue sky. Kent dropping away like a discarded map in a gale. At three thousand feet, Cliff’s voice on the intercom: “You have her.” His hands raised to head height, visible through two layers of Perspex to prove it. So I gripped the control column and flew her.
Just as I had been led to b
elieve. Ultrasensitive to the touch, eager, willing, wanting to obey before the order was complete. It had been an awfully long time, but as with the bicycle it never quite leaves you. Diffident at first, confidence growing. Bank, turn, climb, twist, correct. I pulled into a rate-two left-hand turn and looked down.
There was the Weald of Kent as it had been since the times of the Crusaders. A patchwork quilt of woods and fields, manors and meadows, farms and streams, hop oasts and orchards, ancient villages clustered around the cricket green, timbered pubs, Norman churches. The same Weald I had pedaled through as a boy, just as it was in 1940, when Spitfires and Hurricanes hurled themselves at the oncoming Luftwaffe. Enough to make even a cynical old journalist choke up. England, our England.
It was over too soon, but it was done. The seventy-year-old promise was fulfilled and the little boy’s dream had come true.
Ready . . . Here I am (above) in the garden in Ashford aged three in the early war years. RAF Hawkinge and its Spitfires were just down the road (bottom).
Steady . . . With my mother and father. My father was a major in the army during the war, but as a member of the fire brigade he was not allowed to go on active service overseas.
Go . . . Off to Blue Bell Hill aged sixteen on my second-hand Vespa and then up into the clouds. The knife in my sock came in handy later when I found myself in a tight spot in Paris.
Thanks to my father’s efforts, I spent the school holidays abroad learning how to speak French and German like a native. Here I am with Herr and Frau Dewald and their children.
It was while I was staying with them that I was introduced to Hanna Reitsch, Hitler’s favourite aviatrix.
Tonbridge School was not much fun; this is the farewell assembly in Big School in 1952. I hung on until December 1955. At least I had the satisfaction of saying goodbye from the cockpit of a Tiger Moth.
The RAF at seventeen. Heady stuff: flying Vampires in formation. I am number 15.
Eleven of us made it to the end. I am second from the right in the back row.
Here I am getting my wings. I had never been more proud. I was a pilot in the RAF.
To King’s Lynn, to work on the Eastern Daily Press. I lived in a flat above a pet shop at the far end of the ironically named Paradise Chambers.
My mentor, chief reporter Frank Keeler, taught me the importance of checking facts before you write.
Then to Reuters in London where Doon Campbell was news editor and the inspiration for generations of foreign correspondents.
A lucky break sent me off to Paris just in time for the assassination attempt on President Charles de Gaulle in August 1962. He is in the back of the car with his wife, Yvonne, in a reconstruction of the event.