At first he thought he was going to die, and then feared he wouldn’t. I was lucky in having a fairly strong stomach, whether for open boats on an angry sea or journeys by road. And I had just spent June throwing a Tiger Moth all over the sky above Rochester. Our misery ended around six p.m., when the truck pulled onto a wayside lay-by and we were let out.
John retired to the verge to put his head in his hands. I produced a map of France from my haversack, and the driver pointed out where we were. South of Avignon, but north of Marseille. I thanked him profusely, we shook hands, and he left, presumably to head for his melon farm and a large bucket of disinfectant.
But such is the recovery of the young that within half an hour we were up and marching along the verge. By eight, as the sun set, we had found a farm with a friendly barn full of straw and hay. Despite being ravenously hungry, we collapsed in the bales and slept for ten hours.
On the following day, we discovered as we marched, rigid thumbs erect for a lift, that the Union Jack did not work anymore. The Midi had never been occupied. It was part of Vichy France, notorious for its enthusiastic collaboration with the Germans. Even the Allied invasion of August 1944 was seen locally as an assault rather than a liberation. No cars stopped. We turned along the coast at Marseille, and for three weeks, thousands of cars, vans, and trucks sped by without stopping.
We lived off crusty baguette bread and cheap cheese, slaking our thirst and filling our water bottles at the public drinking fountains in the villages. There was no Corniche Littorale motorway (where hitchhiking would have been forbidden, anyway), but just the shoreside road that wended through every village and hamlet as well as the great cities of Toulon, Nice, and Cannes.
Marching along it, we found tiny non-tourist bays and creeks, where we could strip off and dunk our overheated bodies in crystal-clear cool water. We slept in the workers’ sheds in the olive groves and once on the cool marble of a mausoleum in a cemetery. We saw the grandeur of Monaco and Monte Carlo, where all the cars seemed to be Rolls-Royces and where I would many years later be the guest of Prince Albert. Finally, we came to the Italian border at Ventimiglia.
Just to say we had been to Italy, we went across and trudged to San Remo. Then time and money ran out. We had just enough for two third-class tickets back to Marseille, and there we bought just one single ticket for Paris. We spent the whole journey in the lavatory. Three times, a ticket inspector came to the door and rapped. Each time, I opened a fraction, explained in French that I was not very well and had the ticket clipped. Each time, John stood on the lavatory seat behind the door and out of sight.
We hitched back to Dieppe and used our return halves to get to Newhaven. No mobile phones back then, so we used a public phone booth and four one-penny coins to alert John’s aunt to our presence, and then waited to be collected.
We were very brown and rock-hard. We had each grown an inch, and still, in old age, laugh at some of the tricks we got up to. The fifties were a good, carefree, and uncomplicated time to be a teenager, before drugs and worries and political correctness. Materially, we had infinitely less than what youngsters have today, but I think we were happier.
A few years back, a friend from the same generation—one of the teenagers of National Service, who got by with very few rules and regulations, minimal bureaucracy, basic but healthy food, good manners, and masses of walking—remarked to me: “You know, we had the best of the last and the last of the best.” And that got it all in a single sentence.
But it was mid-August and I wanted something badly. I wanted that private pilot’s license. So the day after my seventeenth birthday, I Vespa-ed back to Rochester Flying Club.
And since that holiday, John Gordon has never been able to contemplate a melon, and I have never carried a blade.
A SILLY REVENGE
The flying test was almost a routine. Everything about it had already been covered during tuition.
First came a triangular navigation exercise in which I had to give a running commentary to the instructor in the front cockpit, describing what I was doing and why. The technology for nav exercises in a Tiger Moth was basic and there were two. They were called eyeballs.
A map had already been prepared, with the route marked in felt pen, folded, and strapped with elastic bands to my left thigh. Identification of where one was could be achieved by putting my head over the rim of the cockpit and looking down. Location and direction depended on recognizing main roads, railway lines, and above all rivers, with their distinctive curves. Towns and cities were identified by castle, cathedral, or other obvious features.
There was one elderly member of the club who was so nearsighted that he used to swoop down to fly alongside railway trains and read the destination board on the side of the front carriage. One imagines commuters might be somewhat surprised to lift their gaze from the crossword to see a biplane outside the window and an old codger peering down at them. But no one seemed to mind. It was a rather carefree age.
After the nav test, we repaired to the clubhouse for a sandwich lunch, then did the general competence hour. This involved the usual basic maneuvers—climb, dive, turn, wingover, sideslip, and several pretended emergencies. The routine was for the instructor to suddenly shut down the power and say, “You have a complete engine failure. What are you going to do?”
The response was to look around for a large, flat green field away from woods, large trees, or buildings; with the landing field selected, assess wind direction and speed; glide down behind the idly turning propeller; line up as if for a real landing; and approach the unwary farmer’s best wheat crop. At the last minute, the instructor would ram the power back on and the Tiger Moth would surge upward and away.
Landing back at Blue Bell Hill, I was told that I had passed and my license would be “in the bag.” The written test, a two-hour paper exam, I had completed before going to France. But I noticed that of my thirty hours of flying time so generously prepaid by the RAF, there were still forty-five minutes left. I asked for them as a last solo flight, and, with a shrug, was granted them. There was something else I wanted to do.
Tonbridge town was easy to find by following the river Medway, which flows right through it. Short of the town, I dropped down into the shallow valley between the school playing fields and Hildenborough, through which I had pretended to jog so many times.
I came up out of the valley and approached over the two playing fields known as Martins and Le Flemings. I think I was about six feet up. There was a quick blip to clear the line of elms between Le Flemings and the first X1 cricket pitch, the sacred turf of the Head. Then the school buildings were ahead of me: School House, where the headmaster lived, and Old Big School, the big assembly hall.
The school was still on holiday and therefore empty of boys, or, at that hour on a summer afternoon, they would have been playing cricket on the Head. A face appeared at a window in School House, staring openmouthed at the approaching propeller. It might have been the headmaster, the kindly but ineffectual Reverend Laurence Waddy, but I was never later in a position to ask.
The owner of the face threw himself to the floor as the Tiger Moth climbed the wall of the Old Big School, nearly clipped the roof, rolled to the north, missed the pepper pot on the chapel roof by a few feet, and climbed away into a clear blue sky.
Having completed my asinine gesture to a place I was yearning to leave, I flew back to Rochester, hoping no sharp-eyed citizen of Tonbridge had noted my registration number and reported me, for then I would have been finished.
School would reconvene in a fortnight, and to please my father I had agreed to complete the last term of the year and leave at Christmas. At the start of term, I half expected to be summoned to report to the headmaster, but no one said a thing.
A fortnight later, my private pilot’s license arrived from the ministry at my parents’ home in Ashford. I mailed my flying kit back to RAF Kenley and have never flown a Tiger Moth since, until I was given a ride and the controls at the age of seventy-six at Lasherden airfield in Kent. And she is still a great little airplane.
A GENTLEMAN OF CLARE
When I returned to Tonbridge in early September 1955, I thought I faced a term of filling in time. The previous summer, I had fulfilled my wager with my father whereby if I could pass every exam they could throw at me, he would get me out of there. With great luck, I had managed my O Levels at fourteen and my A Levels at fifteen, about three years earlier than required. In this, my fluent French and German, provided by the prescience of my parents, had been invaluable.
In