I have been over privileged for most of my life. I have been to the airshows with Hurricanes, Javelins, Scimitars, and the Vulcan and her two contempories. I saw a perfect stack of Lightnings at Farnborough and I have seen shows in America and Canada, Red Arrows, Pelicans, Blue Angels, Snowbirds. Sometimes it is not the grandeur or the fame, it is just the moment. Like Whitstable on the N Kent coast, 1970 something,
It was a Whitstable and Tankerton Regatta weekend and I was down from London. All the sailing was being held off Tankerton for the day. It was a typical August day, hot and sunny, four o’clock in the afternoon and there was hardly any breeze. The sea was just rippled as we sat on the balcony at no 24. Pauly was reading a book and sun bathing. The regatta organisers had managed to set up a fly past, you could hear them first, a Spitfire, a Hurricane and a Lancaster flying in formation down the shore line at a couple of hundred feet on their way to Tankerton. Twenty minutes later the Spitfire returned down the beach but now at thirty or forty feet, the distinctive roar of the Merlin higher pitched, I got up and leant against the balcony rail but Pauly hardly moved. I thought the pilot was just returning towards Biggin Hill or wherever he had come from but when he got down toward Seasalter he pulled up in a huge wing over and came beating back down the beach even closer and lower. Sometimes when you stand on an old Roman road you can hear the tramp of marching feet, well I have read and heard all my life about the planes wheeling and swooping over the Kent countryside in the Summer of 1940, Pauly was there, married a pilot, saw and heard the planes, felt the unreality of those Summer months; I could smell the planes, engine oil and exhaust smoke, hear the droning engines and staccato machine guns, I’d swear if I looked up into the blue sky I’d see the con trails. The Spitfire pulled up somewhere down past the tennis courts and the engine note rose as he pulled round, nosed down and tore along the high tide line again, five, six passes, I could see the pilot in his leather helmet, I’ll swear I could make out the rivets, and then he pulled up towards the West and was gone. The air was heavy with history, pilots’ chatter, you could feel the war coming, I expected Churchill on the radio at any moment. I turned back to the balcony, Pauly had not moved, she was still reading.