Originally Posted by
Wig Wag
One meal stands out above all others:
Aircrew survival exercises, North Yorkshire, January sometime in the 1980's.
6 days of nowt to eat except a lovely table bunny toasted on sticks over a fire after five days. At ten to five on the Friday we were lined up, told that we had all failed the course due to bad attitude, and were to collect our kit and march to the next RV. Not too sure what was happening but . . .
Five minutes later we were taken into a clearing in the woods and served a three course slap up meal!
Good thing we could all take a joke.
Ah yes, LSE as it was known in my day. Late on in our survival week (1977) we were brought a basket of chickens by the Station Commander (name of Gubb?).
He took great delight in agitating the chickens before launching them one at a time, whilst nominating which group it was for. Ours (we were deemed to be the fittest group) was obviously crossed with a racing pigeon and it set off, flying into the woods. It took some catching and took a while then I was nominated to despatch it, which I duly did by smartly hacking off its head with my Wilki knife, across the top of a fence post. We gutted it and set about cooking it.
Next to us was another flight who had stated earlier in the week (when true hunger hadn’t fully set in) that not having done it before, none of them thought they could actually bring themselves to kill a chicken. We weren’t too surprised when we got back with our spoils to find one of them actually plucking their bird while the rest of the flight were away to collect firewood. When the bird was completely naked, but still intact, it was laid at rest by the fire. Suddenly, it sat up and squawked! They were mortified and didn’t know what to do. I picked the poor thing up and despatched it in the same way as ours. They then admitted that one of them had knocked it on the head with a stick and hoped for the best. Obviously, it was only stunned!