Thanks both.
John isn't up to it this week, so we have put it on hold. Tanker - agreed, what difference does it make? I spoke with his daughter about it, and she thinks it was a DFM, so it was prob my mistake.
What he talks about is not the operational flying as such (I did take him to Munchengladbach once and he looked around, sniffed and said; '.. looks a bit different from the ground' - and that was it), but instead the esoteric craic, the gossip and the banter - the colour on the tapestry that we are going to lose because it wasn't and couldn't be properly captured and transcribed. The fact that he always hated Rockapes because one stole his push bike in 40-something, the waiting to get back to a decent breakfast and then hitting the sack like you would after any night shift in a cold room with people snoring, how crappy a certain bomber was because the seat was poor, or how the crews hated it and grumbled all the time and ached to get onto Lancs, and inter crew politik.
The post war period of service life remains generally murky to me, but he also talks a bit about the different grades of aircrew Warrant Officer that they had for a while and how that was treated with derision and scorn. When it became clear there were no slots for AGs in Vulcans and a possible discharge was on the cards, he went into admin. He was the Families Officer at Akrotiri in 74 and does talk of the pronto evacuation of the patch at BG in Limassol which sounded quite tasty. I think he would have rathered been sitting behind some .303s and not his in-tray.