A Spitfire Pilot. Part 6.
Kidlington, Multi-Engine Training May 1941 – July 1941
We were sent off on a weeks leave and told we’d be posted to Kidlington in Oxfordshire. So we dutifully packed our bags, got on the train and trundled back to London. It was on that train that I had my first taste of spinach, I’d never eaten it before. In those days you could still get a meal on the train and to pass the time four of us decided we’d have lunch and they produced this spinach, but never having had it, I tried it, thought it was smashing and I’ve liked it ever since.
Leave was much like any other in the early days. You’d spend some time rushing around seeing relations you hadn’t seen for some time, taking out the odd girlfriend (including your mother!) and waiting for the day when you could bomb off and do a little more flying. I went from Paddington to Oxford, changed for Kidlington, got out, met one or two chaps I’d known on the course. There was no transport to take us to the aerodrome, which wasn’t all that far, so we wandered up to the gates, having previously met one of two of the chaps who’d been on the senior course at Brough. We naturally assumed, going on fighters, we’d be flying Masters next and were shaken to the core when the ex-senior flight told us we’d be flying Oxfords! The idea being that we were all going on night-fighters. Our hearts sank into our boots, or rather our shoes, as we were all wearing the shoes we’d bought in Hull. Thereby hangs another tale.
We reported to the guardroom and met the Station Warrant Officer, who was definitely a member of the Old School, and would have done well in the Brigade of Guards. He immediately spotted that we were all wearing shoes and in dulcet tones that could have stripped paint, he advised us to,
“Change them so-and-so shoes into so-and-so boots, and don’t let me catch you with shoes agin!”
What with that and having to fly Oxfords, we were delighted! Anyway, we got to our billets, unpacked and in the afternoon we were told to report to one of the hangars for lectures. As we marched along one of the roads to the hangar, we had to pass the remnants of a burnt-out Oxford, which gave us food for thought. Anyway, we got to this hangar-type lecture room and up came the CFI. Now at this time all that we knew about Oxfords was the fact that they had two engines and we had no knowledge whatsoever of their capabilities. Anyway, the CFI’s first words were,
“You don’t want to believe what you’ve heard about Oxfords, they’re really very nice aircraft, if they’re treated properly!”
Now to say that to a bunch of people who have never sat in an Oxford and knew nothing about them, didn’t exactly inspire confidence. There were several thoughtful faces as we filed out. Anyway, knowing the RAF, things change every two minutes, and at least we were flying an aircraft, so most of us were happy.
I had quite a decent instructor who happened to live in Seven Kings. My first experience in an Oxford was 15 minutes as a passenger and the 2nd Pilot or pupil was Johnny Lee, a chap I met later in Gibraltar when he became a pilot in 111 Sqn. Apart from a few days, when it rained like the clappers and turned everything into a quagmire, the weather, whilst we were at Kidlington, was very, very good indeed. To get through the mud, we were all issued with Wellington boots, which Big Gag (father of RJHR) appropriated when I took them home when I had one quick weekend leave. The weather was so good we never wore helmets or flying clothes, most of the time we were in shirtsleeves, with no jackets or anything. Sitting in an Oxford, under all the perspex, most of us finished up as brown as little berries.
There was still a lot more bull than we’d had at Brough, but that’s something that you cope with without too much trouble. We worked pretty hard, we normally started at about half past seven and there were lectures. I can’t remember doing any drill, I suppose we might have done, but nothing comes to mind; it was mainly ground subjects and as much flying as possible, in fact we flew nearly every day and in our spare time tried to find a pub with beer. In those days beer was on short supply, you could often walk to a pub and find a sign outside saying
“No beer this week.”
It was heart-rending, I can tell you.
I had three particular chums at Kidlington. There was Jack Ranger, who was an ex-member of Highgate Diving Club; Derek Olver, who was the proud possessor of a motorbike and sidecar, and his wife lived close by in one of the villages, and Brian Talbot, who happened to be the cousin of our flight commander, a certain Flight Lieutenant Gaynor. Now Gaynor had been a member of one of the Auxiliary Squadrons, I can’t remember which one, but his RAF tunic had red silk lining, so maybe you’ll know which one it was. He was an excitable character and one of his favourite words was,
“Aaamaaaazing!”.
He’d rattle on about something or other and Jack Ranger and I would stand there, look at each other and say
“It’s aaaaamaaazing!”
I think he was too dim to catch on, but other people were amused. When we’d finished flying for the day, or on an odd day off, of which there weren’t many, Derek would get his motorbike, with his wife Kay, and little Brian Talbot in the sidecar, and then Derek would drive by sitting on the tank, I would sit on the saddle and Jack would sit on the pillion seat of the bike and all five of us would trundle down to the villages, looking for pubs that were open or rivers we could swim in and generally have a pretty good time. We used to go down to the Parsons’ Pleasure in Oxford. It was a part of the river near one of the colleges and there was a nice little backwater you were allowed to swim in, so Jack and I would change, swim from the backwater into the main part of the river where, by this time, Derek and Kay, and Brian and his newly arrived wife, Kitty, would be sitting on the bank with sandwiches. We’d just swim up and down the river, occasionally getting out, lolling on the bank and quietly enjoying ourselves.
Jack would often climb out, go up to one of the bridges over the river, climb over the side and dive in. As I said before, he was a member of Highgate Diving Club and he was absolutely terrific and life really wasn’t much better.
We used to go down to The Trout at Godstow and have a few beers there. There was a little hut you could change in, in the garden, and we’d come down, get into the river, and just swim up and down. Beautiful! The river was quite fast at The Trout, actually. You could come under a bridge, shoot off down the other side and the idea was that you would buy a pint of beer, swim out with it to the middle of the river and drink the pint of beer whilst paddling water. It was stupid, but it was fun!
Other times we’d go to The Bear at Woodstock, where I learned to play Cardinal Puff after several attempts and from there you’d go through the village, down past Blenheim Palace, through a field, where there was another nice little river, where all sorts of trout used to congregate on one side of the bridge and the other side of the bridge we used to use for swimming and general poodling about. It wasn’t a bad life.
I soloed after five hours dual on the Oxford and eventually we came to quite like it. It was hardly an aerobatic aircraft, but with a great deal of oomph, you could get it to do a slow roll. That was a bit shattering, because when you looked out the window, you found that the wings, from the engines outwards, flapped a bit. So some of us did one slow roll and that was it. We never tried it again and it was all illegal anyway. We started to have ground tests which weren’t too bad. One in particular was a bit of a farce. We had a navigation test and one of the questions that came up, which carried quite a few marks, hadn’t been covered in our syllabus. So the instructor, who used to be on Hudsons in Coastal Command, strolled up and down the aisles, talking to himself, and explaining to himself, how the question would be answered if he were taking the test. All this with a very straight face and needless to say we all passed the navigation test.