A Spitfire Pilot. Part 19.
Social Life at Biggin Hill – April 1942
I haven’t mentioned much about the social life at Biggin. The Sergeant Pilots were all billeted in what used to be the Station Commanders’ house which was a vast place not too far from the dispersal and I shared a room with Tommy Wright, who’d bought the radio I’d managed to pinch from Hawarden when I ran short of money, which was fairly frequent in those days. It really was a pleasant place, the mess was quite a way, but then all we had to do was ring up transport and say there were pilots waiting to go down to the mess and up would come a 15 cwt van driven by a very nice WAAF, in we’d pile, and go down to the mess. When we wanted to go back again, reverse the procedure, it was great!
All pilots were issued with a .38 revolver and a few rounds of ammunition. We used to practice now and again just in case we landed in France and had to shoot our way out. In actual fact very few of us carried revolvers when we flew, the main reason being there was nowhere to put the thing. We tried sticking it down the side of our flying boots, but it wasn’t too secure and more often than not you’d find the revolver bouncing about in the bottom of the cockpit, so we decided to give that a miss. But occasionally, in the evenings, we’d decide to do a bit of practice from the windows of the billet. We would all lean out the window and fire down at ground targets until we got some irate “erk” who rushed in from the NAAFI saying the ricochets were hitting the NAAFI, so we had to call that off.
George Malan was with us at this time and we’d become very friendly and more often not we used to fly together. (George Malan was the brother of the famous “Sailor” Malan, Group Captain, DSO*, DFC*, one of the highest-scoring pilots in Fighter Command and subsequently Station Commander at Biggin Hill in 1943.) He flew as my number 2 and was quite happy to do so on whatever trip we went on. He had a little tiny Austin 7 for which he had no insurance, no tax, and he’d pinch the petrol from one of our bowsers. On one occasion he was up in Piccadilly, parked the car up there and came out from the shop to find a policeman standing by the car. He said to George,
“Where’s your tax?”
George said, “Oh I haven’t got it, I’ve applied for it.”
“Where’s your Insurance?”
“ I haven’t got that with me”
And with that George got in the car, started up and just left, leaving the policeman standing there.
Sometimes George and I and Pete Fowler, another chap who’d come to us from a Hurricane squadron, used to pile into George’s car and do little trips to pubs, into Westerham and various places and George used to let me drive his car, it was a great little thing, used to go like a bomb, often getting up to as much as 40 mph!
The powers that be decided that it was no good pilots living in the lap of luxury, so they cancelled all our transport and provided each member of the squadron with a bicycle. We got quite used to them I suppose it kept us a little fitter than we might have been. The one good thing about them was that in the summer we used to take 12 bore single-barrelled shotguns, get on our bikes and ride all round the aerodrome chasing rabbits. George and Tommy Wright were pie-hot with a shotgun, they used pot things left, right and centre, but I regret to say I never hit a thing with a 12 bore.
Sometime earlier, Brian Kingcome had told me he’d put me in for a commission. Now at one time, if a Sergeant Pilot was commissioned, it was one way to get him off the squadron. You’d commission him and then make sure he was posted somewhere else, so the first thing I asked Brian was, would I have to leave the squadron? He said in no way, according to him I was quite a valued member of the squadron!