Two months of luxurious idleness (well, not quite!)
At Bournemouth, our little bunch of some thirty new NCO pilots had (in the nature of things) to be placed under the command of someone whom authority could hold to account for our misdeeds. The choice had fallen on a brand new Air Gunner Pilot Officer - of all things! We wouldn't have minded if he'd been a tour-ex NCO from bombers - we'd treat such a man with the utmost respect due to him. But this chap was just a "sprog" like ourselves. Everyone knew that you only needed a month's Course to qualify as a gunner, whereas we'd all had a year's hard graft in pilot training. It was a delicate situation, but this chap realised just how incongruous his position was, and treated us with "kid gloves". We rubbed along well enough.
At this point, I should explain that everyone in the training system would spend some time (often quite a lot of it) in Transit Camps, as the sequence of Schools had gaps between stages. All Transit camps are basically the same, nothing much happens apart from meals and the occasional inspection or roll-call, while you wait for your posting to arrive. In fact, it must be much like being a POW, except that you can escape! In the spring of 42, Bournemouth wasn't a bad place to kick your heels in, for a month. Then, for some unaccountable reason, they shipped us all up to Harrogate. Here we were billeted in the "Majestic" (is there anyone who didn't spend time there?) This was much less majestic than the name implies, after years of being knocked-about by generations of trainee aircrew. We did another month's "stir" there.
At last the RAF took notice of us. Our next move was to Hullavington (Wiltshire), a Flying School, to accustom us to map-reading in England, where the countryside was vastly different from the wide open spaces of the New World. Also new to us would be British weather, the Blackout, and RAF cockpits and wheel brake systems. Hullavington was an RAF "Expansion Station", built in the late thirties when the RAF was "expanded" to meet the threat of oncoming war. It was the last time the RAF ever had any money to spend on permanent buildings (as this only happens when the public and the politicians get really scared). These "Expansion Stations" are with us yet; the architect seems to have sketched only one set of designs for the individual components of a Station, then slightly adapted them and moved them around to suit each particular site (and the Treasury saved money).
The result (quite helpful) was that you could walk round any new Station and confidently say: That's the Armoury, that's the M.T. Section, that's the NAAFI, that's the Sergeant's Mess, that's the Stores, that's Station HQ,
and every time you'd be right - even though they'd all moved about from the layout on your old Station.
They had another enormous advantage - they were centrally heated! And they had proper paths and roads round them! They even had garages! Nobody who has not struggled with those dreadful little square coke stoves we had in our rooms in the Mess huts, can imagine how we seethed to see our transatlantic cousins ensconced in luxury, while our Squadrons were banished to the forests of Nissen huts in forlorn fields, ankle deep in mud.
But at Hullavington we were billeted in the peacetime airmen's Married Quarters. It must have been a brutal upheaval for the families living there at the outbreak of war, for they'd been turned out without ceremony, and left to fend for themselves to find somewhere else to live, so that the accommodation could be used for the wartime influx of single airmen. These stripped-out quarters were sad little places, and I imagine very cold in winter, but we were in early summer, and in any case all we did was to sleep in the places and sweep them out.
We flew from Castle Combe, a few miles away, and next time I'll tell you all about it.
Danny42C
It's being so cheerful 'as keeps us going.
Last edited by Danny42C; 10th Mar 2012 at 00:20.