Danny,
Glad that you are back on course again and after reading your latest posts I am somewhat hesitant about putting my mundane experiences on this thread.
March 1945 and back at Heaton Park for a couple of weeks and then the same group of u/t Nav/Wops are once more sent out on detachment, this time to Gransden Lodge. a PFF station and home to 405 RCAF squadron equipped with Lancs and a Mosquito LNSF squadron.
As had happened at Strubby we were once again spread round the various sections and this time I was allocated to the armoury and my only abiding memory is of being told to paint the stones surrounding the building white. Soul destroying stuff.
In these days I was quite a useful football player and Gransden being mainly staffed by Canadians who were not that good at the sport it was reasonably easy to gain a place in the station football team which led to trips away to other bases for matches thus helping to relieve the monotony.
We were still at Gransden on VE Day and a huge party for all personnel was held on the sports field, the beer flowed like buttermilk and there were a few inebriated airmen and WAAFs by the end of the day.
The squadron moved out towards the end of May and soon afterwards we were recalled to Heaton Park
A couple of weeks later we were on the move again,this time to a small camp on the outskirts of Reading.It was not an aerodrome and we had no idea what we would be doing there. Next morning we found out and this was an odd sort of detachment. There was an HMSO(His Majesty's Stationery Office) warehouse in Reading and this was to be our place of employment. This was a civilian establishment and we were the only RAF people there.
We were issued with bus tokens and would take the bus to and from the warehouse each day, it was like being back in civvy street.
The job was to make up orders placed by various RAF establishments of the various forms required to run an Air Force and ensure that they were despatched on time.
Petet asked in a previous post if we just accepted these delays in training but this time we had had enough and being in a mutinous mood we led the guys at HMSO a merry dance, mixing up orders and generally putting a spanner in the works until they were glad to get rid of us. Incidentally I never found out what the function of that camp was.We only slept and ate there.
By VJ day we were back at Heaton Park having given up on any idea of ever flying and towards the middle of September we were informed that we had been remustered to straight W/op and that we were being posted to Bridgenorth for a refresher ITW course about a year after doing the original one.
Seems like you had to go back to move forward.