Danny, what an utter contrast to your life in India. There you were a Commanding Officer. There you were a military pilot. Now you are demobbed and earning less than half of what you were paid in India. Yet you say that you were better off than most, and being employed no doubt you were. These were hard bleak years. Rationing was if anything more severe than in wartime. Any consumer goods produced, especially cars, were aimed at export and hence earning us the all important US dollars needed to pay off our wartime debts. So what is your response? Logical and purposeful as ever. Get a better job. Try for ATC but get rebuffed by the bizarre need for spoken French (I seem to remember that you could learn any living language at school then, as long as it was French. Reading and writing it was important, speaking it was not; the oral test at O level I took concentrated as ever on directions to stations (or perhaps as you hint, to wars). What a pity that ICAO was yet to be invented with the insistance that English would be the Lingua Franca, no doubt despite outraged protests by Versailles.
You'll be back again no doubt and in the meantime make the most of things, in particular via the local ice rink. You wonder why they are no longer part of our scene. I do too, but no doubt our aversion to anything that causes you to trip or stumble and encourages you to phone an 0800 number if you do might have something to do with it. Much better it seems to watch from our sofas others doing it, together with other vicarious pleasures. Unintended consequences? No worries, the Pizza man is here.
Maugster, welcome to the thread and with an appropriate WWII era query at that. I'm afraid I don't know Sperling's fate but I suspect that she is now in the great boatyard in the sky. I certainly remember being part of her crew as a Flt Cdt in the early 60s, beating across the channel at night, with half of us on deck and the other half below pumping out the water that her leaking seams allowed in. She was an old lady then, dating from the 30s. For those who don't know, she was post war booty seized by the RAF from the Luftwaffe and continued her life providing aircrew R&R, albeit now for the enemy.
Last edited by Chugalug2; 5th Dec 2012 at 09:19.