Danny and the set-up when he arrived in Valley.
The plain fact was that 20 Squadron was an anomaly in Fighter Command, and in the nature of things it tended to attract anomalous people. It would be unfair to characterise it as the "sin-bin" of the Command, but perhaps a better description of us might be as the "Awkward Squad" of that organisation. One or two examples will give the flavour of the whole.
M. was in dispute with his ex-wife's solicitor over some payment of alimony. In exasperation, he (M) made up the whole of the sum demanded in coin, put it in a barrel of treacle and sent it to the solicitor. He naturally refused to accept the payment in this form, and I do not know what happened in the end - nor what became of the treacle - but the case reached the local Press. By ill luck the story got to their Airships; another young man saw a bright career fall even further behind him.
This M was (very unusually) a man of some modest wealth. His wheels were a Green Label Bentley Open Tourer of the mid thirties. This would be worth a king's ransom today, of course, and even then it would not be as cheap as all that to pick one up (perhaps £2-300 - and a F/O had to make do on £30 per month). It was in well-worn state, and it would have been hopeless to put his meagre petrol ration into the vast tank, as he would lose the lot to rust and evaporation.
Accordingly he set up a jury-rig arrangement with lemonade bottles and rubber tubes to gravity-feed the huge float chambers. Extra full bottles were carried under the rear seat to ensure return to base. The other members of the Squadron would contribute perhaps half-a-gallon each (garages in those days were quite accustomed to such a request) to fill a bottle or two. In return, the whole lot of us could be squeezed into the huge boat of a body for the trip to the pub du jour.
Nor was this the last off his services to the community. In this most Welsh-speaking part of the whole Principality, all our Mess staff and the civilian employees on the Station spoke it exclusively among themselves, absolutely confident that we couldn't understand a word. And, of all the people whom they might suspect, M, this public-school, cut-glass accented officer (a perfect Sloane Ranger before his time) was the very last.
But the family seat was near Wrexham; in his childhood years he'd had a Welsh nanny, who'd cooed, babbled and sung to him, and told him countless stories in her mother tongue. Although his spoken Welsh was mostly gone now, he could still make sense of 99% of what was being said. This was of enormous value to us. No wartime secret was more tightly guarded, to the very end it was, I believe, kept from the natives. In this way we learned a lot of things we weren't supposed to hear (truly, "no man is a hero to his valet !" ).
S. had been in the Fleet Air Arm. In a Seafire, he was landing-on a carrier (hook stowed away ??) He contrived to bounce and float over all the wires and the barrier (the Angled Deck was waiting to be invented). There were two parked Seafires on the far side of the barrier. The day ended with S. winning 3-0 (he didn't get a scratch).
Their Lordships intimated that he might seek his fortune elsewhere. Nothing daunted, he trotted round to Adastral House. They took him on (things like that happened in those days). I must say that he bent no more Spitfires with us: on the contrary he put up a Good Show with one, which I shall describe later.
Then there were those, like me, who were simply too far outside the age/rank/seniority "box" to fit comfortably in a fighter squadron, and so were banished to odd-jobs on the periphery of the Command. To the best of my knowledge and belief, none of the 20 Sqdn alumni got past W/Cdr (only one or two made it: one was the chap who'd gone out, got himself a degree at public expense to "resettle" in civil life, then used it to get a PC back in the RAF - nice one !) Our Boss, Alex Hindley, did best of all. He made W/Cdr, resigned, went out to India and started some sort of an import agency for aircraft, and grew very, very rich.
Now I had better resume my story. As in my early training days, so now it was a great relief to get onto your Squadron, whatever and wherever that was. Now you belonged somewhere - you had an RAF "fixed address" at last; your post and laundry might (with any luck) catch up with you. As so often, the more Spartan the surroundings, the nicer the people
Laptop still firing on all four. Goodnight, chaps,
Danny42C.
Ground tested and found servicable.