Growing up in the 1940s RAF
Yes Danny, we had every intention of riding the bomb dolly down to the village and even extended its steering bar. Fortunately we had more enthusiasm than strength so the monster never reached the top of Swinhope Hill; it would certainly have reached Mach 1 at the bottom. I now cast myself upon the charity of the Mods with the opening chapter of 1949 memories:
Austerity Britain, struggling to its feet after a terrible war, was a very dull place ... but to an eight-year-old arriving from the brown plains of India in 1947, Lincolnshire was a riot of excitement and colour, the long-awaited "home" where there was something new to explore every day.
Like most Service families we had to wait for married quarters to become available, and spent our first month in a transit camp. If you explore the crumbling buildings on former airfields, note their single-skin brickwork and asbestos roofs, and the small rooms opening onto a central corridor. Each family would have two such rooms, with communal ablutions in the centre of the block. The buildings were centrally heated but the condensation would stream down the icy walls. Most houses, of course, had only a coal fire and were even more damp.
Our first home was at RAF North Coates, where flying had ceased the year before. For months my father and a few colleagues had to cycle 15 miles to Binbrook to arrive 0800 each day, and 15 miles home each evening, until the RAF reluctantly provided transport. But wartime airmen were tough.
A year later we were allocated quarters on what is now Windsmoor Road on the Brookenby estate. Life was very basic by today's standards. Local farmers collected every scrap of waste food or swill, to be boiled up and turned to valuable pig food. Sweets, sugar and some foods were rationed and our annual treat was a bottle of Coke from the Mess. In school we used both sides of scarce writing paper, and nothing was wasted.
Binbrook was just one of many schools, for Service children led a nomadic life. On my first morning Mr. Gordon the headmaster introduced me and another new boy, saying that our parents were serving our country, that like all Service families we were often on the move, and he asked everyone to make us welcome during our stay in Binbrook.This was the only such welcome I received, and we still remember Binbrook as the community which more than any other took its Service neighbours to its heart. On some stations we were regarded as interlopers, especially as wartime memories began to fade. I was glad to learn that Mr. Gordon's regard for his Service pupils, of which there were 20-25 in my time, was continued by his successors until the station closed in 1988.
Years later I learned that Mr. Gordon had remembered my father's Battle squadrons flying into Binbrook in 1940 after terrible losses in the Battle for France. He told my father that he grieved for the hundreds of young airmen who never returned to Binbrook, and said he would do all in his power to help the Service children. It is fitting that the Australian 460 Squadron memorial is placed at the roadside in front of his school.
The 1949 winter was harsh and coal for our open fires was not only expensive but difficult to obtain at one stage as the roads were snowed up. After every packing-case on the Station had been burned the men from the Patch went foraging on their bicycles, once bringing back a telegraph pole slung along the crossbars of four bikes. It was cut up and split into logs and while the creosote-soaked wood burned well, it produced a thick pall of black smoke which hung over the Patch for a week.
All too soon we were on the move again with a posting to RAF Khormaksar, Aden. My parents offered the choice of an RAF boarding school but I wouldn't miss another overseas trip. I'm still glad I was able to go in those days when foreign travel was impossible for most people, and I remember Aden as though it were yesterday. As you will find from our next instalment, Mods permitting ...