Still a couple more bits of the 'by the way' stuff on a thread that must surely be due some sort of prize for being the most divergent from its actual title.
It was probably in 1943 that we had a short holiday with relatives in Newcastle-under-Lyme and I remember large numbers of Canadian troops based nearby. For local small boys their special appeal was that they smoked Sweet Caporal cigarettes and on the back of the packets were a series of aircraft recognition silhouettes; these were highly collectable and the cry “Got any Sweet Caps” followed any soldier with a ‘Canada’ shoulder flash. We were after the packets rather than their contents and much enthusiastic swapping took place in order to get a complete set of silhouettes. With a father in the Air Force it was probably inevitable that aviation was my main interest, and like several friends I could not only recognise a vast range of aircraft visually, but also a lot of them by sound. One of my possessions was a cardboard device that one held at arm’s length, consisting of two arms pivotted together at the bottom. A list of aircraft types was printed up one side and when you had identified a type and moved the cardboard arms so they appeared to touch its wingtips you could read off its altitude on a scale.
I used to go off for walks by the Blackwater and was once found by my mother sharing a baked bean lunch from a Canadian soldier’s mess-tin. On another occasion I met some Italian prisoners of war (distinguished by having large white circular patches sewn on the back of their overalls as aiming marks in case of escape); they were clearing mud from the river. By then my father was also a POW and I explained to them that he had been captured in Crete, which they understood. My mother was rather affected when I told her about this particular meeting, I think.
To supplement my father’s RAF pay and to pay my school fees my mother, who had been a teacher before I was born, did some coaching at home, but cooking and looking after a small boy in the absence of a father must have been pretty demanding. I don’t remember ever being hungry but I do recall my mother making ’marzipan’ for Christmas cakes from glucose powder, almond essence and soya flour; it tasted pretty good to me, and for some time after the War I thought this was what marzipan was supposed to taste like.
My daily walk to school, about a mile and a half, took me past a military convalescent home, where wounded soldiers, dressed in bright blue pyjama jackets and red ties were wheeled in invalid chairs or hobbled on crutches.
By the age of about six or seven I had a bike, with wood blocks screwed each side of the pedals so I could reach them; one of its features was a projection from the left of the rear hub, about a couple of inches long, You put a left foot on that, kind of skipped along with the right one, and then when up to speed vaulted onto the saddle; I became quite adept. My mother and I would go for long bike rides and one of the best used to be to Hazeley Heath. This was an area of sand pits and heathland that was used for tank recovery practice. Several old tanks lay there and while my mother gathered blackberries I would explore the interiors of these; in one, a Matilda I think, I found the turret traversing crank and managed to get the turret to rotate. One day a German PzKw III was lying there, probably captured during the campaign in the Western Desert. Another ride took us to a Bofors anti-aircraft gun site at Sandhurst, where I was allowed to sit on one of the gun’s seats and operate the elevation and shown how the gun was fired. In the saddle bags of our bikes we would carry a Kilner jar of full cream milk; the rough roads, coupled with a bit of shaking while we stopped for a picnic, produced a small amount of butter which supplemented our ration.
The other regular cycling destination was Hartfordbridge Flats, where in 1942 a new airfield was being built, re-named Blackbushe near the end of the War. The first day we went there my mother picked blackberries while I wandered about on the airfield (nobody seemed to mind reasonably-behaved small boys then); it was the sight and the smell of rows of camouflaged Hotspur training gliders and Whitley bombers, used as tugs, that got me hooked on aircraft for life. The smell of warm aircraft, with their doped ply and fabric, and the aromatic fumes of high octane aviation fuel (probably 130 octane then) cast a spell that brought me and my long-suffering mother back to that airfield as often as I could persuade her to pedal there, and kept me involved with aviation in various forms ever since. A bit more about RAF Hartfordbridge later.