The memoirs of Sqn Ldr Rupert Parkhouse, recorded in 1995 – Part 6
The first post in this series is #9775 on page 489 of this thread.
I WENT home for Christmas 1939 with my wings, feeling very proud, returning in January to join the advanced training squadron for bombing and gunnery, which was very enjoyable, firing the front gun and dropping 20lb practice bombs on the range. We didn't do any night ops on the advanced squadron, which seems very strange.
We flew up to West Freugh [near Stranraer] for armament training camp, there were more pilots than aircraft so some were flown up in a Vickers Valentia from the wireless school at Cranwell. We landed beside a burned-out Heyford on the airfield, which we wondered about, but it had been pilot error and nobody was killed.
There we were snowed up and could not fly for weeks, while I contracted a frightful cold so when the rest of the term went back to Cranwell I was kept in sick quarters at West Freugh, where the flight sergeant nurse regaled us with stories of his exploits in various bordellos in Egypt, Hong Kong and Singapore which I found quite interesting.
Eventually I got back to Cranwell where the list of postings went up with much laughter and guffaws when we found who was posted onto Fairey Battles, and who had got onto fighters or heavy bombers. People thought the indifferent pilots were going onto Battles where if they had a crash they wouldn't kill too many as well as themselves.
In fact the chaps who came onto Battles with me included Johnny Rothwell, a very reasonable pilot who was killed later on a torpedo bomber, Shirley Shuttleworth, a member of the famous family who survived the campaign in France but was shot down in 1941 in a Blenheim, and J. M. Dyer whom I last heard of as a squadron commander at the RAF College.
NEXT POST: In a grim portent of events to come, Rupert has difficulty with instrument flying.