Tell us your experience of India (or at least Karachi and Poona) with a five-year old eyes !
Your wish is my command, O senior one. First, Kojak has kindly answered my Poona inquiry:
the ambience in cantt Pune is the same.Af Stn would have changed, he says. But after 70 years RAF Poona is bound to have changed like everything else.
My earliest memory from 1946 is travelling from Portrush in Co Antrim to Belfast, an exciting train journey which became decidedly less enjoyable when we reached the hospital where I was introduced to inoculations: yellow fever which stung like a hornet, TABC/typhus which made us sick for a week, cholera ditto, smallpox a very sore arm. In a few weeks we were off, train to Belfast, overnight boat to Liverpool, trains with several changes via Waterloo to Southampton, at last embarkation on the Strathnaver. Other than three-tier bunks and the Suez Canal with its bumboatmen and the Giligili magician I remember little of the voyage until exotic spicy smells (and others less so) came wafting over the deck even five miles out of Bombay. There were several RAF families on board and their menfolk came out to the Strathnaver on a launch; my father was just one head visible amongst them, I and the other children could not understand why our mothers were excited about meeting someone we had never met. Such were the vicissitudes of Service life when its families were still spread around the Empire.
We travelled by train from Bombay to Poona, I see it's only 60 miles or so. Families were given a wooden-framed bungalow thatched with (?? palm leaves) a short gharri ride from the airfield, like most personnel my father used a pushbike. Our mothers walked us to the RAF school, I think there were two or three classes from civilian families as well. All the RAF families had a bearer, we called ours Pop and this kindly man was a treasure whom we treated as one of the family. He taught my father to make real curries and we brought a supply of spices when we returned to the UK as such things were unheard of in those days. Cooking was by two or three Primus stoves and an oil-fed cooker which was regulated by counting drops of oil through a glass sight. I found this most interesting but was banned from the tiny kitchen after my full-throttle experiment set fire to the thatched roof and nearly burned down the house. Otherwise the only dissonance arose when my mother swatted flies, and Pop would sadly shake his head and remonstrate 'memsahib, memsahib' because as a Hindu he revered all forms of life.
Other childhood memories include shopping trips with my parents in horse-drawn gharri but I much preferred the 15cwt Bedford truck, borrowed by the MT officer two doors away. On the journey we sometimes went past the burning ghats with their clouds of drifting smoke. My father took me to the airfield a few times but I don't remember details apart from the monstrous Vengeances and being spoiled rotten by the Indian officers who (if I remember correctly) were to take over the base from the RAF.
We were posted to Karachi and spent almost a week on the Deccan Queen express via Lahore, a journey of some 1500 miles. Each family was allocated half a coach, with lounge and sleeping accommodation, but we were horrified when told that Pop had to travel in the native carriage farther along the train. The adults were shattered by the heat and the slow journey but we kids would have been happy to stay aboard for a month.
Somehow we didn't like Karachi as much as Poona and I remember little about it. We went to school by gharri (usually Bedford QL) apart from the great day when the MT section ran out of trucks and we kids were packed into three Jeeps instead, with grave risks to health and safety but sheer bliss for those hanging over the sides of the swaying vehicles. My father took me across Drigh Road to see the Tempests, but these were thrown into insignificance when I encountered the magnificent white-painted Lancaster which came through twice a week. Dad said they were selling them for a few pounds at home. Ever the optimist, I began saving my pocket money... as I would save for another 21 years and even then my first aircraft was not a Lancaster, but hey, you can't have everything.
My excitement knew no bounds when Dad announced we were to fly from Karachi to Bombay, where we would board the Georgic for home. We boarded a Dakota with a line of canvas seats down each side and so began my lifelong love of flying. We returned home in February of the terrible 1947 winter, being allocated a couple of rooms at RAF North Coates which had closed in 1946. These were standard wartime blocks, with condensation running down the single-skin brickwork and asbestos roofs. The radiators were barely warm, augmented by two electric rings for cooking; when all the families switched on the fuses would blow, so heavier fuses were fitted, culminating in a very satisfying bang when the transformer at the Patch entrance exploded with a blue flash that was seen two miles away. I and a few other families from India had a terrible cough which was diagnosed as bronchitis and effectively treated with M+B tablets, the new-fangled penicillin. A year later, the new NHS mass radiography service came round the schools and revealed that we had contracted tuberculosis during our last days in India. In fairness the RAF kept a close eye on our family with annual X-rays for the rest of our service.
We were then moved to the North Coates married quarters, where we lived on what is now Marsh Way where the quarters are still in use. Even the (new) transformer still stands in its brick enclosure. My father was stationed with 9 Sqn at Binbrook 15 miles away, he and colleagues would cycle there on Monday and stay in the Sgts Mess until Friday. Given the grim winters on the Lincolnshire Wolds, the RAF eventually relented and supplied a truck until MQ at Binbrook became available. There we enjoyed three very happy years until being posted to Aden.
My parents are long gone but we agreed we did enjoy our travels in the days when the journey was part of the experience. Our one regret was that we never heard from Pop again and we feared he became victim of the massacres which followed Partition. As a family we still feel guilty that we took him so far from his home. Only when I became much older did I appreciate the burdens placed upon my mother and all Service wives, burdens only recognised by choirmaster Gareth Malone and his Military Wives' Choir. I was not surprised that Mr Malone took a well deserved six months' sabbatical to recover from his emotional experiences.