It might have been Ian Mackersey's book "Rescue Below Zero" published first in 1954 that first told the story of the Hastings stranded on the Greenland ice-cap.
The detailed recall of some of the others here is amazing. To remember what people said when you were five, equally so. All I can contribute along those lines is knowing what an Avro York was when aged five. My cousin, five years older than me, lived downstairs with our grandmother. One day in their kitchen, Richard, the cousin, was playing with a model plane on the floor. It was a die-cast model of a silver coloured York with the registration in big black block letters right cross the upper surface of the wings. The G- part has stayed with me down the years. But when seeing Richard again after the passage of some fifty years, he had no memory at all of the occasion or even ever owning a die-cast model plane. (In my case, I left school, then went on to work my way up the ladder of civil aviation in Australia, enjoying every moment of a sometimes pretty colourful - and hairy - flying life. Poor Richard, for his entire working life, worked for a produce store in the country.)
The late Ian Mackersey, by the way, when he had finished his biography of Charles Kingsford Smith, asked me to read his draft and make any comment or suggestion i felt warranted. It was an honour, I thought to be so asked. The only correction I suggested was that in Australia there are no 'ranches', as in the States , but stations, as in cattle station or sheep station. Meentheena was the name of such a station in the Pilbara of Western Australia. Smithy wrote to his mum in 1922, saying "Nice girl at Meentheena" Their wedding and subsequent reception, (or monumental piss-up) in the Ironclad Hotel in Marble Bar, lasted for two days and two nights. An affair Ian Mackersey described with characteristic verve and aplomb. Forty years on from that doomed marriage, I'd overnight in the Ironclad, while flying for an earth-mover with plant all over W.A. The publican was 'Smokey' Dawson. His Pekinese spent half his life on the bar. He'd lap up the beer slops from a big old battered brass ash tray that was his at the end of the bar. I'd turn in, imagining I could hear Smithy, singing a raunchy song to his ukulele, a skill he perfected during his time in the RFC in the war.