The membership card has arrived in grand style and I shall wear it proudly on every future occasion I should board an SAS flight. Come to think of it that might not be for very long as rumours abound that our Scandinavian carrier is likely to be sold to Lufthansa. Therefore I shall wear it on every appropriate and indeed on every in-appropriate occasion.
Thank you very much for sending it over!
I suspect we shall have to wait and see when the next Grandmotherly moment arrives, these tactics work best I think on the unsuspecting!
In the meantime, while I retire to contemplate the high flying activities of yesteryear, and before I forget, here is the last of my earlier stories which somehow evaded your diligent inclusion into the vaults on the first publishing, now featuring spell-checked content:
TO ABSENT FRIENDS
”You’ve developed a funny tick”, she said.
Jenny was sitting in front of me in the restaurant where we had gone for dinner. After we’d met when I was in hospital I’d asked her to go out with me and amazingly she’d accepted the invitation. That was a fortnight ago and we had been to the cinema and high-tea on a few occasions.
“You’re not even aware of it yourself, are you?”
“I admit I have no idea what you’re talking about”, I said in earnest puzzlement.
“It’s when you enter places, rooms, like when we came into this restaurent earlier: You’re humming some bars from a piece of music. And it’s almost like when you go to the movies, and there is a particular theme accompanying the leading actor, a signature theme that is played every time the hero enters.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize that”, I said. “What piece of music is it?”
“I don’t know. It sounds very dramatic and purposeful however. I quite like it. Somehow, it suits you perfectly, I think.”
----
We’d been scrambled endlessly during the last 2 weeks, clearly the battle was becoming fiercer by the minute with Goering sending over armadas of aircraft; Bombers protected by Me-110’s and 109’s.
The assistance from a corps of ground observers and the chain of home defence radio-location stations gave Fighter Command a much needed advantage to meet the invaders on slightly better odds than the number of our Spitfires and Hurricanes would otherwise have mandated.
The radio-location stations were manned by operators who knew how to look into cathode ray tubes and how to interpret the various spikes on the small screens for what they represented in reality: Waves of enemy aircraft. This information was then relayed to a central coordinating room where Command put together all the pieces of this deadly puzzle, enabling the staff to paint an accurate picture of the present situation. This they did just by placing and continuously moving markers on a large table. Displayed on the top of the table was the map of England and northern France.
Squadron status was regularly updated on panels on the wall, and through radio communications the controllers assigned to each sector would call up flights on patrol or order a scramble when a raid was detected. Then they would direct the defenders towards the raid. Directing and choreographing the airial ballet
More often than not you’d hear the words “Help yourselves everybody” just prior to our engaging the enemy force. Clearly there were enough aircraft to go around. At times and from a distance they looked a bit like huge swarms of birds. But these birds were deadly, and they came in orderly formations.
Meeting the armada head-on, the closing speed was frightening and I prayed that I would be able to roar past the main bomber force unscathed. I selected the nose of the leading Heinkel and waited until I dared wait no longer. Then I squeezed the trigger. If my fire did any damage at all was not possible to tell, I was already past the German aircraft and looking for the spaces in the netting, to find the gaps that would see me safely through this box of twin-engine aircraft.
Once behind the enemy formation I began a banking climb to engage the rear-most part of the formation, and edged into a position where I could attack from behind and above.
The r/t was constantly feeding voices into my ears; “They’re shooting at us!” someone yelled. “Yellow leader: Break! There’s a bandit on your tail!” another voice declared, and someone yelled his encouragement to another pilot by repeatedly urging him with the words; “Shoot him, shoot him”.
I had taken several shots at Heinkels and Dorniers scoring some hits on several of them, but walking my bullets over several of planes had not yet resulted in me downing any of these planes. I could clearly see some of my bullets hitting these aircraft, shedding parts of fuselages, engine-cowlings and bits of rudder or ailerons, but they were tough to actually shoot down. “I’m hitting him!”
Suddenly the voice of my Squadron leader registered with me as he spoke to all pilots in his Squadron; “Who’s that humming?”, but his query went unanswered.
Then there was a loud bang and part of the Perspex windscreen in front of me had suddenly gone form transparent to white, and I had great difficulty in seeing anything straight ahead. A bullet from somewhere had been stopped just in time by the armoured screen which was now useless in terms of forward visibility. The situation then went from bad to worse as I discovered that the bullet had been fired from a 109 that had latched itself on to my tail, the German pilot now firing with both his guns and cannons, evidently determined to claim this Tommy for himself.
When the right side Perspex went white as well, I knew I had met a superior pilot and called for assistance.
“Don’t worry “Cilla”, I’ll get him off your tail”, Squadron Leader Mack said in his usual clipped style. You could even see his handlebar moustache wave from the wind generated by his words, as he articulated them.
Another write-off, as incredibly the left side Perspex had gone milky white too, just before the last bang that shook my poor trusty Hurricane violently and left me in no doubt that the old girl had had it and was already beyond being crippled and mortally wounded.
I pushed the canopy back and instantly the noise level in the cockpit rose considerably. I unstrapped myself from the doomed Hurricane and let myself fall out, into the sky, waiting a few seconds before pulling the ring that released the parachute, and in the silence that had suddenly engulfed me, the first thing I heard was my racing heart.
Reborn.
Although this was my second crash in little more than two weeks I was alive and unhurt. And this time I’d land on terra firma. I watched the battle from under the dome of my parachute during the remaining descent, almost forgetting that I was man, not a bird, and was meant to walk on the ground, or take to the skies in one of mankind’s brilliant inventions, his machines, dependant on engine, propeller, wings and fuel.
Upon my return to the Squadron I was quite pleased to learn that I’d downed one 111 and one Do.
----
Jenny and I had gone to Sunday services in the small church where Jenny’s uncle had agreed to listen to the theme I was humming and to transcribe it to musical notes. Jenny’s uncle had studied music seriously and with a passion until he had found his true vocation as a man of the Church.
When he had taken down the notes and added a bit of arrangement to the theme, he remarked to us that he did not recognize it from any existing music, but that he found it very dynamic and somehow fitting.
Then he played it for us on the church organ, and we were all suitably impressed.
----
Years later and the Battle of Britain long gone, so many of the surviving pilots, the transcription that Jenny’s uncle; Mr. Moore-Sommersby created and then played from on that Sunday in late 1940 was found. It suddenly resurfaced amongst notes and sermons that had been stowed away for more than half-a-century. The war-time clergyman’s work desk was to be cleared in preparation for it to be part of a permanent Battle of Britain memorial. The memorial will reside in the old and now unused buildings belonging to the vicarage, thus forming a historical and authentic background to the artefacts on display. The diaries of Squadron Leader Peter “Cilla” Csilly, DSO, DFC and bars, will also be on display in the museum.
Every answer presents new questions, and so it is quite extraordinary and impossible to explain why the bars hummed by a young pilot in the Royal Air Force during the battle should have been composed twice, by two men who never met, and who were separated in time by almost a generation.
Perhaps it is indeed as the composer once remarked; just a case of the number of notes in the world being finite, and after some time the only thing you can do with them is to move the order around a bit.
The coincidence might not be so inexplicable after all; When you think about the Battle, the sound of Merlins, and when you’re looking at that blue sky broken by clouds that stretch in thin strands looking like surely they had to be made by aircraft, you might start humming it too.
