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Booing out the old year and bringing in the new at 46 Squadron’s New Year’s Eve party, 1943:

‘The night before there had been an ENSA show, and many of the members stayed on for it. Together with the wrens, this made around seventy guests in all, and the biggest Squadron party ever. As before, after helping to decorate the Mess, I drove over to Alexandria with Jack Barnes and collected some of the wrens from the Sacre Coeur in Alexandria. It was a splendid evening. There had been a lot of rain over the previous weeks, so a large marquee was erected, and there was a huge bonfire outside. Once again the RAF Dance Band from Aboukir played for us. As midnight was counted down, Doc MacDonald made a dramatic entrance through the front door of the Mess dressed as an ancient old man, representing 1943, and was booed and heckled as he made his way through the crowded room and out at the back door. He was in fact the oldest member of the Squadron and, as it happened, I was the youngest. I therefore landed the job of representing the New Year, 1944, and, as the Doc exited bang on midnight, a flaming punch was served, and in I came, dressed as a baby with sheets for a nappy, and cheered to the nines. Not my finest hour, and no one from ENSA took my details for future bookings, but great fun all the same. We just about managed to squeeze everyone into a huge circle to sing Auld Lang Syne. It was 1.30 in the morning when Jack Barnes and I took our three wrens back into Alex. As Jack snoozed on the way home, I reflected on a year full of strange and powerful experiences. As I turned the car into the camp at 3.30 a.m., I knew that despite all the difficult things I had seen and been through, I was actually having the time of my life.’

From: ‘Flying Blind: The Story of a Second World War Night-Fighter Pilot’ published by Fonthill Media

A happy Christmas to you all.  Keep following the star.

Extract from Chapter 8: ‘Christmas and New Year in North Africa’:  Some of you may recognise Charlie Peace, featured in the previous photograph, seated cross-legged on the floor at the front of the throng.

‘The next week was the Officer’s Mess Party on 10th December. This was a big affair for the Squadron, with around fifty guests invited to a dance and a buffet supper. Owen’s Cairo West detachment was now closed and all the aircraft returned to base, so the Squadron had its full complement. We spent all morning decorating the mess with whatever we could find; mostly palm leaves, which looked marvellous, I thought. In the afternoon I put on best blue and went into Alex int he CO’s car, with Dudley Arundel, Jenx, Jack Barnes and Atkins. We had a few drinks at the Cecil to get in the swing of things and then picked up the invited Wrens from the ‘wrennery’ and took them to Idku with us in style in the three-tonner.  The party was one to remember. There were plenty of girls and eats to keep us all happy. The RAF band had been brought in from Aboukir and we danced the evening away in the open under a brilliant moon. It was a magical setting.’

46 Squadron held a lot of parties and was famed for its good spirits – not only its Cyprian brandy. Doc Macdonald’s daughter kindly sent me this great photograph of a ‘session in the mess’, on the back of which Doc had written the following caption:

‘taken after a lunchtime session.  I am on the piano with Sheriff Muir behind me and Oscar Wild standing up. Charlie Peace with Fritz in the foreground.’ 

Sherriff Muir (Squadron Leader Gilbert Alexander Muir DFC) was a Canadian, who, as a special signals officer in 46 Squadron, had devised a means of controlling night-fighters from the warships they were escorting. Charlie Peace had been with my father in 256 Squadron back in the UK in 1942.  He had adopted Fritz after the Dachshund had been left behind by the retreating Germans. Charlie was killed in action in early 1944, and Dad looked after Fritz from then on.  ‘Oscar’ was Dad’s nickname in the Squadron. I was very moved to receive this photograph in 2013, and wrote the following poem.

There’s my dad standing at the back,
Clapping or playing rhythm spoons,
Next to the smiling Sheriff Muir;
While the Doc bashes out the tunes

on the old Joanna, festooned
With flowers, as if they’re in Hawaii,
Not Egypt, under a desert moon.
In front of the draped Union Jack

Two chaps stage right are obviously
Dancing, pounding the boards, a blur
Of movement in the camera’s eye.
Charlie Peace, self-styled conductor,

With his back to the players sits
Waving his right arm frantically
And on his knee the Dachshund Fritz
Wags his tail and grins ecstatically.

The picture’s still, there is no sound
For me: no honky-tonk music,
No spoons’ percussion clacks, clapped hands,
No feet-taps or the dog Fritz’s

Barks, no creaking boards. I can’t smell
The frowsty, beery, tented air.
The Doc’s playing but who can tell
Now what song?
I see but can’t hear.

All these chaps are gone: weeks later,
Lost in action, Charlie died out there,
His final resting place unknown;
My dad in Derbyshire, last year.

Here’s a photograph of Owen Hooker taken by my father in 1943 or 1944, at Idku. Owen is holding Fritz, the 46 Squadron mascot.

Six Weeks of Blenheim Summer by Alastair Panton and Victoria Panton Bacon,  is a memoir written by a second world war pilot which has been compiled and edited by his granddaughter. The account was written down by Alastair Panton for his son originally, and it is thanks to Victoria Panton Bacon, who found the manuscript after her father died, that it has been brought to publication. As she says, ‘If I hadn’t discovered the transcript of Blenheim Summer in my father’s dusty garage it might never have come to light.’

Alastair Panton’s writing is clean and elegant; he is a good writer, which is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the accompanying short stories, based on his own experiences of POW camp and escape attempts. His style is spare but full of humanity and telling detail, wry humour and a sense of immediacy. His appraisal of his own abilities and actions is both honest and modest, and he has the ability to take the reader into that brief world of French summer before the Germans broke that fragile idyll apart. He depicts the French countryside and its people and their sometimes difficult responses to both British presence and German invasion, as well as the warmth and courage of those who put their lives and safety on the line to help the British who were caught up in the action.

This is a good read, and difficult to put down.

I will be meeting the regional fundraiser for Wales and the West of England, Cerys Sadler, together with Simon Foster from ‘HQ’ on 9th December to go through all aspects of my tour and the schedule.  I’ve spoken with the helpful Cerys (lovely Welsh accent, Cerys!) many times on the phone, and am looking forward to meeting her in person. I already met Simon at RIAT last year.

If any of you are thinking of joining me, or undertaking fundraising in connection with Where They Served and would like any help with that, perhaps you could let me know before that date.

1940

The first chapter of ‘Flying Blind’ follows Bryan Wild’s progress in his flying training from first joining up in the summer of 1940:

‘I was young but very keen,’ he writes. ‘…the Corporal had to bully me to hold my  breath long enough to hold up the mercury in the tube.  I was tallish, rather pale, and on the thin side.  To my utter delight, the man whose job it was to gauge my fitness shook hands with me and wished me luck.  I was in.’

He learned to fly on Tiger Moths.

‘Sgt. Allan glanced at his watch. “Right. It’s now one-thirty.” He patted me on the shoulder. “You’re the first off. Be here at two and park yourself in the rear cockpit. I have to say it: don’t forget your chute. We’ll be in the air for approximately thirty minutes – in this kite, BB795. OK?” I nodded and was immediately aware that my mouth had suddenly dried up. The sky was now clear apart from a few clouds; a cold but pleasant autumn day. I noticed a skylark and gulped as I realised that in a short while I too would be airborne and defying the laws of gravity.”

By the end of that flight, he wrote, ‘I could hardly wait for the following day to arrive; a sure sign that I had most likely become hooked on flying.’ 

A good job, as he would spend around one thousand nine hundred hours in the air over the next six years.

Buy the book direct from Fonthill Media or via major online bookstores.