Whilst walking along the sunny Prom with Callie this afternoon, I spotted three dodgy characters lurking in a well hidden shelter, who looked at me most suspiciously as I wandered past. They were clearly foreign and speaking in an alien tongue….well one I didn’t recognise anyway. They might have been Syrian or Afghan or anything in between. Had they just landed and were plotting their next move? Or had they escaped from a refugee/asylum centre and were plotting their next move? Or were they totally innocent and I am guilty of awful prejudice and unwarranted suspicion? I suspect these are rhetorical questions that will never be answered. It did make me wonder though what I would do if I saw a small, overloaded dinghy heaving into sight and landing on the beach? Would I dial 999….or wander down with arms outstretched and warmly embrace them with a cheerful “welcome to Britain, you poor sods”? Or would I be the Philistine that turns and walks off in the other direction? It’s quite hard to know until it happens, but I’m fairly certain that I would dial 999 and then at least wait to see what happened, if not wander down to ask where they’d come from; being the nosey journalist that I am!
The skies above Eastbourne must have been filled with the sounds of Merlin engines eighty one years ago, as well as the sounds of whatever engine an ME109 had. (Pardon my ignorance) Yesterday a lone Spitfire Mk IX reprised that sound as it overflew The College in honour of a very distinguished Old Eastbournian who had flown Spitfires in the war and whose Memorial Service it was in the College Chapel. It reminded me of my adopted father’s farewell. He had been a Battle of Britain pilot and Treasurer of The Battle of Britain Association almost until he departed this mortal coil at 92. The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight overflew our very crowded garden after his Memorial Service. It was magical. John was a member of the Caterpillar Club having baled out from 18,000 feet when his Spitfire was getting a bit too hot to handle. Getting burned was the big fear of most pilots. Imagine you are at high altitude, on oxygen, in a dogfight with a Messcherschmitt and suddenly you have a shooting pain in your ankle where shrapnel has entered uninvited and your beloved pristine airborne sports car is suddenly not working quite the way it should. There were no ejector seats then. It required a conscious decision to disconnect from the oxygen, pull back the canopy and climb out over the side. Jumping off a burning machine (just really picture that and imagine what it must have been like!) free falling through the air with no experience or training, then pulling the ripcord and watching a parachute deploy for the first time, was far preferable to trying to land an airborne incinerator. Very, very scary. He deployed his ‘chute pretty quickly so it took a long time to come down; long enough to light up a cigarette and wonder what might happen. Descending at about ten feet per second, it would have taken the best part of half an hour. Typically free fall parachutists jump from 12,000 and the air is quite thin even at that height. They will skydive down to about 2,000 feet before deploying their canopies. Fortunately John landed in Kent, although there were a few hairy moments while he convinced Dad’s Army that he was a true blue Brit and in no way related to the Red Baron. Corporal Jones was apparently quite threatening with his pitchfork. The Caterpillar Club was instituted by Leslie Irvin to recognise those who had used an Irvin parachute to bale out of their not-so flying machine. You were given an enamel lapel badge that looked like a silk worm with your name engraved on the back. (The parachutes were made of silk). There were 34,000 members of the club by the time the war ended. Ironically John’s wife worked in a parachute packing factory during the war. We will never know if she packed the one that saved his life.
In later life it always used to amuse John that I had chosen to become a paratrooper. “Why on earth would you voluntarily jump out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft?”. I came to understand that thought when I graduated from paratrooper to helicopter pilot. They’ve yet to devise a method of safely leaving an underperforming chopper, so the aim is always to try to put it down vaguely in one piece. Anything that you can walk away from is considered a success. The good news is that you can invariably cope with an engine failure. It’s the loss of the tail rotor or tail rotor drive shaft that is a lot more tricky. Damage to the main rotor tends to be terminal! Fortunately I never experienced any of those things, although we used to practise “engine off” landings all the time. Once you switch the engine off you only get one chance so there’s a reasonable amount of pressure not to screw it up.
Meanwhile Captain T Kirk has just gone into “Space, the Final Frontier” for the first time at the age of 90. I wonder if he said “Live long and prosper” when he landed? Sadly he was boldly going where quite a lot of people have already been before. “Warp drive Mr Zulu”. “Aye aye Captain”.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 