Burning the plane – my dad and me

Burning the plane – my dad and me

Anyone who knows me will say it is hard to shut me up. I love talking to people and listening to their stories. There was one person in my life I never did talk to until it was almost too late, my dad.

You may find it hard to believe that I did not have a genuine one to one adult conversation with my dad until three weeks before he died aged 88.

But, because we had those conversations, all the demons went and I was able to organise and take his funeral service and have never had negative thoughts about him since.

Dad was a terrible mental bully, but he was also a very angry man. The anger welled up in him and he would take the littlest thing as a slight and a harmless conversation would turn nasty in seconds. I had realised that by the age of 15 and never really spoke to him again for 30 years, even though I spent most of those years in the same house.

A few months before he died he stopped reading and doing his puzzles. As I was cooking the dinner I would have Radio 4 on in the background and every day I would latch on to something and pop my head round the door and we would exchange four sentences and I was gone.

When dad went into hospital for the last time (although I first thought he was dying 20 minutes before he did) I went to see him every day bar one. The first day it was just long silences. I decided that this could not go on and went in on subsequent evenings ready to talk about a particular subject. The next three weeks we discussed everything we had never discussed.

I think dad was angry because of the war. He lost all his friends. Having been a communist before the war and remaining a lifelong socialist, he split with the communists over the Hitler/Stalin pact.  He volunteered for the Royal Air Force to avoid the horror that Granddad had encountered and somehow survived in the trenches of World War One. He became a Squadron Bomb Aimer and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. As it happens the service with the highest level of attrition in World War Two was Bomber Command.

Dad hardly ever mentioned the war, so I will share his few stories with you.

He fired a weapon just once when he fully discharged a pistol without success at a snake in the latrines in India.

He was reprimanded for paying his Indian servant above the accepted rate.

He kept only one photograph of his bombing exploits a superb triangle of bomb craters neatly destroying the main Burma Road. His only instructions…. Don’t hit the road….

He said to me in his last three weeks, I hope I never killed anyone. Well odd though it may seem he may never have killed anyone. Almost all of his bombing was strategic against bridges, roads, waterways etc. He didn’t believe he hadn’t killed, but he wished he hadn’t.

Dad told me once that he was the navigator on a flight across Egypt and the pilot told him it was ok he could put his head down. Dad woke and found that the pilot had gone into shock and flown 100’s miles in the wrong direction. He returned him to his senses and they got to their location just before the fuel ran out…. Or this page would be blank!

Somewhere I have a piece of shrapnel that dad found inside the trousers of his flying suit, although there were no holes and no marks on his body – can you imagine if the conspiracy theorists got their hands on that….

There was only one story that dad loved to recount. He was flying to Gibraltar as a passenger when his plane was blown off course by bad weather and forced to ditch in a field in Spain. The superb pilot landed in a belly flop with no undercarriage and no injuries to the crew. Dad and the rest jumped out just as a group of angry farm workers waving pitchforks advanced towards them. The crew never carried loaded weapons as there was a risk of explosions at high altitude. Dad removed his pistol from its holster and held off the advancing mob with a gun with no bullets. In the background the crew set fire to the wooden plane with petrol.

The Spanish Army arrived in Jeeps and arrested them. As they were about to drive off a contingent of the Spanish Air Force arrived. All hell broke loose as an intense fist fight developed between the two branches of the Spanish military. The Air Force was victorious and the crew were whisked off to their base. For two days they lived the life of Riley in the Spanish Air Force mess until Military Police arrived and removed them. Eventually they were interned in a 3 Star hotel which held several crews over the war period. Although Spain was in theory neutral they were ruled by a fascist Dictator and there were German Gestapo Officers sent to watch over the crews. The Gestapo were old and fat, well relative to the young and fit British Airmen. Dad and the crew would walk miles up the steepest hills in the locality. The Gestapo would follow them wheezing and panting before the crew would run down past them shouting and swearing. It brings a smile to my face thinking about it now.

Eventually the British Government bought the crew back for 20000 gallons of petrol each. When they returned they were told off for burning the plane, apparently the government would have swapped it for the crew and saved all that vital fuel.