In August I went on a fortnight’s advanced navigation course at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, practising square-search and interception techniques on Dalton computers, and learning how to ‘box’ an aircraft’s compass. Halfway through the schooling a friend waved a newspaper telling in big headlines that a bomb dropped on Hiroshima had wiped out the whole city. It was hard to believe the war was over, until a second such projectile descended on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered.
We abandoned classes for the day and went to London, no one at railway or underground stations asking for the fares of those in uniform. King George waved to us in the crowd from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Zipping from A to B on the underground to enjoy the novelty of being in the capital, I was surprised at how only a second or so seemed to pass between one station and the next, making it difficult to know whether the time was short because there was nothing in my mind, or whether it was due to the density of my reflections.
The station warrant officer’s daughter at Halton was about my age, slim, lively and russet-haired, with a sharp pale face. We passed each other walking along an impeccably kept avenue between the barrack blocks, on an evening when a delicious scent wafted from the nearby wooded hillside. Both of us immediately turned to say hello and talk, as if we had known each other before. Perhaps she was as much my type as I was hers, and in colouring if little else she resembled Edith Shaw of Parknook who earlier that summer had walked me through the overgrown rose-smelling grounds of Ranton Abbey near an aerodrome in Staffordshire.
I don’t remember the name of the girl at Halton, but recall that she took me to meet her father, who was neutrally polite, and gave me a cup of tea in their comfortable married quarters home. Nor is it certain that we kissed, but a letter or two passed between us, before her father was posted to Wales and contact ended. A year later, in the air force, a man came with an oral message saying that she still thought of me.
At that age love is as profound as it will ever be, but the objects of it are displaced by continually moving events. The tragedy of changing affection is also a factor; having only one life made it impossible to live through each piquant adolescent romance to a terminus of bliss or devastation. The enjoyable yet sad working out can only be done by memory, and mine was already a useless bundle of fused reflections as I took the train back to Nottingham knowing we would never meet again.
Chapter Seventeen
Exhausted from the factory, and smelling of disinfectant suds as I sat down to eat, my mother put a small buff envelope by my plate of conger eel, potatoes and peas, which contained notification of my appointment to the post of air-traffic control assistant. I was bemused at being referred to as a ‘temporary civil servant’, never having thought of myself as anybody’s servant, though feeling no regret at saying farewell to factory work for what I hoped would be for ever.
Payment for the new job would be monthly by cheque, and not much more than half of what I had earned in wages, though there would be no hardship in managing. I was sent for a fortnight’s instruction at RAF Wing near Leighton Buzzard, a short course in the control tower, with airborne experience in Wellington and Stirling bombers.
My posting was to Langar, in Nottinghamshire, and I was disappointed at not being billeted in the nearby village (birthplace of Samuel Butler, a fact not known until some years later) which was an option only for those who lived more than twenty miles away. The word ‘work’ hardly described what I had to do, and such an amalgamation of my enthusiasm of the last few years made it seem as if I were already halfway serving in the air force, since days were given to ‘duty’ rather than to the concept of hours ‘clocked on’.
Out of bed at six, I took a bus to the town centre, bought the Daily Herald, and caught an aircraft workers’ special to the aerodrome twelve miles away, arriving just before eight. Our boss was an amiable grey-haired squadron-leader referred to as ‘Pop’, who spent his nights on a camp bed downstairs next to the radio installation room because the accommodation price at the local pub was so ruinous. On entering the control tower, by an outside staircase, I put a kettle on the hotplate to make a pot of tea, taking a mug for Pop to drink between getting up and shaving.
Only two of the three assistants needed to be on duty at a time, with the squadron-leader either present or available. One of us stayed in the tower, while the other was taken by a van, which also towed the chequerboard caravan, to the runway of the day according to the direction of the wind. Once there, his first task, after the caravan was parked and the telephone cable plugged into the terminal point, was to place white planks on the grass outside in the form of a large letter T to indicate to any pilot wanting to land which of the three runways he was to use.
All the air-traffic controller had to do for the next four hours was sit in the turret of the caravan, much like being in the mid-upper turret of a bomber, and be on the lookout for aircraft approaching the circuit to land, in which case he cranked the handle of the field telephone to warn those in the tower to have a fire tender and a ‘blood wagon’ standing by, then signalled a green go-ahead on the Aldis lamp to the plane, by which time someone in the tower might be speaking to the pilot by radio.
At the end of the stint the other assistant would take over for the latter part of the day, and whoever was in the caravan would walk back to replace him in the tower. The only aircraft movements were four-engined York airliners towed across the road from the construction hangars and taken on test flights, or twin-engined Ansons landing now and again to bring spares and technical personnel from other A. V. Roe factories.
The tower man on duty in the morning would sit at the radio and take down details of the weather, spoken in a beautiful voice by a WAAF, at a score of airfields throughout the United Kingdom, and plot them on a chart. Another occasional job was to go on to the perimeter track with a pair of large tennis-like bats and guide an aircraft just landed into the correct dispersal point. Sometimes it would be necessary to climb on to the wing of an Anson with a handle and crank the number one engine into life, before the pilot in the cockpit, now able to start the other, could taxi out and take off.
The aerodrome had been used by the Royal Canadian Air Force, and another assistant and myself got into the large hut once used for briefing sessions to find one wall covered by a vast map of Europe on the one-million scale, and another of Eurasia at one to four million. Spinning pennies to decide who should have what, we dismantled them in sections and carried our loot home on the bus.
On dim winter afternoons, when Pop was out, we fired red and green Very cartridges for amusement, and sent rockets streaking in fiery tangents at the sky from a launcher in front of the tower. Flicking a switch at a control panel, the runway and perimeter lighting system could be flashed on and off like Morse code, goading the squadron-leader to telephone from the village one blackening afternoon and shout: ‘Stop playing the bloody fools with those lights! We can see ’em for miles!’
Using the telephone, and having to make myself clear over the radio, changed my accent towards a more neutral English. During the winter, with little air traffic and, on days of nil visibility, no flying at all, the three of us stayed in the tower. I read Pop’s Daily Telegraph and tackled the crossword, or played darts; or we would gaze outside in case the aeronautical equivalent of the Flying Dutchman should suddenly glide by our observation greenhouse in an enormous but ragged amphibian and request permission to land.