CHAPTER TEN

Why Am I Here?

One good thing about coming back from an overseas tour is that one could normally expect to have a decent slice of leave. I had six very welcome weeks. This gave Esmé and me ample time to go over to Belfast, enjoy a spell with each set of parents, look up old friends, buy a car, acclimatise, and do some desperate phoning of estate agents in the area around Chivenor to try to find some suitable accommodation. It was pure luck, or rather a moment of low demand, that had got me a Married Quarter at the tail end of my previous Chivenor tour. However, this time, although I was one rank higher, had several more years’ service, and had had a second child, all essential elements in the mix that gave one qualifying points for Quarters, there were none to be had. There were no Hirings available either but the Married Families Officer helpfully put me in touch with the owner of a small hotel, closed for the winter, and I was able to rent this until the end of March.

When I reported for duty at Chivenor, on 22 January, the feeling of déjà vu was less than I had expected for there had been quite a few changes in the four and a half years since I had left on my way to No. 19 Squadron. The Vampires had gone, and had been replaced entirely by Hunter T7s. Mark 6s, each carrying two drop tanks, had replaced the Mark 4s. And, as the Lightning had now replaced the Hunter in the air defence role, the emphasis at the OCU had switched to ground attack; and there was a section dedicated to fighter reconnaissance training, something that I had taken to very readily on the DFCLS course, and rather thought I would like to do by way of a change. Chivenor had also become responsible for running short courses to train an agreed number of Army officers each year as Forward Air Controllers.

I was rather pleased to be assigned to 234(R) Squadron as it had the FR section. However, this line of business was well sewn up by a small coterie of ex-RAF Germany pilots and, probably quite reasonably, only those who had served on a FR squadron could join the club. I was to be, once again, a tactical instructor, but this time I was also to be one of three weaponry instructors on the squadron. There was some discussion about sending me on a PAI course to prepare me for this but I demurred. The long defunct PAI course had been resurrected and a new Interceptor Weapons Instructor course created to cater for the Lightning force. I could see no point whatever in repeating what I had had at West Raynham but, as nobody currently on 234 (R) Squadron had done the DFCLS course it took a fair amount of arguing to get the point across. By the time I had finished, I think that my flight commander, Pete Heighton, was convinced that I was simply being refractory. He was right, up to a point.

However, by the end of my first week back at the place, and in spite of my misgivings at having apparently taken a career-step backwards, I knew that I was going to enjoy myself, and especially so in the role of weapons’ instructor. A new and more complicated cine exercise had been introduced that was difficult to master and a challenge to teach. Air-to-air firing was still in the syllabus and had been joined by a fair amount of air-to-ground gun and rocket firing. On the purely tactical side the emphasis was very definitely on low-level work. Within the first week, too, I realised just how much more dual instruction had been introduced to the course, and how much the quality of the training had accordingly benefited.

As a follow on to the earlier sale of Hunters to India the British Government had agreed to provide OCU training for Indian Air Force pilots and, coincident with my arrival, a new course of seven Indians was just beginning. This scheme had not been in existence for very long and it surprised me, given that we had begun delivering Hunters to the Indian Air Force before my sortie to Cawnpore in 1958, and I had met a sizeable bunch of Indian Hunter pilots at Palam in 1961. We very nearly got off to a bad start with this latest course when one of the OCU instructors, running the operations desk in the squadron, and with it the flying programme, addressed the course leader and another Indian student as ‘you Westernised Oriental Gentlemen’. Although a fair amount of badinage has been common currency between aircrew members in crew-rooms across the ages, and anyone getting upset by it could expect nothing more than the old military retort of ‘if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined’, this was in a different category of tactlessness. It was crass, stupid and insulting, even if, as was the case here, it was not meant to be. The course leader was very put out by what he considered to have been a serious bit of post-Raj racism and telephoned the High Commission in London to complain. Luckily whomever he spoke to must have realised that this was likely to have been nothing more than an isolated bit of idiocy and told him to accept it as such, and the crisis subsided.

I had something of a weapons’ training success with one of the Indian pilots, Pilot Officer D’ Silva, that gave me considerable pleasure and, rather undeservedly, established my reputation as a weapons’ instructor. D’ Silva had not found the cine exercises easy, had achieved the same low average standard in air-to-air gunnery as I had done on my OCU course in the Vampire F5, had not distinguished himself at air-to-ground gun-firing, and had lost his confidence completely over rocket-firing. It was decided that he should have a further RP dual sortie and I was assigned to do it. I gave him a very thorough briefing beforehand and, as we were walking out to the T7 I suggested to a fellow weapons’ instructor, who would be on the range concurrently with another student, that we ought to have a bet on which of our students would get the best score.

We bet a fiver and I told D’ Silva that I was not prepared to lose. We took off as a pair with the other T7 and headed for the air-to-ground range at Pendine Sands in Carmarthen Bay. Once there, and settled into the pattern, I talked us around a couple of non-firing or ‘dry’ attacks pointing out the features on the ground that should be flown over to set up a consistent attack circuit and a precise 30-degree angle of dive. It was then just a matter of holding the bottom diamond of the gunsight on the target (selecting ‘RP’ fixed the diameter of the diamond circle, and the bottom diamond at the ‘six o’clock’ position) and recognising the look of the target at the correct range for firing. Putting the ‘pipper’ on the target for gun-firing was a lot easier than manoeuvring the bottom diamond, and a good attack depended on rolling into the dive with the pipper at the right distance above the target so that the bottom diamond came onto it as the wings came level. One then pushed on the stick to hold the diamond on the target as speed built up in the dive. This sounds awkward, and it was. I got D’ Silva to follow me through on the controls on the third pass and left him to do it himself on the fourth. Two more non-firing passes and it was time to ‘go live’ with the four rockets we were carrying. I turned in to fire the first RP, talking away encouragingly as I did, and hoping that I would get near enough to the target both to impress my student that I knew what I was talking about, and to convince him that RP firing was easy. The range controller called ‘Direct Hit’ and, as a five or even a ten-yard miss distance was then considered very good, I was both surprised and delighted. Given the flight characteristics of the rocket (practice RPs had rough concrete heads) a direct hit had to be a fluke. ‘There,’ I said, ‘see how easy it is.’ I went around again, fired, and, amazingly, got another direct hit. This is my lucky day I thought, but said: ‘There you are, my friend, I told you it was easy. Now you get the same.’ And, damn it, if he didn’t. Twice. A direct hit by a student was very rare; two in a row was unheard of. His delight was a joy to behold and his subsequent confidence unrestrained.

Taking Army officers up to show them how ground targets and surrounding features looked from the cockpit was a periodic and not unpleasant diversion from the main syllabus tasks. The first FAC’s course that I was involved in was held during the last fortnight in March and followed a pattern that was now well established: a week of lectures followed by a split week when half the course flew while the other half went out into the local countryside and practised controlling. The basic problem was to wean them off the methods that the Army had taught them to describe ground features and to show them that there is a dramatic difference in the visual significance of an object when it is viewed from a few thousand feet above as opposed to from a prone position under a bush. The old army favourite, the ‘bushy topped tree’ that stands out boldly for the man on the ground was, when seen from above, merely a small flat patch, at best a different colour from its surroundings. The theory was that the penny would drop when the budding FACs saw things from aloft. I suspect, however, that only one of the several enthusiastic young officers that I took up hoisted anything aboard at all from the practical demonstrations of FAC-controlled attacks that they were given. Bumping along in the turbulence of low level, pulling up at 2 to 3 g, rolling over, pushing and pulling to get the aiming mark on the target, pushing negative g to keep it there, and pulling out of the dive at 6 g is really not the best way to ensure that the uninitiated remain at their most observant.

Meanwhile, I had been badgering the Married Families Officer about Hirings as my rented hotel was going to be given a preseason face-lift at the beginning of April. In the nick of time he came up trumps and we moved into a rather charming thatched-roof cottage in Braunton, a village about three miles from the Station. This was both more comfortable than the hotel, and more convenient. However, because of the rigid enforcement of catchment area rules it meant a change of school for Caroline after three months, her third since she began school eighteen months before.

In April I was asked if I would like to work up a solo aerobatic sequence for the coming season of air shows and airfield open days. I was more than happy to do this and set about dusting off my previous routine and getting in a bit of practice between other sorties. Near the end of the month I was given the opportunity to concentrate to the exclusion of everything else on working up in a T7 – or rather down, as before, from the standard aerobatic practice minimum height of 7,000 feet – via a few sorties at 3,000 feet.

During some of my practice sessions I experienced a somewhat disquieting sensation: the application of negative g made me feel rather dizzy, in an odd oscillatory way. On others I could subject myself to all sorts of aerobatic manoeuvres, and to the maximum permissible g limits of the Hunter, without feeling the slightest adverse effects. On the occasions that dizziness struck, and it could do so almost as soon as I had begun my practice sequence, I had to break off and hold the aircraft steady until the world had stopped oscillating and I had stopped feeling slightly sick. On practices away from base and off the coast where, this time, I normally did my stuff, and with only summer visitors on the beach watching me, I could break off the aerobatics without it mattering. But I was haunted by the fear of an attack of this odd form of acceleration-induced vertigo occurring during a display. It was certainly not something that I wanted to experience while running along a display line upside down at a low level. Nor was it something I wanted to admit to the Station doctor, at least until I discovered whether or not it was going to persist. I just put it down to some odd after-effect of my spell in the tropics and hoped that it would pass.

In due course, and after a dual aerobatic sortie above 7,000 feet with the squadron commander, Nigel Walpole, I was authorised to do my five-minute sequence at 1,500 feet over Chivenor for official approval by the Air Officer Commanding 11 Group. A week later, after another session at 1,500 feet over the airfield watched by the Wing Commander Flying, Mike Hobson, I was authorised to come down to 500 feet. This was a more controlled approach than I had experienced on my last tour at the place – a first indication, perhaps, that higher authority had tightened the rules in the intervening years.

My first display was on 13 June at Eelde, a civil airfield in the north of Holland near the town of Groningen. I flew out to the Dutch Air Force base at Leuwarden in a T7 the day before, carrying the squadron’s junior engineering officer as passenger and (highly qualified) ground crew, and spent the night there. The following day, apart from a slight problem in finding Eelde in a thick summer haze, all went well – and by that I mean I felt not the slightest hint of vertigo and my five-minute sequence was reasonably professional. My second display was at Filton, Bristol, on 20 June and again I felt perfectly fit and well.

June is also the month during which Her Majesty the Queen’s official birthday is celebrated and, on that day, the Birthday Honours List is promulgated. The half-yearly promotion list follows on 1 July. There was a rather silly little ritual within the RAF concerning the contents of both: no advance notification of Honours was given, and only very seldom was anyone below the level of Group Captain told in advance that they were to be promoted. At one minute after midnight on both days – and similarly for the New Year’s Honours and Promotion Lists on 1 January – both would be available on the Stations, and would often be read out at parties in the Messes (in those days the media, too, scrupulously avoided jumping the gun). No one seemed to mind this method of disseminating the news but it always seemed to me that a little advance warning could have been given, if only to allow those concerned to get their new medal ribbons or rank tabs on their uniforms in a timely fashion. And it was sad to see the odd person, convinced that promotion was in the bag, prematurely lining up the champagne on the bar. As some hopefuls were inevitably going to be disappointed the ritual of the late night promotion-list readings was widely referred to by the wags within the Service as the ‘feast of the passed-over’. Given my apparent backward lurch in career terms I was not expecting anything from the Birthday Honours List but got a Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Services in the Air. As this would have been recommended from Singapore for my tour on 20 Squadron I began to feel somewhat better about the future – but more puzzled than ever about my current posting.

The award, coming when it did, was welcome for another reason too. I was presented with it by the Station Commander, Don Farrar, one week later in a small ceremony in the Mess bar. He had been Wing Commander Flying at Odiham during my first few months on 247 Squadron and, although nothing was ever said, I had the distinct impression then that he had shared the poor view of me that my OCU report and my initial weeks on the squadron had created. Then, a month into this second tour at Chivenor I had given him reinforced cause to believe he had been right. I was Duty Officer, a twenty-four hour task that normally kept the incumbent on the ground for its duration. On this occasion, however, I was put on the flying programme late in the afternoon by the Boss, and he stood in for me and took charge of the Duty Officer’s Book while I was airborne. When I got down, debriefed and changed, he and the book had disappeared. It was remiss of me not to have attempted to track him down and get the book back before I left the squadron offices at the end of the flying day. However, I did not, and at two in the morning I suddenly desperately needed it. The airman on duty in the station communications’ centre had telephoned me in the Duty Officer’s room to say that he had received a signal with just a code word on it – ‘Quicktrain’. He didn’t know what it meant and, without the Duty Officer’s book, neither did I. It took me thirty minutes to track Nigel down, get him awake, and get the book, and just another few seconds to discover to my horror that Quicktrain was the code word that set a NATO practice alert going. The UK air defence system had been integrated into the NATO system during my spell in the Far East and some new measures had been introduced of which I was unaware. I didn’t know, until I read it in the middle of the night, that from receipt of the code word ‘Quicktrain’ fighter stations – and the OCU was classified as one of them – had six hours in which to prepare and arm up 50% of their aircraft, and a further six hours in which to produce another 25%. Sounds simple, but with unserviceabilities, normal servicing schedules, and spares on order but not yet delivered, it was no mean trick to produce 75% in twelve hours.

I had the Station alarm sounded, set in motion the ‘cascade’ system that was designed to call in Station personnel living in the surrounding countryside, sent a fire engine to make a clamour around the Station Married Quarters, all the time painfully aware that I had lost Chivenor thirty minutes of preparation time. I rather expected Don Farrar would not be happy about that, and so it proved. I was summoned to the Station Commander’s office later that day to explain the delay. Having listened to my explanation the only words he said were: ‘If this had been wartime I would have court-martialled you. Now, get out.’ Perhaps it was just as well that Chivenor managed to meet both preparatory states with a couple of hours to spare.

My next aerobatic display was at the end of August at Little Rissington, the home of the Central Flying School. I had felt distinctly unwell for several days beforehand, with streaming nose, flu-like symptoms, and recurring vertigo on almost every practice. I took off from Chivenor the day before the show, not feeling too good, but determined not to cry off with so little time to go. I spent the night at Little Rissington, didn’t sleep, and felt terrible the following day but, imprudently determined as ever, I took off to do the display. I had to contend with a strong crosswind, positioned dismally for the looping manoeuvres and generally delivered a pretty poor show. Back at Chivenor and into bed I was diagnosed as having pneumonia. So much for flying with a ‘cold’.

Later in August, having recovered from both the pneumonia and my embarrassment at having produced a crappy display at the holy of holies I flew a low-level dual sortie with one of the students, Mike Steer,¹ a hefty rugby player with a ham-like grip on the controls. We got airborne and set off on a pre-planned cross-country. His navigation was dramatically accurate and he was hitting all the pinpoints with ease. I bent over to look more closely at my map to see if I could make things slightly more testing for him. As I did so he snatched the stick back, loading us with a sudden 8 g, having suddenly spotted a power line rather close ahead. My head, weighted by my ‘bone-dome’ almost smacked into my knees, and my neck gave an alarming crack. For weeks afterwards I could hardly look to left or right but, again anxious to avoid doctors and probable time off flying, I did nothing about it. As I write, some forty-three years later my neck is still stiff, and occasionally sore enough to make me wish that I had taken time out to have it seen to.

My last show of the season was at Rennes St Jacques in Brittany at the beginning of October. I flew out in a Mark 6 – for my first display in that aircraft – on a Friday afternoon for a Sunday display. Someone from HQ 11 Group had done a reconnaissance trip (in a Devon, a piston-engined aircraft) and declared the runway to be fit for a Hunter to land on and operate from – and so it was. However, what he did not report was that the runway had a dramatic gradient for about half its length. When I arrived, with thunderstorms flashing and banging around the airfield, and the surface wet, I was directed to land towards the down slope – which I couldn’t see from the air in the prevailing conditions. As I went over the brow of the slope and saw how little runway there was beyond it I knew that I would be very lucky to stop within the distance remaining. As I approached the end of the tarmac I was still doing about 40 knots. Directly ahead and about fifty yards away was a small brick-built structure, probably something to do with an instrument approach aid. I put on a boot-full of rudder and brake as I went onto the grass beyond the runway’s edge and managed to steer clear of the brick obstacle. Happily the grass was reasonably firm so I simply put on some power and kept going fast enough to avoid becoming bogged in the ruts I was creating. I steered in a wide circle around the brick structure and turned back towards the runway and then onto the adjacent taxiway. To my surprise and relief my tyres had suffered no damage at all from this bit of cross-country taxiing – nor did they from the unswept carpet of stones that I noticed on the taxiway. The following morning I did a practice over the airfield and this time insisted on an uphill landing – which was unquestionably the way to go.

On the day of the air show the participating pilots were entertained to a formal lunch in Rennes by its organisers. The only course served was boiled mussels, which I detest at the best of times, supplemented by bread. I felt that I had to eat something before flying so I filled up on the bread and got through the mussels with the help of a couple of glasses of wine. I had become a lot wiser and quite prudish about the dangers of drinking and flying since my imprudent evening at Orange in 1959 and, if asked, I would have ventured the opinion that drinking before performing low-level aerobatics was suicidally foolish. I would not have countenanced anyone else drinking before flying – when I found Derek Gill having a pint one lunchtime at Tengah I gave him a heavy dressing down and suspended him from flying for the rest of the day despite his protestations that this was what they had always done on 92 Squadron before a formation aerobatic practice. However, on this occasion I felt that circumstances justified a little hypocrisy. And, whether there was any causal relationship or not, my display, which confidently included on that day a run along the runway upside down at very low level, was the best I had ever performed. I got both a gratifying round of applause from the crowd as I taxied in past them and, later, a presentation cup for the performance. I must confess I wondered for a moment or two if a couple of glasses of red table wine might possibly do more good than harm before a show, but didn’t pursue the thought. I was just glad that my last show of the season had gone well. Best to quit when you’re ahead. And alive.

About a week later I was informed that I would be going to the RAF Staff College at Andover in January 1964 and, as an essential preliminary, I was to join the next month-long Command and Staff School course at RAF Ternhill starting almost immediately. All was now suddenly clear, but the fact that I had been left to wonder for almost a year made me feel that there was something definitely wrong with the system. And to make matters more irritating, I found out while playing squash three months later with the officer who had been responsible for posting me to Chivenor that he had considered posting me to the staff of DFCLS on my return from Singapore – an experience that I would have been delighted by – but had thought it hardly worth while for just a year.

I had time for just one flight before setting off for Ternhill, and two after the course there ended, and that, apart from a few hours that I managed to beg during, and subsequent to, Andover, was the end of my Hunter flying. I finished with 1,800 hours on the aircraft, which probably represented – I have not counted them – more than 2,400 take-offs and landings. It was a superb aeroplane to fly, manoeuvrable as any fighter during the 1950s, and an excellent air-to-ground platform well into the 1960s.

I drove up to Ternhill each Sunday evening and back down each Friday evening for the duration of the Command and Staff School course. The journey took five and a half hours each way (no M5 then!) and the thought struck me as I did it for the second time that if I could find eleven hours each week to sit in a car during this course, I could find eleven hours later to do something useful. As I had got the only two Service examinations that involved a fair amount of study-time out of the way, I felt that it might be worth having a look at what I could do in the academic world while continuing to function effectively in the Service one. I contacted London University (then the only institution in the United Kingdom that set external degree examinations) and found that, once accepted for, and registered, to take a degree it was simply necessary to turn up to sit the examinations at the prescribed intervals. The snag was that there were very few degrees that could be tackled successfully with just a bundle of books in a kit bag, a requirement that I felt my itinerant life would dictate. Law seemed to be the best bet and I went for it – not realising then that law is such a dynamic and rapidly changing thing that I would need more than a bundle of text-books to keep up to date with it. And, more foolishly, ignoring the likely demands of the coming Staff College course and whatever lay beyond it.

Having begun my second tour at Chivenor, puzzled about being sent there, I left having very thoroughly enjoyed it – and, of course, more than pleased by the outcome. At the dinner night that I attended before leaving I think the Station Commander found it difficult to include me in the valedictory pleasantries that were customary on such occasions. He had previously made a passing remark about people who only served the Station for a few months before swanning off elsewhere– a sort of implied lack of loyalty. He was fulsome in praise of two officers who were leaving with acting promotion to fill squadron leader appointments and mentioned that he expected that they would be ‘substantiated’ in the near future. He clearly thought it improbable that I would be among those to be promoted that New Year and, for that matter, although I was pretty sure that normally only squadron leaders were selected for the Staff College course, I wasn’t prepared to count any chickens. His congratulations at midnight on 31 December, after he had read out my name from the promotion list signal, seemed just a little insincere.