This concoction of memoirs is not intended as a piece of literary art and there is no chronological story or thin-red-line through the collection. The anecdotes are simple fact and the quotations by persons are remembered precisely. I have omitted the presence of dates so that the text may not be one of a bore in this aspect. The memoirs are, however, assembled according to the home aerodromes or bases from which I operated or was stationed in Canada, Great Britain, Malta, and in Canada again. I apologize for not remembering the names of some persons long gone but I do not think that the omissions here deter the descriptions or actions.
Some of the dialogues are gruff in nature but one must stick with the actualities, and further, one must keep in mind that the men (whatever a man is), as boys away from home, lived from flight to flight and that the pitch of their thinking was on edge continuously, that staying alive was simply a job, and devil-take-the-hind-most.
The remembrances are very personal to me and I hope that they are accepted as such. Please realize that the names of persons are actual but I have used initials here and there so that my friends and other persons who may be living will not be embarrassed.
My father walloped me upon three different occasions when I was a kid and each walloping was offered to stem my cursing (whatever cursing is) but I never stopped. Somebody said that cursing is the language of the insecure in any culture, but I never had time to recite the Sermon on the Mount, or to put band-aids around vulgarisms. So cursing became both a type of religion for me and a panacea in the alleviation of mental explosion.
There has been much do-gooder criticism of veterans over the last number of years and I hope that my remembrances may show in some small way the comradeship among pilots who flouted death so that, in due time, their offspring could put footprints of freedom in a soil even though the pilots had no use for those who played at war. I have never believed a veteran, who was as lucky as I was, who said that he didn’t want to talk about actual happenings. Certainly, talking about drastic events has dulled the effects of them and remembering the humour has caused one to laugh again. As a kid aching to get away from the parental home and from then on I was a young punk of ruckus, but I believed in the strictness of, what was to me, common sense. Although my Mother was a flag-waver, nationalistic flagwaving was never a part of me. I was, however, perturbed when I saw bomb damage near my Grandmother’s home in England, and indeed, my youthful tune changed drastically when the Nazi bullets entered my Spitfire for the first time. Certainly, most of the young bucks in poverty-ridden New Brunswick found jobs by joining the military when war broke out, and mine was in the adventure of flying. In 1945, Kit Fisher, a navigator, Norm Vincent, a camera operator, and me, a pilot on aerial surveys, were walking along the one main street in Bagotville, Quebec when three young Frenchmen called us “Poisson.” We never knew whether or not they would be able to call anybody “Poisson” again and we didn’t give a damn, but this was as close as I have been to behaving in a nationalistic manner.
Professional humanists have stated that operational pilots of my age (20-25) during World War II actually lived ten times the lifetime both socially and physically. Well,…………………………. .
Read on, if you care to.
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