Our Next Bank Holiday ...

[papasmurf]

'Its all very well all this talk about "the few" and what we did and how the nation should be proud of us, but you see my job was to get up at the crack of dawn, or before that, get really high in the sky and then wait for a radio call. A call telling you to drop out of the sun behind some poor bastard barely beyond your age and shoot him in the back. And if you got it right you got him in the head and he never had the faintest idea it was coming. And you did it because it had to be done and all the while you wondered if someone just like you was lining up to do it to you....."

A stereotypical member of "few", (Interview on Youtube somewhere,) stated "any bloody idiot could fly a Spitfire," (I am glad we had sufficient "idiots,"

He also stated something along the lines of, " we took off to committ murder, and got a bacon and eggs for breakfast as a reward."



A very different breed of men.

[johnofgwent]

So the sun blazes down at the start of the easter bank holiday weekend the chinese wrecked for us...



And my thoughts move to next month. VE day 75 years on.



Boris should stay well away from Union Jacks given the kerfuffle last time he waved some. I presume hes over his hang ups from that by now, but you never know.



So, before the news and possibly these pages get filled with jingo and bunting, I give you my personal encounter with one of the few. I put this on the old site a while ago...



One of dads great interests away from work which caught his interest from childhood was Electronics. He for reasons that confused me but now I understand exactly, took on the role of treasurer of a little group called the British Amateur Electronics Club. From a meeting as an adult education night once a week in a Penarth school, it grew to have a worldwide membership with mailed magazine and newsletter and an annual charity exhibition on Penarth seafront in holiday week



I joined in my teens and it was through the club, its members and its evening sessions that I built a synthesizer from scratch.



And it was there that I met Arthur. One of dad's friends from dad's early career



Arthur was an RAF pilot. It would be some decades before I realised his working relationship with dad had been basically to take a Canberra jet to the edge of flame out through lack of atmosphere to combust to see if dad's little toys at Malvern were any better at finding him coming screaming out of the sun with a nuclear payload than grandads rather more Heath Robinson gear had been at finding the Luftwaffe.



But arthur had known grandads technology too.



Because Arthur was one of 'The Few'



He once, and only once, told me on seeing my clear enthusiasm for a trip to the farnborough air show, that one should never be too keen to be in the drivers seat of any military vehicle, lest one's dreams came true in ways not realised.



And he said another thing once, and once only, too.



He never said much about what we are about to commemorate the end of.



But in a conversation neither of us started on one of those holiday week charity exhibitions, as the red arrows flew down the coast going to, or coming from, one of the "customers" remarked about the Red Arrows and used the words 'the few'



Dad suddenly took on an expression I now understand. It's the one you wear when the dials in front of you say your nuclear reactor is misbehaving. Dad and I have both worn that look for real but that's another story.



Arthur, to whom this chap was speaking at the time, let slip THIS ...



'Its all very well all this talk about "the few" and what we did and how the nation should be proud of us, but you see my job was to get up at the crack of dawn, or before that, get really high in the sky and then wait for a radio call. A call telling you to drop out of the sun behind some poor bastard barely beyond your age and shoot him in the back. And if you got it right you got him in the head and he never had the faintest idea it was coming. And you did it because it had to be done and all the while you wondered if someone just like you was lining up to do it to you....."



I've been on warships, all sorts of armed vehicles and the odd warplane.



And every time I do, I hear arthur saying that.