where art collides philosoperontap

It is five-thirty a.m. and the sun’s not yet risen. It’s uncomfortably warm and the air I breathe, so still, so heavy and damp I’d like to wring it dry, smells of the surrounding jungle. My shirt and shorts stick to me like khaki cling-film. And it will be even warmer when the sun’s up. To my left, pale green at the horizon, the eastern sky prepares for its arrival.

Through the dispersal hut window I look out onto concrete where, fifty yards away, a Handley Page Victor SR2 is being prepared for take-off. Her crew-chief, (more…)

 It’s Tommy this and Tommy that

And kick him out, the brute

Rudyard Kipling

The vehicle’s new, in fact not quite finished, and you’re yet to see what it can do. You think the road ahead is clear. But it’s a high performer, it’s temperamental and you’re not quite au fait with the gears.

So it is with youth on its way to maturity. And leaving home to join the Air Force as I did at seventeen, there was no parent in the passenger seat advising me to slow down, no back-seat older siblings pointing the way.

Fresh out of training, I was posted to RAF Marham in Norfolk to help maintain radar equipment fitted to the Vickers Valiants stationed there at the time. Flight Sergeant George Tomkin, known as Tommy to his subordinates though not to his face, was my boss.

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