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Everything was going right.
I was in my last year at school and actually enjoying the workload. They even made me Deputy Head Boy. I was also enjoying the comforts of my school-friend’s home, and the great cooking that his Mum provided. And, courtesy of school chum’s Dad, who was in the motor trade, I got a motor car on favourable terms - a little black Austin A30 that served me well for several years.
So the future looked bright when I set off for Sywell aerodrome, just 16 miles from Market Harborough, to commence the flying course that was part of my scholarship from the Royal Air Force College, Cranwell.
In short order I found myself in an Auster Autocrat, seated alongside my instructor, Roy Hillditch. The Autocrat was a great little high-wing monoplane, a single-engine piston aeroplane with a Blackburn Cirrus Minor engine rated, I think, at around 100 horsepower.
What about instructor Roy? He was ex-Fleet Air Arm with a tremendous amount of flying experience. He was a nice guy, too, and I respected him hugely because he had been through hell: flying from aircraft carriers in 1940s machines was a perilous occupation at the best of times; doing so under wartime conditions was nothing short of heroic. But it had left him with a problem that I discovered when I turned my head to look behind me. There, wedged in place behind the seats, was a box containing bottles of wine - Yugoslav Riesling if I remember right. Roy would just reach round, grab a bottle and glug the wine directly from it.
Over the next three weeks I learned from Roy that he really was trying to cut back his drinking because his annual check-up was imminent and, for some reason, the powers that be frowned upon airborne alcoholics. My own top of head assessment at the time was that, sadly, he was fighting a losing battle.
Trouble was, so was I. My battle, however, was not against alcohol (at this stage, at least) but against a health issue that I did not want to own up to. Shortsightedness. Myopia. That may sound like nothing much but at this particular time it had a major bearing on my future. A year or so earlier when I had had my full RAF medical I was rated A1 G1 Z1, the top rating. But I knew that, latterly, my eyesight was changing.
The problem evidenced itself every day. In school, in the final couple of terms, I moved as near to the front of the class as possible to have any chance of reading what was being written on the blackboard. And, because I struggled to make out text at any distance, there was difficulty with everything from billboards to car registration plates.
I said nothing: I didn’t want to admit the problem, even to myself. A little bit of adult advice might have helped but I wasn’t sure who to trust. The trust deficit was evidenced by my reaction to a clandestine approach from a schoolfriend’s father in cahoots with my physics teacher. Schoolfriend’s Dad told me that help was available and that he and others wanted to put me forward to become a member of a very special group. He handed me a little book and asked me to read it.
The ‘very special group’ was the Freemasons. The trouble was that, although I read the book, I could not go along with a requirement that featured right up front - the need to believe in a Supreme Being.
A couple of years earlier I’d made the choice to be an atheist and I felt very strongly about it. So, this idea of a Supreme Being, and much of the quasi-religious expression in the little book, was a problem - a showstopper even. That, and the fact that I was familiar with the, to me, bizarre practices of the International Order of Good Templars which I knew were modelled to some extent on Freemasonry. Brother This, Sister That, Chief Templar and so on all mimic features of Freemasonry. It was maybe an unfair comparison but it was all I knew. So, I told schoolfriend’s Dad, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Shortly afterwords, at school, I was surprised when my physics teacher, a portly Yorkshireman called Mr Dilworth, asked me, “Have you got a couple of minutes?” and guided me into the physics lab. This was a very unusual move. I liked and got on well with Mr Dilworth but, up to this point, our relationship had never been anything other than the normal pupil-teacher set-up. I was intrigued.
Although he was careful to be polite about George and Nellie, he told me that he thought I had not had a propitious start in life and that it was limiting my options. The approach that had been made to me, he assured me, was “a help to balance things out a bit” and he thought I should accept the offer. The sense of it was: “Don’t worry. Just go along with it.”
All of this, I am sure, was well-intentioned and maybe I was a fool to reject it so completely but I ended up without any idea who I might reach out to for advice. So I shut down and tried to carry on as though everything was alright.
The fiction was, of course, impossible to maintain when it came to landing an aeroplane. The immediate challenge when flying a light plane like the Autocrat had to do with the distance at which things come into sharp focus. Sywell was a grass airfield so the issue was when did the blades of grass become distinct. This was important because it was a decision point in the landing sequence. In my case, it turned out, the grass became distinct at around six feet. This is waaay lower than for someone with perfect vision. So, I was trying to compensate by coming in to land under power and then, so to speak, ‘dropping’ the aeroplane on to the ground - a version of a dead-stick landing. This was an acceptable emergency procedure but definitely not approved for routine landings.
Even with a somewhat sozzled instructor I was never going to get away with it. I did a couple of solo circuits and landed safely using my - ahem - special technique. But I came to realize that Roy could not give me a pass and, back then, RAF flying training would only commence if one had perfect vision.
What this meant, of course, was that my plans had just been blown to smithereens. What the hell was I to do? I froze. All of my contemporaries had their plans for university or whatever and I simply couldn’t bring myself to admit what had happened.
The Royal Air Force promptly assured me that I was still welcome at Cranwell but that the end result would be a commission in what was then called the Secretarial Branch. It didn’t sound anywhere near as sexy.
Post-Sywell, I could not bring myself to tell people that I would not be flying. I didn’t even want to admit it to myself. It was just too painful. So I’m ashamed to say I allowed the fiction to continue.
Looking back down the tunnel of time it looks crazy. Why did I think that the decision I had taken - which, you may recall, was one of three possibilities - was a sudden death playoff for everything in my life? I don’t know. The only rationale that now occurs to me is that I somehow was subconsciously adopting George’s haphazard model. Find a job, any job, even if you’re not equipped to do it. When it ‘fails’, find something different. Repeat ad infinitum.
Talking of which, also around this time, George’s role as manager of the East Kilbride yoof coffee bar crashed and burned. George’s tenure had lasted little more than a year. Following this entirely unsurprising outcome he and Nellie relocated from Scotland back to Leicester where they at least knew and were known by people.
They ended up in a weird apartment on the top floor of a three-storey office building on Leicester’s London Road. I say weird because … well … it was: the lavatory was on a half-landing below the apartment. So every trip to the loo necessitated going out of the apartment’s front door and into the office part of the premises.
The living accommodation was a sitting room, a bedroom and a kitchen. The kitchen, small as it was, had a bath in it that was covered by a hinged worktop. Want a bath? Clear everything off the worktop and raise it to rest against the wall. Voila! The hot water was supplied courtesy of a wall-mounted Ascot water heater that probably dated from the Industrial Revolution.
So, having failed to qualify for my Private Pilot’s Licence .. and the end of the school year meaning the end of my comfy billet with my school friend … and with a six-month wait until I was due to start at Cranwell … it was time for me to go back home. But where the hell was home?
The only available option, it appeared, was the weird apartment in Leicester. And so it was. The sitting room, small as it was, was divided into two to create a bedroom for me.
You may recall that, earlier in this tale, when I was at Wyggeston Grammar School, I made friends with Tony whose brother, Nick, worked in the woodworking shop owned by their father on Welford Road. Nick helped me acquire the materials (chipboard) and advised on the building of a partition across the room. ‘Cosy’ is one word to describe the outcome. Another is ‘cramped’. Yet another is ‘noisy’; the noise coming not from the main road outside but from the television just the other side of the chipboard partition.
Which brings us back to George. At this time he was around 56 years of age but looked a lot older. Although he remained physically quite large he somehow managed to look small. The whites of his eyes were yellowish, the jaundiced look caused, I believe, by years and years of mental health issues and decades of drugs and treatments both inside and outside mental institutions. So, his physical presence sort of remained, but his mental presence withdrew to somewhere deep within, a core of incomprehension and sadness. He was broken.
The Scottish coffee bar job that he had just lost turned out to be his last ever employment. Although he participated in some of the local activities of the temperance organization, the International Order of Good Templars, the remainder of his days were increasingly spent sitting and staring into space.
Two things seemed to keep George going. The chief one by far was Nellie: Nellie the source of unwavering (well, almost unwavering) support. Nellie the Rock. But she was ten years older than him and their hard life was taking its toll on her, too. Still, she rarely complained.
The other thing that got George’s engagement was television - specifically, TV programmes featuring all-in wrestling. TV made wrestling immensely popular in the 1960s and, because George was also going deaf, I too had no option other than to become familiar with the North American twang of British wrestling presenter Kent Walton (1917-2003) - “Greetings, grapple fans” - and the names of such wrestling personalities as Mick McManus, Giant Haystacks and Jackie Pallo.
Problem was, some of these programmes were aired late in the evening and George would turn the volume up to Spinal Tap 11. Just the other side of the chipboard partition I would pull the pillow over my ears and try to get some sleep.
Everything was going wrong.
Don’t worry! Coming up next is a extremely odd uptick in the tale!