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| from My Box of Memories |
Back in 2009 when we were still living in Kitchener Road, Milford, Sharon gave me a birthday present of a voucher for a commercial airline flight (a Boeing 737) with the flight simulator company Flight Experience, located at that time in Takapuna. The company set up there in 2007 as part of the world wide Flight Experience franchise, relocating to Halsey Street in the CBD in 2010 and rebranding itself FlyaJet.
As a young boy my fascination with trams
* and trains soon gave way to an interest in aircraft, initially with the heroics of Spitfires and Hurricanes in the second World War. My childhood comics were full of dog fights between Spitfires and Messerschmitt 109s and "Achtung Spitfire!!" word bubbles from terrified evil looking German pilots when they saw a handsome RAF fighter ace on their tail.
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After the war I, along with most British children my age, was totally chauvinistic. To us Germans were 'Jerries' or 'Huns' or 'Krauts', the French were 'Frogs', the Italians 'Ities". Britain and its Empire were everything. I absorbed negative attitudes to foreigners, later reinforced by my favourite Biggles books. But I was fortunate to have in real life a person who was a splendid antidote to my comic-book prejudice about Germans. When I was seven and we were living in Cambridge (1947-48) there was an internment camp nearby in which prisoners of war were being retained prior to repatriation. Here's my mother's account of our times with one of them:
Not long after we went to Cambridge, we were sitting on a seat in Christ's Piece alongside a German prisoner of war, watching bowls. There were quite a number of POWs in a camp in Trumpington being taught 'Democracy'. This chap looked pretty miserable so Spen spoke to him and asked if he would like to come to tea with us. He could speak English pretty well. He did not come home with us that day but came to New Square the next day, and we saw him from our windows, walking along, too shy to ring the bell at No 10 so we went out and invited him in. He had been a Luftwaffe navigator in the war, bombing Bath and a lot of other places, and had been shot down and taken prisoner. By profession he was a teacher, married, with two children. His name was Kurt Loffler, and his town, Pforzeim, near Stuttgart, had been very heavily bombed by us towards the end of the war. As I had done German at school, it helped with conversation with Kurt, and the children made him welcome. We played games together. Kurt was fond of classical music on the radio. He became a regular visitor and we became great friends.
I particularly remember that Kurt taught us how to play rummy but he was so good at it we could never beat him.
The opportunities to pursue my fascination with aircraft increased after we moved to London in 1952. I regularly went to Horseguards Parade on Battle of Britain Day to see the display of fighters and bombers assembled there and have kept all these years a page of photographs I took at that time.
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| From my photo albums |
London also provided a suitable base for another annual pilgrimage for a few years in my teens, this one to the Farnborough Air Show. I first saw the De Havilland Comet there, the world's first commercial jetliner (from 1952) before a series of crashes later in the 50s from metal fatigue forced its grounding and redesign. Again I have kept a page of photographs taken back then. At that time I would have been able to name any aircraft I saw but I no longer know what most of these ones are.
Another favourite outing enabled by living in London was to the annual Boys Own Exhibition at Olympia. There is only one thing that I remember from those shows. It was the simulated Spitfire cockpit in which you could sit at the controls of the plane and take part in a dogfight on the film that ran on a screen in front of you. There was a wheel you used to fly your plane and, within the wheel, buttons for firing the plane's cannons when you had lined up an enemy aircraft in your sights: seemed magic to me although probably very primitive by comparison with today's flight simulations. Never mind it was enough to convince myself I was an ace Spitfire pilot.
Because we had moved so far from my school in Wells, plus Dad's full schedule of commitments on Sundays, it was no longer possible for my Mum or Dad to visit me on parents' weekends or public holidays. So some friends and I would take off for the day and cycle to Yeovilton where there was a Royal Naval Air Station, a round trip of about fifty kilometres. We would park ourselves on the fenceline there and watch the incoming and outgoing flights of what I think were, if memory serves me correctly, predominantly jet fighter Hawker Sea Hawks, which first flew in 1951.
Amongst my hobbies at boarding school was making model planes from balsawood kits - mostly jet fighters. And my favourite movie back then was
The Dam Busters, released in 1955, and my favourite music the movie's theme tune, The Dam Buster March. I only had one obsession more powerful than aircraft - cricket!
Needless to say this is all a preamble to a brief encounter with a Boeing 737. As you will have guessed my simulator flight was not what you would expect from the ace pilot I once was. After successfully taking off from Auckland International Airport and heading out to the east over South Auckland and the Hauraki Gulf, the flight plan required me to head back to the North West to land and take off in one manoevre at Whenuapai, the RNZAF base. Not withstanding the excellent pre-flight training, this was way beyond my capability and I crashed the plane there. Next thing we are flying out over the West Coast and preparing to come round to land back at Auckland International. The instructor tactfully suggested that it might be a good idea to use the automatic pilot for the landing. I quickly agreed.
After that fun experience (which it was) I was issued a thoroughly undeserved certificate.
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* I had wanted to grow up to be an Edinburgh tram driver (I was born in Edinburgh) but that goal dissolved with the gradual replacement of the trams by buses in the early 1950s. The last of the old Edinburgh trams ran on 16 November 1956 but, since May 31st this year, a new tram service has operated from Edinburgh Airport to York Place in the city centre. This came at an estimated cost of over a billion pounds after massive delays, project redesigns, construction disputes, political disagreements and cost overruns.
** My German being pretty nonexistent, I googled 'achetung' to see if I was spelling it correctly (I wasn't) and, out of curiosity, added 'Spitfire!' to my search. To my amazement "Achtung Spitfire!" is now a range of online games and activities. There is a strategy computer game released in 1997 simulating World War II aerial combats between the Luftwaffe and the RAF: and there are "Achtung Spitfire!" T-shirts, hoodies, art works and stories.
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Previous blogs in The Archaeology of a Box series:
November 2013
71. Introduction
73. (1) Children's Drawings, Paintings and Cards
74. (2) Self-Portrait
77. (3) My Grandparents' Victorian Greetings Cards.
December 2013
81. (4) Old 45 rpm Pop Songs
83. (5) NZ Values Party Manifesto for the 1975 General Election
January 2014
86. (6) - Mementoes of a Working Life
90. (7) In the Public Eye - Dancing Cossacks, Angels on Pinheads and Rogernomes
February 2014
91. (8) A Valentine's Day Blog
94. (9) Napoleon Buonaparte, Joey the Clown and a Chariot for Sale
April 2014
99. (10) Elizabeth and the Queen at Buckingham Palace
