“My interest in aircraft started back in 1936 or 7 when Sir Alan Cobham brought his flying circus just a couple of fields away from here, and I saved up a half a crown to have flight…. In the morning I was out and we used to walk across a grill that was over a shaft and I went across this grill and rather stupidly didn’t look down all the way and my foot went down and my leg went down and caught there and dug a piece of out my leg….. I spent the afternoon with my leg on chair in a splint watching the planes take off from where I lived but that was my early aircraft recognition… I mean its just one of those things that grows on you, the more you go into in the more interesting it becomes.”
“Well sometimes you were tired yes, I mean especially if you had come off a night shift and you would just have a few hours sleep… you could come up in the afternoon before you started at 8 o’clock that evening, but well you got used to it, and you arranged to sleep sort of with a drop of a hat…. I still can according to my wife…! I still go to sleep watching the news and things like that, but I mean it was long hours working though we didn’t do too many shifts up here as part timers… they had a number of them and the rota was made out, and you knew what shift you were going to do and you could adjust yourself accordingly….”
