Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

  In her mid-twenties she experienced a life-changing – more a life-affirming – event borne of initial misfortune. By now working in the dress shop in Bond Street again, she contracted chickenpox from her mother while visiting home and, although cleared locally of the disease, came back to work in London with a tell-tale spot or two. Promptly sacked from her job, evicted from her Cromwell Road lodgings and thrown out of her mother’s home, she eventually found a shabby room to rent in her mother’s village belonging to the doom-laden widow of a policeman. The chickenpox now took good hold and Sheila couldn’t shake it off, became depressed then deeply depressed in her surroundings and with her circumstances. She had a nervous breakdown. In her own words, she…

  …was finally restored to health by meeting a wonderful healer. She did not use drugs and she herself had had a miraculous recovery from Bright’s Disease. She used to talk to me and give me absent healing and it was entirely through her that I was able to lead a completely normal life again. I learnt a great deal from her about prayer and meditation and constructive thoughts.

  Thus was born Sheila’s unquestioning belief in natural healing and prayer, not to mention her vegetarianism and, being Sheila, an equally strong distrust of doctors and drugs, a philosophy she applied throughout the rest of her life and one that she later used to save Francis’s life.

  Her healer was Mary Winnithorpe, a West Country follower of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement in New England. The absent healing to which Sheila referred enabled Mary to heal Sheila through prayer even when they were apart. These prayers recognise that ultimately the spiritual realm is all that really exists and that all worldly appearances, including illness, are illusions. It followed that, for example, the best way for Mary to treat Sheila’s nervous breakdown was not by medication but by correcting the mistaken belief that reality is what appears to exist rather than that which is aware of its existence.

  That which the Eastern mystical tradition holds as the transpersonal Absolute or Brahmin the two Marys held as the personalised God: ‘The great I AM; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-wise, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence’.13 This metaphysical Love is beyond the mind-induced limitations of time and space and so can be anywhere, at any time; all that is needed is union between the person praying and God. The similarities with Eastern mystical traditions are remarkable and I must admit that it was at this stage of research I became rather fond of Sheila.

  Soon after recovering her equilibrium, Sheila had a piece of bad and then good fortune. Her mother had been ill for some time and died from what the now-Naturalist Sheila saw as ‘death by doctors and injections’. However, her mother’s death meant that a minor inheritance had somehow slipped through Sheila’s mean grandfather’s net and with it she embarked on a Grand Tour of Empire.

  The Cravens had never been short of connections, it was just Sheila’s branch of the family that could never afford to use them. Now in quick time she sailed first class to Raj India on the steamer Strathaird, was hosted by the governors of Madras and Bombay, visited the Maharaja of Bundi, stayed with and danced with the Viceroy in Delhi, visited the North-West Frontier, rode elephants, was danced off her feet in the officers’ messes of the Plains and was courted opportunely wherever she went. Giddy with the glamour of Empire, she set sail for Abyssinia, staying with the Resident in Aden and from there sailing for Djibouti to stay with the British Minister at Addis Ababa, where she met the Emperor Haile Selassie. On the passage from Aden the Somali captain, worried that a 30-year-old woman was unmarried, gave her a set of charms to help her find a husband. Francis arrived in short order and she always made sure that, when sailing alone, he sailed with one of the Somali captain’s charms.

  And so to Francis. Piecing together tales of the courtship from their autobiographies, we can imagine how it all happened.

  On 30 December 1936 Francis and Sheila both happened to be house guests at the house in Westward Ho! in Devon of Francis’s cousin Douglas Blew Jones. Douglas was famous for having size 24 feet and would become even more famous as the father of Bindy, Lucien Freud’s favourite model. Francis was a very bachelory thirty-five and Sheila a proto-spinstery thirty-one. Nearly all their contemporaries were married, and with issue. Before Sheila arrived, Francis was told that she was coming from a dance in Wiltshire and instead of driving down was putting her car on the train. Francis noted ‘this unusual move intrigued me’ but thought not much more of it and went out shooting with the other house guests.

  Sheila arrived around teatime and was chatting by the fire when in walked Francis holding a dead goose in one hand and a broken 12-bore shotgun in the other. Sheila was less than impressed: ‘I was repelled by this because I didn’t like killing. However, he laughed and I thought he seemed quite nice’.

  Over dinner Sheila explained how she preferred to put her car on trains so that she always arrived fresh. Francis approved of the freshness: ‘she liked comfort, and appeared rather languid. I felt that she should have a black boy following her with cushions, a rug and a parasol over her head’. The conversation turned to travel. Francis noted that ‘Time seem to have a little importance to her. She was always interesting to listen to, and often had original views. I was surprised when I discovered that this languid personality had just returned from a voyage alone to India and Abyssinia.’ She then explained how she had always wanted to go exploring and planned to do some more. Francis thought ‘that this was just a bit of airy verbal thistledown; if it had been revealed to me that she would one day sail across the Atlantic with me, I would have laughed at the joke’. Francis doesn’t seem to have mentioned his adventures even though he was by then one of the most famous aviators in the world. (Sheila claimed the significance of his fame had not dawned on her until told of it by Amy Johnson after they were married – but I find that rather hard to swallow.)

  The next day the Westward Ho! house party repaired to a New Year’s Eve party in Cornwall. The acquaintanceship continued. Francis had lived most of the last eighteen years in New Zealand and Sheila couldn’t help being rather sniffy about it. ‘I thought he had well-cut clothes for a man who had come here from the Dominions. Later I discovered that his evening clothes had been made by the Duke of Windsor’s tailor. In those days one tended to look on people from New Zealand as being a bit uncivilised.’ Francis must have been quite attentive as Sheila noticed that ‘he made quite a set of me and I felt his personality’.

  Sheila’s next party was in Winchester on 2 January. She again decided to put her car on the train and on New Year’s Day drove to Bideford with Francis as her passenger to make all the arrangements. He then stayed on with other cousins at Instow. He spent most of the night thinking about Sheila and about marrying her. The following day she duly boarded her train at Bideford, a train which then stopped at Instow. To her amazement, onto the train jumped Francis and onto the point he jumped straight.

  ‘I’ve got on the train to ask you to marry me’, he announced. Before she could reply, he added: ‘I’ve got an overdraft of £14,000, a million trees and a thousand acres, a hundred pounds in the bank and that’s all.’

  Sheila didn’t know what to say, but said, ‘Well, you know, I spend £50 a year on my hair.’

  ‘I’d like you to do that’, Francis replied.

  Sheila thought to herself: ‘Men are so impractical, but this an interesting one’; she said to Francis: ‘We are both fairly mature, and we’ve lived alone. We might be able to make a go of it.’

  Francis then sang the praises of life in New Zealand, where he intended to take her. Sheila remembered that her mother had been out there when first married and had always spoken well of it. An hour later the train stopped at Exeter and Francis alighted.

  ‘I’ll think about it’, Sheila promised, and they went their separate ways.

  She took soundings from her friends. Most of the men were dismissive: ‘You can’t do tha
t, he hasn’t got any money.’ Then she asked her mother’s old maid Hester, whom she had inherited along with the small change. Hester gave her a cheerier, if rather frank, reply: ‘Well, I think he sounds rather good, quite different from all the others you’ve had. I always worried about you taking up with these married men.’

  When Francis telephoned to ask how she felt about it, she replied, ‘I think we might make a success of our lives together’. They arranged to meet again in her London flat, where Sheila had prepared a supper before they went to the theatre. The evening didn’t get off to a good start.

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking it over’, Francis announced. ‘I don’t think I can get married. I’m so used to being alone, and I don’t think I’d like to be married.’

  ‘I absolutely understand how you feel’, Sheila replied, ‘but let’s go to the theatre all the same. Don’t feel tied at all, because it’s a dreadful feeling and it would be stupid’, and off they trooped to her box at the theatre.

  The next morning Francis reappeared on her doorstep. He had changed his mind; he did want to get married after all. So did Sheila and they became engaged on that very doorstop.

  They had met on 30 December 1936, became engaged on 7 January and were married on 25 February 1937. The British Minister from Addis Ababa, Sir Sidney Barton, gave her away in Chelsea Old Church; very apt, as since staying with the family Sheila had adopted him and Lady Barton as her proxy parents. They tried to keep the wedding small but once Sheila discovered that Francis had thirty-five first cousins alone, the Craven contingent grew to match and it was quite the hullabaloo.

  Their time together in New Zealand was not a success. The outdoor, gun-blasting, fish-hooking New Zealand life that Francis remembered so fondly didn’t export to Sheila, especially the gun-blasting, fish-hooking part of it. For some reason he rented a villa, 77 Duthie Street, in the hillside suburb of Karoni, miles up twisty roads from what little life there was in Wellington. Even when there, there was a further steep walk up six flights of stairs to the house. To get to the villa they had to pass Francis’s snazzy old penthouse apartment on The Terrace, which would have been much more up her street. Sheila, who didn’t even suffer wise men gladly, felt she was in a hilltop prison. Constrained in their suburban villa in Wellington, her bohemian life in Europe was now unimaginable, with restaurants closing when they should be opening, the wit of sophisticated banter replaced by talk of sheep and trees – and as if they mattered. She soon longed for the cut and thrust of cosmopolitan London.

  For Sheila the best part of their time in New Zealand was getting to know Francis’s son, George. He’d had a hard time of it, his father leaving when he was less than a year old and his mother dying when he was three. He had also developed very bad asthma. By the time Francis returned he was eleven and Sheila set about giving him the happy home life he’d never had. In doing so she limited her own life even further, as his asthma meant that George wasn’t able to go out easily and couldn’t be left alone at home.

  Before a year was up she drew stumps. Francis wasn’t sad to pull them too, partly because he had to agree with her about dominion life in suburban New Zealand and partly because she wanted to take George with her, but also because the drums of war were rolling in Europe. And surely an aviator of his renown would make an essential fighter pilot in helping defeat the Hun?

  Actually, no. The first time he applied to join the Royal Air Force, in 1938, Francis was turned down flat: at thirty-seven he was much too old and he had poor eyesight to boot. He was much chagrined and set about trying to find a job. It took six months but eventually his contacts in the world of navigation came good: Arthur Hughes of Henry Hughes & Son created a job for him developing bubble sextants at Hainault in Essex, about a dozen miles east of London. Francis found himself content at work: ‘the job involved many hours in the air taking sights, and on the ground checking achievements’. But he was discontent at home, hemmed into Sheila’s tiny flat in Chelsea, with the daily grind of the commute to Essex on the District and Central Underground lines, his off-work life restricted after the outdoor freedoms and space of New Zealand.

  Six months later war broke out. Again Francis applied to join the Royal Air Force; again he was rejected. He was by then even older and his eyesight certainly hadn’t improved but that didn’t stop him being equally chagrined a second time. He then had a brainwave, which even the dunderheads at the Royal Air Force couldn’t turn down: together with his ‘too old to fly’ chum from the Royal Aero Club, the distinguished aviator Wing Commander Lord Douglas Hamilton, he decided to form a sort of suicide squadron, formed solely of known flying aces who lacked a limb or 20/20 vision or were ‘too old’. The idea was that, by dint of their superior navigation and flying skills, members would be able to fly low and deep behind enemy lines, pinpointing bombing or photographing strategic targets that the novice pilots had no hope of reaching. It was implicit in this scheme that the members were expendable, the sorties being dangerous in themselves and the pilots being of no use to the regular RAF anyway. The idea was considerably ahead of its time and, as Francis wrote, ‘I believe that this would have shown the value of the Pathfinder Force and brought it forward by a year or two. I was disgusted with being turned down a third time by the RAF and said “if they want me after this they can damn well come and get me”.’

  Henry Hughes & Son site in Hainault

  Getting him would now be a little harder: the lease on Sheila’s Chelsea mansion flat had expired and she leased a new house, Pages in Chigwell Row, then a small village in Epping Forest, much nearer to the Henry Hughes & Son offices at Hainault. With bombs now falling, young George was sent to stay with Francis’s mother, Emily, in the West Country; the danger was no idle threat, as by the end of the war Pages had been damaged by bombing eight times.

  Sheila found her war role, working for the YMCA in the blitzed East End, meaningful and personally rewarding. Francis though was soon bored at Hughes, no doubt made worse by his constant awareness of fighter pilots in derring-do action above the Essex skies. He broke the boredom by writing a series of short stories and articles on navigation for Flight magazine, which in turn led to a commission to write two books for Allen and Unwin, The Spotter’s Handbook and Night and Fire Spotting, both published in 1940 and both aimed at telling bomb-threatened Londoners what planes were overhead and, Francis hoped, stop them running for shelter every time an aeroplane engine was heard overhead.

  Although he was dismissive of these books, describing them as containing a lot of nonsense, by early 1941 they had attracted the attention of the Air Ministry. Word was sent to Hughes & Sons that the country needed Francis, an instruction with which the company was obliged to comply. An interview with Air Commodore the Hon. Ralph Cochrane, head of navigation training at the Air Ministry in Queen Anne Street, followed quickly. Cochrane listed Francis’s civilian occupation as ‘Air Navigation Specialist’.

  The wheels of war moved quickly and on 14 March Francis received his commission as a Pilot Officer in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, the lowest rank that could be commissioned. As he soon found out, the word ‘pilot’ in Pilot Officer was a cruel misnomer. He was assigned to the Training Navigation section of the Air Ministry Directorate of Air Member Training (AMT). Flying a desk from a fourth-floor office in Adastral House in Kingsway he might well be, helping write navigation manuals for instructors and students he certainly was, but he was at least in a uniform and contributing to a war that so far had seemed to hold a grudge against him. For the first time since returning from New Zealand his spirits were lifted; they were lifted further on the one or two nights a week when he stayed at his club, the Royal Aero Club at 119 Piccadilly, rather than suffer the Central Line commute to and from Essex.

  Air Vice Marshal Cochrane, Francis’s recruiter

  At Adastral House Cochrane had thrown Francis into a small team with two very distinguished Air Force navigation experts, Group Captain L. ‘Kelly’ Barnes and Group Captain F.C.
‘Dickie’ Richardson. Nicknames were clearly the order of the day: Francis, who had been ‘Chich’ in New Zealand and ‘Chicko’ on Lord Howe Island, became ‘Frank’ during his part in Hitler’s downfall. With Kelly he never got on at all; with Dickie he formed a lasting bond of respect and friendship. His problem with Kelly had begun before Francis ever met him.

  Francis’s respite, the Royal Aero Club building in Piccadilly

  Adastral House, Kingsway, Air Minsitry HQ from where Francis flew his desk in the early war years

  When Francis was in New Zealand he had heard a story about a Royal Air Force seaplane navigator who had got so fed up with an interfering VIP that he socked him on the chin. The good news was that the plane landed safely; the bad news that said navigator was court-marshalled. Like many a good pub story, the facts had been improved in the telling and by the time Francis had turned it into a short story, Curly the Navigator, it really was a work of fiction. Unfortunately for Francis, the officer delivering the real-life punch was none other than Kelly; double unfortunately for Francis, Kelly had read Curly the Navigator.

  ‘Frank’ was duly summoned

  to meet my boss, Group Captain Kelly Barnes, a big red-faced character who looked and acted exactly like the traditional John Bull. He had been the flying-boat navigator whose story I had dished up. I was decidedly uneasy as to what sort of reception I should get. He called me into his office and, as I did my best to stand smartly at attention, he said, ‘You know, you got the end of that story wrong; what actually happened was that I was court-martialled in the morning, and called up before the Air Council in the afternoon to be awarded the MBE’.