The tuition was not confined to women. There were pilots badly in need of advice too. ‘These officers – one in particular, Charles Crusoe – were teasing me. Now, I had a flat in London and he thought it would be a good idea if we all met and had a night out in London – and that’s how I met my husband-to-be Donald, who was the other chap there at the lecture. A very serious Scotsman. I found him extraordinarily interesting. Nothing you talked about he wouldn’t know the answer to, from politics to a remote river in China. He intrigued me up here and I decided it was time I got married because I very much wanted to have children.’
But Patricia Clark was also unusually independent; her writing career was beginning to take off, partly thanks to those long nights in the Filter Room when the Germans decreased the scale of their attacks. What life at Fighter Command also offered this budding novelist was material. She had been given a unique chance to see, close up, people under the most serious duress – had experienced it for herself – and she now had a much sharper understanding of the wilder shores of human nature. All the pilots and officers she had worked with, all the romances that she had seen flowering in the most unlikely circumstances, gave her an insight at a very young age. Her own mother, Denise Robins, was still the country’s outstandingly successful romantic novelist (a crown that Barbara Cartland was yet to appropriate); Mrs Clark now says that this could not help but rub off on her.
As a result, when the war came to an end, Mrs Clark felt that she had a purpose other than simply having a family and making a home; the choice that was expected of women of all classes then as men returned from theatres of war. ‘It was a slow transition,’ she says. ‘But I was lucky.’ It was more than luck: short stories led to children’s books, and these in turn led to romantic novels which were to become huge transatlantic bestsellers. As an author, Mrs Clark is still writing and also giving talks today.
For Eileen Younghusband, the end of the war was in some ways just as dramatic as the start; instead of gradually winding down the shifts, she and a handful of other female WAAF officers were chosen in 1945 for a very specific mission when the Low Countries had been liberated. Even though the Germans were in retreat, the fighting continued. And RAF units on the continent needed more immediate support. ‘Only eight of us were chosen to go over to Belgium,’ says Mrs Younghusband. ‘And again, we had to be the best at the level of mathematics they needed – probably trigonometry. It was that that we used. We were told what formulas to use. We went governed by the Filter Room initially. It was 33 Wing we were in. It wasn’t just RAF people. We had the serving regiments. We once had a mixed hockey match – several of the army bods were in the hockey team with us. And we played the Belgians who were made up of Belgium’s international ice hockey team. All male!’
The popular image of liberation now is of Allied soldiers surrounded by adoring crowds, of young women bearing flowers. The unvarnished reality of life just before that, recalls Mrs Younghusband, was rather different, and sometimes intimidating. ‘I was billeted with a very strange family – they weren’t very nice to me at all. They were terribly jealous because I was having proper food. And the other thing that I remember: coming off duty at midnight and having to walk across the town centre, with no one else around, to get to my billet. It was a big sort of market square with a big cover over it. The ground was either tessellated or bricked and as I walked in this silence – I had black strong shoes – you could hear me, clip clip clip. When we were first over there, there were still German snipers about. And that was the only time I was really frightened. I wasn’t frightened so much about the bombing but I was quite frightened of walking through that town centre alone.
‘After a very short time, the stray German soldiers and snipers were all captured. But in general, people weren’t supposed to be out at night. So if you ever heard footsteps in the dark – well yes, that is rather a memorable thing.’
While, over the Channel, her WAAF colleagues celebrated the end of the war in Europe, it was all a little more involved for Eileen Younghusband and her colleagues in Belgium: ‘Actually, I came off duty at eight o’clock in the morning of VE Day. We didn’t know then but we knew that the Germans were in retreat and we had a feeling that the end was very, very near. I walked out into the street and this little car came to a jerk. Two British pilots got out – who had been prisoners of war – and hugged me and said, “You’re the first English woman we’ve seen since 1940.” Those words ring in my ears!’
Mrs Younghusband had been on duty all night; and she and the two RAF pilots saw in VE Day almost delirious with tiredness and disorientation. ‘When I brought these men back into the mess, I’d been up thirty-six hours by then,’ says Mrs Younghusband. ‘The MO came and he probably thought I looked tired and he gave me sleeping tablets. He said: “You’re so hyped up because it’s VE Day, you had better have one of these.” I didn’t have a room in the mess – all the senior officers had taken those. So I had to walk quite a way to get to my billet. So I took this pill, went up to my room, got into bed, and then I thought, this is bloody stupid! This is VE Day! What am I doing? So I got up again, went back to the mess, and that’s when the MO said, “Oh God,” and then gave me an upper, after I had had the downer! And then we went in a little tiny car – three of us – and we drove through the streets of Brussels in this sort of victory parade. They gave us flowers and cakes and all sorts of things. Then I came back and went to sleep.’
Post-war life was – in some ways – a disappointment for some of Fighter Command’s senior figures. Right the way across the world, on 12 September 1945, Sir Keith Park – alongside Lord Mountbatten – accepted the surrender of the Japanese in southeast Asia. Back in 1940, in the aftermath of his dismissal from 11 Group, he had gone on, first to supervise flying training in Gloucestershire, and then back out on active service when he was posted to Malta. There, on an island that took particularly heavy bombardment in the Mediterranean war, Park’s skill in handling the tactics of fighter pilots won admiration from the Americans, as well as his British colleagues. By then Park was fifty; his experience was vast, his manner ever more calm and assured. He received a knighthood in November 1942. A year later, he was promoted and moved; appointed an air marshal, he found himself Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Command in Cairo. Again, experience counted for a lot; but his innate good manners were invaluable in keeping peace among the Allies at a time when any notion of the ‘special relationship’ being completely harmonious would have been greeted on all sides with satirical laughter.
From there to South-east Asia Command, backing up General Slim’s army, and a period which once more brought forth golden opinions, Park found that his talents were being recognised on a wider stage. He was gracious about it too, and his immediate post-war months were spent carefully winding down the vast and effective fighter operation that he had led. After that, he left the RAF and turned, like so many other pilots, to the burgeoning world of commercial flight. Moving back to his native New Zealand, he took a job with Hawker Siddeley as its Pacific representative; this was a new age of mass flight, no longer the domain of the very wealthy. Now ordinary tourists were going to be able to feel the wonder that he himself had yearned for when he had joined the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War and trained at the Netheravon station in Wiltshire.
In those post-war years, Sir Keith Park was quite forthright on the subject of those who had done him down in the autumn of 1940; his anger (as opposed to Lord Dowding’s tone of hurt) was palpable. But at the same time, the invaluable role that he had played was openly acknowledged by a variety of RAF establishment figures. His retirement in New Zealand was peaceful; he died in 1975, aged eighty-three. Movingly, Sir Douglas Bader spoke at his memorial service at St Clement Danes in London. There was no further band-standing about ‘big wings’. Instead, his tribute was plain and gracious: ‘The Battle of Britain was controlled, directed and brought to a successful conclusion by the man whose memory we honour today.’ In the years
following 1940, history had been adjusted, and Sir Keith Park was acknowledged as a hero.
And just as Sir Douglas Bader had had the honour of a film based around his wartime exploits, so Sir Keith and Lord Dowding had had the satisfaction of the 1969 epic production The Battle of Britain, starring Sir Laurence Olivier as Dowding and Trevor Howard as Park. Even more satisfying for Dowding was the opportunity to meet and talk to the producer (Harry Saltzman, well known for his partnership with Albert R. Broccoli and the Bond films) and the actors. Here was a vast production that would reach worldwide audiences; and here was a film that substantively stood by Lord Dowding and his system. Dowding was to die a year later. It must have been gratifying for him to know that not only had he been vindicated by historians and RAF colleagues alike; but his achievements were also woven into the tapestry of national culture. Unfortunately, the film, fantastically expensive to make, itself proved something of a turkey – by 1969, the cinematic war genre was very much past its peak, and younger audiences were after cooler, gaudier entertainment. Happily, its reputation has grown in the intervening years as a perennial television favourite.
Immediately after the war, as fighter pilots posted around the world were gradually returned home, one particular contingent of men were understandably reluctant. The Polish pilots, who had fought with such exceptional determination, now looked across at a country behind a dark Iron Curtain; Poland had been annexed by the Soviet Union. And these men knew that far from being received as heroes, the new Communist regime would view them in a very different light: as lackeys of the western powers, corrupted and infected by those alongside whom they had fought. For these pilots, any sense of victory was fleeting. They had been fighting the fascists, and now their country was controlled by a no less lethal form of totalitarianism. So it was that an Act of Parliament was passed, allowing any Poles who wished to stay in Britain to do so.
For others who had served, there were other difficulties to face. Eileen Younghusband had one last terrible job to do before she could leave the WAAFs; she was still based in Belgium in 1945, so it fell on her to guide fellow RAF officers around the prison of Breendonk, in which the Nazis had carried out an extraordinary number of atrocities. Mrs Younghusband had to hear accounts of torture – burnings, drownings – and she found the atmosphere of the place extremely unsettling. Having seen the nobler side of the conflict, she now had to descend into its unutterable squalor; the reality of what ordinary people were capable of doing to one another, the limitless suffering that they could inflict. ‘The army worked with town mayors in Belgium and elsewhere,’ says Mrs Younghusband, ‘and because I spoke fluent French, they sent me down to Breendonk. They thought that the RAF personnel that were stationed anywhere around that area should see what the Germans had done so they would begin to see the truth.’ They saw it.
Then, on her return to Britain, and as part of her very last WAAF duties, Mrs Younghusband returned to Bentley Priory – and immediately began working with Polish airmen, helping to improve their English. ‘I was living bang opposite the Filter Room aerial in Hill House where we had been moved to.’ Because she stayed in the air force until January 1946, she took on the job of teaching English to the Polish officers at Stanmore. ‘They gave me a book called Poland’s Progress, and they all signed it. One of them was Group Captain Bayeun, a First World War Polish pilot. Because I was only over the road, and the pilots were all enjoying their English lessons, they asked if I could continue.’ She continued giving lessons as long as she remained a WAAF.
So what sort of impact did their Filter Room experiences have on the postwar lives of Eileen Younghusband and the other women who had worked there in secrecy? For Mrs Younghusband, life acquired a different rhythm but nonetheless a very hard-working one. She married Peter, the bandleader she had met at RAF Northolt. And as he tried to establish a new civilian working life, as a salesman, she found her mathematical and accounting skills in demand from her father-in-law, who ran stables in Stanmore, leasing out horses for film productions. Thereafter she and her husband went into the hotel business, working ferocious hours in a less than congenial economic climate; but as austerity gave way to the new Elizabethan age, trade grew brisker and again, Mrs Younghusband found herself thoroughly occupied. The war – and her contribution – was a never-to-be-spoken secret in ever-lengthening shadows.
Some other WAAF women found happiness elusive and everyday life grimly unendurable after having been at the nerve centre of the war effort. Eileen Younghusand sadly recalls that one of her colleagues went into a disastrous decline afterwards: ‘One girl had been on the balcony of the Filter Room. She was one of the first, she had been in very early. She married a bomber pilot, and after the war ended, they went up to Scotland. They had a croft up there. Well, can you imagine? After being on the balcony, in contact with the controllers and the radar stations – a very vital job – and then to have it all cut off and go and live in a croft. The girl took to drink – she always drank quite a bit – and she drank herself to death. The end of the war was like taking the rug from under her feet. Having given orders – and then to go from that to end up probably milking cows – if that – in that lonely landscape. When before, you had had all that life going on.’
Some fighter pilots went on to cultivate unexpected fame. A young man called Ian Smith, for instance, who had flown fighter planes in the Mediterranean towards the end of the war, returned afterwards to his farming life in southern Africa. About twenty years later, as Prime Minister of Rhodesia, he made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, amid worldwide condemnation of racism (though the condemnation did not go so far as tightly controlled economic sanctions, and the country thrived), and he remained a hugely controversial leader until 1979. The country is now, of course, Zimbabwe. It is tempting to wonder if there is a streak of implacable recaltricance in the fighter pilot, or even a maverick disdain for the rules that everyone else must abide by.
Another fighter pilot, Roald Dahl, was curiously ungovernable as well. A fighter ace, having scored five victories in the Mediterranean, Dahl was later posted to Washington as part of Air Intelligence; sent back to Britain by senior British embassy officials for insubordination, he was swiftly recalled by intelligence supremo Sir William Stephenson. His sardonic approach to both authority and social norms informed his later best-selling fiction. His children’s stories – among them Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach – have an edge of anarchy and a near disgust with grown-ups; and his adult short stories and novels are frequently both macabre and cynically sour.
Other fighter pilots retained a quintessential boyishness in their later careers. One such was Raymond Baxter: he had flown Spitfires and taken part in sorties over Sicily (for which he was mentioned in dispatches) and in missions against V-2 launching sites, and his post-war career took him swiftly to the BBC. He started as a commentator but specialised in broadcasting from annual events such as the Farnborough Air Show. He became best known as one of the presenters of the BBC science show Tomorrow’s World, for which he became one of the pioneer passengers on Concorde, as well as trying out outlandish devices such as outboard motors designed to be strapped to the body.
This sense of a boyish rebel spirit was also captured brilliantly by one of only three German-born men to have flown for the RAF during the war. Klaus Hugo Adam, who had emigrated with his family from Berlin in 1934, sent countless badgering letters in his eagerness to be accepted in the RAF. In 1941, he joined, and by the end of the war, he was flying Typhoons over France, escorting American bombers towards their targets (at this point, his younger brother Dennis managed to join up too). He came under enemy fire many times; and friendly fire too, from American fighters who had never before seen Typhoons. Adam was in a unique situation for another reason too: had he been shot down and captured by the Germans, he recalled, he would not have been a prisoner of war; instead, as a German-born male, he would have been instantly executed for treason.
> Klaus Hugo Adam had also changed his name to Kenneth; he had an abiding fascination with engineering and design. After the war, he moved into British film production. It was he, Adam, who as production designer, created the unforgettable look of the James Bond films starting in 1962; from Dr No’s modernist lair to the cathedral of gold in Fort Knox to the extraordinary extinct volcano base (with added monorail) of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Not long ago, Adam received a long overdue knighthood. Sir Ken is an interesting synecdoche for his generation of fighter pilots: that combination of lightly worn bravery, unorthodox creativity and a certain cussed individuality.
The end of the war did not bring the decommissioning of Fighter Command HQ in Stanmore. But it did bring an altogether new phase, with a different flavour, different priorities and perhaps just the smallest spark – quite quickly ignited – of melancholic nostalgia.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Afterlife
In the 1960s, the popular television comedy thriller The Avengers featured a couple of episodes whose action was centred around abandoned fighter stations in Britain. In one, ‘The Town of No Return’ (1965), bowler-hatted protagonist Steed, investigating a series of disappearances in a remote Norfolk coastal village, spends some time absorbing the atmosphere of the old airfield, with its roofless Nissen huts and scraps of topless pin-ups still attached to mildewed walls. The landlord of the local pub, the extravagantly moustachioed former fighter pilot ‘Piggy’ Warren, tells Steed that he was stationed there himself: one of ‘The Fighting 33’. ‘Grand days, bang on days,’ he sighs. Although ‘Piggy’ later turns out to be an imposter, part of a bizarre invasion plan involving replacing one by one the populations of local villages, smallest first; and despite the menacing atmosphere of the pub and village, there is also a twang of genuine sadness about the old airfield, filmed on location: the crumbling shelters, the weeds growing through the concrete.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 30