(32) Tern Hill,
Shropshire,
7-6-42
Dear Mum,
Funny the way things happen, isn’t it? I had just sealed up my last letter to you from Harrogate last week-end, when I went downstairs to find my name on the posting list. We arrived here on Tuesday – it happens to be the station to which Tom was posted – and I found that he was leaving next morning for a few days at a subsidiary station, so didn’t see much of him. However, he came back to-day, and will leave again shortly for another training unit as he applied for another type of ‘plane. You see, this is a single-engine station and Tom didn’t like the type, so has arranged a transfer. As for me, they happen to be just what I wanted, so I am staying put.
Since they tell me there is a war on I guess I can’t tell you very much about this station without offending the delicate susceptibilities of the Censor. However, I can tell you that we have excellent accommodation in the officers’ mess here, so we are doing rather well for ourselves. It is a pretty full day’s work to get through our programme because we don’t have a very long stay here and have plenty to do all the time. Most of the flying is dual, solo work apparently being considered unimportant; it has been a little odd for me having to re-adjust myself after four months of flying twin-engined jobs and three months of flying nothing at all, but I think I have the “feel” of these single-engined ‘planes now.
A big item of news is that, by a strange co-incidence, one of the instructors here is Les Mardon, whom you may remember as having been in 2nd Hastings Scouts at the same time as your son Arnold. We knew one another at once; he doesn’t seem to have changed a bit. He had about a year over here on operations before they “retired” him to an instructor’s job here. There are quite a number of other New Zealanders here in the same course, including three other P/O’s with whom I came from Harrogate, and with one of whom I am sharing a room. With the exception of one Sergeant from our course in Canada, all the other New Zealanders are home-trained. The officers in our course are certainly a cosmopolitan little bunch, as there are Canadians, Australians, N.Z.’s and Americans, one of whom is a Greek. The U.S.A. boys amuse me – they seem to get a great kick out of everything.
Our station is plump in the middle of a large slice of green English countryside, and the nearest teeming metropolis is too far away to bother us much so even if we had time off, I wouldn’t be getting very far with it. Finding one’s way around this country by map promises to be very far from the simple job we had both in New Zealand and Canada, as for the navigator it is very difficult territory to fly over. The little taste of map-reading I have had has shown me that – I didn’t get lost, but it was a narrow escape. The fields are so small, and there are so many roads and railways that it is all like a badly constructed jig-saw puzzle. However, I daresay we will soon get used to it.
There has been no further mail from home, but as the last lot filled in all the gaps up to April 8, parcels and all, I expect there won’t be any more for a while so I am not looking too anxiously at the mail-box. There isn’t any more news at the moment, either, so for now goodbye and love
from
Arnold G.