The Lonely Sea and the Sky (41 page)

  About the time I was brought into the Air Force, I produced a game, 'Pinpoint the Bomber', for teaching navigation. This was published by Allen and Unwin, and considering the limited market which any navigational work must have, it was a great success. I also brought out a sun compass which enabled you to tell the direction by the sun if you knew the time, or to tell the time if you knew the direction of the sun. This, in turn, was followed by a star compass made of cardboard and transparent plastic which sold for 5s, and a 2s 6d Planisphere of Navigation Stars. Another publication of mine was a big star chart designed for teaching star identification.

  At the Air Ministry I worked for some time in the same room as Dicky Richardson, then a Wing-Commander who was rewriting the
Standard Manual of Air Navigation
, A.P. 1234. He made a fine job of it. Dicky was one of those sterling, stalwart citizens who make a country great if there are enough of them. He left the Air Ministry to become Chief Navigation Officer of Coastal Command, where he introduced a navigation drill which helped raise the standard of navigation and with it the standard of safety. Dicky's navigation drill was almost precisely the same as the system I had worked out for navigating to Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island.

  Convoy escorts, and anti-submarine patrols were out for long flights with continuous manoeuvring, such as square searches to be plotted. I took part in one sortie, in a Liberator which was eleven hours and forty minutes out. We proceeded to 25° W. in the Atlantic, and after an oblong search for ships' boats, picked up a convoy on the return. Another day I joined a Fortress, for an eight hour thirty-five minutes flight into the Atlantic. I got into hot water with the captain of the aircraft for firing a burst from a .5 machine gun I was interested in, just as a corvette was passing below.

  By the middle of 1943 I reckoned that I had written 500,000 words on navigation, and was becoming difficult to live or work with. I was offered a post at the Empire Central Flying School, with no official status and the rank of Flying Officer, the lowest commissioned rank except Pilot Officer. I accepted what looked like an interesting job. I was not allowed to do the sort of job I wanted, such as Navigating Officer at an operational station, because of my bad eyesight; and for the same reason I was not permitted to hold a General Duties post. I could only have an administrative job. I was not officially allowed to fly, not officially allowed to navigate, and I was not permitted to wear pilot's or navigator's wings on my tunic. One of the results of this was that whenever I visited an operational mess, unless I knew one of the members of the mess personally, I would soon be quietly edged out of any group of operational pilots talking at the bar. For my job at the Air Ministry I had been upgraded to the rank of Flight Lieutenant, but that was as high as I could rise.

  I arrived at Hullavington where the Empire Central Flying School was stationed feeling like a new boy at a public school. The standard procedure for anyone coming into the Air Force was to do an Officers' Training Course. I had been moved straight into a uniform and into an office, and I knew little about the drill, customs and procedure. Hullavington was a big station – we had thirty-seven different types of aircraft there alone – and taking the parade as Duty Officer when the ensign was lowered at 6 o'clock was a formidable ordeal when my turn came. The last squad I had drilled was at my preparatory school in 1914. Naturally, I watched what the preceding Duty Officer did, but it was a very different thing to shout all the same commands in a parade ground voice to troops who were experts. It was a great relief to me when I found that I could get through it all right.

  The Commandant at the Empire Central Flying School was a regular RAF Officer called Oddie, a stalwart character. He got himself into trouble with the Air Council because he believed in getting on with the war in the best possible way, and that regulations ought to be made to fit this purpose. After I had been there for ten days he put me into the Navigation Officer's post to succeed Wing Commander Edwards, who was leaving for an operational tour. The ECFS ran courses for officers such as Chief Flying Instructors with ranks from Flight Lieutenant to Group Captain. They were mostly pilots drawn from every arm of the Service and from every ally. In one course we might have Fleet Air Arm, Army and RAF officers, together with Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Poles, Frenchmen, Norwegians and Americans. (But we never had US Air Force and US Navy pilots at the same time, because they did not mix well.)

  My job, principally, was to brief them on the navigation of their flights, and to devise navigation exercises for them. At the end of each course we used to have a navigation race with twelve light two-seater Magister training planes in it. This was fine training for the sort of navigation that is really valuable to a pilot. We made it a kind of treasure hunt. For instance, in one race they had to fly to Stowe, the public school, and count the number of tennis-courts there, multiply the number by x, and then fly in that direction for 5 miles to find another clue. These races were immense sport, and very popular. I acted as pilot in one of them to Group Captain Teddy Donaldson, who at that time held the world record for high speed flights. He had to do all the navigating, and I simply acted as chauffeur. He swore afterwards that I had made him airsick for the first time in his life, but I think the truth was that it was the first time he had ever put his head down to look at a map in a cockpit.

  Another of my jobs at Hullavington was to devise methods for teaching 'nought feet' navigation to pilots intruding into enemy territory when they would be unable to take their eye off the ground ahead, and must be jinking all the time to avoid anti-aircraft fire. It amounted to map reading without maps, in other words all the map reading had to be done on the ground before taking off. It sounds an impossible requirement but, with the right methods, and plenty of drill, pilots could find a haystack 50 miles off while dodging about all the way to it. Oddie reasoned that it was impossible for me to do this sort of work if I was not allowed to fly or, for that matter, navigate. As a result, I was not only navigating continuously in the various types of aircraft at the station, but also had a light plane for solo flying and experimental work whenever I wanted it. This enabled me to prepare the flight tracks for the instructional films we were making, work up interesting exercises, and also to fly myself home occasionally at the weekend.

  I used to land at Fairlop, a mile from our house at Chigwell Row. One morning, just before I took off, a cryptic message came through from Air Traffic Control London saying that I must take great care while flying and look out for anything strange. I usually flew low, because it was more interesting, and I was surprised to see all the children dash across a playground and take cover as I flew over. When this happened a second time, I realised that they were taking cover from me, and when it happened a third time, I wondered what it was all about. On this occasion I landed at the Fighter Station at Hornchurch. As I stepped out of the plane, I saw one of our fighters tip a doodlebug over with its wing tip, and send it crashing into the ground where it exploded with a mighty bang. The schools had mistaken my little monoplane for a doodlebug. When I got home I found that one of the first three of these infernal machines had flown low over our house where Sheila was living alone. Our house was slightly damaged many times (I gave up counting after it had been repaired nine times), and naturally it was a great worry to me leaving Sheila there. I tried to persuade her to come down to Wiltshire, but the only accommodation I could find was a room in a house which she would have to share with several others. She said that she preferred living in her own house with the bombs. One day I returned to find that a doodlebug had exploded nearby, and blown every leaf off the big lime tree next door. The completely bare tree looked strange in the middle of summer. Some weeks later I came home and was delighted to see a new crop of leaves appearing on the tree, just as if it was at the beginning of spring.

  I tried to console Sheila by telling her that the bomb risk in London was nothing like the risk from flying accidents at the ECFS Most of our students had been doing administrative office jobs before coming on the course, and when they were expected to fly every one of our thirty-seven different types of aircraft while undergoing an intensive course of lectures, it was not surprising that we had a high casualty rate. The chief safety factor when flying is thorough drill in handling the aircraft. It was thought, however, that we could not win the war if we played for safety.

  It is an ill wind that blows no good, and if any of my students were lost on a navigational exercise I used to spend many hours in my light aeroplane searching where I estimated them to be. Two South African majors were lost on one exercise, and I hunted for days among the Welsh hills. Three months later when we had given up all hope for them, word came through that they were prisoners of war. They had flown the reciprocal heading of their compass, south-east instead of north-west. When they crossed the English Channel they thought it was the Bristol Channel. They were grateful when an airfield put up a cone of searchlights for them, and it was not until they had finished their landing run on the airstrip and a German soldier poked a tommy gun into the cockpit that they realised that they were not on an English airfield.

  I often used to make solo flights to operational stations to find out if there were any developments in navigation and, I must admit, to try for a job as navigator on a raid. When I climbed to the control tower after landing on a strange airfield the duty officer would look at my wingless tunic and say, 'Where's the pilot?' I enjoyed this, and regarded it as some consolation (childish, perhaps) for the indignity and disregard the non-flying man had to put up with from operational pilots.

  At the end of the war I wanted to get into business on my own again, and decided to become a maker of air games and toys. I visualised toy jets. I dare say 10 per cent of the RAF had a similar idea. I also wanted to get into the air travel business. When on leave I marked off an area in the West End of London where I thought the air travel business would be centred after the war. This was a rectangle, with Piccadilly in the centre. I hired a taxi and drove through every street in the area noting down all the houses for sale. In the end we bought one in St. James's Place where my business now is. My forecast of air travel has turned out to be right, because nearly every airline and major air travel firm has an office in this area now. But it was all wasted for me, because I never got into that business.

  The first thing I found on being demobilised was that I could not get any materials to make my toys. A friend – or was it an enemy? – suggested that I should make jigsaw puzzles. There were 15,000 maps left over from my 'Pinpoint the Bomber' game. I bought a ton or so of cardboard, designed some cutters, and turned these maps into map jigsaws. I set off on a sales campaign and sold the first 5,000 to big stores and other shops. I came back elated thinking, 'Hurrah! I'm in business,' and promptly made 10,000 more. On my next sales round the buyers told me that the puzzles had not sold as well as they had hoped. I decided that this was due to using an old map, so I designed a new one. Several times when the sales lagged I produced a better map to help to sell the old ones. Then one day a man walked into my office and said, 'This picture map of London is the best I've seen; if you will take it off this lousy piece of cardboard I'll order 5,000.' And so I became a map publisher by accident.

At this time, besides being the designer, producer and salesman, I typed all the letters, did the book-keeping, invoiced the goods, parcelled them up and delivered them – it was very much a one-man firm. I think map publishing was the right business for me, for I had been involved with maps ever since I made my first chart for my Tasman flight. My adventures with faulty maps when flying, the game 'Pinpoint the Bomber' which I had devised for teaching map reading, and my search for methods of teaching fighter pilots how to map read at nought feet without using a map, had left me with strong views on what should be put into a map and, equally important, what should be left out of it. My map of the heart of London was different from a flying map, but I worked in a number of my ideas. For example I pictured prominent buildings; the eye would go straight to one of these, which would make it easier to find a near-by street; and I tried to keep the map clear, by not overcrowding it, and by keeping out unnecessary features.

  Gradually I made bigger and better maps, but it was a struggle for financial survival. At one time we kept only one room of our house in St. James's Place, and I not only worked in it, but slept and lived there as well. Sheila was living in a weekend cottage on the banks of the Kennet in Wiltshire with our young son Giles, and I joined them at weekends. This Fisherman's Cottage was also an accident, like my map publishing business. After the war I tried once more to switch from flying to sailing, and looked for a cottage at various places near the sea. However, a friend offered us the Fisherman's Cottage with a length of the Kennet for trout fishing, and the north half of Savernake Forest, 750 acres, for rough shooting. I thought that if there was another war I should at least have fish to eat in summer and game in winter. However, shortly afterwards my family turned vegetarian, and when I did the same, I was left literally with the bag. I had had gallstone trouble. I have been told this is the greatest pain known to man; I believe it. Fortunately, a man can stand only a certain amount of pain, and then passes out. The doctor wanted to operate on me, but my wife refused to let him. I was introduced to a nature-cure doctor, Gordon Latto, who said that he would stop the stones forming, but that I must go on a strict vegetarian diet for a year, besides knocking off drink and smoking, which he said was worse than drink. This was a tough regime; the gallstones gave up, but I survived. I found that I was cured of smoking, too. And I have preferred vegetarian food since then.