Ginger Lacey: Fighter Pilot Read online

  So, this decision made, what was he to do instead? He had passed his School Certificate with credits: among them, chemistry and botany. He enjoyed chemistry: he would, then, exploit his talent and satisfy his liking by becoming a chemist. He apprenticed himself as a student pharmacist.

  ‘It is just as well,’ he recalls soberly, ‘that I didn’t go into farming. In 1933, the year that I left school, farming was at the rock bottom of its slump.’ It was in this year, also, that his father died. Sadly, he helped his mother to sell off their stock at the low prices then prevailing and went on with his pharmaceutical studies. For the latter he really did not have much heart: the denial of a R.A.F. career had been a more grievous blow to him than he had shewn; and he had been mistaken in his assumption that working in a chemist’s shop meant ‘doing chemistry’ as he had done it in the school laboratories. I was, he discovered, mainly a matter of selling perfumes and bath salts, of wrapping up tins of cough lozenges and bottles of linctus in neat, white paper parcels sealed with a blob of red wax, of dispensing single razor blades to stubbly-chinned old men who looked as though they made them last from one month to the next. He had gone into pharmacy not because he really wanted to but because he wasn’t allowed to go into the air force: his father had put his foot down. So there he was, the most undedicated young student pharmacist in Yorkshire; and it was the disillusion about ‘doing chemistry’ that had spoiled for him something that he might in time have been able to accept; perhaps even with enthusiasm.

  It was a three-year apprenticeship. Three years of pausing in the act of taking a bottle from the shelf or a box from the counter, arrested by the sound of an aeroplane flying overhead. Three years of reading enviously in the newspapers about the fun and achievements of others: there were air displays and exploratory flights and flights that broke records for altitude, endurance or distance. Three years that dragged by with aching slowness, filled inadequately by poring over books on aviation, talking about aeroplanes with your air-minded friends, and even listening with absorption to the maudlin reminiscences of a regular customer for corn plasters who wore a faded, soup-stained and frayed R.F.C. tie with defiant panache. Even though one knew he had been nothing more belligerent than an Air Mechanic, there was a breath of adventure and freedom in his hoarse allusions to Ball and Mannock, Sopwith Camels and B.E.2s.

  The three years between sixteen and nineteen, between boyhood and manhood, are the slowest and longest in life. But at last, Jim Lacey’s bondage ended. He took his intermediate examinations and turned his back on pharmacy for ever. Standing on the pavement, with the shop door shut for the last time behind him, he paused for a moment to breathe the keen autumn air and savour the freedom that was his after a seeming eternity of being fettered by a humdrum indoor job. He heard a familiar drone overhead and looked up. Moving across the darkening sky, a pair of bright lights—one red, the other green—brightly symbolized the far horizons that beckoned to him so strongly.

  A passer-by, hurrying along with his head bent in a townsman’s stoop and his shoulders hunched against the cold, butted into him; hardly raising his head, the man grumbled and pottered on. Young Lacey felt sorry for him. Poor devil, with his gaze fixed half a yard beyond the toecaps of his boots: what would he ever see but the grime of the pavement and dirty rainwater in the gutters? Lacey kept his eyes on the twinkling navigation lights five thousand feet above and watched them until they were gone and the single yellow light in the aircraft’s tail gleamed no more strongly than a pinprick in the heavens.

  ‘So,’ he says, with West Riding prosaicness, ‘I joined the R.A.F. Volunteer Reserve.’ His mother treated his decision with good sense. It was his life, she felt, to live or to end as he wished. Lacey adds, with fond irony, ‘She didn’t really think I’d be accepted by the Medical Board anyway when she gave me permission to go and have my medical.’

  ‘When she gave me permission to go and have my medical.’ A simple phrase, which reveals more of the speaker’s upbringing and character than a page of other people’s opinions about him. At nineteen, the youth with adventure in his blood who had left school three years ago and worked at a man’s job, still asked his mother’s leave to join the R.A.F.V.R.

  Two of his friends in the rugger club—strapping front row forwards—had preceded him and both were turned down. Who would suppose that the rather pale wing three-quarter of scarcely middle stature who did not look impressively robust would pass?

  But he did. There was an interview and he passed that too. And now, for the first time, doubt set in. Never a garrulous sort, he kept his enrolment a secret even from his brother. His mother was the only one who knew that he was going to try to learn to fly. It would be time enough to mention it to others when he had succeeded; better to say nothing at all now, in case he should fail: it would be bitter enough to support such disappointment without having to bear the inevitable jibes that must accompany it.

  Thirty embryo sergeant pilots—the first course of them in the V.R.—assembled at Scone, in Scotland. No. 740042 Lacey, J. H., C. of E., born Wetherby 1st February 1917, was one of them. He was also the first to fly solo: in 6 hours 55 minutes, in a Tiger Moth; which was good, particularly for the R.A.F., which errs if anything on the side of caution.

  Flight Lieutenant Nick Lawson, was his instructor. ‘A nicer chap you could never find. A born instructor. If I ever did become anything respectable in the way of a pilot, it was certainly due to Nick Lawson and not because I had any inborn ability.’ Nevertheless, Lacey admits that he took naturally to flying.

  At the end of the course he was assessed ‘Above Average’ and has maintained at least this grading throughout his flying career; there are several endorsements in his log books which award him ‘Exceptional’.

  What does a young man who has wanted to fly since he was a schoolboy and who is destined to become an outstandingly able pilot feel the first time that he is airborne?

  Lacey had been looking forward to this moment for eight years, more keenly than he had ever anticipated any event. He thought he could foretell the sensations and emotions that were in store for him: after all, books and films had painted vivid, realistic pictures. The actuality exceeded expectations as all empirical emotion must surpass the vicarious.

  Within four hours of arriving at Scone airfield, he was strapped into the rear cockpit of a Tiger Moth a thousand feet above the Perthshire hills. His eyes darted from the gently jiggling joystick to the rudder bar which moved a few inches this way and that as Nick Lawson turned; from the airspeed indicator impressively shewing 70 m.p.h. to the altimeter which was climbing through the hundreds into its second thousand; from the purple hills to the dark green valleys; from the miniature houses, vehicles and farm animals beneath to the canvas and wire of the wings that hummed a few feet away from him.

  Through the Gosport tube came the instructor’s voice, telling him to touch the controls gently and follow their movements. Eagerly he put his hand on the stick and his feet on the rudder bar and tried to imagine that the helmeted head in front was not there; that he was alone up here with the sun-drenched wisps of cloud, the majestic mountain tops and the hovering eagle. A gruff command told him not to hold so damned tight and to put less pressure on the rudder controls with his clumsy feet. He didn’t mind. He didn’t mind what anybody said to him, as long as he could stay here and enjoy this superb elation, this stupendous release that was as much spiritual as physical. The one worry he had now was that he might not be efficient at his task: to cease flying training was the only tragedy of magnitude that he could envisage. He relaxed, cupping his fingers gently around the stick and letting his shoes rest lightly on the bar. ‘That’s better,’ said Lawson.

  ‘I wonder if he’ll think I’m cocky if I ask him to do a loop,’ thought his pupil.

  It was gratifying to be sent solo before his companions. It was not until he was at five hundred feet and circling the aerodrome that he wondered if he would ever be able to get down again: he had a momentary vis
ion of himself as an aerial Flying Dutchman, destined to orbit Scone in a Tiger Moth until the Last Trump; then he remembered that Tiger Moths only stayed airborne while there was petrol in their tanks and if he wanted to put this one back on the ground without bending it he had better fix his mind on reality.

  Learning to fly in Scotland was appropriate, for his mother came from Caithness. Her father, Captain James Smith, had been a Master Mariner; and perhaps there could be no better heritage than Jim Lacey’s for a man born to fight in the fiercest aerial battle in history: on the one side, the adventurous spirit of the seafarer and on the other the conservative rationalism of a father who made his living among farmers. Maybe, indeed, it was the worthiness of both his Scottish and Yorkshire forebears rather than the streak of sailor’s daring that contributed more to his will to beat the enemy.

  His 65 hours of flying at Scone, half of them solo, were accomplished in six weeks and he returned home to continue flying at Brough during weekends. Here he flew the Blackburn B.2, a side-by-side two-seater of about the same dimensions and weight as the Tiger Moth.

  Proudly, his mother told their friends and relations that Jim was now a qualified pilot; and he found it pleasing to acknowledge this casually. It had been worthwhile to keep his aspirations to himself. The savour of admiration and envy, after success, was sweet and rich.

  He found a new comradeship among his flying companions. The first sensations associated with flying are the smells of fabric dope, oil, petrol, hot metal and rubber mountings that cling to airfields and aircraft the world over. The first time anyone enters an aeroplane, this is the impression that immediately registers: here is a pursuit with its own special odours, like those of hay and manure in a stable or damp jerseys and muddy boots in a changing room. People who fly react to this aura of their mystique as others do to the aroma of good whisky or the scent of a rose garden. And, bound together in the sodality of mutual understanding, they have a particular kind of common bond also: flying, fundamentally, is something at which you take the risk (however mild this may be rendered by rigid safety precautions) of hurting or killing yourself; therefore people who indulge in it have an unconscious respect for each other. Out of this emerges a spirit of friendship which can only prevail when danger is not very far in the background. In a few weeks he knew his flying friends better than he did those with whom he had been at school or played rugger.

  There was no need to think about a humdrum job any longer. The R.A.F.V.R. paid a good training allowance, and with regular attendance at weekends, this was adequate pocket money. Now and again, when he felt like spending a little extra, he would help out in somebody’s business from Monday to Friday. But whatever his hands were doing, his mind and heart were fixed on Saturday morning when he could catch the bus to Brough.

  When he had put in 60 hours on Blackburn B.2s, the Training School received its first Hawker Harts.

  Here was an aeroplane to bring a gleam to the eye. More than twice the weight of the other two types which Lacey had flown, it had a maximum speed of 184 m.p.h., compared with their 110. Its length and span were impressively greater and it had a ceiling of over 21,000 ft.; he had not yet been above 10,000 ft., a height to which the Hart could climb in eight minutes.

  There were only two pilots at the school with enough flying time behind them to be capable of flying this paragon, and Lacey was one of them. Now, on Saturdays and Sundays, he was told to go off on his own and put in as many hours as he could; he usually entered another eight in his log book before returning home.

  Before 1938 was over, he underwent an instructors’ course at Grimsby, passed the examination of the Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators, and obtained an instructor’s endorsement on his licence.

  This was the decisive point in his life, more significant than his abandonment of pharmacy or his enrolment in the R.A.F.V.R.; the course on which he determined now gave him the experience and skill to survive the severe tests and perils of the future.

  His mother, watching him across the supper table that first night back from Grimsby, recognized the signs of preoccupation in his face. His brother Charles, now a medical student, later to be a R.A.M.C. parachutist doctor and fated to die at 29, noticed it too.

  ‘What’s biting you, Jim?’

  ‘I was thinking.’

  ‘Hang on to that thought; it’s likely to be lonely!’

  But Jim wasn’t rising to any bait this evening.

  ‘What are you thinking about, son?’

  ‘Flying, mother.’

  ‘I know that. But what about flying, this time?’

  ‘It’s the only life for me, you know. I don’t mean just this weekend stuff: that’s champion fun, of course; but I want to do more than that.’

  ‘I see. What have you got in mind?’

  ‘Well, now that I’ve got my instructor’s ticket, I think I’ll try for a job with the Yorkshire Aeroplane Club.’

  Charles said what was in all their minds. ‘You’re not thinking, lad: you’ve decided.’

  His brother grinned, looking uncertainly across at their mother. ‘Well,’ she asked briskly, ‘I suppose you’ll be applying for this job tomorrow?’

  *

  The Secretary of the Yorkshire Aeroplane Club was patient and polite. She was accustomed to handling nervous members, even to coping with boisterous ones who celebrated a first solo too bibulously. But a slightly mad juvenile was a new and unsettling phenomenon.

  She eyed the rather short, slim, fair-skinned youth who sat in her visitors’ chair, and made yet another attempt to understand; and to persuade him to understand, which was more important.

  ‘So you want to join the club?’

  ‘In a way, yes.’

  ‘To learn to fly.’ She did not put it as a question, this time: she tried to state it firmly as a fact, the logical and only reason for wishing to join a flying club; but, to her annoyance, she heard her voice falter as she faced that level, candid and half-amused stare. Inconsequentially a small voice at the back of her mind reminded her that if ever she had seen real flyer’s eyes she was looking into them now: pale grey-blue and sharp. Putting the distracting thought aside with mild annoyance she braced herself for the answer. If this exasperatingly persistent, apparently obtuse, and presumably runaway schoolboy repeated his absurdity about wanting to instruct, she felt she would have to scream.

  `No,’ he said, ‘I want to be an instructor.’

  Hold it, she told herself, this is what you’re paid for: to put up with imbeciles, and kids who would have stowed away on a sailing ship, for adventure, in the last generation. ‘Yes. Yes, of course. You want to instruct. Quite. But before you can do that you’ll have to learn to fly yourself, won’t you?’

  ‘But I can fly …’

  ‘How old are you? Sixteen … seventeen? When have you had time to learn to fly?’

  ‘I’m twenty-one,’ said Lacey, politely putting his logbook on the table.

  The secretary went so pale that she looked almost the same colour as her tormentor. She glanced at the first page of the log book. Flicked over about a dozen sheets. Muttered ‘two hundred and fifty hours’ under her breath, crossly, scrutinized his licence, and reached for the telephone. ‘Give me the Chief Flying Instructor,’ she said, not taking her eyes off her visitor with the deprecating manner.

  What’s up with her? Lacey was thinking, Surely I can’t have annoyed her? If I did … oh, sister! Wait until I really try to be irritating.

  Unexpectedly he smiled at her and she smiled back unthinking. ‘As a matter of fact, we have got a vacancy for another instructor …’

  The next twelve months were halcyon ones. Today he might be instructing, tomorrow flying by day or night around the Territorial Army gun sites to give the soldiers aiming practice; the next day, he might fly a club member down to London for a few hours’ business, the day after give joy-rides to cash customers at five shillings for ten minutes. ‘Flying at its best,’ he calls it, ‘none of this bus-driving like an
airline pilot has to do. Just the kind of flying I like.’

  Even his annual holiday was spent flying, on annual attachment to a regular R.A.F. squadron for training.

  On completing 250 hours’ flying, Volunteer Reserve pilots were invited to carry out these periods of duty by a letter from the Air Ministry. Young Lacey was delighted to see that the signatory was a group captain who courteously claimed to be ‘Your Obedient Servant’. Being, as he says, ‘very much a civilian’, he acknowledged the invitation with a gracious indication that he would be prepared to accept it provided that he went to a squadron flying single-seater fighters on the south coast. In order to make the group captain’s task easier, he went so far as to express a preference for No. I Squadron, at Tangmere (Sussex), which was equipped with Furies.

  Whether it was resignation which prompted the group captain, or kindness of heart or some innate sense warning him (as was to dawn on many others in the future) that he had encountered simultaneously an immovable obstacle and an irresistible force, is not known; but one afternoon in late January 1939 saw Sargeant Lacey arrive at Tangmere for six weeks’ attachment.

  The Hawker Fury was slightly smaller than the two-seat Hart. Its wing span was over 7 ft. less, its fuselage about 3 ft. shorter and it had a loaded weight some 500 lb. lighter. Moreover, its top speed was 240 m.p.h.

  For three weeks, the laconic Volunteer Reserve sergeant pilot from Yorkshire revelled in the high speed and manoeuvrability of this fighter; in the formation flying that called on every ounce of his skill and experience; in shooting at a towed drogue. It was the last that gave rise to most comment among the regulars. Sergeant Lacey’s flying ability was high enough to win mild praise: nobody expected much of a mere amateur weekend flyer and he was, after all, a professional pilot in civilian life. But his marksmanship was far above average and was partly explained by the quickness with which he picked out other aircraft when a formation went up on battle practice. His outstandingly good eyesight was responsible for both the first warning that ‘hostile’ aircraft were approaching and for the extraordinary number of hits he could score on an air-gunnery target.