MY RAF JOURNEY SERIES – PART 1

Divine Intervention

MY RAF JOURNEY SERIES – PART 1

Divine Intervention
This is a story about an international adventure of the most life-altering kind. But as with all great adventures, it was enriched by the swings of encountering both light and dark shadows: the yin and yang, ever present in any big endeavour. It is a story about growth, triumph, larger-than-life experiences – but also of spies, secret services and aircraft sabotage. And – ultimately – about gratitude and humility. I will express my musings as streams of consciousness, rather than as a CV of chronological events. Here goes….

My grandfather was a Colonel in the British army (Legal Branch) during the Second World War. My father was a Major in the Royal Rhodesian Regiment in Lusaka, where I was born, in the pre-Zambian-independence era. An initial British military journey seemed to flow in my blood from the get-go.

I began building WWII model aircraft at St John’s Prep: mainly the Airfix brand. I ran around the school’s corridors with my wooden ruler held in front of me as a ‘wing’, with its natural aerodynamic shape and banked it around the corners as a rudimentary flying simulation experience. My pens were ‘rockets’: especially Parker pens. Everything I imagined could fly, did ‘fly’ in a world of make-believe and that excited me. My enduring regret was that I had lived ‘out of sequence’ in that being an RAF fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain would have been my ultimate calling, had time and circumstances permitted that. As it happened, such a cruel denial was eventually to be mitigated in a series of twists of a ‘Plan B’. Someone ‘Up there’ was listening to my boyhood grievance.