Air Stories, April 1936 — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AIR STORIES moment at the school was that perilous game known as ‘ Follow-my-Leader ’— you know, the first pilot of a string carries out some stunt, the more hair- raising the better, and all the rest have to imitate him in turn, or else drop out and go and play with someone else. So the C.I.’s veto on stunting near the ground wasn’t very popular. ‘<It was simply ignored at first. The lads just used to fly off somewhere out of sight and carry on with the game. So the Colonel, getting wind of this, put the under-officers * on to the job of playing spy. You can imagine what happened ; the under-officers didn’t like the prefect system any more than we did. They either took care not to be around when the rule was being broken, or else, when they did see us playing the fool, pretended they hadn’t. They were all sportsmen—except one. ‘* Well, one morning a crowd of half a dozen of us on S.E. 5’s foregathered for a friendly game—the usual—over a village some fifteen miles from the aerodrome. We were all of us near the end of our training and expected to get our pips and be sent out here to a service squadron within a fortnight. ‘<The fellow who happened to be ‘leader’ that morning—lI forget his name—was leading us the very deuce of a dance—splitairing about all over the place and doing the most crazy things with his ’bus. Several had dropped out, unable to follow suit, and there were now only two of us still following the leader. I was last in the line. ‘<I didn’t see the stranger ’*bus approaching from the left. Nor did the leader, or he wouldn’t have attempted the stunt he next pulled off. ‘‘ There was a long white road ahead of us, and what he actually did was to put down his nose and dive down towards it at full throttle. The angle of dive was forty-five degrees, I should say. On the ' further side of the road the telegraph wires ran parallel, and this fellow, just when I thought he was going to bury his prop. in the ditch, yanks the stick * In some R.F.C. cadet wings, under-officers were chosen from senior cadets. 2 back into his chest and zooms upwards, having actually passed under the telegraph wires. ‘Well, this was a bit too hair-raising for the fellow ahead of me, and, after making a feeble sort of throttled-down dive, he pulls up his nose when a hundred yards or so away from the road and clears off to make room for me. ‘<T didn’t like the look of that stunt a bit, and the closer to the ground my power-dive brought me, the more windy I got. You know what it feels like when your bones seem to have turned to plasticine—horrid. By the time I had decided I would pull out of it, though, it was too late. I shot down under those wires and pulled in the stick just in time. wheels brushed the grass. ‘‘Up at a safe height again, I felt like a dog with three tails—you always do after pulling off those damn-silly ‘ coffin-for-one’ stunts—and when the stranger bus ranged himself alongside me I just waved him a cheerio. I was feeling proud of myself and hoped he’d seen me. He had. I saw him give a sickly kind of grin and make a note of the number of my ’bus—very ostenta- tiously. It wasn’t a cheering sight. ‘ Still,’ I thought, ‘I shan’t be the only one on the mat’... That’s where I was wrong.’’ es EXT morning,’’ Westringham con- tinued, ‘‘ there was only one of us up before the Cockroach, and that one was me. The old devil gave me both barrels. ‘A cadet incapable of obeying orders forfeits the right to give them to others. I deem you, young man, unworthy of holding the King’s Commission !’—and so on.’’ ‘‘The under-officer had a grudge against you,’’ I suggested. The Hon. Charles Edward nodded. ‘‘He most certainly had. Well, now you know, Trevelyan,’’ he added with a rueful grin, ‘‘why I’m wearing these ’’—he touched his sergeant’s stripes and then nodded at my pips—‘‘ instead of those.’’ 94 I could have sworn my > COnniclooo SJ (Cl Q)