大象传媒

My father was a soldier in the First World War. He was just over age for miltary service in WW2, so he was placed on essential war work after he had worked in a hospital in the east end of London during the blitz and was badly injured by fling glass when a land mine exploded nearby.
He then became trained as a semi-skilled aircraft fitter and he was sent to an airfield at Burford on the Oxfordshire/Gloucestershire border and was put to work patching up Spitfires that had been shot up in battle. It was very much a case of make-do-and mend in the beginning and of getting them back into the air. When he could see that more and more brand-new engines and parts were becoming available, he joined a group that said the end of the war could be speeded up by the starting of a Second Front to relieve the Red Army which was steadily making its way towards Germany.
He was supplied with batch of posters calling for this Second Front. Working with him was a chap with a bike who offered to go around the local twons and villages sticking them up in prominentlocations.
off went our paperhanging cyclist one evening and he was missing for quite a time. He then returned and triumphantly reported that all the posters had been put up.
The following day, my father was perched aloft on a Spitfire, when the foreman told him that the police wanted to talk with him.
He coudn't think what he had possibly done wrong.
They were plain-clothed police officers and they asked him if he had put up, or organised any illegal fly posting. Ther was panic in Oxfordshire that day because our resourceful cyclist had only stuck two of these posters on the front gates of no less an establishment as Blenheim Palace, the home of the Churchill family - known as the Dukes of Marlborough - I expect old Winston saw the funny side of that, but my father told me that our intrepid was never aware of the irony of the situation. My father denied being involved, but I dont think they believed him, but they had no concrete evidence.
But he said that you'd have thought that with all the resulting panic that ensued that he had committed a major crime.

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