大象传媒

CHAPTER 4
In May I was posted to No 4 SFTS at Saskatoon some 200 miles to the North of Assiniboia. Here we graduated on to Cessna Cranes, twin engined 4 seat aircraft which were more like private planes than service ones. Again it was an easy and pleasant plane to fly. The area around Saskatoon was just as flat and monotonous as before. However there was the difference of wooded country and lakes to the North of us and the nearby Saskatchewan River was a prominent landmark.
Saskatoon was a small city and the Bessborough Hotel was well known in the Province. The camp was only a mile or two outside town and it was easy to go into town for food and entertainment. There were several social clubs to be found and at one of them I met a nice girl, a keen singer training locally as a mezzo soprano.
Erna lived at Hague, a small farming community 30 miles north of town. She was the youngest of four daughters. Her parents were German and had come to Canada before the first world war. Father was the village postmaster and spoke mainly German in the home. I was invited home on one occasion and found that the family lived quite humbly. It was the first time that I had eaten sweetcorn straight out of the garden and it tasted good with the hamburgers. I had to remember my danke sch枚ns and bitte sch枚ns! The sheets on my bed were sewn-together flour bags! But perfectly adequate.
Flying conditions were for the most part ideal, with cloudless skies and unlimited visibility. Towards the end of the summer there were days when flying was cancelled due to smoke haze that arrived from bush fires hundreds of miles to the West of us in the Rocky Mountains. When flying at night, the lights of the communities could be seen up to a hundred miles away. In fact it was difficult to get lost in this sort of climate and a very different situation from what we were to encounter when we returned to Europe with its constantly changing weather conditions. It was easy to see why all the aircrew were sent to America or South Africa for their flying training. It would have taken vastly longer to get in the necessary hours if trained in the European climate and of course there was no problem of interference by the enemy.
There were exciting moments again when flying here. On one occasion I was practising solo night take-offs and landings and it was normal practice to take over from another student when he had completed his turn, without stopping the engines. It was the middle of the night and as I left the ground I felt the plane shudder and vibrate badly. I carefully continued the procedure for the circuit, flying crosswind then downwind. As I peered out of the side window watching for the green aldis light from the control wagon that would give me permission to land, I turned my head back a little and saw to my horror that the entry door over the wing root was open. Somehow it had not been closed properly when I got into the plane. It was impossible to reach the door to close it now. I decided to go ahead with my landing but made my approach a good deal faster than usual, in case the turbulence caused a premature stall. Fortunately there was no problem.
From time to time we made navigation flights in Avro Anson aircraft and had to do all the chart work for dead reckoning navigation. These flights would sometimes take us down to Estevan near the US border and back. We practised flying 9 plane formations and even 18 plane formations and it was very tricky if you were on an inside position when executing a turn. The plane on the outside had to fly as fast as he could and the inside plane as slow as possible without stalling. A game we would play when flying in 3 plane formation line astern, was for the leading plane to just skim the tops of clouds forcing those behind to go into the cloud, since they would be in position flying a few feet lower.
Towards the end of the course our instructors decided the students should try out a new exercise. We were sent on a solo low level formation navigation flight. It was a triangular course and only about 2 hour's duration with grain elevators as turning points. We were to fly no lower than 300 feet. It ended up with a court-martial for one of us and reprimands for the rest. We had decided it would be more interesting to fly at 50 feet round the grain elevators. One pilot crossing a lake found his rev-counters suddenly registered a lot higher than he expected due to clipping the tips off his wooden propellers on the water. Several others collected birds in the leading edges of their wings. We were lucky to walk away from it.
At the end of the course I had completed 366 hours flying in Canada. 124 hours as pilot, another 168 hours under tuition and 74 hours as passenger. It was now October and I had the chance to spend a few days leave in Vancouver. It was a superb trip on the CNR train through the Rockies by way of Edmonton, Jasper and Kamloops. We stopped at one point where there was a magnificent view of Mount Robson, at 12000 feet the highest peak in the Rockies and the vastness of the forests and mountains amazed me. No signs of habitation for hours on end and yet the comfort of seeing it all from a train. We ended up in the valley of the Fraser river famous for its apple orchards and for its salmon. Whilst in Vancouver I contacted a relative, Dick Fairhead, who lived in Capilano, just outside the city and also met Eve, Erna's sister who worked at the Hudson Bay Company store there and took her dancing one night. I slept at the YMCA Hostel and met up with three of my friends from Saskatoon. Gil Bradner lived in Vancouver and borrowed his father's car to take us around. It was the first time I had been to a drive-in eating place. This one was called the Green Spot.
I was impressed with Stanley Park with its beautiful trees and Indian totem-poles. Not far away was the Lyons Gate suspension bridge that stretched across the water to the wooded mountain slopes on the other side. I walked across the Capilano suspension bridge, a small and seemingly fragile pedestrian bridge that swung with every step. It all seemed very wonderful and the perfect place to live, where you could ski in the winter and swim in the summer. Seeing the Pacific Ocean seemed to be a milestone in my travels. I was conscious of how lucky I was, travelling the world and enjoying my flying, things I had always dreamed of in my schooldays.
The time passed quickly and when I returned to Saskatoon it was to receive my wings. It was the most important day of my life in the airforce and the parade was a memorable one. Our RCAF band took part, complete with our glamorous redhead drum major with her long white boots and white gauntlets. Every member of the course had his photograph taken receiving his wings from Wing Commander Greenwood, as well as a group photo of the entire course. Everybody qualified as a sergeant on the day but my commission as a Pilot Officer was handed to me as we left the camp to make the train trip back to Moncton, New Brunswick. There was a little bit of bickering about the unfairness of the system of awarding commissions but this soon settled down.
The Wings Parade was of course celebrated by most individuals in the form of a fairly riotous drinking session at the Bessborough Hotel in town. I remember returning to our sleeping quarters and turning all the lights on at some unearthly hour, much to the displeasure of the rest of the dormitory.
A few days later we set off on the train back across Canada to Moncton, New Brunswick, where we were held for 3 weeks until a ship was ready to take us back to the U. K.
At Halifax, Nova Scotia, we embarked on HMT Mauretania. We had sergeant's stripes on our sleeves as our commissions had not yet been formally presented. However this soon caught up with us. While we had been waiting at Moncton, my friend Johnnie Harrison, a Jamaican, tried to persuade me to fly home with him for a few days. I was too worried about being court-marshalled if I missed the boat. In fact all would have been well and I regretted missing the opportunity. Johnnie managed to hitch rides on various aircraft, a common enough practice in those days and he got back in time!

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