大象传媒

It's doubtful if people forget very much. They may not always be able to remember, but deep down in the recesses of that labyrinthine thing called the human mind, you can be sure that there are millions of records waiting to be called up into conscious memory. Something triggered a recollection of a war-time incident for me and it all came back as if it had happened yesterday, instead of forty five years ago.

It was September 1944 and I had Just been posted to No.26 Operational Training Unit at R.A.F. Wing, in Bedfordshire. Oh the trouble and confusion that address must have given the R.A.F. "Yes airman, I know it's an R.A.F. Wing but I want to know where it is, not what it is.

Anyway there I was. I'd Just passed an idyllic six months at navigation school on the Isle of Man, including two months doing nothing much when they took our Avro Ansons away for the Normandy invasion. What, for Pete's sake, did they do with Ansons in the Normandy invasion? However, I digress; something of a habit of navigators, so I've been told.

It was at Wing that I met all my crew with the exception of the flight engineer who was to come later at Heavy Conversion Unit. The bomb aimer was an elderly thirty year old, a mounted policeman in civilian life, but the rest of us were teen-age striplings. No, that's not quite true, because the skipper himself must have been all of twenty one. He was a beefy, freckle faced and ginger haired Aussie who had already put in a couple of years in the Australian army fighting the Japanese before he decided to come and help the Poms sort it all out.

We all got on well together and we put up quite a good show in our training which was uneventful except for oxygen lack. What was that you say? Oxygen lack? Yes, that was the little matter which surfaced in my convoluted mind before I started digressing.

The point was this you see. In non-pressurised aircraft, above a certain altitude, you need a supply of oxygen otherwise your brain doesn't work properly - no personal comments if you please. In order to bring this point home, the authorities, like the Air Ministry with their local reps., the Chief Flying Instructor and the Medical Officer, used to stick the budding aircrews into a decompression chamber and drop the pressure to an equivalent of say, 20,000 feet altitude.

Absolutely Super. No problem at all with oxygen masks. But then came the rub. A volunteer was required to take his mask off to demonstrate the effects of oxygen lack to the rest of the crew. To a man we all volunteered the skipper's services and we watched with interest as, without oxygen, his face paled, his brow glistened and he gently slid into unconsciousness. For all the world it was just as if he'd had fourteen pints of best bitter.

Following instructions from the intercom, we stuck his mask back on, turned the oxygen up to full bore, and he came back to life. He didn't remember a thing of his time without oxygen. All very interesting.

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