[WWI] How did you get here

[Helen and Chris]

> Another angle, how'd you get here?  

Mine was a much more tortuous route.  As a kid, I was a great reader.  Aged about  8 or 9, I was seriously into the Biggles books.

Around that time, Woolworths (a chain of shops connected to, but different from, the American chain and now, as of two days ago, no more) were offering "classic" books at very low prices in hardback.  Amongst the titles were two(?) early Biggles books describing his exploites as a Camel pilot with 266 squadron in France.

My imagination was fired and I started to write my own stories.  Very quickly, even as a kid, I found I needed more information.  In those days, it was hard to get.

Then, someone bought me an Airfix kit of a Camel.  Disappointed that it was an RNAS kit and not an RFC one, I nonetheless cobbled the thing together.  It took about 10 minutes.

Huge stalagmites rose from horizontal surfaces where they had come into contact with gluey fingures. The top wing was about 40% in alignment with the bottom wings. Decals found their own resting places and paint was something for the future.

This got refined as the Aifix and Revell range was discovered and built. Ish. 

But the WW1 stuff ran out very quickly.  So I moved onto WW2 stuff and the Spits my dad flew and the Lancs my uncle captained. Politics quickly raised their collective heads and I was forbidden to depict the aircraft of certain pilots.  Interestingly, they were all Allied pilots.

>From what I can remember, Stanford-Tuck and his bunch of Merry Men were good guys.  Mention of Jonnie Johnson was an invitation to make an appointment with a dentist.

An ace in his own right, my father had respect and admiration for Adolf Galland, so I was allowed to assemble a Me 262.

Although I was allowed to build the DH89 Dragon Rapide that he flew us in to north Africa in 1951 when I was 3 (the build came much later), his censorship and the lack of available kits deadened my interest.

Until a couple of years ago when I was messing about on e-Bay and discovered there were kits I'd never heard of going for not a lot of money.

That's how I got here.

Chris.



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