Spink Medals 12044 pages:Layout 1
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September 6, 2012 - LONDON aircraft being brought to grief. The same stock shots are wheeled out regularly to support documentary and news items to do with the battles in the air of the Second World War. That thumb on the firing button, which must have been seen by more people than any thumb in history, is my claim to immortality. Reader, the thumb is mine.’ (ibid) Kingcome struggled with early post war business ventures, despite having initial success with a Rolls-Royce hire company in partnership with old friend and colleague Wing Commander Paddy Barthropp, D.F.C., A.F.C. Despite it being several years after the War he found himself still ‘newsworthy’, ‘I was subject of headlines I could have done without, though how it came to be regarded as a news item I will never understand. It happened when I embarked on married life, though the origins of the story were to be traced back over the years to the days of Biggin Hill in Kent in 1940. About seven miles from the airfield was the White Hart at Brasted, the pub known by 92 Squadron as ‘our pub’, and not far up the road from the pub their lived a pair of identical female twins, the daughters of Sir Hector Macneal, in the Red House. They were tall, elegant, sophisticated and beautiful young women, and as if that were not enough in itself, they were also rich... the twins had style in abundance. The elder, by ten minutes or so, was Moira. She had two children... Her husband was an Air Commodore who was then doing a stint in the Middle East. The younger twin was Sheila, who had been married to Squadron Leader Freddie Shute, a fighter pilot killed earlier that year... After Freddie’s death Sheila moved with their small daughter, Lesley, then not much more than a toddler, to join Moira in the Red House. There the twins, with their good looks, lavish generosity and captivating personalities became the centre of an elite coterie of fighter pilots, of which 92 Squadron inevitably formed the core. After the White Hart had reluctantly shut its doors at closing time, as often as not we decamped en bloc to round off the evening at the twins’. There was another bonus from this friendship in that it became possible for me to cover the seven miles of winding road between Biggin and the White Hart at Brasted in seven minutes with the help of a specially modified and tuned Jaguar SS100. This outstandingly beautiful car had belonged to Freddie Shute, who used to race it at Brooklands, and his widow, Sheila, let me have the loan of it. The Squadron was not stood down in the evenings until thirty minutes past last light, which could be alarmingly close to ‘last orders’. Every minute saved on the journey between airfield and pub was therefore vital and the car a godsend... I became very close to the twins at the Red House, till my posting to the D.A.F. in 1943, when I lost contact. I had also met their father several times at Biggin Hill. Sir Hector Macneal... known affectionately as the ‘Black Knight’, was a friend of Beaverbrook, who was given the task of overseeing aircraft production by Churchill... After the war was over Sir Hector moved into a flat in Piccadilly close to the Air Force Club and he and I started seeing quite a lot of each other as neighbours.’ Through this close geographical proximity Kingcome got reacquainted with the family, and one night Macneal threw a party in his flat, ‘the indefatigable ‘Black Knight’, by then in his mid-eighties, moved on to some night spot or other with the bulk of his guests, though I stayed behind, no doubt because I was too broke to go. Also staying behind to help with the clearing up was Sheila’s now grown up daughter Lesley, and as I sat there idly, glass of whisky in hand, I watched her restoring things to some sort of order. I had to admit I was staggered by the transformation in the interval of what seemed only a few short years. The toddler of just the other day had grown into a bewitching young woman capable of stopping London’s traffic. And my heart.’ (ibid) Kingcome proposed there and then and several weeks later they were married in St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, ‘The occasion was a huge success, and we stayed the night at a hotel on Monkey Island in the Thames near Bray, before leaving early
next morning for Heathrow, en route for Germany. As we relaxed in our seats in the aircraft, waiting for take-off, we casually glanced at the morning papers which the stewardess was distributing. The press had done it again: turned the facts upside down for the sake of a good story. The headlines screamed at us: “They Said He’d Marry Mother But Lesley Is The Bride.’ Memories of Biggin Hill, 1940-42 ‘What did you do in the War, Daddy?’ ‘Get drunk in the White Hart at Brasted, my son.’ Not all the time, perhaps, but it was certainly not unknown.... No doubt about it, of all the members of the fighting forces during the last war, the fighter pilot, had the most enviable of jobs..... The Spitfire pilot in 1940, charged with the defence of his homeland, faced a longish day of course - from half an hour before dawn to an hour after dusk - but he flew from a warm comfortable base with the most versatile of all fighter aircraft, and it being a single-seater he was more or less master of his own fate. I suppose at the height of the Battle of Britain we averaged three, sometimes four, sorties a day, but a sortie seldom lasted more than an hour, and we had the immense moral advantage of fighting over own territory. It’s surprising how fierce one’s protective instincts become at the sight of an enemy violating one’s homeland, and how comforting the knowledge that if one is shot down one at least has a chance of living to fight another day.... Of all the places from which to operate, as I did from August 1940 to June 1942, Biggin Hill was way out in front. It was superbly placed, both operationally and socially. Operationally we were just far enough inland from the main German approach lanes to give us time to climb flat out due north to the enemy’s altitude before turning south to hit him head on, by far the most effective and damaging form of attack, usually somewhere over mid-Kent. The social aspects of Biggin Hill exhausts me just thinking about them. When we were stood down half an hour after dusk there was the choice of either scooting up to London... an evening at Shepherds and the Bag of Nails... or the White Hart at Brasted, where five shillings kept us in beer until the local bobby moved us on at closing time. Then, with a few girlfriends, on to our billets... Where one of our pilots, a pianist... would play into the small hours, and we would finally snatch an hour or two’s sleep in arm chairs, fully dressed to save time and effort getting up for dawn readiness. Then at the dispersal hut with the unforgettable sound of Merlin engines warming up in the grey half-light, the squadron doctor dispensing his miracle cure (would that I had kept the recipe) from a tin bucket, occasionally a pilot, suffering more than usual, climbing into his cockpit for a quick rejuvenating whiff of neat oxygen. And then the inevitable stomach-churning ring of the telephone and the voice from Ops: ’92 Squadron, scramble. One hundred plus bandits approaching Dungeness at Angels Fifteen.’ The surge of adrenalin, the half dozen or so pilots, that were all we could normally muster, sprinting to their aircraft, the tiredness and the hangovers disappearing as though they had never been, the flat-out climb to 20,000ft, the mud on our flying boots freezing fast to our rudder bars in our unheated and unpressurised cockpits, the long shallow tension-building dive south to meet the enemy, sometimes seeing the sun lift over the horizon from 20,000ft and again, after landing, on the still darkened earth. The day only just begun and already behind us the savage, lethal action, death for some, and for those safely back on the ground the memory of two sunrises in one morning and thoughts quickly suppressed of friends not yet accounted for. And life, at least until the next telephone call. Adrenaline-filled life. One sustained electrifying high. I remember Biggin Hill with enormous affection.’
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