Six-Three-Three

It was bright and lovely, my first day at school; a great wide expanse of playground took the light from the September sun and bounced it back at me, like some vision of the future, of all that I could do know that the professionals had hold of me. The bit of the school for us infants was simply a number of wooden huts on stilts, the doors of which were up steps at the front, where I am sure we would have sat had we been allowed. I was four and free and of course, homesick. One day, the big school was closed and we had the whole playground to ourselves so we stuck out our arms and turned into planes, skimming over the white line that marked our border, like Mosquito bombers- the Timber terrors, hugging the contours of the French countryside on their way to flatten something. We made the right noise, the throb and gritty crackle of Merlins, something all boys knew then, only 25 years after the end of the war.

Skimming fast over the asphalt, we are up against the brick and glass of big school, dropping our 500 lb bombs as we wheel and pull up round the bike sheds and then back as fast as possible to our bases on the other side of the channel to be refuelled, rearmed and sent back to crush the krauts. Think of the Dambusters speeding over the grey of the channel, lifting gently over the southern coast and then along the canals to do their worst. We knew all that, we had all the history of a war that was like yesterday to our parents and it was good and great and we couldn’t imagine anything being better. Stick those silhouettes up on the wall and I can still tell you what most of them are, Dornier, Typhoon, Heinkel and the Meteor from the future. We could tell you all of those and all the more common dinosaurs. A fried of my mother’s can tell you the time he first saw a meteor, and one of my aunts will complain about being left alone as a Doodlebug hit the cliffs over which she was standing while all the men in the troop hit the floor. And maybe these are separate stories but in my head I see the Meteor chasing and tipping the Doodlebug with its slipstream, sending it to nothing more than a noisy, wet end in the surf and gravel. Its not the same today; the death and injury is more real these days and, quite rightly, small boys want to be David Beckham rather than Douglas Bader. The result of a laser guided bomb going off is a bit more in-your-face than the voiced explosions of our pretend bombs chipping away at the school walls. I’ll paint my face black and sit in the bushes, guiding my mates into the target area by swinging a torch at them. The grey of today makes me think of all those war games, the sky like the skimming sea as it speeds under and over us, like hanging upside down with the river below us.