William Tweddle Audio memoir. Four

William Tweddle Audio memoir. Four

Continuation of the self recorded report of Doug Tweddle about his experiences at 9 Squadron, RAF Bardney during the Second World War. Doug was awarded an DFC for being on all three attacks on the Tirpitz. However, that actual medal took four years to arrive. On return from operations he had lost two crews from the same billet. He was diverted to the emergency airfield at RAF Woodbridge and discusses the experience of using the emergency airfield.

00:48:31 audio recording

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— and long sloping earth supports so really it was difficult to get a bomb into it to burst it and as subsequently proved we didn’t. But what we were worried about with that was that the Urft Dam had retained enough water to be able to flood the valley down [unclear] way to about five or six feet. And the Germans had an engineer unit sitting on the dam and it was wired for blowing and they were expecting the Americans to commit their armour to attack across this valley and it was the German intention to flood it so they asked us to try and take it out first and we had a go. They made a big mistake. They let the main force that was supporting us go in first and of course they just created a great deal of dirt which made accurate aiming with Tallboys afterwards rather difficult. So not a very clever thing and we were diverted that night to Odiham on the way back because of bad weather. The next sortie, I was getting now towards the end of my thirtieth. I was on about my twenty eighth and at that stage of the game we hadn’t made our mind up whether we were going to go on to forty five or back up to thirty and at that time Margaret, my first daughter was about to be born. Anne. Well, not about to be but it was in the, in the air and I thought well it might make life a little easier if I’m not operating. So the crew said, ‘Well, whatever you do Dougie is ok with us.’ So when I said to Jim Bazin, ‘I rather feel at the moment, Jim that in fairness to Margaret I ought to give it a rest.’ So he said, ‘Oh, in that case, Doug get it over with quickly.’ So that accounts for my next two entries which were December the 17th and December the 18th when I took a twelve thousand pound bomb to Munich but not the twelve thousand pound Tallboy but an HC bomb, high-capacity bomb which really was a fancy way of saying three four thousand pound cookies bolted together and it was a long bomb as you can imagine. The bomb stretched the full length of a Lanc bomb bay. But then it was down to have a devastation area of a quarter of a mile square. Well, we gathered old Butch was rather annoyed that Munich had had a bit of a pasting but there was a piece of Munich between 12 o’clock and about 2 o’clock using clock square as not touched and this was rather an upset to Butch. So, he wanted this particular piece taken out so it was decided that the markers would go down in the [Sportsplatz] in Munich and that we would fly with our big ones. We would do timed runs over the markers. If you can imagine running up towards 12 o’clock, the next line is running at a minute past twelve, two minutes past twelve and you gradually take out the segment and then on a time basing you would drop so many seconds after markers and drop them along the line you might say of the direction. I know I haven’t explained that very well but that’s what it’s about. Well, I remember that night we, we went the long way around and took it out from the bottom. We went past Mont Blanc and I remember seeing it absolutely clear like in a photograph when looking down. Then we flew across the north plain of Italy. The Milan. As a matter of fact subsequently I was walking along that [unclear] to Venice on many occasions and we flew along there and then turned northwards and came up to Munich via the Brenner. And as you appreciate on these trips towards the end of the war the whole crew was to stick absolutely on timing and in order to, to keep yourself clear of night fighters. That whole business there was done in about two or three minutes. H hour, I think, I’m guessing now but I think H hour was about 1 o’clock in the morning and the whole business had to be finished by about three minutes past. And that was the way to do it because if you lingered and you were five or ten minutes later the odds are that if you hadn’t got it right in the first place the night fighter controller would have his kites up quickly and you were in trouble. So I remember that was done rather, well per book and we got back. The only thing that surprised me was that we came back, we passed [unclear] on the left and [unclear] had been taken out that night by the Halifaxes from 4 Group and it was on fire all right. And again on my post war trips I remember staying at a place called [unclear] near [unclear] in a little village place. I think what really happened there was that they decided to rebuild the place again almost. But what happened again we were, we were fired at on what we took to be the wrong bombing line. We always had an idea where our ground forces were and we were getting shot at what we took to be our territory and subsequently I think we found that that was when the hun had gone through Ardennes, the Belfort Gap and was in fact well beyond what we took to be the line. But I remember a little joke about that later. I was listening to, to [Coleman] the sports laddie talking about the Munich Olympics about the time when it was on and he said that this magnificent stadium of course when they’d cleaned a lot of the bombing rubbish out of Munich they had taken it outside and this had been the bulk of the aggregate and what have you for the construction of this magnificent place. And I remember saying to Margaret well I would have thought that being one of the principal contractors the least they can do to us is to send us a couple of tickets for the Olympics complimentary. But I don’t know. I never did think they had a sense of humour over in that part of the world. So we never made it. However, that was the only occasion that I dropped one of those twelve thousand pound HC bombs. As a matter of fact I don’t think many of them were dropped but they were certainly a vicious looking thing. No streamlining at all. The Tallboy was a beautiful bomb but this HC thing was, was really a villain. Now, the next day I was saying I went on two nights. The next was December the 18th and we went to Gdynia in Poland. You know, Gdnia, Gdansk where it is all happening. We went there chasing the Lützow which was one of the cruisers of that time. I think we were getting rather ambitious and I was wind finding again on that trip and it was a long one because we went up over the Baltic and I remember again cutting across the bottom tip of the Swedish neutral part and I was flying about twenty minutes ahead of the main force on this, on this wind finding lark and I was finding the wind in, in the bay there off Konigsberg and north of Gdynia. And on this occasion the only occasion not having got a fixed point in which to orbit my rear gunner we got a [flame] float out under the water and used that as a fixed point. Anyway, we got a wind. I don’t recall that the trip was very successful. I seem to remember later when we went in we got a bit of flak from a long narrow peninsula above Gdynia. I’ve an idea it’s called Hel. H E L. Because some considerable time after the war, it’s a few years ago now I took a rugby side to Poland for their fiftieth rugby anniversary time. That’s my sport actually and I went with two other oldies with a bunch of the lads and we went to play a week of rugby in Poland and we, we played a couple of our games up in Gdynia Gdansk area which is very pretty and they were nice people. An independent type of people. I can see why they caused trouble in Poland. They’ve got a streak of marine thinking in them. But we went and I remember standing on the dockside looking towards this Hel peninsula affair and I thought well I had a different view of that on the last occasion. But that was the 18th and I think we made up our minds about that time that we’d probably go on anyway. So I see it must have been around Christmas time too, December the [pause] yes where are we now? Yes. December the 28th and also probably a lot of bad weather about then because and I probably had some leave. But I notice my next entry was a ferrying trip up to Lossiemouth on the 26th of January. Of course, what was happening, John, what was happening about this time was as the more senior crews were becoming more clued up about Tallboy dropping that they were keeping us off main force targets because we had new crews coming in and they could cut their teeth on those.
[recording paused]
And the old boys were more useful on, for the Tallboy targets. You see they didn’t allow 9 Squadron to pull out of the general work. We did specialised targets working most of the time with 617 but we also were available for main force general work. So you can imagine our armourers had a hell of a rough time because they would bomb up the kites for Tallboys and they were so heavy that they used to have a special trolley with hydraulic pumps on the end of it and they would load that up on to the kite and then someone would say, ‘Oh, that trip is cancelled. Take it down and bomb it up for fifteen ones or a cookie and something for a general target.’ And they would change their mind again and down came the armourers. I don’t think they ever got any sleep. But another point of course was that by the time you fuelled up and put a Tallboy on board if you stood too long you wouldn’t do the Oleo legs any good and we didn’t have enough trolleys to run under the kite, jack it up and take the weight off. So all in all our armourers worked like hell. Every now and again Jim Bazin if we had a weekend stand down he’d come around the crews and get a quid a piece from us and he’d say we’re giving the armourers a drink tonight in the Jolly Sailor which was our pub at Bardney. Bardney village. We would go down and get the armourers drunk you know because they worked very hard. All of them did but in particular they had a bit of a job. So the younger crews who came in they sort of doubled up in a way and I remember at the time that a young Australian called [unclear] he’s, I forget which part of Australia he was in, he came along and he came, he used to fly Y. Fly on Youngers when I didn’t have it. You can imagine he got a hell of a briefing about what he must not do to it and to be fair to the lad he got himself as equally devoted to Y-Youngers as I was myself and he did a good job and he kept it out of trouble for which I’m very grateful. And later on he became somewhat more clued up himself and I’m not quite sure if he in turn didn’t get allocated the aircraft. You couldn’t monopolise these. You couldn’t say that’s mine and when I’m not flying when I’m on leave no one else can have it but which accounts for the fact that though I ultimately did thirty seven trips and I got the kite when it had done about twelve so we’re talking about forty nine, fiftyish. In fact, Y went on to do somewhere in the region I think of eighty two because they were very keen that before it went in for its first, for its big stripped down major that it beat whatever squadron record for between majors which was about eighty I think. So that’s why the odd other name appears as flying it you know. But I was first choice but only on those specific kinds of targets when we began to segregate Tallboy work from general work. That takes us to February the 3rd is my next entry and this was another trip back to Ijmuiden again. That was the Dutch place I was telling you about that we were chasing E-boat pens. Well, now we went after the pens again with a Tallboy and I was wind finding again on that and that was my thirtieth. That was my first tour completed but we had agreed that we would go on so that was the end of that. We just carried on. So the next one is the 6th of February and this was interesting. This was a day that I should definitely have stayed in bed and pulled the blankets over your head but I didn’t and it was a real day I was down to be out. We were going to Paderborn. At this stage of the game 617 and 9 were taking out the big bridges behind the Rhine. Montgomery was going to do his Rhine crossing and in order to slow down his supplies, the German supplies there were some big bridges to be taken out. They were still standing because there were originally four lines of rail on them and the Americans and ourselves early on had been there with the ordinary thousand pounders and frankly they weren’t the things for moving them. And when you flew over them they were peppered with small craters but this still meant that he could get his traffic in or behind the Rhine. So we were given some targets and 617 were given their share. The, Bielefeld was the one that got the Grand Slam on it later on, the twenty two thousand and we got ours and Paderborn was the one that we went for on the 6th of February. It was a viaduct, a big viaduct we burned down with a twelve thousand pound Tallboy. I was wind finding and we abandoned that. Oh no. This wasn’t the one when I nearly got written off. We abandoned that because of ten tenths cloud and we were diverted to Woodbridge. I remember this was amusing because we were flying, we used to fly then in like eighteen of us say nine and we would fly on like two stepped down columns through nine a piece. And I remember we were at the back at the time because it was easier to peel off for your wind finding and Jim Bazin called up from the front and asked my navigator, asked me if my navigator would give a course to turning point so and so. And then we quickly realised that he was leading and Doug Melrose who was deputy leader, something had gone wrong somewhere and old [unclear] was very chuffed to be navigating the squadron he said from the back. But when we got there it was still all ten tenths and we were diverted into Woodbridge. That’s that big wide long runway which the Americans have got at the moment down in the bottom corner of Norfolk. You know, around, [unclear] and that way. Well, I don’t know whether you’ve ever come in on a runway like that but its about six hundred yards of undershoot grass. Three thousand yards of asphalt which was a lot in those days and then about another five or six hundred yards of overshoot grass at the top end of that. There was one there at Woodbridge. There was another at Manston in Kent and there was one at Carnaby in Yorkshire and they were all on the sea coast so you could come in over the water. The object was to bring in damaged and distressed crews. It wasn’t unusual that a kite would call up and say, ‘Well, I’m flying this thing but I happen to be the navigator or the engineer and the skipper at the moment is either — ’ A dead or B badly injured. ‘What do I do?’ And believe it or not successful landings were made at a place like that with a bit of instruction and a bit of confidence because it had a lot of field and a lot of go and everyone had some idea what to do. So it was deemed worthwhile. There was only one interesting thing about it was it was about two hundred and fifty yards wide those runways. It was very wide and it made you realise what is important when you land anything is really your appreciation of width out of the corner of your eye in a way. It seemed the same when you probably remember you come in on a grass field you begin to see the height of the grass almost but when you come into a normal standard two thousand yard Bomber Command runway of less width than these your hold off point for touching down and you used to repoint a Lanc if you wanted, the holdoff point was very much determined about the side vision. The result was every kite I saw try to land on the Woodbridge’s and Carnaby’s held off at eight foot and fell in without fail. So it was so wide that if you were in a hurry and you were always going there on a bad weather diversion you could actually put almost two or three kites. You could put two kites down together. Perhaps even three if you were fine but you could get a lot of kites in quickly and that was why they were constructed. Another little more gruesome aspect was that the surface if there was a hole in the [unclear] there was a softish kind of asphalt that they had the necessary gear to very quickly fill it in and smooth it out again too ready for the next lot. Anyway, we were diverted to Woodbridge and I recall sitting around there trying to get something to eat and the Americans were there with their Fortresses and they were sitting around with those little caps of theirs with the edge pointed upwards you know and I remember one chap saying to me, ‘We’ve been all over Europe today, Bud.’ He said, ‘And I don’t think our leaders had a bloody clue where we were.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.’ I said, ‘It happens to us all.’ I didn’t want to let the side down by saying we were doing precisely the same but near enough. Anyway, we got diverted to Woodbridge so we were there overnight. We slept in a big heap somewhere. We came back the following day. And on the 10th I got my new bomb aimer Doug Jennings who I was telling you about that jumped out on his first trip and he came to join me because having completed his thirty Jack went back to Canada which was just as well because I’d been having a chat with the doc about him. When Jack was drinking a cup of tea the cup was jumping out of the saucer and landing again. He was obviously twitched a bit. The Doc said oh I think he’ll get away with it alright.’ But it was very suitable that his time was up and he went off back to Canada. Subsequently he got his DFC and we were all very pleased. But he, incidentally I didn’t say that Cas Shields and I, the navigator and myself got our immediate awards after Tirpitz which was about our twenty third trip and we got an immediate award because it worked out that we were on all three attacks. That was the attack from Russia and the unsuccessful one and the final sinking from Kinloss and Lossiemouth. A bit of good fortune in a way because by going on leave we may well have missed one of these trips. But anyway, another skipper called [Stohl. Stohl ] and I were the only two crews that made the three trips plus the wind finding extra that we did and Cas and I got immediate DFCs in ’44. As a matter of interest I said to Margaret, ‘Well, you’ll look a pickle if we go to the palace very pregnant.’ But that wasn’t to be and I was presented with my DFC by my postman in 1948. Four years later, on the doorstep and he came up and he said, ‘Here’s a very interesting package Doug. It’s got a Buckingham Palace postmark on it.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I know what that is. It’s been a hell of a time arriving.’ And when I unpacked it I had a little, a little half sheet of note paper with the Buckingham Palace postmark with George VI’s signature on the bottom saying, “I’m very sorry that I was unable to present this personally but I wish you well.” And, you know, Bob’s your uncle. So I just, just a few weeks ago I had the laddie in my local shop to put a frame around this and he made, you may not believe this, you may not like the taste but I was digging amongst my old photographs and I picked a sample of them out along with that palace one and this Cooper lad got me a copy of my citation which I didn’t know existed but there is a proper form in which your citation is written on. First by station commander, second by the base commander and finally by Cochy recommending the award. Well Cooper, just a matter of course about twelve months ago now got me a copy of this from Air Works so I got a few of these and photographs, two of which I’m sending to you and framed them and I said to my wife Margaret I’ve always been ambitious that these photographs along with the Humane Society Award is something that will go up in my toilet because when you think about it where can you get a captive audience without bragging? I mean if you hung them up in your hallway or in your lounge people would say oh big head but when they’re up on the walls in the toilet there is plenty of time to read them and if it takes longer than normal there’s nothing wrong with that. So that’s where they are. And I thought well the right thing to do I’m going to Dymotype and type, “Operations Room,” and so instead of WC on my upstairs toilet you’ve got Operations Room stamped on it. I’ve two walls. I’m hoping to add to it before things are over. But I’m not the first one to put things like that in the toilet. Anyway, that was the February the 6th. Then I was practice bombing on the tip of the 10th of February with Doug Jennings my new bomb aimer and I just realised when I read that that I gave you the wrong name. When I said that I took Cochrane to Tollerton to bomb instead of Wainfleet it wasn’t. It was to Epperstone. It’s in the same area. Epperstone. E P P E R S T O N E. And I drove past that not long ago. I saw a signpost pointing to it. One day I think I’ll go and have a look at that but that was the range we used. So on the 10th Doug introduced himself to the crew and we practice bombed but I remember Bazin, when he told me that this lad was joining me he said, ‘He's going to be one of two things Doug.’ Having jumped out of the first one, he said, ‘He’s going to be pretty good or pretty awful.’ Well, he turned out to be marvellous. A great deal. Very efficient. He, when we were doing daylights which most of ours were he was always pointing out suburbs and parts of Brussels when we went that way where he had stayed and ridden on trams. At one stage of the game he was billeted with a jeweller in a jeweller’s shop and when the Germans came in with their broken watches Doug used to give them a little talk on there was a mainspring problem and if they came back later he’d get it fixed. He could talk a little German and got away with it. He was a good boy. So we saw off the rest of our time with Jennings doing Jack Singer’s job. We went again to Paderborn on the 14th and again we abandoned it and we went again. We practice bombed again on the 20th and on the 22nd of February we finally bombed Paderborn. That was our third sortie to that viaduct with the same Tallboy. So we finally got rid of it. And you couldn’t, they were so expensive, the castings were done in America I believe and you couldn’t throw those away. Old Cochrane would sack you. March. March the 9th we practiced bombing again at Epperstone. There was no let up on this. It didn’t matter how much you were doing. Now, we were doing some fighter affiliation with, occasionally did that with cameras and with a fighter. With another fighter. Now, this was the day that I said I should have stayed in bed. March the 13th. Lancaster Y operations Arnsberg. That’s another bridge. Again a Tallboy, and we were wind finding and that morning I took off in the Lanc and as I was going down the runway it suddenly swerved to the left and I couldn’t straighten it up. Not immediately. And down the left-hand side of our runway there was some sodium lights, quite big things but by really good luck and what have you we sort of picked our way between them but we definitely had the port wheel off the runway and I jiggled around. I got it back on again and we actually got airborne but with obviously with reduced power and I just got up to about two or three hundred feet and then throttled back as you normally would do, you know. Well, we were flying then these upgraded Merlins. I think they were Merlin 24 but they were high powered. The highest-powered Merlin. It had no going through the box at the top. You just opened it straight up and I remember the Rolls Royce man who used to live with us at 9, a Rolls Royce civvy engineer used to say, ‘For God’s sake get the revs up because you’re really pushing that engine, you know.’ But when I throttled back on this this flame that had dived out of my starboard inner quietened down and I felt that I could sort of manage so I continued and joined up and went off and did the sortie. But again we didn’t drop it. We ran into bad weather again and we were bringing the bomb back. Well, the weather was very poor and that was the day that 617 were going to for Bieldefeld with the big bomb, the twenty two and they were diverted to Carnaby which was the Yorkshire field. And 9 tried to get back in on its own field, Bardney which most of them did but when I came to the field and was going on the downwind leg when you dropped your undercart and opened up the rev the pitch again I got this big flame again and had to feather the starboard. The starboard inner. I called up and told them the problem and they diverted me to Waddington. They said, ‘No one is operating out of Waddington. You’ve got the field to yourself. See if you can get down there.’ So I went over to Waddington which is quite close to our base command base station and called up Waddo. Identified myself. The usual pattern, ‘Have you got any hangups?’ From the girl in the tower. She said, ‘Have you got any hangups?’ I said, ‘Yes. One.’ She said, 'What is it?’ I said, 'It’s a twelve thousand pound Tallboy.’ At which I could sort of hear the consternation that went on by the tone of her voice and she came back, ‘Go to Carnaby. Clear.’ I said, ‘I can’t go to Carnaby. My navigator, my engineer and navigator tell me we are down to a hundred and fifty gallons.’ At which you normally thought about getting out of a Lanc. ‘And we can’t go to Carnaby.’ In the meantime before, I tried about three times to line up on the main runway at Waddington and I kept drifting away. I had no, certainty there that I could control there. So my navigator figured out that, he said, ‘Doug, if we go in a straight line to Carnaby without any [pause] without any frills we might just make it.’ So I said, ‘Right, we’re going. Tell them by the way to put all the lights on. The lot. Because I’m coming in from the sea and I’m coming in once.’ So that’s true. It was like Blackpool Illuminations. So I came in over the sea on three engines with a Tallboy doing a hundred and thirty knots. I wasn’t going to stall on that one. And I was telling you the length of these fields. Well, I used the lot. I used the entire length of the main runway, taxied up from the top and the taxi track was a great big horseshoe shape and I taxied around on that and parked and there were all the 617 people including these two Lancasters with no turret in the nose, no bomb bays, no mid-upper and had, instead of where the bomb bay should be virtually a stream lined hole and this enormous Grand Slam just like a hen sitting on a big egg you know. Anyway, I remember sneaking into the billet, in this emergency billet and I heard them in the darkness saying, ‘Who the hell is this 9 man that’s here?’ Because there was always a tremendous rivalry between the two squadrons. They worked together but we had a lot of rivalry. There still is. It’s all in good fun but you know what shape it can take. So I just deemed it diplomatic to keep quiet in the dark and Bob’s your uncle. Well, the next morning I didn’t expect to get attended to until they got the wizz kids out of the way with these two big ones and they were going back to Bieldefeld again because the weather had picked up and they still had the bombs. Well, I was witness to the very interesting episode which has since been, I’ve seen it written once but it just reminded me that my memory’s a good one. I was parked near to the CO of 617 at the time and it was this man, this Canadian Group Captain Fauquier who had taken over command of 617 from Billie Tait. Now, Willie, Willie Tait rather. Not Billie. Willie Tait had moved on and Fauquier to his credit had a big background of operational tours, two I believe in 6 Group. The Canadians. But he was a very different type of person to both Cheshire and Willie Tait. When he turned up at, they’d gone down then to Woodhall Spa. When he turned up to command 617 I don’t know whether it was a defence that pitched him against the brass he found there but you were always impressed when you met particularly the earlier bunch of 617. They were men like [unclear] Martin who subsequently went on to Air Chief Marshall and Shannon and [unclear] Men with [unclear] men with two tours behind them and they were all squadron leaders there and when 617 had a problem, had a job to do one imagined that Willie Tait threw it on to the table and said, ‘What do you think of that?’ And, ‘What are we going to do about this one?’ And they sort of hammered out obviously the correct answers because of this real collection of talent. The, he seemed to, Fauquier seemed to adopt the view that well you might be brilliant at so and so but you’re not going to be a bunch of arty crafty types with me and he actually had them out practice bombing and sitting out with their kite waiting for the weather to improve. Well we practice bombed there was no harm in that but I think he would appear to have regarded them as a bunch of prima donnas who wanted sorting out. I know I heard the buzz that they weren’t terribly excited about him but on this particular trip that I’m talking about he had one of the specially converted Lancs and he had got of course they were taking off from Carnaby and they were returning after the trip to Bieldefeld to their own base.
Rumour had it that he had all the Press ready to welcome and publicise the man who got the first big one. The Grand Slam. The twenty two thousander. But the other man who was going to drop it with him was Wing Commander Calder. Incidentally, if you are looking at this, the June 30th to July 13th issue of the Royal Air Force News there’s a drawing just being prepared by Maurice Gardner who was one of the big ones for drawing paintings of the Grand Slam being dropped by Calder on that particular day, the 14th of March which when I look in my logbook was the day that I went up to Carnaby from, to base. We had more trouble there that I’ll tell you about in a moment. But there they were very close to where I was parked at Carnaby and Fauquier was running up his Lanc and we were watching him from ours. We’d nothing else to do and believe it or not you don’t often see this with a Rolls Royce engine he must have stuck a conrod through the motor or something because he stopped with an almighty thump and oil and what have you fell below. Well, apparently, and I could see one part of this he was getting his crew out quickly with the intention of going across and taking over Calder’s kite. Well, Calder did the old Nelson touch on him and quietly taxied away and thereby became the first man. The man who dropped the first operational twenty two thousand on Bieldefeld. I see in this RAF News he’s a Morayshire man and he had a DSO and bar and DFC later on. Part of it then I’ve no doubt and he went on to stay twenty seven years in the Air Force. So this particular Gardner’s painting has been signed by Calder. It’s one of these limited edition ones. Well, I obviously didn’t see the one dropped that day but I did on one of our later bridges see one of these go down and we were accompanied then by a Mosquito who was photographing then and I must say again that although the Tallboy is a big bomb this other thing was unbelievable. Well, on the day of the 14th when the 617 boys finally got away all except Fauquier I got hold of the engineer and said, ‘Well, what have you found wrong with mine?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s alright.’ I said, ‘You must be joking.’ He said, ‘Oh yes. I’ve run it up and it’s alright.’ So I told him what it had done to me. I said, ‘It’s tried to kill me twice. Three times yesterday.’ I said, ‘Now, what are we going to do?’ So anyway he signed my travelling 700 and vouched to me that the thing was right. So I said, ‘Well, now it’s all quiet and the mighty have departed,’ I said, ‘I’ll go down to the bottom right-hand corner of the main runway —