July 1, 2015
Stow-on-the-Wold, England: Flying Spitfires
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I WISH I hadn't got up early this morning. There weren't many people in the hostel but among them was a squat, gingerish man of about 45. He had the complexion of a compulsive chip eater.
I was alone, and enjoying being alone in the hostel common room. I'd found a book about Milton Keynes and I was reading why the city had built concrete cows. And there seemed to be no reason. It just seemed a good idea, although I doubt the town thought it would stay about the only thing that people recalled of the place.
Anyway, I was sipping coffee and turning pages when the man walked in, opened a tabloid with shouting headlines and, uninvited, said: "All those people trying to climb on those lorries in Calais, they should be shot, I reckon."
If you remember, there'd been protests at Calais after staff of a ferry company found they were losing their jobs and perhaps the money they'd invested in the business. The tunnel had closed and trucks were stacked back on the French side just as they were on the other. The news had been full of desperate refugees cutting tarpaulins to climb into lorries, tugging open the doors of drivers who hadn't thought to lock them. Desperation had driven them to desperate measures.
I said "Mmm" in the hope he'd leave me alone.
"Shot, that's what they should be. They should send the army there. Those drivers, that's their home, their cab, isn't it?"
He came from Barnsley and had the appropriate accent.
"Mmm."
"And they wander around Calais robbing, don't they?"
"Well, no, they don't actually. People in Calais have taken pity on them. They may prefer they weren't there but they take them food and water."
He looked crestfallen and let the subject drop. Then he said that all foreigners wanted was to buck the system.
"You know what they do in Romania? They learn robbing when they're at school, you know that? Believe me, I work with them. And Poles? I had two years without work but when I went to see if I could get any benefits, they told me to change my name to Palewski or something and come back and say I was Polish. Then I'd get whatever I wanted to claim."
Happily, the rest of the day was more pleasant. We set off on Milton Keynes' extensive but variable bike paths and escaped from Buckinghamshire into the gentle lanes and appealing villages of Northamptonshire. Everywhere was green. There were quiet roads and thatched houses in pretty but unpretentious villages.
The man in the hostel hadn't been the only nutcase in the area. There's a plaque on the side of the church in Water Stratford that celebrates John Mason, who was the parish priest back in the 1600s and wrote more than 30 hymns. What makes him better value, though, is that he began to insist he was the prophet Elijah and that he would rise from the dead three days after his death.
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Well, he must have been quite a talker because he died in May 1694 and hundreds flocked to Water Stratford and lived in barns or camped in fields to see it happening. It's a rare day you see someone rise from the grave and they didn't want to miss it.
When they did miss it, they assumed his spirit had been invisible. For 15 years they insisted his grave must be empty, to the extent that his successor was obliged to dig him out again. The believers were then so upset that the militia had to be called to send them away.
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And so the day went its eccentric way. We passed the huge, mysterious bowls of a listening station that showed the days of Bletchley Park aren't wholly over, and we begged water in the yard of a farm which appeared to grow horses rather than crops. A sign on the gate read: "We do not need tarmac, we do not have scrap."
The woman who helped us was eccentric in the way that women were in 1950s British comedies.
"Please take no notice of the dog," she said absent-mindedly as a creature the size of an elephant kept bouncing against us. "He's only a puppy."
How old she was, I don't know. She was thin, with grey hair drawn back tight, and her tweedy clothes fitted like a hammock. She had a voice that nobody has had since the days of Noel Coward. Any moment I expected her to say: "But, naturally, we always shoot ramblers. Is that sort of thing dimly thought of these days?"
Nice old bird, regardless.
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We rode through Duns Tew, too, where we had a pub lunch and discussed the curious case of Anne Greene.
Around the time the potty parson was insisting he was Elija, she really did rise from the dead. She was a maid at the manor house when she was convicted of killing the child she had after rumpy-pumpy with her master’s grandson. She insisted the child was stillborn but she was hanged at Oxford. Friends obliged by pulling at her body and walloping her, to make sure she died, and she was cut down, and after being pronounced dead by the prison doctor, given to students for dissection.
The students started work a day later. And found she was still breathing. They gave her hot drinks, rubbed her, bled her and applied a “heating odoriferous Clyster to be cast up in her body, to give heat and warmth to her bowels”. Unable to explain, people praised God for acting on behalf of the innocent.
And then there were the Spitfires. Close to the end of the day we rode into Enstone where, in a wartime airfield on the edge of the village, a happy, talkative man called Paul Fowler, "the skipper", is building a squadron of Spitfires for sale.
He had been a marketing whizz until his boss called him and said his job was going to the man he'd trained. He went from there to running and then owning a flying club, a club in danger because each year it had fewer members.
"I had a business coach because I was so out of touch."
He asked what was needed to bring people in.
"Something unusual".
"Why not get a Spitfire?"
"Three million reasons why not."
"How?"
"£3 million."
Instead, borrowing an idea from Australia, he hit on building Spitfires of his own, 90 per cent the original size because he couldn't get the original engines and they'd look odd at full size with smaller ones.
There were countless Spitfires during the war and, after it, they were junk. Some rotted at the entrance to RAF bases and many were just scrapped. Those that were restored are now like grandfather's axe, he said, the parts so frequently replaced that "the only original bit is the registration plate.
"You know how long the average Spitfire lasted? They flew 21 hours. That's all. It was a single-seater, so your first experience in the cockpit was flying it alone."
Visiting Enstone was irresistible. The Skipper welcomed us with cold drinks on a hot, humid day. It was a remarkable experience. The planes are for sale, by the way. One is already owned and flying. You don't have to buy the whole thing - the £365,000 is a lot less than the original but still beyond many - you can buy a share with others and take turns flying.
As one of Paul's invitations reads: "We are going to need all kinds of people to make this look and feel like the real thing. Mechanics, fitters, oily rags, WAAFs, radio operators, administrators, cooks, RAF regiment, NAAFI personnel. If a squadron had it, we must have it to create the picture as accurately as possible."
Scramble, scramble!
Today's ride: 96 km (60 miles)
Total: 1,083 km (673 miles)
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On this particular day- a day with splendidly clear, fine weather- one of the "Flights of Remembrance" (I think that's what they were called) marking the 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Britain passed low and slow overhead. We had no inkling these flights were happening, and even less that we'd actually witness one. Seeing a close formation of four Spitfires and two Hurricanes, and to hear the rasp of their Merlin engines, was a thrill I'll not soon forget.
By mere chance my wife had her camera at the ready and managed to snap a couple good photos in the few seconds the window of opportunity was open. I later posted one on another forum-based special-interest website, and was stunned when a few days later one of the other members not only identified the type of plane, but narrowed it down to the specific one in my photo.
When I asked how he'd manages such a feat (the photo shows only the plane in partial silhouette, with no chance of picking up identifying markings) he revealed that he's a pilot. He had been at his local airfield recently, which happens to be the same one where these particular planes are based, and had struck up a conversation with one of the guys whose privilege it is to fly them periodically. The man went on to say he had in fact been at the controls that day, and pulled up the details of the flight plan on the computer! What an amazing string of coincidences.
2 years ago