‘My family lived in a glider’
Maura Naylor recalls her Irish aunt and uncle’s unique post-war home
After the war, while others queued up for prefabs, my uncle Richard went to an airfield and bought the giant fuselage of a De Havilland ‘Horsa’ Troop Glider (minus its tail). It cost their entire savings of £75! Auntie Maura (my namesake) was horrified. As the aircraft was towed into the campsite she nearly had heart failure. “You have to be joking!” she said. “How on earth could anybody live in that big black pipe!” Undeterred, my uncle set about making the glider that had survived D-Day into a 36ft mobile home. The other campers on the field thought him completely mad. Materials were scarce and fittings virtually unobtainable. The neighbours watched with cynical interest to see how anyone in their right mind could possibly make a home from an old aircraft full of wires, tubes and metalworks. My uncle’s first job was to fill in the open end of the fuselage, while my aunt was tasked with pulling out the mass of wires inside, crawling warily around on her hands and knees in case the whole thing tipped up on its wheels! Once cleared, the interior was lined with hardboard and aluminium panelling and divided into three rooms. The work was slowed for weeks by lack of materials but ingenuity always triumphed. Starting on the living room, my uncle got hold of a little solid fuel stove that was
originally a tailor’s ironing stove. He fitted that in and built an airing cupboard around it. Next a sink unit was installed in the ‘kitchen’ with a semi-automatic pump underneath that drew water from a 30-gallon tank outside. Into the living room went a settee-cum-spare-bed, a dropleaf table, a sideboard, radio and another airfield find: a small leather armchair from an American Boeing Fortress. Since electricity supplies to campsites were unheard of, the glider was lit throughout by paraffin pressure lamps. The family moved in before the final stages of the conversion, and visitors were baffled as to how to get in. One morning my aunt was in the kitchen when she heard somebody walking round the glider swearing loudly and banging on its sides. Eventually a voice called out: “How do you get into this thing?” Maura whipped up the roll-up aircraft door, nearly frightening the poor coalman out of his wits. “Like this!” she announced.
Aged nine, I spent part of the summer holidays in the glider, sleeping in the big bedroom with my two cousins while Uncle and Aunt decamped to the pull-down double bed in the sitting room. It felt wonderfully spacious and comfortable. Outside, the grass in the camping field was so long you could hide in it and my cousins had made a tree house in a big old oak tree. One summer in 1949 the weather was abnormally hot. Normally the glider tank was filled from a well in the field,
but that dried up and everyone on the site was rationed to one bucket of water a day. That was until my uncle had another of his bright ideas! He strapped the 30-gallon tank to his car, filled it at his works and drove home to share it with the neighbours. After several 12-mile round trips everyone had plenty of water all right, but he’d broken the springs of his car!
In 1953 Richard and Maura sold their home, complete with fixtures and fittings, to a young couple and had their own spacious brick bungalow built near Poole. I believe the glider remained on the field until 1960 when it was taken to a private site which was to be its final resting place.
Aunt was tasked with pulling out the mass of wires inside ‘How do you get in this thing?’ Visitors were baffled!