Unsung war hero flew like a Bird
RI’VE been thinking about Mr Bird quite a lot this week. Mr Bird was my headmaster at Rush Green Junior School in Essex. He was pretty strict: at dinner time the noisiest children had to sit at Mr Bird’s “special table” and eat our lunch under his watchful, not to say baleful, eye.
But there was rather more to our martinet than a state primary school headmaster. Not much more than 20 years earlier, Mr Bird had been a Spitfire pilot. He was stationed at Hornchurch and he fought in the Battle of Britain.
The incongruity did not escape us, young as we were. This now- portly, balding, be- suited man with ultimate responsibility for timetables, chalk and blackboard rubbers had not so long ago been at the controls of the then- fastest, deadliest fighter plane in the world.
The pudgy thumb he now habitually used to push his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose had once leanly hovered over a gun button, ready to open fire with four lethal machine guns nestling in each wing on either side of him.
Mr Bird spoke little of his combat experiences but I remember him telling us boys that going into action for the first time was a deeply shocking experience. “Until that moment, all we’d had to do with our aircraft was fly around in them,” he said. “Now suddenly we had to kill with them – and others were doing their best to kill us, too. It was all very alarming.”
Last Tuesday was Battle of Britain
Day; the 80th anniversary of the date young men like Mr Bird achieved their decisive victory over Hitler’s Luftwaffe. It was the Fuhrer’s first bitter taste of defeat and for all the Allied setbacks still to come, we now know it was the pivotal moment of the entire war.
All those pilots are dead now: not one is left. But when I was growing up it seemed as if the war had only just ended. Not only were we surrounded by former warriors such as Mr Bird, the visible scars of recent conflict were everywhere.
On a family trip to St Paul’s Cathedral in the mid- 1960s, vast piles of rubble still surrounded the building from bomb damage that, miraculously, had spared the
cathedral itself. I went to grammar school in Mile End: as late as 1970 you could walk along East End streets that had long gaps in rows of terraced houses, like knocked- out teeth. Most of the rubble from direct hits had been cleared but occasionally a great mountain of bricks and splintered timbers remained, covered in weeds and grass. Anderson bomb shelters, made from curved corrugated iron, now commonly stood service as garden sheds. Our neighbour in Romford had one.
I don’t know what became of Mr Bird; he was long ago gathered to his fathers. But my headmaster literally helped save civilisation. On Tuesday, I raised my glass to him.