Memory Lane
It is the early 1960s. I am a steward in the VIP lounge at RAF Lyneham, Wiltshire, standing rigidly in one corner between hot and cold drinks trolleys, with instructions to respond to orders issued by a pink-cheeked Duty Movements Officer.
At 2200 hours, the DMO presents a grumpy air vice-marshal: not patrician stock, but a working-class erk (slang for aircraftsman) risen through the ranks, contemptuous of the oval Perfectos Finos cigarettes in my polished silver box. Consequently, I am dispatched into a downpour to fetch him Woodbines from the machine at our cinema.
At another time, it’s Hugh Gaitskell, then Leader of the Opposition: he asks for coffee (white – no sugar), settling at a desk, with paperwork.
Another customer is retired Field Marshal Montgomery, in mufti, off to a reunion, running his finger along window sills for signs of dust, petrifying Pink Cheeks with barked questions about ETA. On another occasion the Station Commander appears, with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. She has mislaid something – or, rather, somebody else has! Pink Cheeks assumes headless chicken mode, already an equerry in his imagination, berating customs officials and baggage handlers. I provide Tony Snowdon with gin, which he sips at a distance from the disturbance, concentrating his gaze on a picture of Hastings aircraft running the Berlin blockade.
An hour later, Pink Cheeks, on a downer after royalty, ushers in a geriatric clad in khaki, raises eyebrows in my direction to indicate ‘foreign nonentity’, and leaves me to cope with the Chief of the Belgian General Staff. I extricate him from his greatcoat and his walking stick, lower him into an armchair, and provide salmon sandwiches and Scotch.
His plane’s unserviceable. After ten minutes’ silence, I am courteously required to furnish him with details of my embryo Air Force career, which he contrasts with his lifetime under arms: a baptism of fire in the First World War, followed by the Second World War and colonial conflicts. ‘I’ve never won a battle in my life,’ he says. ‘I spent most of my existence under siege or in retreat.’
All this is delivered with modest dignity, selfdeprecation and humour. No reference to the five rows of medals on his uniform. Presently, his pilot beckons him. He shakes my hand; hopes he ‘hasn’t bored me’. In 35 years of subsequent service, I never met an officer more deserving of the postscript, ‘… and a gentleman’.