Airbase babysitting

SIR – Michael Deacon (Features, April 7) says that there are not many household tasks he would trust to his eight-year-old son.

In 1949, aged eight, I lived with my parents and six-month-old sister in a caravan on a dispersal airfield at RAF Benson, home to Lancasters, Mosquitos and Spitfires. My mother would give me a shilling to push my sister’s pram while riding my bicycle around the perimeter track. If confronted by a taxiing aircraft, I would steer on to the grass and wait till it passed. I waved to the pilots and they always waved back.

In the evening my parents would go to the officers’ mess, leaving me in charge. If my sister awoke I would rock her, heat her milk on the gas stove and change her nappy. Should all this fail, I could go out to a battery-powered Mosquito landing light mounted on the tow bar and change its filter from green to red. The air-traffic controller on the other side of the airfield could phone the mess and my parents would return. It was never necessary.

We learnt independence at an early age in those days. When I became a father myself, aged 27, I could show my wife how to change nappies.

Wg Cdr Martin Mayer RAF (rtd) Chorley, Lancashire