Geoffrey Wellum - First Light: The Phenomenal Fighter Pilot Bestseller

Geoffrey Wellum

---

FIRST LIGHT

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published by Viking 2002

Published in Penguin Books 2003

Reissued 2009, 2018

Copyright Geoffrey Wellum, 2002

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-98433-8

Geoffrey Wellum was born in Walthamstow. Aged seventeen, he joined the RAF on a short-service commission in August 1939 and served with 92 Squadron throughout the Battle of Britain. He is now one of the last surviving members of The Few. He is contacted regularly to make television and radio programmes.

This book is dedicated to all fighter pilots

The time will come, when thou shalt lift thine eyes

To watch a long-drawn battle in the skies.

While aged peasants, too amazed for words,

Stare at the flying fleets of wondrous birds.

England, so long mistress of the sea,

Where winds and waves confess her sovereignty,

Her ancient triumphs yet on high shall bear

And reign the sovereign of the conquered air.

Stanzas composed in the style of Thomas Gray,
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

. School first XI cricket team, 1937

. My father and I at Buckhurst Park, Sussex, summer 1941

. The Harvard I

. Tony Bartley, Allan Wright and Brian Kingcombe

. Allan Wright getting out of his plane

. Repairing the plane

. Pembrey aerodrome, 1940

. Spitfire Mark IX

. First light

. Crashed Messerschmitt 109

. 92 Squadron photographs from Allan Wrights album

. Debriefing

. By the swimming pool

. A sky full of Heinkel 111 bombers

. Dispersal hut

. B Flight scrambling

. A flight of Spitfires scrambling

. Biggin Hill celebration party, 1941

. Take-off in the snow

. Our tally board, Manston, February 1941

. Into the wide blue yonder

. Bob Stanford Tuck

. Johnny Kent and Tom Wiesse

. Messerschmitt 110 under fire

. Group on an aircraft at Biggin Hill

. Cecil Beaton photographs, summer 1940

. HMS Indomitable

. Ohio arriving in Valletta harbour

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce photographs: , Cecil Beaton Archive (photographs from Winged Squadrons by Cecil Beaton).

The co-pilot of the Catalina flying boat came aft to the crews rest room where I, a worn-out Spitfire pilot, reclined on one of the let-down bunks, feeling cold and miserable. Smiling, he handed me a steaming mug of hot sweet cocoa and the thickest and largest corned beef sandwich I had ever seen.

I am on my way back home to England from Malta and, as the Catalina drones through the night sky somewhere between Gibraltar and Plymouth and fortified by the cocoa, I ponder the last three years.

It seems like an impossible dream. Did I really find myself in a front line fighter squadron within ten months of leaving school? Did I fly through and survive the Battle of Britain before I had reached the age of twenty? It appears I must have done.

Thirty-five years later I am sitting at the dining-room table in my small cottage. The french windows are open and the sound and smell of the steady summer rain create a peaceful atmosphere. Before me on the table is a pencil, sheets of foolscap and an old exercise book containing some reflections I jotted down at odd times during those momentous early days of the Second World War.

Without realizing it, I pick up the pencil and start to write. Something seems to guide that pencil as my hand moves back and forth, back and forth across the paper. The daylight fades. I switch on the lamp and continue until finally my hand stops. The writing has totally relaxed me. I must write some more one day when I think about it and before memory fades further with advancing years. I kept no diaries, so Ill just have to put all that Ive written into some sort of order and call it a manuscript.

While men depart of joyful heart

Adventure for to know

Rudyard Kipling,
The Song of the Dead

There are some days in the early spring when the weather is such that, no matter where you are, either in town or countryside, England is at her best and its good to be alive. I notice that it is just such a day as I emerge from the underground at Holborn, turn left and walk down Kingsway.

The morning sun is already warm and rather comforting, which helps to allay somewhat a feeling of apprehension that has been building up within me for the past couple of hours.

I am seventeen and a half years old and, I suspect, a rather precocious young man. It was some six months ago when I first wrote to the Air Ministry. I was leaving school within a year and very much wanted to fly an aeroplane, so could they give me a job, please? It must have been a frightening prospect because they certainly took their time replying, but eventually I received a response in the guise of an enormous and rather complicated form together with a covering letter.

The writer informed me that he had been directed to reply to my undated communication always a communication, never a letter enclosing an application form for completion in due course and he ended by saying that he was my most obedient servant. I remember thinking what charming manners and how polite the Royal Air Force must be to everybody.

So, one evening after junior prep, the members of the VIth Form descended on my study to hold a meeting. The object was to reflect upon and hopefully complete the application form by the simple process of discussing and then taking a vote on the answer to each question. In return I was to supply suitable refreshments for the duration of the discussion. Simple!