Levy DFC - From Night Flak to Hijack: Its a Small World

I would like to express my gratitude to the people who helped me edit, read, write and who offered me endless support and comments regarding my grandfathers autobiography and the epilogue to his unfinished story.

I wish to thank above all my mother, Feeka, without whom this book would never have been finished and published. She was truly the backbone to getting the book done and provided me with endless remarks and comments and assisted in the editing and proofreading. My thank you here will never be enough to give her the proper homage she deserves.

A great thank you also goes to my whole family, my auntie Linda and my uncle Peter, who assisted me with information, lent me material, and helped deal with administrative matters.

My most sincere thanks also go out to ex-Sabena crew members for their valuable help in contacting and identifying fellow staff, planes, routes and places, as well as for their many anecdotes which enabled me to complete the Epilogue.

I wish to express my gratitude to the many people who accepted to have their names or names of loved ones mentioned in the book, for their enthusiasm, best wishes and further encouragement for the publication of Regs memoirs.

Lastly, I would like to thank Shaun Barrington, our publisher, for his enthusiasm and for believing in the book. His words read enough, I want to publish will forever remain engraved in my memory.

A lex L. Schiphorst, 2015

This narrative was started in New York, in September 1982, when I was there on a shopping trip after I had retired. It is an attempt to leave, primarily for my grandchildren, a record of times that have thankfully in many ways changed out of all recognition.

I have not stressed the hardship and privation that we endured, particularly during the war years, nor have I been able to pay sufficient tribute to the courage and support of my wife, Dora.

I hope that none of you who read this will ever have to go through the trials and tribulations of raising small children in one small room, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with the landlady and her family, often with only an outside toilet, no heating, very short of money and at ones wits end trying to scrape a meal for nothing.

I had a very glamorous life, but it was not so glamorous at the beginning and no words that I can put here will ever tell you how much I owe to Dora.

Time plays funny tricks with memory. If I were asked what regrets I have I would reply, Oh if only I had kept a diary. That is the only advice I give to you. Put it down on paper and take care of it.

I was born in Portsmouth on 8 May 1922. At a very early age, certainly before I was two, we moved to Liverpool where we lived for a while in the house of my fathers mother.

My father, Cyril, who was Jewish, had met my mother in Edinburgh, while she was visiting her elder brothers. My father was in Edinburgh on business for his father. My mother was sixteen and certainly not Jewish but it was love at first sight and they were married in Edinburgh after she had converted to Judaism.

I was born when she was seventeen. My father was twenty-one when he married and I was the same age when I married and so was my eldest son, Peter.

The house in Liverpool was a lovely Edwardian one in the then fashionable quarter of Bedford Street, just off Abercrombie Square, to which we had our own key to enjoy the beautiful gardens in privacy. The house, No 76, was a childs paradise having dozens of rooms in which to play Hide and Seek. There was a real Upstairs, Downstairs with a huge kitchen, scullery, larder, and servants quarters. Upstairs were a big billiard room, cloakrooms, parlour, dining room, and lounge.

My paternal grandfather, Louis, was a successful businessman although he once turned down the offer of financing another Liverpool man who came to him with the idea of opening one or two tea shops. It will never catch on, said my grandfather, so Joe Lyons went on to do very well with someone else!

Living with us at Bedford Street was the second youngest of my fathers family, my Auntie Muriel, who was a pioneer of radio. She was already famous as Auntie Muriel of the Childrens Hour broadcast every day at 5.15 p.m. She was a prolific writer of childrens stories and had her own page in the Liverpool Echo . She was a scriptwriter for the Toytown series and played the part of Larry the Lamb in many of the Toytown episodes and partnered Doris Hare (Aunty Doris) in radio skits.

Also living with us at Bedford Street was the youngest brother, my Uncle Stuart who eventually became a very successful film producer and partnered Nat Cohen in Anglo-Amalgamated Films Ltd, which became famous for the Carry On series.

My father was given the job of managing the Scala cinema on Argyle Street in nearby Birkenhead. His Uncle Alf was a Liverpool councillor and owned the cinema together with the Liverpool Scala and Futurist on Lime Street, Liverpool.

We were, by now, living in another big house at 42 Hamilton Square, Birkenhead, which my mother promptly opened as a caf/restaurant called Nans Caf. Even living in Birkenhead, I attended my fathers old school, the Liverpool Institute, later to become the school of Paul McCartney amongst other famous old boys.

There was a Preparatory section of the Liverpool Institute in which I was enrolled and I used to take the ferry to Liverpool. This was an economy measure as the fare was only a penny as opposed to threepence on the much faster Underground. I was given the fare for the tram from the Pier Head to school but would very often walk, if I was early enough, and pocket the money with a gentlemans agreement from my parents. The Mersey Tunnel was not to open for another three years and I was to benefit from a school holiday to watch King George V and Queen Mary open it in 1934. Not that it would have helped me had it been open as it was only for cars.

Around this time, my father was offered the Plaza Cinema, in Manchester Square, Blackpool. So we moved to a semi-detached house at 29 Horncliffe Road, South Shore and I started at the Blackpool Grammar School. These were happy days. I had a brand new bicycle, a Royal Enfield costing 3.19 s on which I used to cycle the not inconsiderable distance to school every day, even coming home for lunch.

I, like most boys, was fascinated with aeroplanes. Even in 1935 people would run out of the house if one were heard overhead. I remember seeing the Graf Zeppelin flying over Blackpool Tower on its way to Barrow-in-Furness where the Naval Yards were only too visible from the skies.

My heroes were Sir Alan Cobham and Captain Barnard whose flying circuses toured Britain. I was a horrified witness to the disaster when the passenger-carrying formation flight from Captain Barnards Circus collided over Central Station and plunged into the town. There were few survivors and yet, thirty or more years later at a dinner party at our house in Brussels, I would recall the event only to hear the amazed comment from one of my greatest friends, Gordon Burch, an Air Traffic Controller with Eurocontrol, that his father had given him the 7/6d fare to be a passenger on the flight and that he had seen the whole incident and had been in the one aircraft that had managed to land safely.

My own experience with aeroplanes began when I was given a Warneford stick model aeroplane which actually flew. My father and I took it down on the sands, wound up the elastic then hand launched it. It soared up to about 20ft, turned and flew, beautifully, out to sea, never to be seen again. Then came the splendid Frog models; an ingenious and well-made monoplane which came in a winder box with instructions to lubricate the elastic with banana oil which could be purchased at an expensive shilling extra. How lovingly that was applied and how well the Frog flew.