The Wednesday Club

In idle moments, I sometimes use Google Maps to look for dead airfields.  They're easy to spot from space.  An airfield leaves a scar that remains through 75 years of reuse and redevelopment.  They may now be chicken sheds, race circuits, industrial parks or car factories but the indelible skeleton of three runways and a perimeter track still shows through from 100,000 feet.

On every one of those airfields, there are the ghosts of young men who took off and never returned.  Tens of thousands of men in noisy, crude, metal and canvas machines that struggled into the air and too easily fell back out of it.  Their spirits remain on the airfields, blown fainter by the winds of time but still there – undetectable shades of a long-lost generation.

Not all the young men became ghosts. Some survived to grow up and grow old.  In my twenties, I met a few of them.

I'd been given a glider flight as a birthday present.   I was told to come to the gliding club airfield on a Wednesday morning and I'd get a flight.

The airfield was and still is one of the oldest airfields in the country.  It was established in the early years of World War I as a training base.  After the war, it became a maintenance base and saw thousands of men and machines flown in to be repaired and returned to civilian life, the scrapheap or both.  It was disposed of in the 70s and sold to the gliding club.   It is a barren, windswept place with the original runways, hangars and grass.  The murmurs of the ghosts are drowned out by the skylarks.

I duly turned up early on a bright November morning and was met by a group of elderly men who spotted my youth and my car tow-bar and set me to work hauling gliders out of the hanger and across the airfield to the launch point.  I spent the day fetching and carrying gliders and generally making myself indispensable.   I concluded that these old codgers needed me here if they were to keep flying and so I joined the club on the same day.  Whenever the weather and my shifts permitted,  I turned up. By turning up on Wednesdays and working my backside off lifting and shifting gliders, I was tolerated into the Wednesday Club.

I soon discovered that the old men of the Wednesday Club were not old men – they were simply young men stuck in old men's bodies.   Away from the airfield, they were retired captains of industry, leading lights in the Rotarians, magistrates, councillors or just upstanding members of the community.  For six days a week, they were respectable senior citizens.  But for one day a week, they were 19 year old boys. 

For all of them, the war years had been the best of times and the worst of times.  Maybe they tried to forget for 6 days a week but on Wednesdays, they put aside the bad memories and shared the good ones. They spent as much time reminiscing and bantering over inter-service rivalry as they did flying.

When I first arrived, a man in his 70s, Bill, who seemed to be in charge, put me to work on fetching and carrying.   A few weeks later, I asked him what he’d done before he’d retired.  “I joined up in late 1944 and trained on Tigers (Tiger Moths).  I pulled out of dives too early so they put me into aircrew.  I did a tour on Lancs as a W/Op/AG* and then the war ended  When I was demobbed, I became a mining engineer and retired a few years ago”. 

I hadn’t asked him what he did in the war – I learned long ago to never ask that question.  My Dad has been called up in 1941 but was so damaged by childhood diseases and malnutrition that he was rejected by the military and had to stay as a civilian throughout WWII.  He felt that keenly all his life.  Bill didn’t care – he told me his war career even though I hadn’t asked.   He went into great detail about his few months in the RAF but swept over the next 50 years in barely a sentence.  For Bill and the other, whatever else they’d been for most of their lives, on Wednesdays they were back in uniform and young again.

Len had been a Lancaster pilot.  He was from dahn the Old Kent Road. He’d done three tours with his crew and escaped death countless times.  For one raid, he and his crew were laid low with flu and so another crew took their ‘kite’ and never returned.  He talked of getting out of searchlight cones by stall turning.   This is when the plane is put into a vertical climb until it runs out of speed, stops and then flops down – sometimes in a direction of the pilot’s choosing.   Doing this in daylight in a plane built for aerobatics is thrilling.   Doing this in a huge four-engine heavy bomber, at night, over enemy territory, with anti-aircraft fire and night fighters all trying to kill you must be beyond terrifying.
After three tours, Len and his crew had more than earned a break. There were sent to Canada to train up new crews and saw out the war there.

Eric was in the Fleet Air Arm.  Well brought up, refined and often with his very attractive grand-daughter, he’d flown Avenger dive-bombers and then crank-winged Corsair fighters from aircraft carriers.  He talked little about his experiences, which is a sign that they weren’t good. I do remember him saying that after the war had ended, his carrier had been off the coast of West Africa.  They received an order from London to ditch the planes -  IIRC to create space for ferrying troops back home. Every fighting plane on board was tipped over the side into the sea.  He said it gave a him and the crew a very flat feeling – relief that there would be no more killing and dying but also sadness as the undignified disposal of the machines that had kept them alive day after day.

Alf had flown DC-3 Dakota transports in the Far East.  He’d been in the same loose group of pilots as walrus-tached actor Jimmy Edwards (who nearly married my mum - a story for another day) and former child actor Jackie Coogan – the kid from the Charlie Chaplin films but best known as Uncle Fester from the Addams Family.  Alf’s job had been transporting men, munitions and materiel from India through Malaya and beyond in support of the offensive against the Japanese army.  Unlike most of the other Wednesday Club members, Alf hadn't stopped flying after the war.  He'd stayed in the air through gliding and had never had to clumsily relearn long-forgotten skills.  When not flying, he'd been a pioneer of flight sims and was always keen to talk knowledgeably of the pros and cons of PC processors and joysticks and which flight sim was closest to reality.  Rarely without a cheroot and unable to remember names (everyone was 'Old Darling'), Alf never let his mind or his enthusiasm for life waver.  He had just married for the 3rd time when he died peacefully at home.

Charles had never flown before but he'd ridden many horses and he felt that as "popsies" had flown during the war, it should be easy for him to do the same, as he was a man...  I was never sure if that was actually a joke of his.  He'd been an officer in the Gurkhas and a PoW in Germany.   He was a proper un-reconstructed country gentleman with an almost incoherently posh accent.  War-wounded hips and enormous brogues meant that he could never operate the controls properly but that didn't stopping turning up week after week and frightening the bejesus out of the poor instructor while Charles tried to force the glider into the air through the combined power of blind optimism, sexism and fox-hunting curses.


Jack was a tail-gunner in heavy bombers.  So was his identical twin brother.  Tail gunners took the heaviest casualties in Bomber Command.  They were at the end where the night fighters usually attacked and had only small calibre machine guns to defend themselves and their comrades.  Although the odds were against them, both Jack and his brother survived.  Pugnacious and blunt Yorkshiremen, neither seemed to have grown up like the others in the Wednesday Club.  Jack’s brother came to visit every summer and they’d come to the airfield and lark around like the sort of rough children our parents didn’t like us to play with.  Smoking, swearing and constantly bickering and playing jokes on each other, they were both 80 going on 12.

Alec was the most charming and delightful fellow you could ever hope to meet.   Bright-eyed and dapper, stick-thin and touching 80, the young Alec was always bursting to get out of the old Alec.   He took off one December morning in a single seat glider and flew above the clouds.  When he came down below the clouds, he had no idea where he was and landed in a ploughed field. The rest of the Wednesday club had to come and get him and his glider out of the field - It cost him a fortune in Scotch.  A few days later, at the Christmas do, he was presented with a white stick to help him find his way back to the airfield next time he got lost.  I've never seen a man as happy as Alec was when he was given that stick.  He got a early satnav that Christmas and was probably watching it assiduously when his glider hit another one.  The pilot of the other glider successfully baled out and (gingerly) walked away.  Alec was killed instantly.  It wasn't until his obituary was published in the Daily Telegraph and pinned up in the clubhouse did we learn that he had been an air-traffic controller, decorated for his work in coordinating the Berlin Airlift. We just knew him as a big, old, smiley kid.

I recently went back to the airfield after nearly 20 years away.  I recognised no-one and no-one recognised me.

The skylarks are still very loud on the airfield but there are a few more ghosts there now, who for me will always be heard above the birdsong.


*W/Op/AG -  wireless operator / air gunner.   Two roles - one man.  When under attack, man a gun turret.  Otherwise, man the radio.