Where’s the old airfield?- You’re standing on it

Press, 7 October 1987, Page 21

Where’s the old airfield?You’re standing on it

JACK SINCLAIR, a Diamond Harbour resident, goes looking for an English airfield where he served during the Second World War:

London in 1987 soon taught me the bitter lesson that memories can seldom be happily rekindled, that when you pursue nostalgic fancies with too much ardour, you stand a very good chance of being unceremoniously dropped into a deep, black pit of disappointment. In spite of this I am about to set off for Norfolk in search of a wartime bomber airfield that could well have disappeared without trace. At least I had realistic expectations. If all I find are the decaying remains of a Nissen hut, it will at least be some link with a rather exciting part of my past life. But London! Where had the magic gone? What was so great about being jostled off footpaths by impetuous youth? Where was the fun in rubbing elbows with groups of fast-talking and even faster-walking groups of German schoolboys? Maybe it was all a history lesson to them, and we wbewildered wartime returnees were part of that lesson. But not willingly. This was no longer our city; one needed the energy of youth to stay with the pace, fight for the space, and survive the exhaust fumes.

Norfolk seemed a better bet than London, and Norfolk did not disappoint. Hills and dales, trees, hedges, brilliantly green grass, and stone-walled farms all blended into the unique beauty that is England. No rusty iron roofs here. No garish billboards, nor even any straight-lined pine plantations. Nature rules; everything is in keeping, all is right. Thank God for the English countryside. English towns are something again, in this modem age. Kings Lynn, an East Anglian town of ancient and honourable lineage, once a truly delightful place, is now traffic-choked and odorous. Still there is an affectionate memory for this place. One sultry summer night, 43 years ago, a group of airmen, having cycled several miles from a camp with a broken-down water supply, were asking about the town’s ability to provide hot showers. They were asking, naturally enough, at the Police Station. Before they knew what was happening, they were in the back regions of the station, in an area of gleaming white tiles and steaming hot water. I wonder if any of those hospitable coppers are still around. After 43 years? I haven’t the nerve to go and ask. Now we are in. the village of Fakenham, where nostalgia takes it on the chin. This isn’t the sleepy wee place I once knew. Where is the cafe where we

sometimes came for breakfast, after sleeping late? I eventually find it, but it’s now a greengrocery shop — and so small! Can this really be where we had our baked beans and wartime dried egg as we read the papers, discussed last night’s "op” and wondered about tonight's? There is the cinema where we seldom seemed able to get seats — the place was always full of Italian prisoners of war. Memory spotlights, without pride, the night that some of us brave boys in blue fortified ourselves at a nearby hostelry, then marched into that cinema to turf out the Italians. As I remember, they went without argument. Not so the theatre management. They made a rare old stink. As the saying goes there was "trouble back at the camp.” But that’s another story. The old airfield is very close now, only a few miles. I am asked for directions, but memory is so clouded. Then I see a sign that says Walsingham. "That way,” I tell our driver.

After a few miles, it seems prudent to ask someone, and we pull into what looks like a fac--tory yard. There are some nondescript buildings, several trucks, and a couple of men. I ask one of the men if he can direct me to the old North Creake airfield. He grins wide, and in that rich Norfolk lilt that defies translation to the printed page, he tells me: “You’re standing on it.”

Then follows what seems like a fairly well-rehearsed tour. Obviously I’m not the first to have come back. He shows me a large, humpbacked building, at second look recognisable as one of the bigger R.A.F.-style Nissen huts, and then something really poignant.

Through a dirty window of another wartime hut, he points to a faded painting, done directly on to an inside wall. After much

squinting, I decide it’s a picture of a Whitley bomber, though to the best of my knowledge, Whitleys never did operate from here.

Then comes the piece de resistance. On another inside wall, I see a large square of newly-laid breeze blocks, and my guide informs me that these have taken the place of a painting of a Halifax bomber, done as a memorial to a missing crew. The work of art had been deteriorating, and the R.A.F. carefully removed it for restoration and display in the R.A.F. Museum at Hendon.

With regret, I- recall that I’d spent almost a full day in that magnificent museum, but had failed to. spot an exhibit with such close associations. Then it is on for look at the old control tower. Not one of the soaring concrete and glass monsters of today, but standard R.A.F. two-storey, with a big front window and a sort of balcony.

Memory lane beckoned again as I recalled the day that my pilot and I were ordered to clean such a big window, on another control tower on another station.

We were being punished. Our transgression? Failing to assist the ground crew in swinging the props of a Wellington. The Norfolk man was telling me that this North Creake control tower was now in two flats, one up and one down. It seemed right that two families should now find shelter in the building that once offered support and direction to two bomber squadrons.

What was this? A square-built brick edifice. It could only be an ablution block, built as only the British can build an ablution block. Without a trace of affection, I remember the shivery time spent trying to wangle the R.A.F. two-chain style of shower. One chain for cold, the other , chain for hot ... if you were lucky.

I was tempted to look inside, but waist-high brambles and nettles barred the way. It seemed that this building was to be forever a place for masochism. Not for me, not today. There are other buildings around, all of which belong to the stock-food manufacturing company that now owns the area, one stands apart, a lonely sentinel by the old perimeter track. One of the old, original hangars, no less. I gaze at its brooding dark bulk, and for one mad moment I have thoughts of Halifax bombers quietly mouldering away in its dim recesses. The Norfolk man seems to read my thoughts.

"Only grain in there,” he says, “stacked out with Common Market stuff nobody seems to want.” With another of his wide, wicked grins, he adds: “Waiting for the Russians to make an offer.” So much for bricks and mortar. The blood and guts of North Creake is yet to come. We cross the broken tarmac of the perimeter track, to look out across a huge field of gently rustling barley. My escort is now silent. At length, he asks me gently: “See anything?” I know what he was getting at. Through that rustling grain field a runway had once thrust its long concrete finger, but that was one heck of a long time ago.

Suddenly, the years drop away. Running diagonally across the pale green of the barley is a broad shadow.

I don’t know why I didn’t see it right away, it is now so obvious. This long, sweeping slash of darker green marks the path of thousands of landings and takeoffs. Perhaps the broken-up concrete has left some sort of deposit in the soil. Whatever the cause, Nature herself has decreed that the old bomber path should not be entirely obliterated.

In the dim light of late afternoon, I fancy I can see the huge, lumbering shapes moving, the blue flame of crackling exhausts. I can hear the roar of straining engines as shapes gain speed, to at last claw their way into the

sky. * Later, the homecomings — the landings, debriefings, the longdelayed meals, the longerdelayed sleep. There was never

enough sleep. Time to leave the ghosts of North Creake airfield to their whispering barley and their rusting relics.

Hospitality from police

Chains for hot and cold

Broad shadow

across barley