V.C.’s LUCKY BEAN

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 29 November 1940, Page 2

V.C.’s LUCKY BEAN

TOO YOUNG FOR ROMANCE (From a Special Correspondent) LONDON. sth October. Old enough to win the V.C., but not old enough to have a girl—that is a friend’s description of Sergeant John Hannah, the 18-year-old R.A.F. hero who was awarded valour’s highest award for beating out a fire in the bomb-rack of a machine in mid-air. "My boy is too young to have any girls yet.” his mother said this week. “But maybe all that will be different now that he’s a V.C.” John, however, has another love—his pet budgerigars. He never fails to ask about them in nis fre_ i j quent letters to his home in Glasgow. There is one thing that the young hero will never part with—the lucky bean that his father gave him when he joined up. “I gave him that lucky bean just before he went away. It was a very tiny thing, made in India, and inside of it there were five very small carved elephants." Mr Hannah said. Burned black, his eyes only just saved from blindness by a fortnight’s frantic I work by the doctors, John Hannah grins cheerfully in hospital. When an enemy A.A. shell burned out the bomb rack of his plane. Sergeant Hannah fought the flames for ten minutes while ammunition exploded all round him.