Coming In To Land
The memoirs of Wing Commander Bill Malins, DFC
By Bill Malins
Edited by Chris Newton
Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Bill Malins
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Memoirs Books
25 Market Place, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, GL7 2NX
First published in England, December 2010
Edited by Chris Newton
Book jacket design Ray Lipscombe
ISBN 978-0-9565102-5-9
Contents
CHAPTER 2 Fire at Lords Farm, 1926-27
CHAPTER 3 Schooldays and sporting success, 1928-1938
CHAPTER 4 A farm boy goes to war, 1938-39
CHAPTER 5 Flying operations in France—the ‘phoney war’, 1939-40
CHAPTER 6 Coastal defence and reconnaissance, 1940-41
CHAPTER 7 Training and surveillance, 1941-42
CHAPTER 8 The invasion of Sicily, 1943
CHAPTER 9 London under attack, 1943-44
CHAPTER 10 Service at the front, 1944-45
CHAPTER 11 Liberation and homecoming, 1945-46
CHAPTER 12 World tour, 1947-48
CHAPTER 13 Back in the UK, 1949-51
CHAPTER 14 Last posting—RAF Fassberg, 1952
CHAPTER 15 Back to the farm—1952-59
CHAPTER 16 Acquisition and expansion—the 1960s and after
In the spring of 1926, as a boy of ten, I suffered the agony of watching my home burn down before my eyes. That was also the year we had to surrender our tenancy of Copthall Farm, Caversfield, to make way for the new RAF station at Bicester, and I remember watching the first aircraft, a Hawker Horsley, arrive at the new airfield and being gripped by conflicting emotions. From that day on I was driven by two very different desires: to see the family farm rise once again from the ashes, and to fly.
The story of my life that follows reflects two contrasting passions; the love of the land and of the farm which has now been in our family for over a century, and the love for flying which I discovered during my wartime career as a pilot in the Royal Air Force.
Whether or not I have managed to reconcile these two very different vocations successfully must be for others to judge.
W E V Malins
Hawkwell Farm, October 2010
Introduction and Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my family for encouraging me to commit my memories to print, and to record my particular thanks to those who have worked so hard over the past few years to make it possible. My particular thanks to my granddaughter, Victoria Williams, my daughter-in-law, Alison Malins, and to Colin Ford, No.268 Squadron RAF Historian.
Dedication
In memory of my late wife, Daphne, to whom I owe so much.
Country boy
I was born at Lords Farm, Bicester, on Sunday September 26th 1915. The old rhyme says Sunday’s child is bonny and blithe and good and gay. I hope I have lived up to that over the years since, though my father was away in Germany fighting in the First World War at the time, so things can’t have been quite so blithe and gay for him and my mother.
My father was Trooper William Vernon Malins of the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. He had joined the local yeomanry, and as a farmer he was expected to take his own horse to war with him, which he did. When his regiment, the 2nd Battalion of the Oxford & Buckinghamshire Regiment, went to France in 1914, my father stayed in England on coastal defence. Only when the Battle of the Somme began in July 1916 was he sent to join them.
After peace was declared the regiment went to Bonn as the occupying force, and my father finally returned home in February 1919.
Not Private—Trooper. I was proud of that. A trooper in a cavalry regiment was considered a better man than a private in the infantry. When I went for my interview for a commission in the RAF, it gained me marks.
My earliest recollection of my father must have been the day he returned home from the war. I remember being picked up by a strange man in a rough uniform and being held up to look over the door of the loose box into the pigsty, where a sow was rearing ten little piglets. It was a sandy and black Oxfordshire sow, a very popular breed at that time among the Oxfordshire farmers. The piglets were of course sandy and black as well, and they made quite a picture suckling on their mother.
My father brought his steel helmet back with him from the war. We hung it up in the porch at the front of the farmhouse and for many years we used it as a flower basket, until finally it rusted and could be used no more.
Today Lords Farm is run by my son Tim. It also houses the headquarters of an agricultural equipment manufacturer, but in those days it was just an arable farm with sheep and beef cattle.
My first clear memory of my infant years is of standing at the gate separating the garden of Lords Farm from the front yard and watching the cows with their calves—I wasn’t allowed into the yard itself. I found it fascinating to watch the men putting hay and turnips into the two square wooden mangers, and then look on as the animals munched their way through their evening meal.
I wasn’t happy just to watch the animals—I wanted to ride them. One day, when I was no more than three or four years old, I climbed on to a cow lying in the yard and it got to its feet with me still clinging to its back. The men were afraid I’d be killed, so they put a fork between its curved horns to hold it down. You rarely see horns on a cow now.
My father had a Suffolk ram which he kept with the flock. He was a friendly old ram with a rounded roman nose and he was very fond of my father, but he didn’t like me. He would take a few steps back and then charge and knock me down. One of the farmhands told me that the only way of stopping a ram from knocking you down was to get on to its back and hold on to its fleece. I tried it, and he was right. There’s no easier ride than on the back of a woolly lamb or a sheep with its fleece still on, though it helped that I was a bit underweight for my age. It’s much more difficult to ride one after early June, when the flock has been sheared.
On hot sunny summer days when the sheep were lying down in the field and sleepily cudding it was difficult to get them to stand up, especially the ram, so I would creep up behind them and leap on to their backs. They would get up and gallop twenty or thirty yards along the field, then stop, realise I was still on board and try to throw me off. Generally I would manage to stay on until I’d decided I’d had enough and it was time to leave the poor sheep alone. What fun we had, all those years ago.
I once asked my father what the ram was for. “He’s there to keep the fox away” he replied. It was years before I found out the real reason. I wish my father had explained to me then that our 150 ewes were the ram’s wives, and that he was the father of all the lambs that gambolled about the fields each spring until they were fat enough to go for slaughter. He could have given me a valuable lesson in the facts of life.
The farmhands used to call me Major Bill, or the Major—it was a name that would stick for the rest of my life, except for my years in the RAF. One day I asked my mother why. She told me that when I was about a year old they had put me on the back of a horse in the yard and one of the farm workers had said “Oh look, it’s Major Bill”. The Major was a retired Army officer who lived at Slade Farm and he used to ride up Lords Lane on exercise each morning, so I suppose I reminded them of him.
I would ride the horses and ponies as well, at the slightest opportunity. I used to get the ploughman to put me on a horse’s back. I would ride it up into the fields and then someone would lift me down so I could run back home up Lords Lane to the farm.
As I grew older I loved working with horses. Ours had to work on a few pounds of oats a day plus hay, but they kept very fit on it. It was a delight for me as a boy to be allowed to take a pair of horses harrowing the fields or behind the drill at planting time, in the spring or the autumn. There was nothing to disturb the peace and quiet of the day. All you could hear was the ‘shushing’ of the harrow as it pulled through the soil and the birds singing in the hedges and the trees. Today’s tractor drivers have to sit in an insulated cab, and all they can hear is the noise of the engine or the pop music on the radio. They don’t know what they’re missing. It’s a terrible shame not to be able to hear the birdsong when you’re out working in the fields.
Haymaking was still done in the old traditional way. The mower was drawn by two horses and it would give you about a four-foot-wide cut. The swathes of cut hay were allowed to dry in the sun for couple of days, after which they would be tedded (turned over to help them to dry) with a horse- drawn tedder and finally put into haycocks, small heaps about two or three feet high and three feet across at the bottom. This allowed the hay to dry out and cure and helped it to shed any rain if there was a shower overnight. The haycocks had to be picked up by hand, but we had a hayloader which picked up loose hay and carried it into the back of a wagon, although it had broken down during the war.
When the hay was dry enough it was “windrowed” with a horse-drawn side rake. This left a continuous line of hay ready to be picked up with the hayloader, which was towed behind. It dropped the hay into the back of the wagon, where one or two men would push it with forks up to the front. In the 1920s the hayloader stayed in the rickyard, gradually getting shabbier, but it wasn’t until the late 1930s that it was replaced with a better hayloader which made haymaking a much easier job.
Haymaking was a chancy business, because of the weather. You had to pick the right time or you could waste the whole crop because it got too wet or went past its best.
Harvesting the oats was much easier. It was less at the mercy of the weather than haymaking. The oats had to be left in chocks or stooks and the old saying was that you should let the church bells ring for three Sundays before it was time to carry them and put them into a rick.
I used to enjoy the harvest. Three horses were needed on the binder which cut the corn and bound the sheaves and the leading horse would often want to eat the ears of oats. My grandfather, Grandpa Malins, would get the men to put me on the back of the leading horse, which was always known as the forrester. My job was to hold the right-hand rein tight so that the horse couldn’t turn its head to the left and start feeding off the standing crop.
Building the rick of oats, barley or hay was always fascinating. I enjoyed being allowed to get on to the rick with the two men who were building it as the hay was pitched up to them a forkful at a time by a man standing in the wagon. During harvest he pitched up the sheaves one at a time to a man who placed them carefully around the edge of the rick to make sure it kept its shape and did not bulge to one side or the other. I had a fork with a short handle so I would be less likely to stick it into one of the men working on the rick.