Spoke to my father, Tim, yesterday. Turns out that he had a rather exciting Wednesday, having been invited by No. 1 Squadron (with which he flew in the Battle of Britain) to Wyck Hill, a restaurant on the hill along from Little Rissington, where he was then invited to come outside around 13.00. Noticing that people from No. 1 kept looking at their watches, he asked whether they would prefer to be elsewhere? No, they said, they had plenty of time. And then a No. 1 Harrier jump-jet did a fly-past.
Having now had a personal aerial salute, it’s hard to know quite what to do for him on his nineteenth birthday in December. Apparently, the pilot who did the fly-past also read a brief speech Tim had done at a dinner – and received a standing ovation. In the end, though, as BoB veteran Geoffrey Wellum (who’s on again as I write this) put it on TV a few days ago, the main purpose of all of this is to honour all of those who took part in the Battle.
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