A flask full of memories

One of the great things about living where we do, outside Valencia in Spain, is that there are some great walks around. Along the beach. Through extensive woodlands or wetlands. Up in the hills.

At the moment, the Covid regulations allow us to go for such walks with at most two other people, as long as they both live in the same households. So, of course, we tend to meet one other couple at a time for any one walk. On a recent occasion, the two good friends who joined us were a Scotsman, Bill, from Glasgow, and his English wife, Suzanne, from Essex.

Now, I’m a little afraid that it’ll seem almost racist to suggest that as a Scotsman, Bill would necessarily like the occasional dram of Scotch. But as it happens, this particular Scotsman does. So I thought it would be fun to bring a little along.

It wasn’t in fact Scotch. Whisky, certainly, but not from Scotland. It didn’t take Bill and Suzanne long to work out its origins. It was Japanese, and excellent.

Still, that’s not the point of the story here. The real point was how I was able to take it with me. We didn’t need much, after all – we were going on a mountain hike. And in any case, I didn’t want to carry any unnecessary weight.

The answer was a hip flask. And, fortunately, I had one to hand. My father’s pewter flask, which he’d carried during World War 2. Battered and full of memories, but still entirely serviceable. Though, I was sad to notice, the chain that held the stopper to the flask, had parted. Fortunately, we have another friend, one of our neighbours, who is a jeweller, and she fixed it for me in a couple of minutes, which made me very pleased. I know my father – Leonard – would have appreciated seeing the flask as near new as possible, apart from the dent in the side, which is precious in itself, as a testament to its use.

Before and after
My dad's hip flask, broken and mended

Leonard, as regular readers of this blog will know, was in the Royal Air Force during the war. He flew as navigator in Stirling bombers. The Stirling was by no means one of the great attacking weapons used by Bomber Command for flattening German cities, the most notable of which was the Lancaster, but that was a source of satisfaction to Leonard.

“I’m so pleased I never took part in the mass attacks on civilians in the raids on cities,” he told me.

Instead, he tended to fly on specialised missions. Dropping paratroops. Taking supplies to soldiers in combat, like the flights he made towing a glider with equipment for the airborne soldiers who were pinned down, trying to capture the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem. A Bridge Too Far tells the story, and it cost a lot of men their lives, and even got my father’s plane shot down on the way back from one of those missions. 

But the missions he told me about the most was taking supplies to resistance units, in particular the ones in France. Leonard had been brought up speaking French in Brussels, and he felt particularly close to the Maquis resistance fighters. 

Those were single plane missions, and he would say that he’d never felt lonelier. Up there in the night sky with no one else around. Even the crew had been cut back to allow a relatively small air force to fly more planes: there were just six of them, rather than eight.

His two most touching experiences came while overflying France at night. On one occasion, someone flashed a V for victory sign in Morse (dot-dot-dot-dash) to them with a torch; on another, someone pulled back blackout curtains to make a V shape of light at the top. In both cases, someone was taking a serious risk to say to the airmen up there, ‘you may feel alone, but you’re not’.

He was 22 when he flew his first combat mission. It still takes my breath away that half a dozen men that young could be put in charge of such a powerful device, capable of killing hundreds of people. As it takes my breath away to think that Britain put them in harm’s way, up there, alone in the dark.

What did Leonard take with him for company?

I know of two things, both of which I now have. 

Flying copy of the Rubáiyát

One was a pocket sized copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. I suppose there must be consolation while up there at night, in verses such as:

Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays

if only because it suggests that you’re not alone in being moved around the checkerboard, to be taken or slain, and laid back in the closet when Destiny’s had enough of playing with you. 

Hence the book.

But I suppose sometimes you needed something a little more life-affirming. As Bill and I both appreciated, that might be a drop of the water of life, which is what the word ‘whisky’ means. 

Hence the flask.

Still, I assume regulations about flying must have been a little less strict than they are today, if having a sip or two of whisky while aloft was regarded as permissible. It certainly wouldn’t be now, at least in civilian pilots. Perhaps rules are, or were, bent a little for the young men whose lives were on the line.

Anyway. It’s great to go on mountain walks around here. And all the better for taking memories of my father with me.