Given I’ve recently bought a house, my parents decided that, now I have space of my own, the time had come to go back and pick up the boxes of my old stuff which they had been keeping in their shed. So instead of flying to Canberra for the Bomber Command Commemorations in June I drove my car the seven hours up the Hume Highway. After the lunch concluded on the Sunday afternoon, I continued north to Goulburn where Mum and Dad now live.
It turned out that most of the boxes in the shed contained stuff belonging to my two sisters rather than me, but I still came away with a couple of those big plastic tubs full of old trophies, documents and childhood memories. Included amongst it were two very interesting artefacts.
I well remember the morning when, as a very young lad, I came out of my bedroom to get ready for school to find a long, tattered cardboard box at my place on the kitchen table. I lifted the lid in the early morning gloom to find some curling, yellowing black and white photos of a young man in uniform, an impressive certificate bearing a large, colourful royal seal and a little blue notebook, carefully inserted into a hand-made blue felt cover. The collection, my father told me later that day, all related to a man who had been my grandfather’s uncle. ‘Uncle Jack’, as Dad called him, had been killed during the Second World War.
The long and the short of it is that this was a critical moment in my growing up. For my next birthday, I was given an Airfix model of a Lancaster. I built it and for the next seven or eight years it was suspended by fishing line from the ceiling in my bedroom, in eternal combat with a model I later built of a Messerschmitt. While the German aircraft seems to have disappeared at some point in the intervening years, in one of the boxes I collected from Goulburn in early June, there was the Lancaster:
It’s far from perfect – after all it was built by a not-quite-ten-year-old boy. The decals were never square and the paint line is nowhere near straight but, apart from a couple of missing propeller blades, it’s survived its years packed away reasonably well.
While Jack’s logbook is obviously the most important single source of my Bomber Command interest, the Lancaster model is also significant. When I was a little boy I wanted to be a train driver. But then I saw the logbook. Imagine if my reaction had been one of resounding indifference. But, happily, I clearly showed some sort of curiosity, so my parents decided to give me the model. And that only stoked the fires.
Also in one of the big plastic tubs I retrieved from Goulburn, hidden in a big folder of mass-produced pre-school paintings of green trains (and one blue signalbox, done after my teacher confiscated the green paint and told me I wasn’t allowed to paint a train) was a drawing of the top view of an aeroplane.
It’s shaky and childlike but it’s unmistakeably a Lancaster. And written underneath (in my mother’s schoolteacher handwriting) is the date: November 1993. Probably not entirely coincidentally, the drawing is very close to the same size as a 1:72 scale model of a Lancaster, suggesting it was completed after I finished the model. That would imply that I probably got the model for my ninth birthday which was in August that year. Dad must have left the logbook at my place at the kitchen table some time before that. So it turns out that I’ve been interested, in one way or another, in Lancasters and the men who flew them for more than two decades.
Dad gave me one more very special box to take home when I drove back to Melbourne. It’s a very small black leather briefcase that he found at an antique shop somewhere.
Inside?
Uncle Jack’s service medals, logbook and those yellowing photos.
© 2014 Adam Purcell
Something Very Big 