Awake at six from the ship’s horn as we enter St Malo harbour in the thickest of fog. I lug my baggage round to a back street to find my aging Ford automatic, literally dumped there as we had dashed on to Caen after last weeks birthday festivities.
There’s a problem. The accelerator cable has broken and I am in a hurry to meet Albert about buying a fishing lake. Boy Scout initiative is called for - a piece of fencing wire strategically moulded to fit the carburettor levers, a piece of bright green rope threaded through the window and I am airborne. I set track for Dinan Aerodrome where I am ordered to give a talk, once I have mastered the language! I thought pilots in Europe had to be conversant with English to obtain a flying licence? So I put down, again, to the Battle of Crecy or Poitiers perhaps, as they obviously want to get their own back!
Smash, crash! Who put the lights out? Twenty kilometres down the road and the bonnet flies up, cracking the windscreen in several places and totally obscuring my view. Earlier, in the suburbs of St Vran, my wire lever system on the throttle linkage had snagged (engine failure RAF chipmunk checks?) on the under side of the bonnet causing the engine to be stuck on full throttle. Driving on the key worked for a while but I later decided to raise the bonnet 4 inches and to just drive on the safety catch. With much aplomb, I again screeched to a halt, rectified the matter by lashing down the crumpled metal with more rope and screamed away, before I attracted undue interest.
Aeroclub de Dinan was an old stomping ground in the 70s as a staging post for export of my elegant French ladies. Ah, the memories of each passionate relationship together, travelling up from deep down south to cross the English travel, trying to avoid all adversity, they being scantily dressed for the Bureau Veritas, let alone the CAA with their demand for forests of paperwork. Since when did a piece of paper improve an old girl’s performance? Was it safe enough for one flight, that’s what mattered? The former had warned me, if they caught me, it would be ‘les menottes et le prison (red wine with lunch)’. Both authorities, rumour has it, put their heads together and conspired. Both falsification of evidence and a blackmailed witness caused my Egon Ronay’s Guide on the culinary delights to be experienced of no less than 6 UK prisons in 6 months, for which I am still very, very bitter.
Francis, the chief pilot, with his four month Yorkshire Terrier greeted me with his usual ‘French actor’ English and posed for the photo before showing me round the old Armee de L’air Fouga Magister CM170 with the characteristic Beech Bonanza tail.
Later, down at the lake near Merdrignac, surveying the fishing potential, I swore I heard a hunting horn and hounds speaking. The farmer soon confirmed they were hunting ‘le renard en chevaux’, a subject currently under threat in England, should a self centred power crazy government be re elected in a few weeks. Sadly they had ‘gone on’ by the time I had trekked through the forest with its incredible flora, deer and wild boar.
Back with ‘le notaire’ and Albert, sorting out the lake, the latter told us of his trip,in 1945 in a wooden Jodel low wing monoplane, made just up the road at Dinard. They were flying 10 to 15 feet along the breaking waves, as one does, but along the Utah and Omaha beaches of the June 6th 1944 D-Day landings. All of a sudden an enormous explosion and a great water spout blew up in front of them causing the pilot to pull hard right on the joy stick, as it was called in those days, to avoid certain catastophe. The army and French navy were still clearing the battle scarred beaches and sea of mines and were destroying them under ‘controlled’ explosions!
At 6pm in my village, I was collared by Eugene from outside his bar, whilst I was trying to get a photo of the kids and ‘Le Tricolore’, flying outside the Mayor’s Parlour to help load thirty 50kg bags of phosphate fertilizer that has now crippled me for a while due to my 8 broken or seriously damaged joints. In consolation though I was, at least, rewarded in the bar with a generous serving of Ricard! Then it was the little village of Laurenan for supper and so to bed.