We were planning to go to Kew today, to visit the steam engine museum, which only steams at the weekends, and then go on to the gardens. We put the date in our diaries about three weeks ago, after checking on the Abellio website that there weren't any rail engineering works planned. As we arrived at Colchester station this morning the Systems Administrator's eyes, alert as they are for anything to do with trains, instantly clocked the intercity stopped in the wrong platform. I was rather slower on the uptake, but it did strike me as vaguely odd for there to be two double decker buses parked outside on a Sunday morning.
The Systems Administrator declined to pay for a day's parking until we'd found out whether the displaced intercity and the double deckers meant that there was a replacement bus service. I opted to stay with the car while the SA went to check, having no confidence that a uniformed NCP attendant wouldn't appear the moment we left the car with no ticket on it and slap a hefty fine on it. The SA said that there would not be a car park inspector, and was right, and right about the engineering works. Replacement buses as far as Shenfield.
Goodness knows why Abellio can't make these things more obvious. I suppose the moral of the story is, don't bother trying to catch a train on a Sunday without checking on the day whether they're running a normal service, but we checked when we planned the trip. Surely Sunday engineering works are planned more than a month ahead? I passed through the station as recently as last Thursday, and if there were notices up they certainly weren't designed to be eye catching, because I didn't see them. We went home. A day out in West London ceases to be fun by the time a replacement bus service as far as Shenfield has been thrown into the mix.
Instead we went to the Boxted Airfield Museum. It only opens once a month, and today was the day. Boxted airfield is actually at Langham, but there was already another Langham airfield in Norfolk, and the authorities thought it would be too confusing to have two. In fact there is at least one more Langham, near Bury St Edmunds, where the gardens of Langham Hall were opening today, complete with walled garden, sunk garden, teas on the lawn and the national collection of alpine campanulas. We'd thought we'd be able to combine that with the airfield, until we looked at the postcode and realised it was a completely different Langham. Bury St Edmunds is a long way to drive to see some alpine campanulas.
We were at the museum by ten, and I predicted that we would be the only visitors. There were already two cars in the little car park, but they turned out to belong to the volunteers, and we were indeed the first tourists of the day, and the volunteers seemed thrilled to see us. The museum sits in two Nissan huts, one rebuilt and the other a reconstruction, and both with an inauthentic layer of insulation that means they don't freeze in winter, cook in summer and drip condensation as much as the originals. After the war, when the base was decommissioned, families lived in the original huts right up to the 1950s.
It is a good little museum, with plans of the original airfield, photos of aeroplanes and some of the airmen who were stationed there, and reminiscences from locals and aircrew. Boxted was a US bomber base for much of the war, though the RAF had it at the end of the war, and the first aircraft to land there was a spitfire that was running out of fuel even as the men busy clearing orchards from what would become the runway hastily dragged tree stumps out of the way. The maps show the full extent of the base running into present day Colchester, and you have to remind yourself that the town is much larger now.
One of the prize exhibits is the rear third of the fuselage of a Martin B-26 Marauder. It was chopped up for scrap after the war, and this piece survived under a pile of other metal until somebody recognised what it was and salvaged it, one week before the scrap yard closed down. Once the SA had told me that was the sort of aeroplane they flew in Catch 22, and that when Yossarian hated being in an aeroplane because there was no place to go except some other part of the aeroplane, that was the sort of plane he was talking about, I was quite impressed by the B-26. It was absolutely tiny. Even multiplied up by three it was tiny, and a crew of five men fitted into that space. I thought about the young airman hit by shrapnel inside his flak jacket on one of Yossarian's missions, and then tried to put the image out of my mind.
One of the volunteers, now with a bar of medals stretching half way across his chest, had been a rear gunner with the RAF. He was significantly shorter than I am, and I'm only five foot four. Even allowing for the effects of age he couldn't ever have been very tall, and looking at the small space in the back of the B-26 where the rear gunner had to sit, the display about one of the US airmen (from Queens) that was assigned rear gunning duties on account of his stature made sense. It was a job for short people.
No comments:
Post a Comment