There are the birds of the air and the birdmen of the air and, need it be said, the birdwoman of the air. Something in the obituary of a well known English writer and broadcaster provoked a phone call to Commandant Peter Young, head of our Military Archives: "Is it true that, way back in the Thirties or Forties, some of our Air Corps chaps in their tiny machines did actually fly under unspecified Liffey bridges - at low tide of course?"
Keeping a straight face over the phone, so to speak, Peter said he thought not, but "try the Boyne Bridge at Drogheda." So next call was to Aidan A. Quigley, whose Green is my sky is a wonderful story of our air times and his part in so much of it here. He laughed. "Yes the thing about the Boyne Bridge was that you had to be sure there was no ship coming against you with a nasty sticking up mast."
He had a dozen other stories in a relatively short phone conversation. His book, published by Avoca Publications, Dublin, you should all have. Some of the stories in that short conversation would paralyse you with respect for the Air Corps personnel and with laughter. All this arose after reading the obituary of an English flyer who later became a well known TV personality and writer. He was in the RAF before the war and tells two stories of minor misfortunes. He was a great poker player and one morning, his pockets filled with half crowns and florins (dear God), was ordered to test fly a plane over a peninsula in Wales. He was half way through his first loop when he noticed his winnings fly ing past his head. He hadn't fastened his pockets. Talk of pennies from Heaven.
Another time he had a girlfriend in Oswestry and promised her to do a piece of aerobatics over the town in her honour. As he turned the plane upside down, a big spanner that a mechanic had left in the cockpit flew past him.
It just missed a policeman on duty, bounced and clattered through the co op plate glass window. The local paper had the headline, "Vandal throws spanner at policeman". This from Malcolm Greenhalgh, writing of Hugh Falkus in Salmon Trout and Sea Trout for May. And much more. A friend remembers Falk, the great angler and outdoor man, warning on TV of the dangers of falling in rivers while wearing breast high waders. "You've got to turn your feet down and then you can come upright." He said this on camera at riverside, and immediately jumped in and did the demonstration.
Aidan, in his turn has hilarious airmen stories, if the laws of libel and the Official Secrets Act allow him to publish.