Page 204 - Demo

200The weekends at Thornhill could be very boring. There were no real papers to read and most of the course went home. Surprisingly, particularly at first, it was often very cold, particularly in the morning and in one letter I remarked that we had spent the morning huddled by a log fire in the mess. However, in the afternoon it then got much warmer. At times the temperature would be up in the thirties and we would drink soft drinks all day to keep hydrated. We did stay with a variety of people at weekends from time to time. Some people were really pleasant,but we eventually got fed up with old fashioned %u201cRAF Types%u201d and at the other end of the scale some very immature chaps. We found the general organisation very poor. Our conversion dragged on for a couple of weeks with no sense of urgency. The weather did not help and for much of the time the radar was unserviceable. They never appeared to consider detaching somewhere better. As an example of poor organisation, they decided to have a dining out night for the departing Station Commander. It then turned out that he was being dined out at Harari on the same night. And so, our dining out night was cancelled. No one ever planned out anything and as there were no notice boards, no one ever knew what was going on elsewhere. One of the problems was that white officers could do no wrong. Each Friday, when the students deigned to turn up for the met brief, OC Ops reminded everyone that private cars were not allowed on some part of the airfield. Each time one of the students was bollocked for doing so. Every week. No disciplinary action was ever taken. At the end of the course, we had pushed one student on ahead as he needed an operation. This was the chap who had got burnt after flying into power cables. His operation had been planned for some time and he wanted it done before he graduated. The final test was done by a staff officer from Headquarters in Harari. He was appointed to test the whole course and would come down to do so. However, they had forgotten to appoint anyone and so the poor chap would have to wait until he had recovered from the operation. He