Page 218 - Demo

214rosion got too bad, I changed one van for another. One of the good things about Church Fenton was that the main met brief in the morning was at 0830 and so it was often a fairly leisurely drive into work. I also found that the three quarters of an hour drive home allowed me to leave the RAF behind before I reached home. I had arrived at Church Fenton just after the SAFFA Air Day was held there and during my arrival interview, the Station Commander, Gp Capt Briggs, told me that I would be organising it in 1983.The work in Standards paired in very well with what I had been doing on Exam Wing and perhaps it is not surprising that we soon had a very good reputation for upgrading our QFIs. The Chief Instructor was Wg Cdr Oscar Wild. His brother, a navigator, had been OC 206 at Kinloss. They were quite different, and Oscar could be quite critical of Jimmy%u2019s ability, but I thought that Jimmy was the better boss. We were kept quite busy working with the QFIs and available to help out with the basic courses from time to time. That year, 1982, we bought our own frame tent and a trailer for it to go in and went up to Northumberland camping. The previous year we had borrowed a tent from Tom and Judy and gone to Wells-by-the-Sea in Norfolk. We enjoyed it but felt to do it properly we needed proper equipment and so were much better organised in Northumberland. To begin with the weather was super. It was lovely and hot although the sea was cold and we sat up in the sand-dunes relaxing. At one stage Gabby went topless as there was no-one about. In fact we could not understand why the place was not packed with the lovely sandy beach. Then, after a few days, the weather changed. A cold North Easterly wind came up with heavy rain. We just threw everything into the trailer and set off for home. After that we thought about camping in France where the weather was more dependable. Thus our long remembered chain of summer camping holidays began. To jump ahead a bit I usually