Page 294 - Demo

290peared touch and go at one point. You could use a lot of fuel carrying out a protracted recovery.That year Gabby and I decided to stay in a Gite in the Loire Valley. It was very nice, but Gabby was very upset that we had to clean it when we left. As a result, we decided to think about buying our own house in France with the idea that we would retire to it. After all, we could see that the children would be off our hands in the not-too-distant future and so there was nothing to keep us anchored to England. The thought of grandchildren never crossed our minds. So, we started looking. We would have liked to get to the Massif Central where I had had my weekend with the French Airforce. However, we thought that we needed somewhere we could reach in a day from York and so looked around the Allier department. We eventually bought a typical house in that area. It was mainly a barn with one third habitable with 2 down stair rooms, a kitchen and toilet. It had electricity, water and a septic tank. There was a loft above this that would have been used to store hay in during the winter as a form of insulation. It had 5 houses nearby and a fair-sized field. We wanted a bit of land but that was a mistake. Later the problem of cutting the grass was one of the factors in deciding to sell it.In February 93 I flew a low level nav trip with one of the Group 2 Students. The route took us down to the Humber and into Lincolnshire before coming back over the Yorkshire Wolds and up to the North York moors. It was a nice day, but the student was struggling a bit and did not do a proper fuel check as we went south. He checked the contents were as expected but did not check the balance. There was a switch to do this. I decided to say nothing but to make a point about it later. As we approached Scarborough, he carried out his next fuel check. Whether he did it properly, or whether I told him to check the balance I cannot remember, but when he did, we found that all the fuel had come from