Page 96 - Demo

92if we had known and it would have saved a certain amount of bother. In transit you were at the mercy of the Movement Section and they were not only completely non-flexible and without any common sense but were also recruited from really unpleasant people. They were often referred to as the Hitler Youth. When we arrived at Lyneham we asked when we would get lunch and after much argument, we were finally fed. After that we settled down for a long wait. We discovered that we would have to get up very early the next morning even though we had checked in and probably handed over our luggage. When Ben asked why we would have to get up before we would have to if we were flying ourselves, we were told that they had to consider the worst case which was nursing mothers. Pointing out that we had no nursing mothers on our detachment made no difference. Ben said that as he always played 18 rounds of golf in the morning and so that would be the worst case, and so we should have to get up even earlier. I suppose we were lucky that they didn%u2019t take us up on that. We then asked when we would have dinner only to be told that we had already had it earlier and we were only entitled to 1 meal. And so the detachment did not start well. I think we just went to our respective messes and ate there but I am not sure. The idea of support command who ran the VC10s was that passengers would be fit for action on arrival anywhere. In fact they were all absolutely exhausted and needed a day of rest before doing anything. The aircraft was refuelled in Bahrein and Gan where the flight crew changed and so after goodness knows how long we finally arrived in Singapore for what was supposed to be 2 months.On non-flying days, we started at the Squadron quite early in the morning and then worked to about 1pm when we went for lunch and had the rest of the day off. There was a bus that took us to and fro, but I think we also had some squadron transport. We did a fair bit of flying with some useful RN co-operation and some %u201ccasexs%u201d which involved finding and attacking RN submarines. Always good fun. I remember once