After the initial familiarization flights most of our time was spent on low level exercises, navigation, smoke bombing and general stooging around. One day I had a real hair-raising experience. While cruising along at 3,000 feet I glanced over my right shoulder and saw this other Oxford making a pass at me.

Upon rechecking its position a moment later I could see that he was going to crash into my tail. Instinctively I banked sharply to the right to miss him. However, at the same time he pushed his nose down which caused his -tail to rise, with the result that the top of his tail rudder took four feet off the end of my left wing.

Fortunately, both planes would still fly. After testing the stalling speed, about 120 knots compared to a normal 80 knots, I headed back to base and managed to land without incident as did the New Zealand chap that ran into me. You can imagine the reception committee we received on landing. All the top brass were at the flight shack when we taxied in. Lucky for me all the blame was accorded to the bloke from down under and he received a permanent black eye in the form of a log book endorsement.

I acquired an ancient three speed bicycle at Fraserburg, and as our base was about 6-7 miles from town, a few of us used to bike in on our days off. A seaside golf links bordered the town road and we talked ourselves into a few rounds using clubs loaned to us. As it was early winter the Scots would use red balls and play in all types of weather: wind, rain, snow. In town we got to know the owner of a tea shop and he would always invite us into the back section of his store, behind the curtain, and here we would indulge in bacon and eggs which were very scarce at that time.


*http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK---Air/Airspeed-AS.10-Oxford/0696728/L/. Licensed under GNU Free Documentation License via Wikimedia Commons,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RAF_Airspeed_AS.10_Oxford_II_Brown.jpg#mediaviewer/File:RAF_Airspeed_AS.10_Oxford_II_Brown.jpg