locals came over, said they had seen what had happened, and took the boy away. Somewhat shaken, I drove the dented vehicle to the tech site, and phoned our Station Adjutant (now Flt.Lt. Cunningham) at the domestic site, who reported the matter to Herr Knoll. To give the policeman his due, the next time he saw me in the village he was eager to tell me that the lad was OK and that, when he got home, he was given a good "Schinken cloppen" (bottom smacking) by his father who was no less a person than the Burgomeister of Auenhausen!1
There was the time when, as a bus passenger, I saw, at a small building site, a workman climb an electricity pole with what looked like a pair of jump leads in his hand. He connected one to an overhead wire, but when he touched the other there was an enormous blue flash and he dropped to the ground. Within seconds he was on his feet and was dusting himself down having connected his equipment to the mains!
While mentioning travelling by our Ford Köln bus, which had a V8 engine, in the heat of high summer the engine frequently spluttered or failed due to fuel starvation because the petrol vapourised in the fuel line before it got to the carburettor. To circumvent this it was usual practice, although highly dangerous, for the driver to remove the engine cowling and to feed neat petrol from a Coca Cola bottle direct into the carburettor. Fortunately this practice was limited only to the hottest days on the steepest hills en route and no harm ever came of it, except possibly to the engine.
On another journey, this time to morning watch, and in winter, our driver was making his way cautiously on the treacherously slippery packed snow covering the roads when we came upon a farmer's wagon loaded with milk churns abandoned in the middle of the lane. It was totally blocking our progress on a downhill stretch. Tyre tracks showed that the farmer had abandoned his attempt to pull the wagon up the hill by tractor, and had used a gateway to turn round and pass the wagon, with the tractor wheels almost overhanging the edge of the ditch on one side. Our driver tried reversing, but the hill was too steep under those conditions. Flt.Lt. Colin Hanmore was on the bus and i/c watch so, with no alternative, and in order to get to the tech site on time, he ordered the whole watch off the bus and told everyone to manhandle the wagon down the hill and into a gateway over a ditch (there were ditches on both sides) and thus out of the way so that we could pass. It goes, almost without saying, that we failed miserably. The wagon was too heavy to hold once the farmer's wheel-chocks were removed and it ran away from us, our feet sliding on the icy surface as we tried to hold it, some of us falling over. It accelerated away and quickly moved to one side before turning turtle in a ditch, milk spilling from the churns and flowing downhill. We did get on watch on time - just.2
Farm tractors could be hazardous in themselves, especially the Unimog single-cylinder variety. These would bounce up and down on their tyres if left on slow tickover. Sometimes this bouncing was sufficient to actually move the vehicle, bounce by bounce, when on a slope. There was one occasion when such a tractor was parked in a field gateway on a slope leading at right-angles to the road along which I was driving. This tractor bounced itself on to a patch of mud and promptly slithered into my path, causing me to swerve violently to miss it.
In the early winter before the Christmas of 1957, I was on night watch and was waiting for the relief crew to arrive and take over in the morning when, instead, I received a phone call from Sqn.Ldr. Ellison, the Ops Officer, who was still on the
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1 Schinken = ham (literally). Cloppen is self descriptive. No serious mechanical damage was done to the vehicle save for a huge dent in the front. As was usual in such circumstances I had a number of forms to complete. Fortunately the passenger sitting alongside me was Flt.Lt. Billing, my Flight Commander, so I couldn't have wished for a better witness.
2 I believe that the farmer was compensated for the loss of the milk.
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