One of the Few E-Book

Johnny Kent

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 568

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

New and updated edition: the original autobiography is enhanced by the addition of family photos and extracts from unpublished letters and writings by the author, and a moving and informative new introduction and epilogue by Alexandra Kent, Johnny Kent's daughter, who presents the father she knew, not only a distinguished and brave war hero but a man who suffered with the scars of war. 'I turned into the attack … The German formation split up and a general mêlée ensued, grey shapes with black crosses on them flashed past only feet away, next the brown and green of a Hurricane flashed across the sights … so confused was the fight that one had little or no chance to see if one's fire had taken effect before having to take wild evasive action to avoid either the enemy's fire or a collision.' Group Captain Johnny Kent joined the RAF in the 1930s and went on to become a flight commander of one of the most successful fighter squadrons of the Second World War. In this role, he helped the famous 303 Polish Squadron play a decisive part in the Battle of Britain, and this earned him the highest Polish military award, the Virtuti Militari, as well as the affectionate nickname 'Kentowski'. Group Captain Kent's fascinating memoirs, originally published in 1971, tell the story of his life in the RAF, from his struggles as a boy on the Canadian Prairies to get into the air, detailing his experiences as a test pilot in Farnborough and his constant efforts to excel at what he did. In this new edition, alongside the classic tale of derring-do, Kent's daughter provides supplementary material that places his extraordinary story into the broader context of his life as a son, husband and father. Poignant questions are raised about what it meant to be 'One of the Few' – for both the men themselves and those to whom they were closest.

Leseprobe

This book is rededicated to my children

Claudia and Raoul

in the hopes that it may in turn help them

to know and understand a grandfather

whom they, regrettably, could never meet.

He would have loved you both deeply.

Alexandra Kent

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to countless people for the encouragement and help they have given me in my efforts in recent years to better understand my father’s life. I would like to express warm thanks to Richard King, author of 303 ‘Polish’ Squadron Battle of Britain Diary, who was one of the first to set me off on a great journey of discovery. I received invaluable help and kindness from the staff of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, in particular Krzysztof Barbarski and Wojtek Deluga, and from the curator of the RAF Museum at Hendon, Peter Devitt. Others who have tirelessly given me their time, assistance and stories along the way include Richard Kornicki, Chairman of the Polish Air Force Memorial Committee, and his wife Lepel; veteran fighter pilot Franciszek Kornicki and his wife Patience; veteran fighter pilot and author of First Light Geoffrey Wellum; Edward McManus of the Battle of Britain Historical Society; historians Peter Sikora and Andy Saunders; Witold Urbanowicz junior; Philip Feric-Methuen; the children of 303 Squadron Leader Ronald Kellett; and Danuta and Artur Bildziuk, Chairman of the Polish Airmen’s Association UK. Sincere thanks also to Rodney and Vicky Byles for – everything.

I am also grateful to Mark Cazalet for the introduction to Tim, and to Tim Cazalet and Liz Razzell for their hospitality. An especially heartfelt thank-you to Tim for encouraging me to write and for the extraordinary generosity of giving me your mother, Janet’s, photograph album and books. I am also obliged to Tim for putting me in touch with his aunt, Patsy Rawlins, and cousin Rob Rawlins, who received me and all my questions with such interest. Thanks are also due to Tomasz Magierski for all the work on the film 303 and for giving me the privilege of participating in such a fine production. I have met too many others on the course of this journey to include all their names but suffice it to say that I have been greeted with unfailing encouragement at the RAF Club in London, the Shoreham Aircraft Museum, RAF Biggin Hill, RAF Northolt and in Warsaw by those involved in organising the reunion of the Polish Air Force in 2012.

I wish too to express gratitude to my anthropology colleagues and mentors at Gothenburg University for many years of guidance. The insights into humanity that I gained under their tutelage have been invaluable in researching my own family. Warm thanks also to Kate Antonsson for her encouragement while I was writing the epilogue.

I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge all veterans and their families for everything that they have endured as a consequence of war.

Profound thanks also to my partner Jonas Persmark and my dear friend Harry Wright for their unstinting support, and to my brother Stuart, my sister Joanna and my sister-in-law Linda for sharing with me their memories of a man who lives on in our hearts.

Finally, I wish to thank my parents.

Alexandra Kent

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

The Man Behind the Memoirs, by Alexandra Kent

One of the Few, by Johnny Kent

About the Author

Foreword

  1    Early Experiences

  2    Flying Training

  3    Farnborough

  4    Test Pilot

  5    Battle of Britain

  6    Squadron Commander

  7    Wing Leader

  8    Lecture Tour

  9    The Middle East

10    Britain and Germany

11    Chief Test Pilot

12    Exchange Officer

13    Final Fling

The Human Costs of Heroism, by Alexandra Kent

Plates

Copyright

The Man Behind the Memoirs

by Alexandra Kent

Sunday Times, 19 January 1941, ‘Not a Poet’:

A young man of twenty-five stood beside two or three Polish airmen last week and received a decoration for gallantry from the Polish Foreign Minister. He was slim, with fine features and delicate hands. His face had little colour, and only a curious hardness about the mouth denied the idea that he might have been a poet or an artist.

A year before the war he came from Winnipeg and took a permanent commission in the R.A.F. When the balloon barrage was being prepared it became necessary to test the exact effect that contact with the cables would have on aeroplanes. The young Canadian volunteered and crashed the cables eighteen times. For that he was awarded the Air Force Cross. Later in the war he was given command of the Polish Squadron formed here after that country’s collapse. ‘They were so brave,’ he said, ‘that you didn’t dare to show a sign of fear even if your heart was in your mouth’. Under his leadership the ‘bag’ of the Polish Squadron reached amazing proportions. He was decorated with the D.F.C.

Now he has been given another command, but Poland has added her honours to ours. His name is Squadron-Leader Kent, and from his appearance he might have been a poet – but I would hate to be the German looking at those eyes and mouth behind a gun.1

Many of those I have met who have read my father’s memoirs, One of the Few, have asked me the same question: ‘What was he really like?’ This was not easy for me to answer because my memories of him are from childhood and the man I knew had retired from the RAF before I was born. When his memoirs were published, I was 13 years old. I read them and found the voice that spoke from the pages quite different from the familiar voice of the father I knew. But, as Shakespeare so famously wrote, one man in his time plays many parts. In this introductory chapter and the epilogue that follows at the end of his memoirs, I shall bring together some of the different parts he played and place the story he told of his life into a broader context. In this way, I hope to give a fuller picture of what he was like.

One of the Few was very much of its time, and the Boy’s Own genre in which it was written was what its audience would have expected. I imagine that if fighter pilots like my father, who were virtually idolised as modern-day knights, had exposed self-doubt or frailty in their stories they might not have been well received. However, as the veterans’ stories become history, I believe it is worth re-examining the old stereotypes of gallant heroes in order to understand these men with a fuller sense of humanity.

Beyond my father’s memoirs, I find a complex character whose life was marked by powerful contradictions. There are many things about him that betray, if not a poet, then a person of aesthetic sensibility who valued solitude and peace. He may have been born to fly, and he certainly sought to excel, but there is nothing to suggest aggressiveness. However, coming of age in such brutal times meant his passion for flying and pursuit of excellence were channelled into the cruel business of killing. However noble the cause, slaying another human being, particularly in one-to-one duels, must impact the soul in ways that defy expression. Even before the war, my father demonstrated an impressive ability to keep his nerve in his test-flying exploits. But this does not mean he was fearless. As a leader who was responsible for his comrades in battle – some of whom proved to be more fearless than he – he must have been under inconceivable pressure to maintain morale by masking his feelings, perhaps even from himself.

There was also the contrast between the strict, almost ascetic discipline of service life and the raucous evenings at pubs and nightclubs, where alcohol played an important role in both sharing and deadening heightened sensitivities.

He writes, too, of the sacrifice his parents made for him and yet, perhaps driven to excel in the RAF as a way of thanking them, he deprived them of the presence of their only child. He left home at the tender age of 20 to embark on a hazardous career on the other side of the world, returning home only twice before his mother died in 1944.

There is also the ambiguity of his role in the RAF; his British heritage and Canadian upbringing meant he was part insider, adept at reproducing British and RAF attitudes and manners, but also part outsider, a condition that was influential in his relationship to the Polish airmen he came to lead. The challenge of gaining acceptance in English society is a point I return to in the epilogue.

Further, beyond the masculinised military world of the fighter pilots’ memoirs was a domestic reality in which women featured prominently and where romance blossomed. During the Battle of Britain, my father was moving constantly and rapidly between the sometimes conflicting demands of these two realms and ultimately he had to decide which to prioritise.

Finally, many of those who lived through the war must have found it disorienting when the wartime ethos gave way to the new liberal generation of the 1960s. While many pilots returned to civilian life immediately after the war, my father came of age in the RAF and remained in service for another decade after the war. When he retired, he had no experience of civilian life and the coping strategies and values that he had become habituated to in service were largely obsolete or, indeed, maladaptive later on – another theme I explore in the epilogue.

I was deeply attached to my father when I was a young child but my parents divorced when I was 11. I then lived with my mother, but she died not long after the divorce and my father was by then unable to care for me. Our contact during the final fifteen years of his life was sporadic and limited. He died when I was in my twenties. I then moved overseas and spent the next twenty-five years building my own career and raising a family. With my siblings living in other parts of the world and with no root left in England, there was little opportunity to revisit our shared past. However, in 2010, my sister sent me a copy of Richard King’s then newly published book 303 ‘Polish’ Squadron Battle of Britain Diary. In it I found quotations from a personal diary my father had kept during the Battle of Britain, whose existence I had until then known nothing about. This inspired me to try to find out more about what he was really like.

What follows is a compilation of my memories and insights I’ve gained during this recent quest to get to know him more fully.

MELLOW MEMORIES

My brother and sister, born almost a decade before me, had spent their early years being fathered by a man who was still caught up in the disciplinarian culture of military service and each experienced him in their own way. Our father retired from the RAF in 1956 and I was born two years later. By then, much of his youthful vigour had already been spent and he was mellowing into middle age. My early memories are of a soft-spoken, indulgent father figure who would buy me Walnut Whips on his way home from London.

All of us in the family went by nicknames. Soon after birth, I became known as Cinderella, later shortened to ‘Cindy’. By now, my father’s gracile, even delicate, but angular frame had gained some elasticity and he developed a paunch. We called him ‘Dumpy’ and this is the name he used in his handwritten inscription to me in my copy of One of the Few:

‘Cindy’

My Beloved and Adorable daughter – please accept

This little present to help

You, in years to Come, to

Remember what I was like.

I want you to know that I

Love You Beyond Description.

I Always have and Shall

Continue to do so Until I Cease

To Exist.

May Every Good Wish Be Yours for Ever,

Your

‘Dumpy’.

As the youngest, I had unique access to him. Looking back I can see that we valued one another’s qualities – like him, I loved to write and draw, and by the age of 8 I wanted to become an astronaut. I would spend hours by his side in his office paring away at scrap pieces of balsa wood that were left over from those he was painstakingly working into model aircraft. He would scrape, sand, paint and varnish his Spitfires to immaculate finishes while I produced chunky little spacecraft that I painted with black and silver lacquer. He seemed endlessly patient. One afternoon, when he was sitting in an armchair reading the Daily Telegraph, I asked him how a piston engine worked. He folded his newspaper and put it on the floor, then told me to go and get a pencil and paper. I did as I was told, then crawled up on to his knee and watched with fascination as he sketched a diagram and led me through the combustion process. We spent hours playing cards together in the sitting room while my mother busied herself in the kitchen. Every time I won, which was not infrequently, he would chortle and call me ‘cheatapator champeen’.

What I knew of his youth came from the wild and, quite possibly, embellished stories he told of how it could be so cold in the winter in Manitoba that the smoke would come out of the chimney and instantly freeze and cascade down the side of the house. There were swashbuckling tales of shooting rattlesnakes from horseback. A rattlesnake, he would say as my eyes widened, can move faster than a horse at full gallop. My childish imagination conjured images of him as a fearless cowboy charging across the plains on his steed. He seemed larger than life, the accuracy of his stories being of less significance than the daredevilry they summoned.

Our Hampshire garden had a row of sweet chestnut trees at the front and, in the autumn, he would be out there in a pair of old jeans, a cotton shirt and a V-necked knitted pullover raking golden leaves into heaps. While he raked, I would charge around pretending to be on horseback on the Prairies, occasionally halting to collect the prickly chestnuts that we’d later prise open with a knife so he could roast them in the fireplace. Once the coals were glowing, he’d hold a brown paper bag upside down inside the chimney and let the hot air shoot it upwards while I raced out of the French windows into the garden to catch it.

I had little insight into his life at this time but I knew he went off to London by train to work and my mother would often take me with her in the car to Hook station to meet him when he returned from Waterloo in the late afternoon. I would careen along the platform in my green corduroy Beatles hat and leap into his arms when he got off the train.

Then, when I was barely through primary school, he was suddenly gone from my life. Just a year after he and my mother separated One of the Few was published and I received a copy. I read it, eagerly awaiting the bit when he would write about me, and was disappointed to find that it was almost entirely about a military and masculine adult world of which I had little understanding and, although my brother and sister got a mention, I didn’t feature at all. We kept in touch and I saw him a few more times and then, when I was 27, he died and I lost the chance to ask him the numerous questions I later would liked to have asked. Delving into some of the materials that survive him has helped me construct answers to some of them.

HUMBLE ORIGINS

My father was an only child, born at the outbreak of the First World War. His father, Robert (‘Bertie’), was the second of four children in a butcher’s family in Dunoon, on the west coast of Scotland. The eldest of these four children, John, was chosen to take over the family business but he couldn’t abide the violence of butchering animals and so married a Scots girl and immigrated to Vancouver, where he worked for the Tramway Department. Bertie got a job at the Dunoon Post Office and then became a postman in Inverkip, just across the water from Dunoon, where he met an English girl called Elsie, who used to come to Inverkip on holiday each year. Bertie and Elsie married and then they too immigrated to Canada, where Bertie secured a job as a clerk at the Head Post Office in Winnipeg, where my father was born. Bertie’s sister Ruby remained in Scotland, married and had three children, while the youngest Kent brother, Alex, joined the army and died of enteric fever at the turn of the century during the Boer War in South Africa, aged only 19.

So my father had in his veins a mixture of the blood of a butcher, of a man who couldn’t bear the sight of blood and of another who had died very young in war. He also bore the legacy of his own father, Bertie, who joined the Great War in 1914, leaving Elsie with their new baby son, John Alexander. For the first years of his life, my father was cared for by his mother and his aunt from Vancouver, and it must have been a jolt to the female-dominated world of a 5-year-old boy when his father, now burdened with the experiences of a gruesome war, re-entered his life. I never met my paternal grandparents and my father spoke little of them, but it would be understandable if the little boy Johnny was in awe of his father and wanted to make him proud.

His all-consuming passion for flying began early when flight technology was still in its infancy and he shared his enthusiasm with many of his contemporaries. His flying instructor, Konnie Johannesson, must also have impressed his young protégé. Konnie had not only fought in the Great War, when he learned how to fly in Egypt, but was also an Olympic ice-hockey player. When I was a child, my father used to tease me by protruding his set of false front teeth – his own teeth had been knocked out during an ice-hockey game in Winnipeg.

After becoming the youngest pilot in Canada to receive his commercial flying licence, he left home to seek his fortunes with the RAF in England. The journey meant travelling from the Prairies across the vast expanse of the continent to the east coast, where he would see the sea for the first time in his life. On 16 February 1935, he set sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Duchess of Bedford, arriving after eight days at sea at the port of Liverpool. Ten days after docking, this pale, willowy young man of 6ft with smooth black hair and weighing only 9 stone arrived at the Air Ministry on Kingsway in London for his 12.30 appointment. Following his interview for a Short Service Commission, he enrolled in a training programme at the Flying Training School near Chester. However, he missed Canada and after this training he briefly went home to look for work in commercial aviation. However, when he was then offered the chance to test fly for the RAF, he returned to England and this was decisive for the course his life was to take.

He kept his soft Canadian lilt until the end of his life. His foreignness must have been both an advantage and an obstacle when he came to England; I believe it may have given him a cultural vantage point from which to critique the English but the unyielding structures of their class system must have dumbfounded him. He seemed able both to internalise and scorn Englishness in ways that earned him approbation as well as condemnation.

In the Royal Canadian Air Force Journal’s 2015 ‘Battle of Britain’ edition, Paul Collins tells a revealing story about my father. During his flight training at Duxford, my father was flying a Gloster Gauntlet in tight formation under the command of what Collins describes as ‘a classic English martinet, the strict and often unreasonable disciplinarian … who cannot grasp the difference between commanding respect and demanding respect’. As they were approaching the airfield, my father realised that the commander intended them to land in formation – something they had not done before. Noting the angle of the perimeter fence and the order of their approach, my father understood that he was at risk of catching his undercarriage on the fence and so he decided to break formation, circle around once more and land alone. This insubordination was met by what my father described as a ‘veritable broadside of invective and abuse which was repeated when I tried to explain why I had acted as I had’.

Paul Collins continues:

As Kent slunk away to lick his wounds, the flight commander detailed another of his charges to get ready for another formation practice. One of the officers who seemed to have taken the greatest pleasure at Kent’s misfortune was now flying in his place, and as they came in for their landing, that officer’s undercarriage struck the fence as Kent knew it would and his aircraft flipped over onto its back and was destroyed, with the pilot escaping serious injury.

With more than a little frustration, Kent was left with the definite impression that in this man’s Air Force, you just cannot win.

Such self-assurance and independence of spirit in such a young man may have irked his British superiors, but these were to prove among the most important qualities that later marked him out as ‘One of the Few’.

His willingness to undertake outrageously risky test-flying exercises in the run up to the war may also in part have been a way to prove himself to the Brits. His skills in ice hockey, rattlesnake shooting and baseball were worthless as social credentials in Britain. My brother recalls wishing the ground would open up and swallow him when our father participated in a parents’ day cricket match at Dane Court preparatory school in Surrey. Instead of following the rules of cricket, he simply played baseball, which met with a flurry of discreet coughing and rolling of eyes. Lacking fluency in English social codes, he had to rely on his wits and flying skills to get ahead. And he did so to effect. It wasn’t long until he received his longed-for permanent commission and he steadily climbed through the ranks of the RAF, earning himself a string of medals along the way.

When he returned to Canada on a lecture tour in 1942, by then a war hero, his mother evidently recognised her son’s extraordinary determination and desire to test his own limits. A newspaper article from the Winnipeg Free Press describing the reunion is entitled, ‘He hasn’t changed a bit, says John A. Kent’s mother’.

HIS FINEST HOURS

Although his entire flying career was remarkable, the part for which he has become best known was his role as flight commander of the legendary 303 Polish Fighter Squadron, the re-formed Kościuszko Squadron, whose history has been detailed by Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson in their book For Your Freedom and Ours. Those few weeks of the summer of 1940 were a profoundly transformative rite of passage. His expertise, his ability to maintain his composure, and his ambiguous status as both insider and outsider all became decisive for the role he played in this epic moment of history. However, combat also required that he find ways to stifle significant aspects of his nature.

The story of Poland’s conceivably decisive contribution to the Battle of Britain has, particularly since the end of Soviet rule in Poland, captivated the British public, such as through the Channel 4 documentary in its Bloody Foreigners series, ‘The Untold Battle of Britain’, and Tomasz Magierski’s recent film 303. In the speech he delivered at the Polish War Memorial service at Northolt in 2015, Chairman of the Polish Air Force Memorial Committee, Richard Kornicki, said:

It is often said that Britain stood alone in its ‘finest hour’. But that is not the whole truth. It still had one ally, bound to it in Treaty, whose Government and Armed Forces alone placed themselves alongside Britain for the common good. It was Poland. The only country in Europe which was occupied by the Germans, but never surrendered, never signed an Armistice, never gave up the fight, at home or abroad, through six long years.

However, before the Poles had entered the battle, the British command assumed the Polish pilots would be inferior to their own – their morale shattered after such a rapid defeat in their homeland. At that time, my father simply adopted the RAF ‘insider’s’ attitude towards the unknown new arrivals. In his diary entry for 22 July 1940, after visiting the fighter station RAF Northolt, he writes, ‘The chaps told me that there is a Polish Squadron coming here. They’ll be a bit wild and woolly I should think. I’m afraid they will present quite a problem on the R/T unless they speak English fairly well.’

On 25 July, when he learned that he had been posted to the Polish Squadron, he was nonplussed: ‘I can’t speak a word of Polish and I’m in a bit of a quandary over it all. The other boys are getting a hell of a kick out of it and are laughing a lot right now.’

Nevertheless, his own experiences as a newcomer to Britain perhaps primed him for the way he quickly bonded with his Polish colleagues. His efforts to learn basic Polish suggest not only pragmatism but also a degree of humility. His convivial attitude to the Poles earned him the affectionate nickname ‘Kentowski’ and he became a staunch supporter of their cause – he would later adopt as his personal emblem a Canadian maple leaf enclosing the Polish eagle. Cloud and Olson describe the transformation that took place in him after he began flying with them:

John Kent, who had been so depressed four months earlier at the thought of flying with a bunch of Poles, was now devoted to them. At a nightclub one night, he lunged at a fellow British officer who would not stand when the band played the Polish national anthem, Jeszcze Polska nie zginela. Kent hauled the miscreant to attention and bloodied his nose.

The RAF drew airmen from a variety of social backgrounds, amateurs as well as professionals. However, the English officers hailed largely from the upper and middle classes, and had been educated in all-male public schools, where they had learned that conspicuous shows of emotion were unmanly. The Poles, by contrast, soon earned renown for their popularity with English women, who were charmed by their social ease and expressiveness. My father, having been surrounded by British reserve for five years, also warmed to their flamboyance. When asked in a 1942 interview what he thought of the Poles, he responded, ‘Temperamentally, they are a lot like Canadians and we get along well together.’

Like the Poles, he too had to earn his credibility in Britain by demonstrating his mastery of the skies. To the Poles, he must also prove himself a fighter and a leader. In the same 1942 interview, he humbly admits, ‘The Poles are the best there are as far as fighters are concerned.’

The affection, respect and smooth communication that developed between him and the Poles, despite the language barrier, was facilitated by liberal quantities of alcohol. The squadron regularly frequented a pub called The Orchard in Ruislip, where they numbed themselves to the tensions or tedium of another day survived at Northolt. Riotous parties and copious drinking feature regularly in his memoirs and diaries, as forums of amity, competition and kudos. After a day of combat with the Poles, for instance, my father notes in his diary: ‘Taken all round we considered it was a day well deserving of a party at the “Orchard” – and we had it.’ His memoirs also record a magnificent farewell party the squadron arranged for him before he left them to command 92 Squadron at Biggin Hill: ‘I managed to hold my own and at three o’clock in the morning the only two left on their feet were Johnny Zumbach, my number two, and myself – and I saw him to bed! This feat boosted my reputation with the Poles quite considerably.’

When he was posted as a flight commander to 303 Squadron on 27 July 1940, my father had not yet experienced the gruesome reality of war. He had never killed a fellow human or experienced the shock of losing a brother-in-arms. In his diary entry for 17 July, he writes, ‘Normally I’m a frightfully gentle little lad.’ However, the tension inside him is by this stage evidently rising. In his diary he notes his bemusement about the fact that his fractious temper had almost brought him to blows with a restaurant manager in Chester: ‘My fighting blood seems to be very easily aroused these days.’

On 24 July, he grimly reflects on the implications of killing: ‘I wonder what it feels like to shoot down a machine and know that you have killed the man inside it? It would be rather interesting to know if any of the chaps who do get these machines have any feelings of remorse. I wonder if I should have any such feelings.’ Then, as though banishing any self-doubt and reiterating the national war sentiment, which had already been stirred in him when he had been flying over France and had seen the long lines of refugees fleeing the Nazis, he continues, ‘Somehow I don’t think so. It is my intention to get as many of them as possible, they have been responsible for so much misery and suffering that they deserve to die.’

When he met the Poles, they had already experienced Nazi brutality first hand and were bent on revenge. Air Chief Marshal Dowding later reflected in the London Gazette, 11 September 1946, ‘[The Poles and Czechs] were inspired by a burning hatred for the Germans which made them very deadly opponents.’ My father, who was working so closely with them, could not but be influenced. After the Polish flying officer Paszkiewicz, on his own initiative, broke formation to shoot down an enemy aircraft on 30 August, thus claiming the squadron’s first victory, my father wrote in his diary, ‘He followed it right down to the ground too just to make sure it crashed – I’d sure hate to have been that Hun as Paskiewicz [sic] hates them like poison.’ The Poles’ gritty resolve must have affected him profoundly.

THE STERN AESTHETE

When I first read Richard King’s book, 303 ‘Polish’ Squadron Battle of Britain Diary, in 2010, I was surprised to see the quotations from a personal diary I’d known nothing about, but still more astounding was the fact that the entries repeatedly mentioned a woman I’d never heard of named Janet. Who was Janet? When I asked my siblings, who are almost a decade my senior, if they knew who this woman was, they coolly explained that she was his wartime bride and dismissed it as a brief and insignificant romance. Our mother had met Janet once, they said. But this was all they knew. I was both astonished and curious and so, with nothing more to go on than the name Janet, I began investigating. Could Janet still be alive? What did she know of the young man behind the steely memoirs?

After a year of virtual detective work to try to find Janet, I’d uncovered boxes of my father’s letters, photographs, drawings, stories, rhymes and more stored in museums and archives in London and beyond. I’d heard of what an austere disciplinarian my father could be and had read what he said to the pilots of 92 Squadron after taking command of them towards the end of October 1940:

I have studied my officers’ behaviour with concern and frankly I think it stinks. You are the most conceited and insubordinate lot I have ever had the misfortune to come up against.

Admittedly you have worked hard and got a damn good score in the air – in fact a better score than any squadron in Fighter Command – but your casualties have been appalling. These losses I attribute to the fact that your discipline is slack; you never by any chance get some sleep; you drink like fishes and you’ve got a damn sight too good an opinion of yourselves …

Now, your billets. It appears that you have turned the living quarters, which were allotted to you to provide a certain amount of security and rest, into a night club. It also appears that you ask your various lady friends down to spend weekends with you whenever you please. This will cease. All women will be out of the house by 2300 hours sharp.

Your clothes – I can scarcely call them uniform. I will not tolerate check shirts, old school ties, or suede shoes. While you are on duty you will wear the regulation dress. Neither will I tolerate pink pyjamas under your tunics … Finally I want to see an all-round improvement. At the moment I think you’re a lot of skunks.

However, as I began to delve into the papers I’d found, other sides of his personality came into focus. I began to see how circumstances had conspired to produce a formidable leader out of an aspiring but affable young man. I found several short stories he had written. Judging by the addresses on the title pages, they dated from as far back as the late 1930s through to the 1960s. One was a discussion about paranormal experiences. I knew that he had dabbled in the occult in his youth in Canada and had witnessed people speaking in tongues, though something had frightened him (he was clearly not as intrepid as one might think) so he stopped participating.

Still more surprising was a three-page story entitled ‘My Most Interesting Experience’ that appeared to have been written in 1940, when he would have been 26. The title suggests it may have been written in response to a call from a magazine, perhaps for a competition. I turned to the first page of the story fully expecting to read about some flying adventure. He would by then have been flying for almost ten years and must have had a wealth of stories of landing on snow and ice in Canada or test flying in England or indeed of warfare. But behind the title page I found a story that had nothing to do with flying – it was about the solitude and silence of horse riding on the Prairies:

It was while I was staying on a ranch in Western Canada that the ranch owner’s son kindly offered to show me the surrounding country, an offer which I gratefully accepted … After catching and saddling our horses, we mounted and set off westward across the prairie … As we rode along in silence, I began to experience that strange feeling of solitude untinged with loneliness, that is peculiar to the prairie. It is a strange effect and is probably due to the fact that the country is so open, and the early morning air so still, that at times one can hear men talking and laughing, although they may be more than a mile away. Thus it is that one can feel the warmth and security of the proximity of fellow humans, and at the same time the freedom of the open range.

It was after we had been out for about three hours that we suddenly came upon a pretty little valley, which marked the course where, in ancient times, a great river had flowed. Now there was nothing but a small stream and a shallow little lake about a mile long.

We descended into the valley, and upon reaching the shore of the lake, we watered the horses and turned them loose to graze, whilst we partook of an early lunch. It was whilst we were partaking of our meal that I happened to glance up at the rim of the valley and saw, standing out against the lovely blue of the sky, a herd of range horses. They were led by a beautiful buck-skin that stood proudly forward, head up, mane and tail flying in the wind, looking more like some magnificent Arab steed than an ordinary range horse. Then, suddenly startled, they were gone, leaving me with the memory of the most beautiful sight I have ever seen …

On reflection, I think it is the profound impression which that strange solitude made upon me, as much as the contact with things more tangible, that makes the memory of this expedition stand out as that of the most interesting experience I have ever had.

I also found a tragi-comic letter that he had written in 1943 to the welfare officer. It showed that behind the stern commander was also a compassionate man. The letter requests that an airman be given leave on the following grounds:

He is a married man with seven children and has been overseas about two years. Recently he received a letter from his wife advising him of the fact that she had foolishly had a drink with some one, and as a direct result, she is about to have a child, which is due in May. She is, it appears, a very hysterical type of woman and judging from one passage of the letter, has already attempted to commit suicide, and was saved by a certain Doctor …

The airman is in a very bad state of nerves himself now that he has had this news, and he is terrified that she will be more successful next time she attempts it and he is certain she will do so. Not only is he worried about her, but also about what will happen to the other children.

He also had an artistic flair. At the RAF Museum at Hendon, the curator showed me drawings of aircraft my father had done in wartime, some of them executed with the same precision and care that I’d witnessed in his balsa wood models when I was a child. A couple of sketches suggest that he was regularly seeking ways to give aesthetic form to bewildering experiences.

When I visited the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, the warmth with which I was received, and later by so many others in the Polish community, spoke to me of the lasting affection in which my father is held. I was immediately shown an entry my father had made in the famous 303 Squadron chronicles started by Mirosław Ferić and, after his death in 1942, continued by his fellow airmen. The entry would have been written when my father was leaving 303, having fought alongside the Polish airmen during the Battle of Britain:

It is with genuine regret and sorrow that I terminate my association with the squadron, the finest the RAF has seen. I can count the time I have spent with you all as the most impressive and instructive of my life and I shall do all in my power to promote relations between my countrymen and yours. With sincerest best wishes for your continued success, John Kent.

Here, the reference to his ‘countrymen’ seems to highlight his British rather than Canadian identity, perhaps to offer the Poles hope that he might have access to networks through which he could exert influence over the course of geopolitical events. He could not. At the end of the war, after the Allies agreed to hand Poland over to Stalin, the Poles were no longer welcome in Britain. Although my father used to attend Polish War Memorial services, it’s possible he felt contrition over having claimed as his own a country that treated the Poles so shamefully.

After showing me the entry in the chronicles, the archivist at the Polish Institute, Wojtek Deluga, then showed me some film footage he had unearthed. It showed my father, his fellow flight commander Athol Forbes and his squadron commander Ronald Kellett receiving their Virtuti Militari decorations from General Sikorski just after the Battle of Britain at the Rubens Hotel in London, where Sikorski was running Poland’s government-in-exile. I’d seen photographs of the event before but this was the first time I had seen a moving image of my father since his death almost thirty years earlier. In the footage, a woman was at my father’s side, smiling proudly. I asked Wojtek if he knew who she was but he said he didn’t.

By this time, I had tracked down the marriage certificate between my father and Janet. They had married in November 1939 at Frimley Church in Surrey. I realised that the marriage could only have lasted a few years because I also found a registration showing that Janet had remarried in 1946. Her second husband was Quentin Cazalet, a relative of the conservative wartime politician and godfather of Elizabeth Taylor, Victor Cazalet. In a peculiarly circular twist, Victor Cazalet was also aide to Poland’s General Sikorski and they died together in the infamous air crash that took place while taking off from Gibraltar in 1943.

I knew that Janet and Quentin Cazalet had lived on Jersey because I found reference to Quentin’s death there in 1971. However, I was unable to locate a Janet Cazalet, living or deceased, on Jersey and resigned myself to having now probably run aground.

Meanwhile, I contacted veteran fighter pilot Geoffrey Wellum, who was seven years younger than my father and had served under him in 92 Squadron at Biggin Hill towards the end of the Battle of Britain. I wondered what he knew of my father’s life beyond the RAF. Geoffrey told me he would be signing autographs together with other veterans at the Aces High Gallery in Wendover in a few weeks’ time and suggested meeting there. When I entered the crowded little room where the veterans were busily signing posters and books, someone alerted Geoffrey to the fact that I had arrived. He called out to me across the room, using my childhood nickname, ‘Cindy’.

‘Your father often spoke of you and always very fondly,’ Geoffrey told me. ‘He always referred to you as Cindy.’ He met my father many times after the war and my father had no doubt found comfort in the friendship, as was captured by the handwritten inscription in the copy of One of the Few that he gave to Geoffrey in 1974: ‘To my old friend Geoffrey Wellum with grateful thanks for your close support in those unforgettable days of 1940 when you and I were amongst those who succeeded in saving the Western World from the foul disease of Nazism.’

I asked Geoffrey whether my father had ever spoken to him about Janet but he said he hadn’t. So, afterwards, I decided to try the telephone directories for Cazalet entries. I started with central London, where I found a handful of Cazalets and I rang the first three numbers to no avail. None of them had heard of Janet or Quentin Cazalet. On the fourth attempt, I got through to a helpful woman who explained that her husband was the Cazalet in the family and that he may be able to help. She gave me his email address and suggested I write. I did so immediately and the following day received a reply: ‘I have just spoken to my cousin Tim Cazalet. He is the son of Janet and Quentin, and would be very happy for you to be in touch with him.’

My heart bolted. After a year of searching, had I finally reached the end of my trail? I wrote to Tim and received a swift response with his telephone number asking me to give him a call. When I did, I found myself stumbling on my words as I began, ‘Your mother and my father …’ He filled in for me, ‘Yes, it is an extraordinary story, isn’t it?’

It was then that I learned that Janet had passed away in 1989, only four years after my father’s death. However, Tim told me that Janet’s younger sister Patsy was still alive and living in London with her son Robert. ‘She’s lived a fascinating life too,’ he said. ‘She and my mother grew up in Brazil and Egypt and then Patsy became a WAAF during the war. After the war, she lived with her husband in Rhodesia and when they came back to England, her husband ran the London Zoo!’ Since I was in London already, he recommended I contact them and see if I could visit, then, after that, continue out to Suffolk to meet him.

So I contacted Robert who invited me to come and visit them in Lewisham. Robert and his wife were running their redbrick, bay-windowed terraced house as a bed and breakfast but had installed Patsy in one of the upstairs rooms. Robert greeted me warmly and guided me up the stairs to his mother’s room, where she was now more or less confined. I slipped through the doorway and found Patsy sitting at her computer screen on a swivel office chair in a mint-green jumper, two bold-faced men’s watches on her left arm. She was 90 years old and virtually immobile but she looked up and gave me a radiant smile, saying how lovely it was to meet a new ‘relative’. She immediately apologised that she may not be able to tell me too much about Janet and my father, but she wanted to share what she could.

‘Let me tell you a tiny silly little story about John,’ she said. ‘You see, he told me how to walk through grass without rustling it. You walk through it like this.’ She slid her hands forward, bringing her palms down through the air one by one. ‘It was so the Indians didn’t hear you or something. But I lapped it all up you see.’ And she leaned back and laughed out loud.

I told Patsy that I knew Janet and my father had married in late 1939 and she agreed, telling me they’d only known one another for a few months when they decided to marry. She remembered Janet bringing a tall, glamorous, handsome man in uniform back to their home in Camberley. ‘I don’t think my parents were very keen on the marriage right from the word go,’ she said. ‘You know, youngsters, wartime. I’m sure they didn’t approve. But your father, John, was very well known wherever he went. Very difficult not to turn the heads of people at that age … they all admired John of course.’

Then she passed me a booklet with a starlet-like black-and-white photograph of herself as a young woman on the cover and the words ‘A WAAF’s Eye View of World War Two 1939–1945’ and, underneath the photograph in smaller print, ‘A/S/O Rosemary (Patsy) Jensen 1146 Commissioned After Code & Cipher School, Headington, Oxford, September 1940’.

‘And this is my story,’ she said. ‘It’s just for the family. Quite a nice thing to look back on.’

I thought of what Tim had told me about her and said, ‘But your life after the war was so interesting too.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But you can’t go on forever giving people details of your life. They’ll get terribly bored!’

As I flicked through the neatly typed and formatted pages, contemplating the fact that the war years were the only part of her long and varied life Patsy deemed worth writing about, she mused, ‘It was a marvellous war. If you survived the war you look back on it as some of the happiest days of your life. I know that’s a terrible thing to say. But we were young and the adrenaline was flowing. Lovely.’ She paused, and then added in a half whisper, ‘And there were very few women around!’ She chuckled and shook her head. ‘I was posted first to North Africa and then to Italy. So I was very lucky. But Janet stayed in England you see. She had rather a dull war but I was lucky.’

The glorious feeling of being young, at the pinnacle of one’s life and living as if there was no tomorrow – because indeed there might not be – was a refrain that seemed to resonate powerfully with my father’s own relationship to his wartime story.

After bidding farewell to Patsy and Robert, I took the train to Suffolk to visit Tim, where, it seemed, my mission would finally culminate. When I got off the train, Tim approached me and we shook hands nervously; we were oddly connected.

When I arrived at Tim’s house he had already laid out on the kitchen table several books and a photograph album that his mother had fondly kept throughout her life as mementos of my father. Among them were also my father’s obituaries. According to Tim, she had followed his life from a distance but with affection and admiration until the very end. I learned that after my mother’s sadly premature death in 1973, my father had written to Janet a few times and even sent Christmas cards. Although Janet had been widowed around the same time as my father, she elected not to respond.

I explained to Tim that I had a DVD that the Polish Institute had generously given me of the footage from the Virtuti Militari award and I wondered if he might recognise the woman who was beside my father. Tim inserted the DVD into his computer and said immediately, ‘Oh yes, that’s my mother!’ Another part of the story had thus fallen into place.

Tim told me that his mother was tremendously proud of her association with Johnny Kent and would often regale Tim and his sisters with stories about him. ‘She told us he was ambitious – the gravest of sins in British eyes – and his goal had been to shake hands with the King,’ he said. This brought to mind an entry I had seen in his personal diary in which he had described how King George VI had visited the squadron on 26 September 1940: ‘The Poles were very pleased indeed. Particularly when he signed their squadron diary. Incidentally beside the crest I had designed for them. I of course, the stooge, must needs get stuck at Farnboro’ and get back just as he is leaving. Damn anyway.’ He would by then already have been decorated by the king with the Air Force Cross, but he wouldn’t have known that he would later receive a kiss and the Polish highest military decoration for courage from General Sikorski and, later still, shake hands with Queen Elizabeth II.

Among the books Tim had piled on the table was a cloth-bound one with a ring on the front where someone had once placed a cup. The cloth must have been dark orange when it was new but it had paled to a shade of cinnamon and was fraying along the spine. I opened it and saw the words ‘Janet Kent April 1942’ in looping letters pencilled on the inside. When I turned the page I found the title ‘Men of the RAF, forty portraits by Sir William Rothenstein November 1939–October 1941’. My father had signed the portrait of himself inside it.

I thumbed the pages and found a pencil marking that Janet must have made on page 57, where the artist is evidently describing my father as ‘a modest but determined character, who was acting as Chief Flying Instructor’.

Further on in the Rothenstein book I found an essay authored by Lord David Cecil, a professor of literature who visited the air bases. I speed read here and there but soon found myself tracing each line with my fingertip as the words painted the scenes of the time. Cecil writes of the otherworldliness of the air station and the intense communion between the men there:

The mental atmosphere of an R.A.F. station is in harmony with its setting. It is not so sensational as might be expected, considering the violent nature of its work. On the contrary, compared with the jolting uncertain confusion of civilian England in wartime, it seems almost peaceful. The dominating impression is of a monastic segregation, undisturbed by the outside world, almost unaware of it. The visitor feels as if he had entered a self-contained universe, revolving upon its own centre and absorbed in its own task … a single man who has lost his nerve can, within a week, affect all his companions with a feeling of uncertainty; so close is his relation to them … The Commanding Officer has to keep in touch with every man under his command. He too is bound by the chain which links the men under him.

I had read elsewhere of how the supportive fellowship on the ground was intensified by the fact that the fighter pilots were so alone in the air. In his book on British culture and the RAF in 1939–45, The Flyer, Martin Francis quotes pilot Peter Townsend saying that, although ‘we fought wing-tip to wing-tip each one of us had to fly and fight, and, if need be, die, alone. It was this sense of isolation and solitude in the air that united us so closely on the ground.’

Cecil wrote of how this experience affected the airmen:

So dangerous a life inevitably leaves its mark on the nerves. The airmen preserve a rigid appearance of imperturbability and good spirits; but one soon begins to realize that they are living in a state of tension. The newspaper picture of the laughing aviator, carelessly risking his life, is not really a flattering likeness … This high tension keys up the whole nervous system.

I thought of what my father had said about working with the Poles, quoted in the Sunday Times article at the beginning of this chapter: ‘They were so brave that you didn’t dare to show a sign of fear even if your heart was in your mouth.’ And I recalled how Francis’ book explained that the dread of showing fear, which was so entangled with notions of courage and cowardice, outstripped the fear itself. Francis notes that the airmen were not expected to be fearless – heightened sensibility was extolled as an essential quality of the national character at war, in contrast to the portrayal of the Nazis and Japanese as dehumanised robots. But the ultimate glory came from conquering it. The man who failed to control his fears risked symbolic emasculation. The appellation of ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’ could mean being stripped of one’s rank and pilot’s brevet (wings) and probably being forced to do menial work. Worse still, others would then have been able to tell what had happened because there would be the tell-tale traces on his uniform tunic. For a man with my father’s qualities, the stakes were extremely high.

As I read on in Cecil’s essay, I pictured the youthful plasticity on the faces of these still relatively unformed men and imagined how their experiences were adding gravitas to their personalities. Cecil notes, ‘Again and again I noticed a young man who in civil life might have seemed insignificant, but who had acquired an unconscious authority of bearing. The simplicity and momentousness of the issues with which he was hourly faced had somehow communicated themselves to his spirit.’ And he observed how the hardships they endured made them impatient of feebleness. This was a quality I’d reacted uncomfortably to when I had first read my father’s derisive words in One of the Few about a sergeant who had requested to be sent to Training Command to become an instructor because he wanted to get married and lead a normal life. My father wrote, ‘My reply is not printable! Fortunately such types were extremely rare.’

On the topic of marriage, Cecil writes of a wing commander, most likely my father, asking an instructor about his pupils. The instructor mentioned a pupil who had become nervous, possibly because he had recently got married: ‘The Wing Commander’s youthful face grew stern. “He must be made to realise,” he said, “that marriage makes no difference. During the war the work comes first and everything else nowhere.”’

Tim generously gave me Janet’s books and the photograph album she had kept in which I found pictures of a part of my father’s life I had, until then, known almost nothing about. It was a part that I soon found shed new light on his abrupt metamorphosis from fledgling into leader.

A LADY’S MAN OR LEADER OF MEN?

This brings me to my father’s diary entries from the summer of 1940, in which his relationship with Janet becomes increasingly strained as he transitions from pilot to warrior. In The Flyer, Francis notes that, while love and marriage may have offered an antidote to the asceticism of military life and the barbarism of combat, it also exposed the airmen to the additional strain of conflicting interests, and ‘Operational flying made such exacting demands on the flyer that his bride required a degree of patience “born of an understanding and love that few women could reasonably be expected to possess”.’

Janet was only 20 when she married my father and he was 26. Newly in love and swept up in the turmoil of war, she must have struggled to reconcile her fears with her duty to encourage her husband to pursue honour by trying to enter the fracas.

In late June 1940, my father is still privately deliberating upon the absurdity of the killing he may have to do:

From a psychological standpoint my reactions to things are rather interesting, here I am sitting around as miserable as sin and I won’t be happy until I have managed to kill some person I’ve never heard of and who has never heard of me but who is equally intent upon killing me – if he gets the chance. Eventually he will be listed as a casualty and honoured as a hero who has died for the Fatherland and I shall be considered a bit of a hero because I’ve killed him defending the motherland … Ah well such is civilization …

However, by 16 July, he is, in classic Shakespearean terms, ‘seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth’ and Janet is trying to offer support. His diary records:

Janet is quite pleased for my sake, realizing that it is what I really want to do. I consider it a damn fine show as she has the idea that a Fighter pilot’s life is a pretty short one and naturally she doesn’t want to be left a widow so soon. She won’t be either if I can help it, my idea is to DO the killing, not get killed myself. I think that as long as I’m not a fool I shall be O.K., after all I have far more experience than the majority of these German pilots and if I’m knocked down it will be either weight of numbers, surprise or just plain bad luck. I feel perfectly confident, without being overly conceited, in my ability to deal with any single Hun anyway. Perhaps I’m wrong, I don’t know – time alone will show.

By 21 July, he is anxious he may miss his chance to prove his worth and Janet provides comfort. He has been told he is in line to be posted to RAF Northolt but is aware that other test pilots like him have been recalled from fighting squadrons because their lives are too valuable to risk. He writes:

Damn anyway, it just looks as though someone was conspiring to prevent me ever having a chance to fight – BLAST. Ah well, Janet is quite confident that I shall not be posted back – she certainly is the world’s greatest optimist which is just as well as I’m such a moody tramp I need somebody to make me look on the bright side of things.

Francis notes in The Flyer that numerous pilots struggled with the irreconcilable demands of making an absolute commitment on the one hand to the war effort and, on the other, to a woman. Commanding officers often felt that family affairs were so likely to interfere with a pilot’s effectiveness that it was better that they live on the base. My father’s diary continues:

Janet is coming with me tomorrow to see if she can find a house near the Station, that is if I can live out – which I doubt. Poor kid, she doesn’t get much of a life these days but she is remarkably cheerful and she is far more perturbed at my disappointments than at her own.

His diary entry from 23 July suggests he understood the value of English cultural capital for getting ahead in the RAF. Most officers would have been educated at reputable public boys’ schools and then at Cranwell:

I can’t get over how difficult it is to get into this war. In the last one the difficulty was to stay out of it while this one is like an exclusive West End club where you must have a private income of a million a year and know the Pope or something.

By this stage, he seems aware of the potentially corrosive effects of Janet’s anxieties on his morale and yet must guard himself against them. Caught between two moral worlds, he berates himself for his ‘selfishness’:

Janet is very amused about the squadron, and I suspect a little relieved to know I can’t possibly get to grips with the Hun for a long time yet. I can appreciate her point of view and I suppose I am selfish but really there is only one period of a man’s life when he can enjoy a war – I mean when he is of an age where he can take an active and exciting part in it.

By now, he has begun to frame combat as an essential rite of passage into manhood: