A time for reflection

It’s now coming up to half past one in the morning of 3rd September and today, if all goes well, we will be welcoming Steve Noujaim back at Southend at the end of a record breaking flight that would make that great pilot and patriot, Alex Henshaw, proud. Watching on the computer screen the little blue L balloon crawl down and then up the map of Africa as the satellite beams back to earth Steve’s progress, trailed by Chalkie’s white C and Alex Henshaw’s white H, in the comfort of one’s home, it is hard to relate to a tiny aircraft with its 200 horses and a lonely man, 12,000 feet up over some of the most inhospitable jungle and desert country in the world, battling doggedly on and on and on against fatigue and whatever weather crosses his arrow–like progress.

In the 1950s there was a film called “The Bridges at Toko Ri”; it was the “Top Gun” of its day and I saw it as many times as my friend Tony Haig-Thomas watched Tom Cruise’s latter day hit. William Holden played Lootenant Brubaker and the gorgeous Grace Kelly (ahhhhh) was his wife, Nancy. Micky Rooney, believe it or not, played a very believable naval helicopter pilot. The plot concerned the bombing of heavily defended bridges (at TokoRi) which our hero Brubaker successfully demolished in his Grumman Cougar, but he failed to return from the mission and Micky Rooney and he died in a muddy trench somewhere in Korea. It was great stuff………

At the end of the film a craggy Rear Admiral Tarrant (all American admirals are craggy) played by Fredrick March, stares out to sea from his command seat on the bridge and asks the rhetorical question “Where do we get such men?”

Tonight I know the answer……………….

Martin Barraclough