Reporting for duty

I reported to 51 Squadron on Christmas Eve, 1943 and it was dark, dark, and I walked up the road from the railway station, through the... all the aerodromes were right on roads, now this wasn’t necessarily a main road, but it was accessible to anybody, you know, you’d think all these airplanes would be guarded, and stuff but they weren’t. We were guarding airplanes here and Debert but in England they weren’t guarding any airplanes on the ground. Anyway I walked up this road, and there were these Halifax airplanes parked around and some of them damaged; they’d been out on a raid the night before and you know they had damage... gunshot damage on them and everything. And I reported to the mess, it must have been 7 or 8 o’clock and there was a big party going on; Christmas Eve and they’d been out the night before and they were having a celebration, and was it ever a wild celebration. The mess had a fireplace up at one end about as big as that wall there and the squadron commander was leaning with his arm up on the mantle and I walked up to him and said, “Bower-Binns reporting sir.” He says, “Oh, I’m glad to have you here,” he says, “I guess you’re glad to be here.” I don’t know whether I was or not after all, walking in and seeing all those wrecks, well they weren’t really wrecks, they were damaged airplanes.