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This contribution was submitted by Owen Cleaver to Edgar Lloyd and is added to the site with his permission.

I volunteered in March 1943 for the Royal Air Force...went up to London, to Euston House , where you stood in a line, took the oath and had a medical and so forth. I was 17 and a half…several of us went from school together from the ATC. Then later on during that summer went up to London again for an interview, because we were given the opportunity of going on a six month university short course - at various universities around the country at which you did two days a week with the university air squadron and three days in my case on engineering lectures. I was lucky enough to go to Cambridge. The idea was that when you joined the RAF later you didn’t have to do ITW the initial training - we did things like RAF law, aircraft recognition, meteorology, navigation, and morse. I seem to remember we had to end up at 12 words a minute morse - it seemed a bit fast to me. Square bashing was separate..we did a bit at Cambridge. I was there until April 1944 at Magdalen College. I was then sent to ACRC… Air Crew Receiving Centre which had just been moved to Scarborough…until then it had been in St. Johns Wood in London. But we were about the first group to go to Scarborough to the hotels there…I was sent up there - I was in the prince of Wales hotel on the front. It was six weeks training, principally square bashing, and aptitude tests, and more medicals and jabs. They issued you with kit and you weren’t allowed out until you had all your kit marked up. The difficult part of it was you had to have your irons all stamped with a metal stamp with your number on. And since there were about 250 of us and one set of stamps it took several days, because you had to track down the numbers you wanted…find out who’d got them and then go and queue up to borrow it and stamp your sixes - or whatever it was - on your knife, fork and spoon. So you weren’t allowed out to start with. Then I was unlucky…because after a week there we had pork pies. The food there was normally extremely good because they were hotel kitchens and the RAF cooks by and large were good I think. But I got dysentery…me and several others - about six to eight of us. First we went into the sick quarters which was another smaller hotel opposite the Italian gardens on top of the cliffs in Scarborough. All the others were discharged after a week….but I was there six weeks. All the signs of dysentery had gone but I was still producing positive test results. It was the spring of 1945 and I was turfed out for two hours a day…and got to know the Italian gardens pretty well. After six weeks they still hadn’t cured me so they sent me to the RAF hospital at North Allerton for two weeks, did nothing, and said I was clear. D-day happened while I was there. I can remember General Dwight D. Eisenhower announcing it….so I was hopeful they’d give me convalescent leave…but they didn’t they sent me to a Convalescent home in Yorkshire. A big country house…it was quite nice, there was Army, RAF and I had a good time really ….there must have been about five people in the room I was in. They took me to the pub most nights…I was the baby - about 18 and a half - there were sergeants and god knows what. What they were suffering from I had no idea. But they looked after me well. While I was there the first of the D-day wounded came in ….with big boots on because they’d been treading on mines. D-day had been about two weeks before….so they were interesting to talk to. After a fortnight there…back to Scarborough, back to square one…back to six weeks training. There was a completely new bunch of people, all my friends had gone. The main thing at Scarborough were the aptitude tests over three days…some were written, some were like engineering, there were boards with square holes and square pegs…all sorts of tests. That was really to find out whether you’d be pilot, navigator, bomber, air gunner or whatever, and you waited after you’d finished. You waited with trepidation, because you’d put down what you wanted to be…not everyone wanted to be a pilot but most did. My grade came back P/NB - which was pilot - navigator bomber. Which meant if I didn’t go as a pilot I could go as navigator bomber…in some aircraft the navigator did the bombing. So that was six weeks at Scarborough. One thing I remember mainly about Scarborough was the size of the cinema…that was one of the sights. That and Oliver’s Mount…a quite conical hill, it was used before the war as hill climb trials, but it was like a red rag to a bull to our PTIs we were always running up and down Oliver’s Mount. Another thing I remember about Scarborough one of the PTIs, can’t remember his christian name, Hardwick played for Middlesborough, he was international for England around 1939, and he was one of the PTIs so we all looked at him in awe. Anyway, we got through Scarborough alright I had a big payout actually when I came out of hospital because for about three months I’d, had no money, and you usually got paid once a fortnight £4.10s. 7/3 a day the UT aircrew used to have, somehow it worked out with income tax at £4.10s a fortnight. My first pay packet was £26.00 so I was a millionaire really. I had started smoking then, you used to get free cigarettes in sick quarters, “Martins” I never heard of them anywhere else so I don’t know who made them…and of course with the NAAFI rations you had 20 good ones and 20 poor ones, that was when I learned to hate Park Drive. After Scarborough, because my first choice was pilot, I went to grading school which was four weeks at RAF Braunston in Leicester, which had Tiger Moths. You had four weeks and you flew something like sixteen hours in that time and you expected to do your first solo, some were between eight and twelve hours…other than that there was nothing much memorable from Braunston. From there I went to ACDC, Heaton Park, Manchester. All the drafts that were going over to Canada, to South Africa or America for training…you all went from Heaton Park…catch a boat at Liverpool and so forth. So from Braunston I went to Manchester in October 1944. We expected to get on a boat soon and off we‘d go…but it wasn‘t like that. Some people had been waiting a year for a boat and so you were sent on detachment. So after a week they sent me and some others on detachment to RAF Wheaton on a seven week MT course, which really was very useful - driving.

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