His life's
experience was limited, being a country boy, but didn't stop
him turning the tables on June by charging her with
insubordination to a senior NCO - despite his hysterics at the
time! June was not amused and makes that abundantly clear.
Basher found her job both interesting and yet infinitely sad.
The knowledge that she was responsible for the handling of
classified information about the amount of bombs in any given
aircraft, details of the targets including August/17th
1944 Brest Shipping in Port area 18/19 Sterkrade
(Essen) Synthentic oil plant, 25th
Pas-De-Calais Flying Bomb site and information on weather
conditions and rendezvous with other squadrons. After the
raids came the sending of more than thirty telegrams to loved
one's telling them their sons and husbands had been either
killed or presumed missing. The unofficial telegrams that
Basher kept in her top pocket advising loved one's of the
arrival on leave of a member of aircrew, and memorising
the aircraft they would be flying in. Then the heart-stopping
experience of watching from her office window as each aircraft
touched down, and realising that
the particular telegram would not be going, and as on one
occasion, the wheels touch the tarmac but have to fly another
circuit because they had overshot the runway. Seconds later a
massive explosion, the aircraft couldn't make it - and neither
did the crew - a telegram went, but this time telling the wife
her husband wouldn't be meeting her at Kings Cross that day,
because he'd been killed over his own airfield. |
