Re: We need more
Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2023 9:57 pm
A Convivial Aviation Discussion Forum for Aviators, Aviatrices and for those who think Flying Machines are Magic.
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Most amusing and totally accurate Karearea! Very bad puppy hound!Karearea wrote: ↑Mon Jan 23, 2023 7:47 pmI have a 1980 soft-cover edition of this little volume, was delighted to find the text and the beautiful and amusing illustrations online at the Gutenberg link below.
All of us who have had dogs recognise the antics of this wee fellow:
A Dog Day, or, The Angel in the House, by Walter Emanuel, 1902
An interesting, intelligent and very complex guy. The son of a Peruvian aeronautical engineer, if I remember correctly. Sadly Bentine was to lose his own son in a light aircraft accident, and so Bentine, who believed in the afterlife and was interested in spiritualism (although he wasn't a spiritualist), sought his boy's spirit in the world of the paranormal which he outlined in his wonderful (even for this cynical rationalist) book 'The Door Marked Summer'.
He started his acting career in 1940, in a touring company in Cardiff playing a juvenile lead in Sweet Lavender. He went on to join Robert Atkins' Shakespearean company in Regent's Park, London, until he was called up for service in the RAF. He was appearing in a Shakespearean play in doublet and hose in the open-air theatre in London's Hyde Park when two RAF Police NCOs marched on stage and arrested him for desertion. Unknown to him, an RAF conscription notice had been following him for a month as his company toured.
Once in the RAF he went through flying training. He was the penultimate man going through a medical line receiving inoculations for typhoid with the other flight candidates in his class (they were going to Canada to receive new aircraft) when the vaccine ran out. They refilled the bottle to inoculate him and the other man as well. By mistake they loaded a pure culture of typhoid. The other man died immediately, and Bentine was in a coma for six weeks. When he regained consciousness his eyesight was ruined, leaving him myopic for the rest of his life. Since he was no longer physically qualified for flying, he was transferred to RAF Intelligence and seconded to MI9, a unit that was dedicated to supporting resistance movements and helping prisoners escape. His immediate superior was the Colditz escapee Airey Neave.
At the end of the war, he took part in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He said about this experience:
Millions of words have been written about these horror camps, many of them by inmates of those unbelievable places. I’ve tried, without success, to describe it from my own point of view, but the words won’t come. To me Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy. (The Reluctant Jester, Chapter 17.)
bob2s what a fascinating video. I was lucky enough to watch a shuttle launch, Atlantis, and it was an extraordinary and never to be forgotten event. More like a visceral experience even when viewed from the main visitor viewing site which is some distance from the launch site. The organ moving resonance of the rockets and the brightness of the two solid rocket motors was almost indescribable. What it must have been like for the astronauts riding that amazing craft can only be imagined!