When I was in the RAF, we were always treated with respect because of the sacrifice and heroism of those who had gone before us, but we were always regarded as different and alien and never like the locals.  As RAF stations are always in the country, we were always among country people and whenever I spoke to one, I would make a bet with myself that within four minutes, in spite of my strange uniform, he would be treating me like one of his own.  He would be stiff and formal for the first minute, but we would be totally relaxed and talking like lifelong friends after another three.  They probably thought, "There's summat about that one, he's different."

One man from the village joined the Navy during the war but didn't think much of the life so he ran away.  He stayed with his mother and when the police came looking for him he would hide under the straw in the pigsty.  They never found him.

The man who lived at the crossing-keeper's cottage gave me my first driving lesson in his pre-war Austin Ruby.  As we drove along, he pointed out the different road signs to me.  He pointed to one and said, "That is a 30 miles per hour sign but it doesn't apply to us because we can't do 30 miles per hour."

On one occasion, the village policeman from Barnetby raised his hand to stop us and I started to slow down.   My friend told me to keep going, but I pointed out that I had to stop for a policeman.  He said that as it was his car, it was his decision, so we kept on going.  As we passed the policeman, my friend raised his hand and waved back.  I still don’t know what he was hiding.

My good friend Bill met me after school on the day of my school's cross-country race. Knowing I was a good runner Bill asked me how well I had done.  I told him that I came one hundred and fourteenth, which to me was a total disaster.  His face lit up and he told me how fantastic I was.  He said it was a brilliant result and he meant every word of it.  That is why even today he is a special friend.  If I had come in the first fifty, he would probably have exploded.

Bill and I went to Barnetby one day to watch a football match.  Someone threw a stone and hit Bill's dog.  Bill was outraged.  He said if you hit me, I don’t mind, but no one hits my dog.  Tempers flared and it finished with Bill fighting the other person.  I held Bill’s glasses and his dog.  Afterwards I thought how brave he was and what a coward I was, after all, there were two of us from Melton Ross and only about twenty of them so that made things about equal.  I’m only joking Barnetby.

Although Melton Ross in the end, literally became a one horse town with a population of about 200, our near neighbour, Barnetby, with a population of about 1,500, was known to some people of Melton Ross as 'sleepy hollow'.  For people from Melton Ross to call somewhere sleepy, they must have thought it comatose.

Bill and I, deadly seriously, decided that if the Germans invaded they would not capture us and we found a hiding place where they would never find us.  It was a big tree covered in dense ivy about a mile outside the village.  One day Bill and I decided we would live off the land.  We set off for Hendale wood with a saucepan, frying pan, a tin of corned beef, fat to fry it in, some water and a box of matches.  We would find a potato field and live like lords. We could see for miles across the flat wolds fields but there were no potato fields in sight. We dined on half a tin of warmed up corned beef each that night.  We wrapped ourselves in old coats and slept in a hedge-bottom.  The next day we absolutely stank of wood-smoke, felt filthy and couldn't wait to get home to see Mum again.

Bill called his next dog "Cummin." He said the only time it ever answered to its name was when it was outside and he opened the door and shouted "Cummin."
He once found an abandoned baby pigeon, which was very young as it had not yet grown feathers.  When he said that he was going to be its mother and bring it up, no-one believed that he could succeed.  He chewed, mainly peas, in his mouth until they were almost liquid, put the pigeon’s beak into his mouth and gently fed it.  It thrived and grew into a healthy, fully grown bird.  It shows what belief can do.

Bill seems incapable of being average or normal.  He has lived for many years in Canada near the shores of Lake Ontario, which is a very big lake that makes the English Channel look like a dried up duckpond.  One of Bill’s passions is to sail his sailing boat on the lake, which he has done successfully and without mishap for many years.  After finally persuading his reluctant wife to sail with him he, for the first time in many years, capsized the boat and dumped her in the icy waters.

On his recent visit to England he went to see his friend who had served with him in the Navy and they were sitting in a café enjoying a warm drink, when they saw two girls standing outside in the pouring rain, collecting for a charity.  When they discovered that it was a charity for the Navy, Bill and his friend, being gentlemen, went outside and persuaded the girls to go inside the café to keep dry and warm, whilst they would take over the collection boxes.  The girls pointed out that Bill and his friend would have to wear their badges to show that the charity was legal.  Bill rattled his box at the passing public with a big badge on his chest stating  “My name is Wendy.”  Bill’s friend became Sharon.

Another friend, Ernie, worked on the old Elsham airfield.  Crop-spraying aircraft used it for refuelling and refilling with spray.  One day as Ernie was driving on the airfield, the corn was quite high and as he crossed a junction, he told me that he heard a loud bang.  He thought it a good idea to stop and when he did, he said the back end of his car was missing. When he looked around he saw an aeroplane on its back and a very big American crawled out and went towards Ernie, put his arm around him, and said, "You and me are lucky to be alive, buddy." After that, when Ernie was driving and we came to a road junction, we would advise him to look out for low-flying aircraft.

I owned a car a long time before I passed my driving test and I needed someone with a full driving licence to sit next to me.  It was a godsend when Ernie said he would sit next to me. Now all our gang could go out on the town, "living it up" every weekend. We would often go to the Waterloo Inn at Laceby.

Some people, then as now, seemed to get pleasure from belittling others and played games of one-upmanship.  This was especially true of the younger generation who probably thought that if they could make others look smaller, it would make them seem bigger.  Being simple country folk, our group probably looked like a bunch of simple, penniless, down and outs, who had to struggle to pay our fares on the bus to get there.  One member of a group of young men, who were better dressed and considered themselves more sophisticated than we were, thought himself clever, and sneeringly asked Bill what sort of transport he had.  Unknown to them, Bill, who later had four rings on his arm as an officer in the merchant navy, was no mug, and realised what they were trying to do.  With deadly seriousness he said, "I used to have an elephant but I kept falling off the howdah and hurting myself because it was a big African bull elephant, so I swapped it for a bright red, left hand drive, pogo-stick which gave me good service until one day I was dazzled by the sun reflecting off my granddad's glass eye which made me panic, slap it in reverse, back it into a brick wall and damage the steering." By this time, they were heading quickly towards the door and we never saw them again. [Continued]