High Flight

My Granny Gill is visiting from Scotland, and over the last few days she's been spinning tales of growing up during wartime outside of Sheffield, England. She was 10 during the famous Battle of Britain.

I was born on the birthday of her mother, my great-grandmother Marguerite, whom I'm named after. In the early stages of World War II, living on the outskirts of the small village of Bamford in Derbyshire, she found an old medal in a trunk in the attic. There was a note that came with it – something about how an ancestor had fought with Wellington against Napoleon in the peninsular war, but nothing else. “What a shame,” she wrote in her diary. “He lived in such stirring times and yet we know so little about him.” “Wait a minute: I live in stirring times. I’ll write it down.” And so she did – 14 diaries, about the village they lived in, windows blacked out to avoid the blitz, food rations, my naughty, yet endearing Granny. I thought about her a lot this year: how important writing and recording history can be, how it serves future generations.

My great-grandfather was fascinated by electricity. Electricity was still new when he was growing up, and he once rigged the doorbell so that whoever entered the house would receive a small electric shock as they passed over the doormat. Unfortunately, the first visitor happened to be the county clergyman, and so he was given a sound beating. When the war ended in Europe, he strung up their small country house on the hill with lights reading VE!. The message shone like a beacon over a valley of blacked-out houses.

We talked about the first spit-fire planes - their invention changed the British airforce, and this poem, written by a young pilot. Maybe you've read it:

Flying over the southern atolls, Maldives

High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941