... with plastic planes and imagination.
I sank Tirpitz, blew up the Mohne dam, all these and more.
I was the saviour of the nation!
Peter Hammill: No More (The Submariner)
The first model aircraft I made was a Sopwith Camel, from an Airfix Dogfight Double I got for Christmas at the age of 10. So it follows that the second one was an Albatros D.V. I painted the Camel gloss Buff, and the Albatros silver and red. It was a pretty intoxicating experience.
Later on I started playing air wargames with my brothers, after my elder brother laid his hands on a rule book that prescribed turning circles and playing cards. The Queen of Spades meant your guns had jammed. Pushkin would have empathised (what with his duelling experience and having written a short story called the Queen of Spades, you see). Because we didn’t have any money, we made planes from balsa wood. I remember that I concentrated my efforts on Fokker Eindeckers, and took a lot of pains trying to recreate the complicated undercarriage in copper wire. My elder brother had other priorities. Remember that documentary about building a Wellington bomber in 24 hours? My brother could turn out a SPAD XIII in 24 minutes, using an innovative stapling technique instead of cabane struts. In retrospect, that probably gave him an advantage. It was serious if slightly obsessive fun though. Nowadays, even the thought of the smell of balsa cement is very evocative. If I had been in the habit of eating madeleines while making my Eindeckers, it would all have been dangerously Proustian.
Later on again, I noticed that companies like Toko had started tackling WWI subjects, and I started getting interested again. I made a Revell Camel as practice and then a Toko Snipe. And the rest will be tediously documented history.
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| See those SPADs? There were plenty more where they came from. |
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| My first kit. Ignore the fact that my mum has written my brother's name on it: it was definitely mine (though to be honest, it might date from slightly later). |
