A METEORIC MESSENGER

I think I must have been fifteen or thereabouts. By now my family were farming in Devonshire, an English county blessed by considerable natural beauty. I was helping my father with the hay making. Our farm was on high ground. We heard a jet aircraft approaching us. It roared low over our heads, flashed its silver livery at us and vanished over the horizon. It was a Gloster Meteor, the first jet fighter in service with the British Royal Air Force.
By the time I was standing with a pitchfork in my hands on a hilltop hay field in North Devon that heroic little Gloster Meteor had been demoted from its combat role and used for training. The sudden appearance of one of them and its pilot’s skill and audacity rooted me by my boots to the hay field whilst my imagination escaped into an unfamiliar and thrilling world. Yes, I know. I am beset by pedantry acquired I fear long after my hay making days. The aircraft was manufactured by the Gloster Aircraft Company, so called because it was hard for foreigners to pronounce Gloucestershire. If you live in Arkansas, you have no room to criticise.
I have heard other people tell of the moment that changed their lives and gave them purpose. That fleeting incident propelled me from the cow sheds and pastures of a small English dairy farm to the coral reefs of Fiji, the glaciers of Norway and sandstorms in the Sahara.
It was the duty imposed by the rhythms of a dairy herd that prepared me to survive long periods of watch keeping in the Royal Air Force and the duties of a House Master of a boarding house in an English school that boasts 900 years of history. House Masters in my day were on duty even when they were asleep.
Those so-called imperialists of my generation who are still alive in the early years of the 21st century may observe with interest that our old schools are filling up with the sons and daughters of the people our generation were supposed to have ruled. These new boys and girls attend their lessons in rooms the walls of which boast memorials to long dead alumni who excelled in the far-flung British Empire.