First Light

Geoffrey Wellum

Having read it

★★★★☆

Fantastic.

An amazing and insightful first person perspective – a great true story – told with verve and humour, on what it took to be a young trainee pilot and then a fighter pilot.

A good passage

An understanding and friendship is thereby cemented between us. It is something that is probably difficult to find in civilian life. We are all young, all paddling the same canoe, and as the evening progresses the certain knowledge that few, if any, of us will survive to see the end of the war binds us even closer together.

A second good passage

One after the other, Spitfires are starting up. The fitters warm up their engines. Twelve Merlins all at 1,200 revs or thereabouts. The power of the moment is awe inspiring. The still morning air reverberates with the sound of harnessed energy. Slipstreams flatten the grass behind the quivering aircraft. In its way it is exciting, wonderful and not without certain beauty. It is also tragic; which of us is going to be killed this day?

A third good passage

Merely a survivor, my name no longer on the Order of Battle in the dispersal hut. A worn-out bloody fighter pilot at twenty years of age, merely left to live, or rather exist, on memories, reduced to watching from the wings.