One mystery solved

I told you in a recent post about Valerie. This has been a lifelong mystery for me. Who the heck was Valerie and why did my Dad name his aircraft after her? I figured she was English and I thought she must have been a love interest before he met my mother in 1945.

You kick yourself later in life for not asking questions. Dad mentioned her once when we were looking at his WWII photo album. Sort of matter-of-factly – “oh, this was my own aircraft and I christened it Valerie“. But brilliant teenager that I wasn’t – I didn’t stop and ask “okay, so who was this Valerie person?”.

But the Internet is an extraordinary phenomenon. It can connect people who have a common thread, even if that thread is nearly 70 years apart. Let me tell you the most amazing experience that happened to me this week. I’m still getting my head around it.

A chap left a comment on another blog I have, saying that he and Dad were very good buddies and flew operations together. Once they joined Typhoon squadrons though, they lost contact and this chap followed up on my Dad in the mid-1990s, only to find out that he had passed on.

I cannot begin to tell you the shock I felt on reading this comment – someone who is still alive actually knew my Dad? I emailed Pierre, a friend and historian who has been helping me make sense of my Dad’s logbook and the planes he flew. Pierre has a number of fantastic wartime blogs – you can check them out here, here and here. Fascinating reading and research.

Pierre immediately emailed this chap because he has written about pilot training at No.6 S.F.T.S., Dunnville, Ontario (where my Dad trained) and the answer revealed that this chap knew a pilot from 137 Squadron who Pierre has been researching and now lives in Quebec. Pierre was excited; I was excited.

So I emailed this chap – Albie Gotze SAAF (Brig Gen. Retd) – and we began an email exchange that ultimately led to Albie telling me who Valerie was and how my Dad met her.

Dad was a private man so I’m not going to reveal the whole story – let it remain a memory shared between Albie and Dad (and now me). Albie has been incredibly generous with his time and knowledge and I’m hoping that he might have more stories to tell. Because it seems that he and Dad were close friends and I’m so very glad to virtually meet someone who was a best buddy of my Dad.

But I will reveal part of his email to me as it highlights how demanding wartime life in the Middle East was – moving squadrons around through deserts and storms. Here’s an excerpt:

“Jimmy and I joined the sqdn while based at St Jean in then Palestine. I a week before him. I had just completed a conversion course onto Hurricane Mk 2. 127 had just been re-equipped with Spitfires Mk 5. So he and I had to convert onto Spit 5. My first solo nearly ended in a bailout as I could not get the under cart down. Our main base was at St Jean but had satellite air fields at Beirut and Nicosia on Cyprus. 

We no sooner got there when the Sqdn was moved lock stock and barrel to England. Everything was packed into trucks and had to drive through the Negev dessert, where, to make things for us most uncomfortable, we were caught in a “Ghamsin” a severe desert storm.We crossed the Suez Canal at Ismailia, onto a train to Port Alexandria. We embarked onto the SS Franconia and went in convoy, escorted by the navy through the Mediterranean, where several ships were sunk, right round the top of Ireland, because of the U boats, to dock at Glasgow and disembarked at 0200h in blistering rain onto a train and ended up at Northweald the following morning.

During this time Jimmy and I had struck up a close friendship, so when we were given a week’s disembarkation leave, the 2 of us decided London is the place to go. With our kit bags over our shoulders off we went. Caught the train and got to Liverpool Street station. Not knowing where to go, we just walked out of the station and down the first big street we saw.”

The rest of the email is about how Dad met Valerie. I don’t know her last name but I wonder if she’s still alive? One thing that strikes me about veterans is their extraordinary memory. I can hardly recall what I did last year let alone 65 years ago (well, I wasn’t alive 65 years ago!). But I guess the power of conflict sears the memory – so the sorts of details that Albie can recall, such as arriving in Glasgow at 0200h during pouring rain, is just as fresh in his memory as what he ate for dinner last night. Amazing.

This excerpt about Dad and Albie certainly rings a bell with me. Dad was just the sort of person to say “let’s go this way“, without really knowing where one might end up. He also loved a good whisky or beer (the colder the better) – Dad and Albie ultimately went on a pub crawl together.

Dad always HATED with a capital H any form of hot, steamy, sweaty weather. Now that I’m learning more about the conditions service personnel lived under during WWII in the Middle East region, I can appreciate perhaps his dislike for hot weather. You’d always find Dad near an air-conditioner during the heat of the Australian summer. Must be genetic as I dislike hot weather too and far prefer the colder climate of the South Island of New Zealand.

So that’s one mystery cleared up thanks to the reach of the Internet. Maybe one day Stuart (or Stewart) Jay Jnr III will email me and say “hey, I’m the American serviceman who was engaged to your mother“.

Oh and I might have discovered who the mysterious Gary was. I think I’ve found him in Dad’s photo album. Not sure but could be. I’ll let you know in a future post.