The great Australian cricketer Keith Miller was once asked how he coped with the pressures of Test cricket. ‘Pressure’, responded Miller, who’d flown a Mosquito during the war, ‘is a Messerschmitt up your arse.’ I was reminded of this by something Geoffrey Wellum said in an interview: ‘If you were in one-on-one combat and you could see the man behind you trying to shoot you down, you knew the meaning of the word fear.’
Like Miller, Wellum (1921–2018) was a pilot: the youngest of what came to be known as ‘The Few’. Unlike Miller, he remained below the radar for almost sixty years. Not until 2002 did people learn how, less than a year after leaving school, he found himself at the controls of a Spitfire, the youngest British pilot to fight in what became known as the Battle of Britain – though only once, in his Prologue, does Wellum use that term. He ignores the big picture. This is one man’s war.
‘Boy’ Wellum, as he was known, grew up fast. He had to: many of the German pilots he would face had already fought for Franco with the Condor Legion in Spain. Over the next eighteen months we observe his first pint, his first kill, his first car (bought for a fiver) and his first sexual conquest. At the risk of offending his shade by using a German term, I would describe First Light as a Bildungsroman – a story of growing up. Perhaps he did it too fast, because at one point he laments: ‘What on earth shall I find to do when I am not able to fly a Spit any more?’
First Light is based on some notes Wellum made at the time in a school exercise book, which he then put aside. Like many veterans who had lost a lot of friends, he recoiled from a trip down memory lane. But in the 1970s his life took a turn for the worse: his marriage ended, his business failed and he lost his house. Feeling rather worthless, he dug out the old exercise book in the hope that it would prove ‘that at some point in my life I had been of use’.
Of this there can be no doubt: he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, following more than a year at the sharp end, which meant being on call almost every day from first light to dusk. But it was only thanks to a chance meeting in 2001 with the historian James Holland, then working for Penguin Books, that the memoir Wellum wrote, by way of therapy, came to be published. ‘I read it and was blown away by its emotional punch,’ recalled Holland. His colleagues at Penguin agreed, and First Light became a bestseller.
Written rather breathlessly in the present tense, with plenty of dialogue as well as narrative, it begins in London on a sunny morning in March 1939 when 17-year-old Wellum successfully applies to become a pilot in the RAF, for long his consuming ambition. A few months later, after captaining his school cricket XI, he straps himself into a Tiger Moth behind his instructor, a patient but exacting flight sergeant, and experiences his first, bumpy take-off. What follows is a sentence that explains why so many readers warmed to him: ‘I just hang on to my seat like grim death and think what a damn silly expression that is to use at this particular time.’
The first third of the book is devoted to Wellum’s training, a gruelling apprenticeship in which many were called, but few chosen. To begin with it looks as if he’s too slapdash to make the cut, which will mean a dreaded ‘bowler hat’ rather than the coveted pilot’s ‘wings’. Fear of failure keeps him awake at night, but it’s only after a rocket from the CO, and the ‘wasteful’ deaths of two friends in training accidents, that he knuckles down. Wellum’s reward is a posting to a Spitfire squadron at Biggin Hill. He’s in at the deep end, and, luckily for him, soon learns some of the ‘golden rules’ for aerial combat: never fly straight and level for more than a second or two: never follow a plane down after hitting it: beware the Hun in the sun. Richard Hillary, author of The Last Enemy, would have approved. Though he and Wellum had little else in common, they both relished the cut and thrust of dogfights and, equally critical, the importance to a pilot of his aircrew: never take them for granted. They were, said Wellum, ‘the salt of the earth’.
Something else that Richard Hillary and Wellum shared was the satisfaction that they were being paid for something they enjoyed doing, however risky. This would not have been the case had they found themselves squatting in a muddy trench or throwing up aboard a storm-tossed warship. It was a somewhat surreal existence, because one minute you were fighting for your life, the next you were sinking a pint at the local pub and chatting up the local ‘popsies’.
Air combat is such a split-second affair that it’s difficult to describe on paper. By using the present tense, Wellum manages to convey its immediacy:
In less time than it takes to think about it, I am 3,000 feet below the main battle and moving at real speed through the air. Stick back and I pull up, feeling the G loading and, using full throttle, regain the level of a real old mix up; everybody split up, each man for himself, a Great War dogfight. Aeroplanes everywhere, coming and going in all directions. Keep turning Geoff, throw her about, don’t fly straight for a second. Fly like hell. Good little Spitty; she responds, she’s on my side.
She’s on his side again when he survives one of the most daunting episodes in the book, losing himself in filthy weather after fruitlessly pursuing a German bomber out to sea. For twenty pages we accompany him through thick cloud and driving rain as he tries to get his bearings. His radio’s packed up and he’s become separated from the rest of his flight.
Are the instruments telling me the truth? Doubt. Horrible doubt. The seat of my pants tells me that the altitude of the aircraft is totally different from the story that the instruments are telling me.
Get it wrong and he could end up, like so many of his pals, strapped in his cockpit at the bottom of the Channel. He doesn’t get it wrong, but it’s the first real sign of the strain he’s been under after over a year of almost continuous active service. This has not gone unnoticed and soon afterwards his CO gives, rather bluntly, the command he’s been dreading: ‘You’re off ops. It’s all over. Finished.’
Utterly dejected, he’s consoled by the squadron Adjutant: ‘Do you know, Boy, I was never more happy than when I saw you landing safely . . . At least, I thought, Geoffrey Wellum has made it and lived. God only knows, I’ve written enough letters to the parents of those who didn’t.’
In fact it wasn’t quite all over. Later, he flew several sorties escorting bombers over Occupied France, and then, in August 1942, took part in Operation Pedestal, the epic expedition to supply Malta, then under almost continuous attack from German and Italian bombers. Despite never having done so before he successfully takes off from an aircraft carrier and shepherds a formation of nine Spitfires several hundred miles to the beleaguered island. Bizarrely, all their ammo has been replaced by ‘morale-boosting’ cigarettes, so it’s very lucky that they meet no Axis fighters en route.
Soon after his arrival in Malta, Wellum begins to suffer a ‘nagging ache’ behind his eyes that gets worse and worse. He learns that he has chronic sinusitis that needs immediate attention. What follows is not for the squeamish. The medic says he’s going to drill a hole through the inside of his nostrils with ‘what looks like a long, sharp knitting needle’. Excruciatingly painful, this procedure results in a stream of ‘strawberry coloured liquid’ pouring out of his nose ‘like water from a tap’. Still only 21, he has shot his bolt. For the rest of the war he serves behind the lines as a test pilot. He stayed on as a pilot after the war, eventually retiring, in the rank of squadron leader, in 1961.
In his classic study The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell says that ‘irony has become an inseparable element of the general vision of war in our time’. I’m not sure Wellum would have agreed. Irony implies ambivalence, and there was nothing ambivalent about Wellum’s attitude to the Luftwaffe: a bunch of bloody Germans with designs on our ‘green and pleasant land’. It’s the duty of able- bodied young men like him to frustrate them. And this, lest we forget, they most certainly did. Wellum manages to convey the nobility of this cause with no recourse to stridency. What he celebrates is comradeship born of adversity. No one reading this exemplary memoir can doubt that he and his fellow pilots were indeed ‘a band of brothers’.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Michael Barber 2025
About the contributor
As a schoolboy in the 1950s, Michael Barber was exposed to a steady stream of books and films about the RAF in the Second World War. But unlike Geoffrey Wellum (and Douglas Bader), he was never tempted to ‘reach for the sky’.
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