The unknown soldier

When I was less than a year old, one night our front door was blown off by a falling ack-ack shell that had failed to explode air-side. A little later, my first words apparently were attempts to say ‘lorries,’ as British and US truck convoys rolled by on their way to the ports. Naturally, I’m still interested in the Second World War.

For Vince Povey, who’s a bit younger, it came about differently. Until 2008, he had been working at high pressure for a Cirencester-based distribution company. Eventually the pressure got too much, as it does, and Vince makes no bones about the fact that he fell ill from stress and had to leave.

Warbirds

Soon his wife and he were living in her late parents’ home, very near a former RAF station, Blakehill Farm. Now partly owned by the Wildlife Trust, Vince used to go and sit under the trees there, and take stock. The old airfield, its concrete runways by then broken up for motorway foundations, had been a transport base for 46 Group in wartime, a logistics outfit involved with both D-Day and Arnhem. Planes towing Horsa gliders or loaded with sticks of paratroopers had taken off from the field, many