Conversations with My Father is about celebrating a life that was created in the fortune of war. Realising that life in the context of childhood dreams and RAF training post-WW1 and during the 1930s, what is revealed is the huge contribution to national defence of the Dominion nations through the Empire Air Training Scheme (1939) and, with the South African Air Force, the Joint Air Training Plan (1941). This would transform the schoolboy into a future fighter pilot.

Yet such was the success of the EATS, later the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, and the JATP, that too many pilots were created. The RAF simply got too big. Just think how disappointing it was get your Wings in April 1945.

Flying was, by then, in his blood. Contrasting the Tiger Moth with the North American Harvard:

... the Moth was the-girl-next-door, the Harvard was the girl about town: Deanna Durbin had given way to Jane Russell. Where Howard Hughes had concerned himself with re-structuring matters that defied gravity in The Outlaw, so my father found himself preoccupied with similar great masses, this time formed in stressed metal.

Then the disappointment of no more war:

The elation of that night in Johannesburg, the camaraderie, the booze and the girls. These lads were something now: they were flyers and they wanted more of it. But with the sudden cessation of hostilities in Europe news eventually reached the Dominion Airfields that training programmes were no longer needed. The war machine no longer needed feeding.

Conversations with My Father is a story of celebration and disappointment. It reveals the desperation for freedom from a dysfunctional family, the hunger to fly, the fulfilment of dreams and the disappointment of being trained to fly, yet not being able to as the RAF adjusted to the economies of peace. Within the story is recounted the evolution of RAF training in the ‘20s and ‘30s and how the Empire Air Training Scheme emerged from Dominion negotiations and the Riverdale Agreement to give opportunity to young men, only to have such opportunity denied them as Britain adjusted to post-war debt and the technological and political demands of the Cold War.

But the fortune of war meets the pragmatism of Civvy Street - too many pilots. More desperation sees painful adjustments to poverty, death, hard graft and responsibility. Far from worthless, this life was one of rich, romantic adventure: of bombing raids, ‘flying wings’, of clean sheets and cocoa, of Tiger Moths and Harvards in South Africa. And then the slow crawl back to a seemingly normal life: Cross-Channel ferries, the post-war emergence of commercial aviation and a role in the Berlin Airlift ... and how coffee smuggling sustained this!