LAST week's column not only recalled the bombing and strafing of RAF Skipton-on-Swale, near Thirsk, but added that even the parish pump was chained down to stop Canadian air crew taking it home as a souvenir.

Ethel Myers, then a 14-year-old working at a nearby farm, offers corroboration to both accounts.

"I had a new bike in those days, and even if I went to the village shop I had to lock it up. They were lovely people but it would be gone in a moment to get one of the airmen back to camp."

Now in Brompton, Northallerton, she also remembers the German planes - "just over our chimney pots" - the free admission to the camp cinema and to the NAAFI dances, the day that Glenn Miller played at nearby Catton cricket ground and even the camp dog, improbably called Wimpey. "I think it was because Wimpey built the runways," says Ethel, who lost a stepbrother in the dam busters raids.

On another occasion in 1944, a five-year-old boy playing in a village garden was killed when a wounded Halifax bomber crashed just short of the airfield.

"All the village was turned out to see him trying to get home. We thought he was going to land but then a red flare went up. He turned around, tried again and hit a clump of horse chestnuts. The tail ended up in Crooky Smith's bed."

Crooky Smith, happily, was elsewhere at the time.

A memorial service at Skipton-on-Swale last Sunday marked the 60th anniversary of the raid on Nuremberg, The country's sole surviving Spitfire flew overhead. Much more of that in the At Your Service column on Saturday.

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