Have it your way Pedant, O level English hadn’t been invented when I had the 3Rs drummed into me :D:D

Racking what few memory cells left to me I realised that we had two states of readiness. 2 minute Cockpit Readiness as described above, and 4 minute Readiness, which entailed sitting in the hut adjacent the ORP, fully kitted up ready to run out to aircraft, similar to action in the old films.

Thanks for the Anson pics. I started and finished my flying in them, first at Hullavington where they vainly tried to turn me into a navigator and finishing at Hullavington, some 7 years later, swanning around trying not to lose u/t AEOs.

They say “any landing is a good one if you walk away from it”. Well this is it.
http://tiny.cc/b1m3bw

Looking at the hood in the rear of the cockpit of RH769 I would guess that is a Brigand T4 from 228 OCU at Leeming. Or possibly an early version of the T4

First were some 303 cases standing in the grass in the field behind our houses. We had heard the guns firing but the aircraft were hidden above cloud. Our first taste of the BoB.

Resmoroh, my uncle did that with a German 7.92mm and it did fire. He was very lucky, it split the case wide open. I knew he had done it and many years later found it among his things after his death.

Superb

Sorry to exhume this thread but I knew I had a pic somewhere which shows this emergency water bottle. Not the best shot in the world but the sequence goes, parachute, dinghy, water bottle.

It certainly looks like the emergency water supply we carried in the Muddle East in the ’50s. Obviously seat pack with the slot in the centre for the parachute harness to pass through.
How drinkable the water would be is anyones guess