AIRMAN CLARENCE

In the 1970s and early 1980s, veterans of the American 8th Air Force were making nostalgic return trips to Norfolk and Suffolk, and to their War-time haunts, on a four-yearly cycle. Then I realised that one trip would actually mark the 30th anniversary of the initial arrival of the Yanks, and I asked the organisers if they had anyone who was coming over for the first time since the War, and if so, if I might meet them. In the end the organisers sent the details of Clarence H, then a DuPont employee living in Hixson, Chattanooga, Tennessee, who was destined to become a family friend.
During the War he had been a radio op and waist-gunner on B-24 Liberator Lil Snooks, based with the 446th - the Bungay Buckeroos - at Flixton. Now he came striding out of Norwich's Post House hotel, smiling, smartly dressed, hair shaved to a thin fuzz, hand outstretched, apprehensive, but keen to see old friends and visit remembered places.
As we drove to Flixton he told me he flew missions to Essen, Brunswick, Giessen, Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, Mannheim and Ludwigshaven, among others, being shot up on several occasions but finishing largely unscathed after 30 raids. Clarence was born in 1922, so he was in his early 20s then. If he was nervous at the time, well, now he was excited, and words poured out of him. 'Saw Warren from Uniontown last night. Hadn't seen him in 29 years . . . I'd love to see Dave again. He used to cycle round the base to fetch the laundry . . . And I want photos of John's grave at Cambridge to take to his wife . . .' And so on.  
As we got closer to Bungay he began to recognise things, a distinctive house chimney, a particular farm barn, a hall they used as a social club. Then we turned off the B1062 and stopped in the lane beside the church, where he carefully wrote his name and squadron in the visitors' book. At Flixton Grange, the former Aero Club was full of sacks of wheat and the old sports and social rooms piled with equipment. We searched for names they had scribbled on the walls, but couldn't find any. But he did locate the old fireplace. 'We used to drink our Cokes and buy our cigarettes here,' he explained.
Then he recalled a games master at a Bungay school who used to blow his whistle during rugby games as the B-24s limped home from a daylight raid, and the boys would form up on the pitch in a V-for-Victory shape as the battered planes roared overhead. The gesture had made a very deep impression on him.
Later, we walked down a tree-lined lane to the old barracks area where the hard surface was now covered by moss, and roadways branched off into dense foliage. Grasses and briars dragged at our trousers, and 30-year-old poplars and scycamores towered overhead. But Clarence knew instinctively where his hut had been, and he plunged into the undergrowth. And there was the remains of a blast shelter, where he once used to prop his bike, and under a carpet of moss and clumps of weed were the foundations of his old billet. He clawed through the greenery and stood once again where his bedspace had been.
Then we drove carefully along the remains of runway 230. 'Beachball, they'd say. This is Beachball. You're clear to land runway two-three,' and I'm sure he could hear the roar of aero engines again. A while later he found the exact spot on a hardpad where Lil Snooks used to park, and the nearby patch of grass where the exhausted crew used to clamber out and collapse. 'Been sick there many times,' he said.
Later still, at Flixton aviation museum, he was presented with a couple of fragments including a fire-damaged cap badge, salvaged some years ago from a crash site at Mendham where a couple of his buddies died. That was a tearful moment. And there was another when he got back to Norwich, when a group of surviving buddies, grizzled veterans all, gathered for tea and cakes in the lounge of the old Castle Hotel, and when some of them sat in a circle and took it in turns to hold a twisted cap badge.