May 12, 1943.
Dear Mother:
Well, we have almost finished the required flying in our flight although the other half of the class has quite a lot to do. I have only ten hours to put in (some have much less) so I don’t know what we will be doing next week. Our wings parade will be on the 28th and on that day we ought to start about 15 days leave.
The last marks in ground school brought my average to 88.9 and gave me 4th place. Top man had 90.8. He is from Chile, is the smallest person in the class, looks the youngest, and is probably the best flier.
I was pleased to find that I was 5th in our flight of 19 in the wings instrument test for I believe this to be a prerequisite (?) for the G. R. course.
I had a wings D. R. navigation test this week but it is impossible to judge on my own how I made out because due to bad weather and unserviceable gyro instruments we never even got half way to the destination of Wainwright. So we gave up navigating and tooled around the sky while the testing officer showed us how to use a drift recorder. Also it was the instructors first trip at D. R. navigation and a lot of the information he was giving me was obviously faulty and I had to return the chits for correction.
I went on a similar trip yesterday this time as second pilot while another student did the navigating. We got there this time and it wasn’t much fun. We were up to 9500 for nearly 3½ hours and got rather cold.
I had a 48 over the weekend and stayed in town. We managed to get in before beer quotas were sold and were able to lay in quite a stock of bottles. Saw “Random Harvest” on Saturday which I thought a very good show.
The last cake you sent arrived in splendid shape. Thankyou. How extraordinary that there should be a shortage of lettuce and cabbage in the Okanagan. But I suppose they have to be imported this time of year.
It won’t be necessary for you to send a telegram re Dick for I got one from him and one from Peter yesterday. Not much news. Dick is apparently still billeting in southern England. He had seen Will Stiell recently.
Peter seems to be getting on well. Among other subjects he learns wireless which he can take already at 8 w.p.m. getting over 90% in the test. He will have moved on to Sandhurst by now.
On Sunday there was a really good air force variety show here put on by a troupe touring Canada.
Recently our station was presented with an E (for efficiency) pennant for being the most E of any station in the command during the last three months. Things should slacken off now.
With love from
Tony
[Note: Transcription provided by collection donor.]
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