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Like many on this forum I remember the excitement of queueing up at age of six for the Cinema (Gants Hill Odeon I think) to see Battle of Britain with my Dad. And again a few weeks later to see it again. At the time the main thing my friends and I remembered was the endless parade of German bombers at the start proving “we” didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance; and the bomber crew’s goggles filling up with blood when attacked! Gruesome, but that’s a six-year old for you. That must have been the time the Airfixing started, initially with Dad but quickly progressing to my own work and painting. Around a year or two later Dad gave me a big pile of aeroplane books. They were a present from an older couple, friends of his who’s son had died in tragic circumstances. He was only around twenty and they wanted me to have the books he’d loved when he was growing up. Wow, I’m getting weepy typing this; the perspective of being a father of a now 20-year old myself. I’ve always been grateful for the gift of those books, which nurtured an interest in aviation and history that has stayed with me. As well as the tiny William Green “Warplanes of the Second World War” 1-6 there was the World Airpower Guide with scale elevations of all the current types in service around the world, from the “Mig-23” to archaic Buchons and Moths. My favourites were two big pictorial books by Martin Caidin, “Air Force” and “Golden Wings”. I still have the books though I’ve managed to get replacements for them all as they had become extremely “tired” after nearly 50 years of use and moving. I even managed to get volumes 7-10 of the Warplanes to complete the series, but don’t bother. They were issued 6 or so years after 1-6 and the four volumes only cover France and Germany – Green “went off on one” and just went into far too much detail; precursors of his later massive German tome, whereas the earlier books give a nice brief precis of lots of types. As a result of those Caidin books, I ended up being as interested in the planes of the USAF, USN and USMC as in Britain’s. Not that I’m averse to a Spitfire as my stash would confirm, but a nice Fifi, Panther or Corsair is equally if not more attractive to me. I hunted through my stash to find something that matched the kits I built back in the day (I have a list of what I built then which I try and update each time I remember one - 132 remembered to date, I’m sure there should be a lot more. Here’s an extract; needless to say the full list shows 90 of the entries were Airfix, most must have been from the local newsagent in the parade up from Grange Hill station). The P-38 with its twin sharkmouths and Roy Cross boxing was shouting “build me”, but last year I picked up a Thunderstreak, which I remember building around the same time as the Sabre Dog and Shooting Star in some keenness on 50s jets (I recall a bunch of Hasegawa kits bought at the Model Engineer Exhibition too) but Meteors and Hunters, no thank you. I can’t recall much of the F-84 I built back then, other than that the red paint reacted with the overall silver paint job, and I’m sure I did an open canopy as it was a separate part for once! Anyway here’s the box with its lovely hard silver plastic just as I remember. I’m not sure I’ll get going on it just yet as there’s the Mark.VIII to decal in the Spitfire STGB and an L139 I should complete from Christmas 2018. Oh for the days when there was nothing else to do at a weekend than build models…wait a moment… Cheers Will

I've finished it at last, took ages considering. Here are some pics I decided to mask and paint the invasion stripes, after my struggle with the Beaufighter decals, I'm quite pleased with them. Any way cheers