High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air ….
This week the Coles Newsletter is being put together in the fields between Stowe School and Silverstone racing circuit. In a few weeks time these fields will be full of spectators and campers for the forthcoming British MOTO Grand Prix, the air will be full of the sound of roaring engines – like angry wasps, the motorbikes will be defying gravity as they lean to right around Copse, wiggle through Becketts and then hammer it along Hangar Straight. Eighty years ago the air would have been full of the sound of another type of engine, that of the Vickers Wellington Bomber, flown by young RAF pilots training and preparing for war when these fields were the domain of RAF Silverstone, home of the Royal Air Force No.17 Operational Training Unit.
This weekend the air is full of chatter, laughter and the sharing of knowledge, this is the weekend when friendships are formed, and the internet friendships are cemented into the real deal – all by the community who have come together around the podcast of Al Murray and James Holland. We’re at the ‘We Have Ways Festival’ – a three-day event with the greatest World War II Historians, sharing extraordinary stories with an audience eager to learn – stories of bravery, derring-do, courage, sacrifice and how important it is to keep up to date on tyre maintenance.
John Gillespie Magee Jr. was a young pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and an aspiring poet. Whilst on a training flight in his Spitfire over the fields of Lincolnshire his plane collided with another aircraft and he was killed – he was just 19 years of age. His poem, ‘High Flight’, was published by his parents after his death – the sonnet features prominently on Aviation War Memorials throughout the world.
High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air ….
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
The full Newsletter can be found HERE
