Conversation Threading

I have always found the way that a conversation can develop and migrate from topic to topic over minutes and hours to be fascinating. Just listen carefully at your next dinner party and see how the subject at issue moves around over several hours.

This morning I was nursing over a recent knee injury, and I also showed Wendy an old childhood scar on the same knee. I recalled that my mother had noted down that scar, and one on the back of my neck (from a lanced boil) in my first UK passport under 'distinguishing features'. This was to help the UK foreign embassy staff identify dead bodies of ex-pats fished out of the Vistula or such, but it no longer features in current passports. This, in turn, led Wendy to ask me if I could remember my first ever journey in an aeroplane.

It took a a few moments of recollection, many of my childhood memories are a delightful haze, but then a old memory seemingly got dredged out of nowhere. What I appeared to recall was driving our car into the front of a plane, and then getting in the plane and being ferried to Normandy for a holiday. I think that I was 10 years old at the time, so my brother Gavin would have been around seven. I described this to Wendy, who immediately thought I was pulling her leg: 'driving a car into a plane's nose'!

Maybe I had imagined it, but I didn't think so. So I turned to Google, and a search for 'plane car ferry' confirmed that such things really did exist.

And here it is - the Bristol Superfreighter. Variations of this model were used from 1953 to the late 1960s by a number of boutique airlines such as Freddie Laker's Channel Air Bridge, and Silver City Airways who merged to form British United Air Ferries (BUAF) in 1963 and continued the cross-channel service until 1977. The Superfreighter took up to three cars and 20 passengers. If my memory is accurate, then we would have been travelling in around 1965.

After running a fleet of Superfreighters for many years, BUAF also acquired some Aviation Trader Carvair's which operated on a similar basis, but the cars had to be raised on a hydraulic mechanism to reach the entry hatch. Not nearly as elegant in my opinion. In any event, my recollection is clearly of the Superfreighter.

BUAF plied their trade from a number of small English airfields (including Southampton, Lydd, Stansted and Southend) to several in northern France, such as Cherbourg, Le Touquet and Calais as well as the Channel Islands. My recollection is that we flew from Southampton to Cherbourg, and then drove to a cottage in La Val-André in Brittany for a summer holiday. I also now seem to recall that I got lost on the beach there - I was always getting lost on holiday and did it again a few years later at Cattolica, near Rimini.

The only other hazy memory I have from that holiday is of the only time I saw my mother in tears. It was shortly after we arrived and after she had undertaken a thorough inspection of the cottage and deemed it to be too filthy to stay in - Betty had very high standards of hygiene. My father comforted her and said that he was sure they could get it up to her standards in a few hours. I don't recall much after that, but it must have worked, as I don't remember us having to leave. My parents are both gone, so I can't check this out with them - but we'll see if my brother recalls any of this. At least I didn't wholly imagine the weird aeroplane that swallowed cars out of thin air.

Does anyone else remember travelling in that fashion?