Jim Hopkins: Nation of courage would honour heroes

The owlish boy loved aeroplanes. He collected the big cutaway drawings that appeared every week in the Eagle comic and Sellotaped them on the walls of his bedroom.

He bought Airfix kitsets (3s 11d in a little plastic bag) from the shop in Selwyn St and clumsily glued them together. They were never as good as he wanted them to be.

There was always a smear of glue or a streak of paint somewhere plain to see. But he hung them from the ceiling anyway, swooping and diving and spinning on their strings.

At night, in the dark, before he went to sleep, the owlish boy dreamed of flying a Spitfire.

He read Alan Deere's autobiography, Nine Lives, more incredible than any fiction, and Douglas Bader's story, Reach for the Sky and didn't really believe his Dad when he said that Bader wasn't the most popular man in the POW camp because his wilful attempts to escape endangered the plans of others.

Nor could he understand why some kids didn't even bother to look when the woodwork class was allowed outside to lie on the grass and watch a giant Avro Vulcan delta-winged bomber fly overhead, its huge white shape clear as a cloud in the bright blue sky.

But it wasn't bombers the owlish boy wanted to fly. It was fighters - sleek jets, whirring props, "Bandits 2 o'clock high".

So he joined the Air Training Corps, No17 Squadron, and marched around an empty hangar at Wigram Air Base every Wednesday night.

One night, when the square-bashing had finished, a grizzled RNZAF Flight Sergeant asked the owlish boy why he was there. To be a pilot, sir. Fly Vampires. Scramble. Go dogfighting. Whiz through the wild blue yonder in a twin-boomed jet! When do we start? Huh, the Flight Sergeant snorted, you'll never do that with those milk-bottle bottoms on your face. And that was it. Shot down by his specs, the owlish boy didn't stay very long in the ATC.

He stowed his parachute and his leather flying helmet in a cupboard in his head and got on with the business of getting on with the business. Eventually, ineptly, he grew up and became what is foolishly known as an adult. The glasses are still on his face and he still dreams of flying a Spitfire, although he hasn't yet.

But he has noted the passing mention of Spitfires and their pilots this week, the 70th Anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Not a lot, of course, there are other more inconsequential immediacies, trivial shocks and outrages, with which to fill the news.

But the fading memory of this ancient battle has merited a minute or so, especially since a statue has just been unveiled in London to commemorate the wartime service of Sir Keith Park.

In a braver country, a country more willing to recognise courage and less willing to insist on counselling for everything, we wouldn't need to be reminded of Keith Park. We would know what he did; as a pilot in WW1, as the commander of 11 Group in England in 1940 and, later, as leader of the air forces defending Malta.

These things would be familiar to us. They would make us proud. They would be part of the myth countries create about themselves.

But we have no truck with such myths now. We prefer to focus on the flaws of the past. So we know nothing of Keith Park or of Donald Cobden, the All Black who flew as a pilot in the Battle of Britain and was shot down and killed on his 26th birthday.

True, he played only one test and, yes, he was forced to leave the field after just 25 minutes with a serious leg injury. But he was an All Black. And is unknown.

As are others, like the RAF's first ace of WWII, another New Zealander, "Cobber" Kain. He became the toast of London after shooting down more than 20 German aircraft during the Battle of France and was killed on June 7, 1940, doing victory rolls over his airfield before heading back to England.

The owlish boy has remembered these pilots, and more besides, this week.

He thinks it would be good if children today knew as much of them as they do of history's failings.

He thinks theirs is a story we should proudly tell. He still respects courage. He still tries to be brave and sometimes he is. He still admires those who fought 70 years ago.

He still believes they have something to teach every one of us with our feet, alas, on the ground. Courage is a necessary thing.

War may be its ultimate measure but there is call for it every day.

So it is good, for a few seconds on a special occasion, to remember those who did brave things for the right reasons. We can't ask any more of anyone, most importantly ourselves.