Man who loved Spitfires and the sky

It's March 1939. At 17½, Geoffrey Wellum is accepted for a short service commission in the RAF. After a final term at school, he begins learning to fly on Tiger Moths at a RAF station in Leicestershire. Two days after his first solo flight war is declared. He moves to Little Rissington, in the Cotswolds, to train on Harvards. Just before Dunkirk - still not yet 19 - he is posted to 92 Squadron and falls in love. "Never would I have believed," he writes, "that a man-made machine, in this case a Vickers Supermarine Spitfire, could have such an effect on any human being." After a spell of night fighting in South Wales, the squadron is transferred to Biggin Hill to find itself in the thick of the Battle of Britain, scrambled so often in the course of a day that it's not worth taking off one's Mae West between flights. When this is over, the squadron begins flying sweeps over France, escorting bombers, first Blenheims, then Stirlings, to their targets. By September 1941, Wellum is the longest surviving member of the squadron, and, at 20, a burned-out veteran with a DFC. Taken off operations, he's posted as an instructor to a training unit, then, as flight commander, to 65 Squadron, and, in August 1942, takes a flight of Spitfires to Malta on HMS Furious. Here his health breaks down completely; but, after convalescence in the UK, he returns to the clouds in a Typhoon, as a test pilot for Gloster Aircraft.

Wellum did not write this account of the brief period that was, as he comments, the pinnacle of his life until 35 years later: nevertheless, the narrative is amazingly fresh and immediate. Devoid of all artifice, and absolutely honest, it is an extraordinarily gripping and powerful story. Though its high points are undoubtedly the brilliantly detailed descriptions of aerial combat, the lyrical passages on the beauty of pure flight and the reproduction of the atmosphere and tense badinage while waiting for the order to scramble ring equally true. In its way, First Light is as good as those classics of pilot autobiography, Cecil Lewis's Sagittarius Rising and Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy.