ISSUE ONE… SUMMER 2016
hIStOry
Local home owners… throw open their doors Child free zones?… meet the couple with the Parent Pod! Is grey just so last year?… Jojo Humes Brown on colours
YOUR BRAND NEW FREE HOMES & LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE
In loving memory … With VE Day upon us next month (May), Living In … features the story of a brave WWII pilot who left a wonderful legacy …
I
t’s so hard for many of us to imagine what it meant to be in service during World War II – the sacrifices made for the good of the whole. Coastal resident Gill Tzanoudakis grew up hearing about just a fraction of the courage shown by her late father, Jimmy Croskell. The trauma he suffered and horror he witnessed, he never spoke about. Certainly not to her or her brother, Geoff. “He often spoke of LMF, or lack of moral fibre,” says Gill. “People like him didn’t indulge anything that bothered them. They just got on with it back then. They rarely admitted to having problems, although I also remember my mum telling me he’d wake up screaming in the night …” Flying Officer Croskell of 227 Squadron was just 23 when his Lancaster, carrying seven crew in all, was brought down in flames by the Luftwaffe during one of the many sky battles of 1944. “He made sure all six of his crew got out first before parachuting out of the burning plane,” says Gill, a physiotherapist from
Top: Jimmy Croskell piloted a Lancaster bomber Top right: The WWII hero in uniform Above: Jimmy, middle, with his crew Right: His daughter, Gill Tzanoudakis, asked her father to chronicle his wartime exploits
Bealings. “I recall him saying he came down over the border of Germany and Holland, and he didn’t know where he was.” In fact, Jimmy had landed in a place called Vaals, in a church graveyard on the Dutch side of the border near Aachen. His plane had been shot down by a Nazi fast bomber called a Ju 88. “He told this story that he could have gone one of two ways,” she says. “One would have landed him in enemy territory, but thankfully he chose the right way to Holland. The choice between life and death was that stark.” When she was 17, Gill encouraged her beloved dad, a “very loving, kind gentleman” to write down his memoirs. “He was a very literate man and so he did it in his lunch hours (from his then job as a sales rep). Every day he would sit in his car and hand write it. I think it did him a lot of good.” It resulted in a wonderful book, Through a Tempest Dropping Fire. Written in two volumes, it chronicles Jimmy’s astonishing wartime experiences as told through the eyes of a fictional RAF pilot and crew. “He embellished some of it,” says Gill. “But certainly everything that happened to Dad is in that book.” For millions of wartime parents, like Jimmy’s mum, Eleanor (Gill’s grandmother), the war brought terrible heartache to their doorsteps. “In the same week Dad went missing, his older brother Geoffrey, also a pilot in the RAF, vanished,” says Gill. Indeed, Jimmy talks in his book about the horrors of the “wretched telegraph boy” arriving on the doorstep with a “beastly purple, yellow and red envelope”, the words inside reading: The Air Ministry regrets to inform you that your son has been reported missing as a result of air operations against enemy territory. “My grandma received two such
telegrams in the same week in 1944, saying both her boys were missing,” says Gill. “Sadly Geoffrey never came back – his plane had gone down in the Mediterranean near North Africa. He’s mentioned on a war memorial in Malta.” Thankfully Jimmy was rescued by the Dutch resistance. Unbelievably they’d also picked up his navigator, Ken East, and the resistance helped the pair over American lines around October 1944.
“He made sure all six of his crew got out first before parachuting out of the burning plane” Gill recalls a family holiday to Holland on which they visited the relatives of the people who had helped save Jimmy and his pal, so he could personally thank them. “Dad was lucky. All his crew had survived too,” she says. “He kept in touch with Ken, who was best man at my dad’s wedding to my mum, Phyllis. He was a very good family friend.” Sadly, Jimmy died from a heart condition, aged just 57. “I’m sure, in some way, the horrors of the war had taken a toll on his health,” she says. But his memoir lives on, and any time Gill or her family want to remind themselves about his remarkable courage, they can delve into the beautifully written book. Gill says she plans, one day, to get it published and also to make a pilgrimage to the Imperial War Museum in London to donate his WWII memorabilia for safekeeping. “The older I get, the more I respect the awful things people went through and yet didn’t make a big fuss about, which is why we should never forget,” says Gill. “I’ll never stop being so proud of him.” ISSUE ONE… SUMMER 2016
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