BUSH PILOT HUGH PRYOR
Where is ‘home’ for you? Have you got some place to which you look forward to returning, with warm anticipation? Somewhere where you can unpack, lay back and forget about tomorrow? A little warren which smells familiar and greets you and cherishes you like a long lost friend? EARS AGO, BEFORE I GOT married, I used to think that ‘Home’ was wherever my Mum was. Now that I’m married and independent of the family nest, I tend to think that the roof over the pillow where my little ‘Dragon’ parks her head at night is the place I would like to call home.
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Pilots often have a problem identifying a place where their roots have had time to take. A bit like those ‘who go down to the sea in ships.’ That’s not very good for marriages either. I have been very lucky, in that my particular Dragon has stayed by me, through firings and furloughs, for over twenty-five years. I frequently wonder why. It can’t be the security, that’s for sure!
That means that she and I have quite a few ‘homes’ around the world. We’ve got an apartment in England, a house in Kenya, where I am sitting at this moment, in-laws in Durban, South Africa, close friends in Austria, who encourage us to treat their house as our home and more of those sorts of people in Australia. In other words, we are more lucky than we probably deserve... in the home department, anyway. There are many, too many, people around who don’t even have a pillow, let alone a roof under which to put it.
The ‘better half’ does not have to be in residence for feelings of homeliness to be present. There are several rather unlikely places I can think of which have represented home for me, over the years…a crumbling Royal Chateau in amongst the high plateaux of Tigray Province of Ethiopia, during the great Famine of 1985/87, for example…or a little box on wheels in the middle of the Sahara in Libya…or a shrapnel-pocked old family home in Huambo, in the war-battered central highlands of Angola.
a great wall of white dust came rolling in
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And talking about wives - what’s the similarity between marriage and the story of the three little piggies & the big bad wolf? You don’t know? Okay…They both start with a lot of huffing and puffing and end up with you losing your home.
I think it’s the people who make it feel like home. You can be in the most sophisticated accommodation in the most beautiful area in the world, and the other people are arrogant twerps. Well, you’re not going to consider that ‘home’ are you?...unless you are an arrogant twerp, yourself, that is.
There are quite a lot of people around, even acquaintances of mine, who understand the relevance of that little joke. And a lot of them are pilots.
On the other hand, you can be at the other end of the same world, in primitive conditions, working till you drop, but with a great bunch of companions and every
FlightCom: November 2021
