BUSH PILOT HUGH PRYOR
Now listen, please, because I think that you should be sitting down when you read this, after all these years of me telling you stories about the fun which I have enjoyed while flying aeroplanes...So here we go.
I
AM NOT A ‘REAL’ PILOT! I was not born with Avgas or Avtur in my blood.
I never dreamed of dancing the skies on laughtersilvered wings, because I knew that I was just a simple 26-year-old soul, who had just enough of ‘The Right Stuff’ in me to build a dairy to milk forty seven Friesian cows on Kilimanjaro. Flying aeroplanes was simply not even on my horizon. Basically I was just too ‘thick’ even to think of becoming one of those Heroes who had so recently won the Second World War, which had incidentally cost me the loss of my Father and four of my Uncles, not to mention the fifty-two thousand unbelievably brave aviators who had launched into the flame-filled skies over Europe, night after night, never to return.
The farm belonged to some cousins of mine and the ‘Boss’ was Sue, the Mother of the Family and she ‘Ran the Show’, so I had to ‘Do exactly as I was told’, which included learning how to speak ‘Swahili’, which took about three months and then to organise my team, which started with the ‘Muster Roll’ at 07:00 each morning, to tell the guys what we were doing that day. This included getting Danielli to teach me how to weld galvanised piping together. Now I don’t know if you have ever done this, but it is much more cosmetic if you start with black skin because the galvanising spits red hot shards of molten metal on to your arms as you go and Danielli reckoned that I was ready to be allowed to weld on my own, when I stopped screeching and I still bear the scars to this day!
I was not born with Avgas or Avtur in my blood.
No...Flying was definitely NOT on my list of ‘Career Opportunities’...maybe I simply didn’t have the ‘Guts’ for that sort of thing. Little did I know.
6
FlightCom: April 2022
Then, one morning, before ‘Muster Roll’, Sue came to me and said, “I need to see you, in the Office, after Muster Roll to discuss your future on the Farm.” Well, I thought that, since the Dairy was now working and the milk was flowing very nicely, this was my invitation to go back to the UK and find a ‘proper’ job.
