Free Moon Squadron by Jerrard Tickell

hadn't a clue who the Joes were-until 1945. Then I had a message from the French Embassy in London, inviting me to go along and have the Legion of Honour pinned to my bosom. I couldn't think why they'd picked on me. Then I discovered that one of those Joes I'd picked up that night was Monsieur Vincent Auriol, President of the French Republic. I don't think he'd mind being called 'a Joe’, 'Joes' were pretty good types . . ."
    It took a long time, even for the chosen few, to find out what went on in this quiet expanse under the Gannocks in rural Bedfordshire.
    “He was posted to Tempsford in the summer of 1942," said Pilot Officer Tim Hilgrove. His name is not Tim Hilgrove, for the highly respectable firm of solicitors in which he is now a partner would be profoundly shocked if they knew that ‘our Mr. so-and-so’ had once been engaged in cloak-and-dagger activities. "I was very happy where I was at the time and the bleak, typewritten slip that read 'Posted to Tempsford for special duties' came as a considerable bind. Nobody in the mess had ever heard of the place and neither had I. And what 'special duties' meant, well, I simply hadn't got a clue. Neither had anyone else. The Squadron Commander, a sardonic type, said that it very likely meant the Air Ministry and that I'd spend the rest of the war polishing the seat of my pants in Whitehall and pinning bits of paper together and passing them on to somebody else for action.
    "Anyway, I g loomily got all my kit together including a tankard I'd won at darts and set off for what I feared was a sort of ante-room to an office. Arrived at Sandy rail way station and found that they'd sent transport to meet me. 'This,' I said to the driver, 'is an unexpected honour. What's the place like?' The driver's answers were short and un-informative. He was perfectly polite and all that but he told me nothing at all. Every time I asked anything about where we were going, he seemed to get an unaccountable fit of deafness and would branch off into something else. 'Fair enough,' I thought, 'I don't suppose he likes the place and doesn't want to talk about it. Fair enough.
    "When he got to Tempsford itself, the people at the gate were unusually thorough. They went over my papers with a small tooth comb and I thought to m yself 'bags of bull, old boy, bags of bull!' Then they finally let me inside and that's when I got my real shock. I thought that this must be some elaborate leg-pull for, at first glance, the whole place looked derelict. There was a huddle of buildings roughly the shape and size of Nissen huts but they looked like cowsheds. In fact, they were Nissen huts built within the walls of cowsheds, but I didn't know that until much later. They were grouped around a farm. Its name was Gibraltar Farm. That's another thing I didn't find out until later, that its name was Gibraltar Farm. Even if I had known, it wouldn't have meant anything. There were some hangars, so superbly camouflaged that it took me quite a time to realise that they were hangars. But there were no aircraft about. There were runways, strangely narrow ones channelled out of fields of vegetables. You hardly notice them. The whole place was odd, very odd. Not exactly up to standard, I thought, as I gave the starboard wing of my moustache a five degree tilt and went into the mess to have the tankard I'd won at darts filled up with beer.
    "Mess life was normal enough. Met the C.O. who seemed a good type. I say 'seemed' because all I got was a brief hand-shake and the remark that he hoped to find me a job sometime. All very vague. The chaps in the mess were friendly enough but no one had a word to say about the work of the Squadron. Every time I asked tentatively what all this was in aid of, the conversation seemed to peter out or someone else would come up and interrupt and we'd start talking about something else. Two things I did notice. There was more than the usual sprinkling of decorations. I wondered if it could be a