My father was a fly boy. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1936 at the age of 16 and remained in the service until 1947. He loved everything about the air force and the airman’s life. Years later, as a married civilian with a couple of kids, he kept us entertained with romantic tales of high adventure and wartime antics in the U.K., Italy, Egypt, Syria and Greece. A technical illustrator by profession, his passion was recreating scenes of WW2 aircraft and our walls were covered in his artwork.

Dad started writing his memoirs after his 60^th birthday. For the next 27 years he wrote short stories, poetry, and even a novel. The narratives featured the aircraft, squadrons, air bases and fellow fly boys that had had been part of his young life. It was through his writing that he offered a glimpse into the darker side of his wartime experiences and the emotional toll they had on him and so many men who lost the bloom of naivety and youth far too soon.This is one of his narratives and it’s my favourite.

By the way, a ha’penny, or half penny, was a diminutive unit of British currency.

Ha’penny Funeral, by Norman Best

I didn’t know Poynter very well. In fact, I didn’t really know him at all. Usually the vices and mannerisms are the things you most easily recall about the people with whom you ate, drank, flew, laughed and occasionally quarreled all those years ago. With a few exceptions, the faces become vague and featureless and you’re left with only a general impression of each one. Yet I remember clearly how Poynter looked, even after all this time.

I don’t suppose I spoke more than a dozen words to him during the short time he was with the squadron, a couple of them on the day he died. I bumped into him going through the crew-room door and said, “Sorry, sport!”

He had joined our unit at the RAF base in Cornwall a week or so earlier. Now his name was on the ops board to go on his first Bay patrol. This was to be on the day following our collision in the crew-room doorway when he had been hurrying out to his aircraft to keep an appointment with a Spitfire for some fighter affiliation. The squadron was having a thin time of it during that period of the war. The Bay of Biscay was a big, rough, unfriendly place and our track took us close enough to Brittany to make us convenient targets for the German FW 190 pilots who had been placed there especially for our benefit.

At the time I was temporarily grounded for medical reasons, but I was hanging around dispersal since I was able enough to do all the ‘joe’ jobs such as taxiing the odd kite across to the hangar.

I can see Poynter now as he smiled and waved off my apology; a thin, sallow-faced boy, barely twenty years old, with mousy hair straggling from beneath his very new cap. Grey eyes were already looking beyond me towards his machine, anticipating the coming exercise. It was a warm day and he was wearing only battledress with a Mae West over it, carrying his helmet in one hand and a set of maps in the other. Anyway, off he went, looking as if he should have been carrying a school satchel rather than a flying helmet.

I didn’t see him again. Apparently after he completed the exercise with the Spit he took a turn at the Beaufighter, and quite inexplicably, flew it into the ground. He and the navigator were both killed on impact and the ensuing fire left little that was recognizable of either of them. The navigator was sent home for burial, but Poynter was laid away in the little cemetery at Portreath village, a couple of miles from the airfield.

His parents came to the funeral and the squadron laid on the proper military honours for him. He had no close friends in the Mess since no one had got to know him in such a short time, but there were enough volunteers to be pallbearers to make up the required number and, as I was something of a spare body, the CO had me arrange things for Mr. and Mrs. Poynter and organize the necessary personnel.

A saluting party was detailed from among the erks who could be spared and they spent two or three hours under the tutelage of Flight Sergeant Byrne, brushing up on their small arms and foot drill.

Byrne was in his element putting the squad through their paces. He drilled them enthusiastically, concentrating on the few movements pertinent to the funeral.

As a Pilot Officer, Poynter was entitled to a three-round salute, fired over the grave at the end of the padre’s service. The only weapon the armoury would make available to us was the notorious Ross rifle. This firearm had so many faults that it had been deemed unfit for anything but the most dire emergency. We found it to be as unsuitable for a graveside salute as for anything else. After firing, the bolt would be pulled back to eject the used cartridge case, then pushed to reload. But when the last round had been fired, the bolt could not be closed because the magazine feed platform sprang up and stopped it. This was a problem as it made the rifle very awkward to handle for the remainder of the salute.

Byrne solved the dilemma by placing a halfpenny coin under the last cartridge in the magazine. It was just the right diameter to prevent the platform fouling the bolt. If it stayed in place. The men tried this with three dummy rounds and it seemed to work most of the time.

The day of the funeral was still and overcast. His parents had stayed in Redruth overnight and I picked them up in the CO’s car that morning with the chaplain along to offer what comfort he could.

Naturally enough, they were both withdrawn but pathetically grateful that the air force, after being at least partially responsible for the death of their son, should see fit to honour him at his funeral. Little else was said during the short journey to the chapel. I don’t know if the padre was any comfort to them; he never was to me. He seemed to think that God was on our side. There wasn’t much Godliness around when you were shooting 20 mm cannon shells at another human being because he wore black crosses on his aeroplane.

The service went as these things do. The CO took the Poynters under his wing and the rest of us endured the chaplain’s words, for the most part stoically immersed in our own thoughts. I slipped out to alert Byrne and the saluting party they were on next.

I left them to check the grave in the tiny cemetery and the route to it from the gates. I remember new graves nearby catching my eye. An American crew had been buried there recently. Poynter would be in good company.

The cortege arrived and the pallbearers bore Poynter to his final landing. Byrne and his men appeared quietly for the slow march and managed to look as if they’d been with the funeral all along. The chaplain spoke the last words of the burial service and he couldn’t have known how macabre the sound of ‘ashes to ashes’ was – he hadn’t seen the charred remains of Poynter’s Beaufighter.

The coffin was lowered and the padre looked at me. I murmured “Saluting party!” to Byrne and he gave the commands in a low but penetrating Irish voice.

“Attention! Slope arms! Present! Fire!” The volley sounded as a single shot and I watched the erks out of the corner of my eye. A creditable performance in view of the lack of practice. Bolts cleared breeches and ejected cartridge cases fell softly onto the grass.

“Round two – fire!” The volley a little more ragged this time. The CO stood at the salute and the rest of us at attention. Mr. Poynter was supporting his wife.

“Round three – fire!” The flat bark of .303 blanks, quite different to the sound of live rounds. A feeling of relief that it was almost over, and then, the loud clatter of a stubborn rifle bolt and a tinkle as a ha’penny, dropped from Corporal Kelsoe’s firearm, bounced off his belt buckle and fell with a thud like the crack of doom onto the coffin.

For a split second every eye was upon it. Then the saluting party went to the ‘slope arms’ and marched away, Kelsoe’s rifle with the bolt still open and he red-faced, with blood trickling down his hand where he’d caught it in the mechanism.

After the others had departed and the CO had escorted the Poynters to his car, I went around to where Byrne and his lads were waiting for their transport. Kelsoe was cursing between draws on a cigarette as I commended the Flight Sergeant on a good effort.

“Thanks, sir. They weren’t too bad, considering”, he said. And then, to Kelsoe, “Don’t worry about it, Corporal. You were doin’ a beautiful job ‘til that ha’penny fell out.” Kelsoe was not to be mollified however.

“We can’t even bury a man properly. Here, none of us really knew him. He wasn’t a chum or anything. But we do all this to please his Mum and Dad, and I go and chuck a bloody ha’penny in with him as if that’s all he was worth to us!” I could see that no amount of reasoning would shake him out of his despondency, so I left him to it.

But I thought about Poynter and his Ha’penny Funeral. Not many of us in those hazardous years could expect any kind of ritual interment if we ‘bought it.’ No doubt that’s why I remember his rather unremarkable features. A lack of either luck or skill, possibly both, had contributed to his end, and the chances of his surviving more than one or two operational sorties had been remote. Yet there he was, ordinary, having had no opportunity to make friends with his squadron mates, but resting in a known place in the peace of a Cornish village and with a corporal’s ha’penny in there with him to make it unique.

And that host of others, scattered all over God knows where, are almost gone from my memory, but Poynter is still clear in my mind’s eye just because somebody dropped a coin. I wonder if even Kelsoe can recall him now.