All about me - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

At different times prior to joining the Royal Air Force at the age of 17, my ambition was to be a railway driver, a professional musician, an announcer on the BBC, a bank manager, a school teacher, an author and an RAF pilot, more or less in that order. As it turned out I never worked in a bank, thank goodness! I could have been a professional musician but had to abandon that ambition for reasons largely beyond my control. I never drove a train, but I have been a lifelong railway enthusiast and there can't be many people who have stood all the way from London Waterloo to Paris Gard du Nord and back in the driving cab of a Eurostar express. I did become an author; I've had two books published and I've written a large number of articles for newspapers and magazines. I never worked for the BBC but I made many radio and television broadcasts for them during my time with the Red Arrows. I was never a teacher in civilian life but I spent quite a lot of my time in the RAF as either a ground or flying instructor, teaching and examining on such diverse subjects as resistance to enemy interrogation (and the converse - how to be an effective interrogator), anti-submarine warfare techniques, and V-bomber electrical systems. I did eventually become an RAF pilot; actually I was the RAF's oldest-ever pilot student because I didn't start my training until I was 31.

I retired in 2001 after 47 years in the Royal Air Force and having served in more than a dozen countries and having passed through many more. I travelled on RAF duty: as far east as Sydney, that's about 150 degrees East; as far south as the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of South Africa and Montevideo on the River Plate, both about 34 degrees south of the Equator, about the same as Sydney; as far west as Los Angeles, 118 degrees West; and as far as 80 degrees North flying over the Atlantic Ocean searching for Soviet Air Force intruders during the Cold War. That still leaves a lot of the planet that I've not visited.

On the first day of 1948 when I was having a little private worry about my destiny, I came across the word serendipity in a book I was reading. Having looked up the definition in my dictionary, I reckoned that serendipity had even then featured in my life several times but I was unclear whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. It was on that very day that I started keeping a diary and from then on I recorded all the events in my life, sometimes in embarrassing detail, and made a special note of any that might be attributed to serendipity. Looking back now through more than 60 years of diaries, I seem to have experienced more than my fair share of coincidences, whatever the cause and whatever I might call them. Without them, my life would have turned out quite differently, but I doubt if it would have been more fulfilling or more enjoyable.

People often say that 'things' run in threes. Certainly the number three seems to have a special meaning for me. For example: I lived in three different cities before I reached the age of three; I was educated at three different grammar schools; I qualified for three different RAF flying badges; I've made three parachute jumps; and I've three times taken off from, and three times landed back on, a US Navy aircraft carrier. More obscurely, I've been the subject of three 'Desert Island Discs' type of radio broadcasts - one of them actually broadcast live from a real desert island. Come to think of it, my local rugby league team in Wakefield is a Trinity, and I am slowly preparing my third book.

I often used to tell my friends that a true Yorkshire man would always return home eventually so it caused them no surprise when, within weeks of retiring, I moved home back to Wakefield, to a house not more than four miles from the one in which I was born.

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