Jan 1954 - Comet crash, Rifle range

2 January 1954   -   “Pegasus” went for a burton today.   They lost to Hong Kong 4-1.   Did it cause a stir at home?

24 January 1954   -   (Comet crash) – There was a tragic sequel to the crash out here.   The son of the general manager of one of the ferry services here was supposed to go to Singapore to catch the Comet but for some reason he missed it so he caught the Phillipines Airline plane that crashed a few days later!

I’m very pleased to know that you enjoyed “Hong Kong escape” as I thought it served a two-fold purpose, your memories of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and my sightseeing around Hong Kong.  (“Hong Kong escape”, published in 1953 by Arthur Barker, was written by Lieutenant R.B.Goodwin, one of the few, if not the only person to escape from Shamshuipo and make good his escape back to England)

One thing that happened to me in Colombo I think I’ll tell you about.   A group of us were walking up from the docks towards the fort part of the city and, naturally, every English girl we saw we looked at hard in fact, stared at.   Well, I saw a girl in a car with her mother and father, I suppose she was about eighteen or nineteen but, boy, was she attractive.   Well, not having seen a female for over three weeks it was only natural that I should stare.   To my complete surprise she looked straight back at me and smiled and to cap it all, as the car passed us she swivelled around in her seat!   Phew!   I was in love with her for about the next ten minutes.

We went on a rifle range yesterday.   My first ten shots were atrocious.   There was no way of telling where they went for there was no “butt” party.   However, I saw that I was firing very high when my sight was centre so I decided to aim at 6 o’clock on the target, not the bull.   My last ten shots were rapid.   We had to shoot all ten rounds off in 45 seconds, it was most enjoyable.   I was banging away and the CSM (company sergeant major) was yelling, “Green, Green, you’re shooting too fast, it’s better to shoot only five and have five on target than shoot ten and have eight miss”.   In actual fact I shot them all off in 40 seconds.   There was the CSM telling me I couldn’t possibly have more than three hits at that speed when the sergeant brought up the targets and there were nine beautifully round holes in mine.   The CSM's eyes nearly popped out when he saw that.   I was somewhat surprised myself.