IT must have been a fairly bizarre sight, a six-year-old schoolboy running along the beach in his uniform, shoes and school cap, trying to catch up with a plane that had just landed on the sand, but mention flying to Henry Powe and he’ll go to the ends of the earth, let alone the bay.

Henry’s 85 now, but still gets very emotional about a fascination with aircraft that began as a child on a sunny day in summer, survived the horrors of the Blitz and then took him out to the badlands of the North West Frontier as India pushed towards independence at the end of the 1940s.

A Londoner by birth, his job in textiles brought him to Worcester in 1965 and in recent years, Henry has become a familiar sight showing parties of visitors around Worcester Cathedral.

However, this story has its roots in one that featured in the Worcestershire Industrial Archaeological Society winter newsletter and told of a visit members had made to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and the American War Graves Cemetery, near Cambridge.

Both were very emotional occasions for Henry and rolled back the years like clouds scudding across the sky.

“As I left the reception area at Duxford, the first thing I saw was a spitfire doing an engine run,” he said. “The sound made my heart flutter as I had first heard that as a 16-year-old.

“I also fired the eight guns in the butts. I never forgot the sound of those eight guns either.”

It was that encounter with the plane on Jersey sands in 1932 that started everything off. Henry ran breathlessly up to the pilot when the little aircraft eventually came to a halt and his bubbling enthusiasm soon had the pair deep in conversation.

Over the next few days, Henry was taken on several flights, one all the way to France and back.

“He even let me hold the controls at times,” Henry said. “Totally illegally, of course.”

It set him on a determined career course to be in the RAF. He even joined the ATC in readiness, passing all the exams and rising to the rank of corporal.

But Hitler had other ideas. Henry was 14 when the bombs started dropping over London and suddenly the whole scene changed.

For a while his fledgling development as an air force operative was put on hold and during the Blitz he became a messenger, furiously riding his bicycle between ARP posts. Once he was blown up, losing several front teeth in the process.

But aeroplanes were constantly in his thoughts and there was part of him (not a little one either) that was hoping the war wouldn’t end before he could fly on a mission.

After the Battle of Britain had been won and the German air threat diminished, he went on gunnery, navigation and wireless operator courses.

He managed to attend pre-flight lectures for pilots and spent a memorable five days with the men of the American 8th Air Force at Bovingdon airfield in Hertfordshire.

“They called me the Blimey Kid,”

he recalled. “Although there I was as a 16-year-old English lad watching them go off on raids – and they would only be about 21 or 22 themselves. They flew the Flying Fortresses and I would stand and watch them disappear into the night sky.

“For an English lad used to all the shortages and hardships the war had brought to Britain, it was an amazing culture shock being around them.

“They seemed to have everything. Bananas, oranges, chocolate, nothing was in short supply. They’d sit there, cigars in mouths, throwing dice and acting just like you saw in the movies.”

But then, maybe as Henry had feared, hostilities ceased before he could get airborne in anger. He passed all the exams and medicals and completed advanced flying training at Bovingdon. But although he joined the RAF, he wasn’t going to war. “I felt in limbo, as though a career I had planned had been taken away.”

Henry was sent on a six-week commando training course in Scotland with the Royal Marines, “which I thoroughly enjoyed” and then found himself seconded to the Indian Air Force just as India approached independence.

“It was an horrific period for the country, with riots and killings,”

he said.

“Part of our job was covering the area around the North West Frontier. I got to see the local tribesmen and I can tell you, we will never win in Afghanistan.

“They are skilled and tactically very good fighters. They are born to it. It’s what they do from a very early age. We are fighting them in their own backyard and the sooner we get out of it, the better.”

Despite the dangers on the ground, Henry returned from flying over the Khyber Pass unscathed and settled into a job in the UK retailing textiles.

It was a lot safer then flying, but nowhere near as exciting.

Although perhaps the Good Lord had been trying to tell him something.