"I dived into this circle firing rather wildly through absolute inexperience, and then the 109s came down on us. Then this phenomenon which I saw again and again through out the war, when you have a dog fight there are so many aeroplanes and then suddenly it's as if the hand of God has wiped the slate clean and there's nothing else in the sky. 

I suddenly found myself alone, except for in the distance there was one speck of an aeroplane circling and he was turning towards me and we approached each other head on, and then I realised that it was a Messerschmitt 109. So we did the equivalent of tilting at the lists in mediaeval times. We just attacked each other head on. I could see the little white dots on the leading edge of his wing as he fired. I was feeling a little bit stubborn that morning so I didn't budge. Anyway he flashed over the top of me and I returned to base, landed. 

One of pilots had been shot down but not injured. I was asked if I'd shot anything down. I said "No. I may have hit him". Then seventeen years later a man who was writing a book showed me an article in a German newspaper of the 1940s, which showed a German pilot by the wreckage of his burnt out Messerschmitt 109 in a field in northern France. It was the same man because he'd done some research and he'd found out my name and my squadron and he described the head on attack. I got a confirmed victory of seventeen years later."

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