First Light

Main Review:

You might recall last year that I was trying to expand my knowledge of WW2 beyond the narrow confines of tanks. Whilst I may have scratched the itch with Malcolm Brown’s Spitfire Summer, First Light by Geoffrey Wellum kept being recommended to me by friends, family and WW2 podcasts alike. Thus persuaded, I sought out a copy and took to the skies with Wellum’s instantly entertaining account of his time as a fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain and beyond.

One of my favourite things about my most recent WW2 read (An Englishman at War) was how engaging and charming the diary author had been. You can imagine my delight then upon discovering that Wellum’s writing style was very much more of the same: so irrepressibly funny that you’ll be hard pressed not to like him by the end of the first page. He’s got a real eye for dialogue, blending the mundane and humorous together as he recounts his various scrapes with stuffy administrators, gruff veterans and slightly sozzled fighter aces alike.

Wellum’s passion for flying is omnipresent, but what I found most entertaining was the fact that, despite his adoration of the Spitfire and his sense of pride in what he’s doing, this is repeatedly balanced out by him recounting all the times (of which there are many) where he grouses, grumbles and chunters about work, his colleagues and how inconvenient all this war is for him. There was something oddly human and reassuring about the fact that even being a member of ‘The Few’ didn’t exempt you from being fond of whinging about actually being required to do your job and not just drink tea all day.

At its core, the story of First Light is almost the quintessential military tale. We start with ‘Boy’ Wellum attending basic training, complete with nerves, excitement and rapidly formed friendships galore. We even get the obligatory scene where the grizzled instructor type calls out the up-and-coming hotshot pilot in a bar for thinking about giving up. Everything feels like it belongs in a movie – so much so that I could practically hear Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins blasting away as Wellum completed his first solo flight and everything fell into place. 

Perhaps because First Light is a memoir rather than a diary, it feels more like a fictional story in places than ‘real’ history. Part of this comes down to Wellum’s immensely poetic writing style, but there’s also things like how his first solo flight just happens to take place on exactly the same day that Germany invades Poland. With the benefit of hindsight, he’s able to pepper in motifs and recurring references at his leisure, and seems to have taken great pleasure in doing so to give the whole thing a real cinematic quality.

The battle sequences dotted throughout are tense and gritty and spaced out enough to never grow repetitive. Wellum repeatedly draws attention to the smells of dogfights and the actual physical experience that flying at such speeds and altitudes generates.  I also really enjoyed the sections where he discussed the repeated advancements and alterations made to the Spitfire as the war continued. The technobabble in these sections, whilst still prevalent, is at least more understandable because of context clues. There’s a real sense of ‘action / reaction’ underpinning every change or amendment that was made – similar to the montages in the first Iron Man movie when Tony Stark has to work through the various problems of the early suits.

As entertaining and engrossing as the story is, I did have a couple of (minor) issues with First Light. The first was that Wellum clearly had a few phrases for which he was particularly fond that kept coming up as the book went on. For example, Spitfire engines are repeatedly described as sounding like ‘a thousand banshees’. As evocative as it is the first time (it sounds like one heck of a D+D adventure to me) it loses its lustre slightly by the third time or so.

The other issue is that, as amusing as Wellum’s writing style is, the amount of plane related terminology and tech talk present within borders on the overwhelming in places. Rather unhelpfully, not much of it is particularly well explained or defined. In several places I found myself wishing for either some more extensive footnotes or, in an ideal world,  a second editor to play the role that James Holland did for An Englishman at War – on hand to provide further contextualisation and information to flesh everything out in more detail.

To give an example, Wellum repeatedly talks about ‘Merlins’ without ever really making it clear that he’s talking about the engines inside the Spitfires themselves. I’m sure the hardened historians and aficionados don’t need any pointers, but if I hadn’t been listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been entirely sure what he was going on about. After a while, I found myself just sort of nodding along with the more technical aspects, without ever fully understanding what half of them meant.

If you’ll pardon the pun, I rather flew through First Light. I found the ending to be very poignant, with Wellum being taken off active service because of ill health. In essence, he runs himself into the ground and his body begins to struggle with the wear and tear of all the fighting. As exhausted as he is though, Wellum continues to agonise about feeling like he’s letting everyone down, which captures how I imagine many people feel about sick leave even when we’re not at war. 

Having read the book, I completely understand why so many people recommended the book as emphatically as they did. It’s got heart, it’s got humour and it’s got a sense of style that makes it a real pleasure to read. If you’re in the mood to get your head in the clouds, you can’t go wrong with Wellum’s high-flying memoir.

Until the next time – happy reading!