If you involve yourself in a hobby for long enough, sooner or later you will start to feel nostalgia for the ‘old days’. The same goes for model building, and along with many people, I look back fondly at the kits available when I first began building in the early 1980s. The big names back then were Airfix and Matchbox, and though Matchbox no longer produce model kits, Airfix are still on the go and are in fact still making some of the kits modellers used to build 30 and 40 years ago.
I have long been an avid reader of combat pilots’ memoirs, especially those from the Second World War, and I fancied building some of the planes which featured in those personal accounts of the war. After visiting a few old Kent WW2 airfields such as Headcorn, Manston and Hawkinge, I had the bug and quickly got together the materials I needed to build a small display based on a typical Kent RAF airfield in the middle of the war.
The following things were used to create this display:
A cheap DIY pre-cut shelf from The Range (wooden base)
Woodland Scenics grass mat (grassy finish for the base)
Woodland Scenics grass scatter material (dark clover patches for the grass)
Hornby OO-scale Nissen hut (briefing hut)
Oxford Diecast 1-76-scale Alvis Tourer (officer’s car)
Wills OO-scale bicycles (the bike outside the briefing hut)
Airfix 1-72-scale Beaufighter TF-X
Airfix 1-72-scale Spitfire Mk. IX
Construction of the display was very simple. I cut the grass mat to size and stuck it to the wooden base using PVA glue, and placed the briefing room and the car in the same way. I sprinkled darker grass material in patches to look like clover, again stuck with PVA. The planes are simply standing in place. The bare, treadworn patch in front of the hut was made by just scraping the green material off the mat.
Apart from the actual planes themselves, nearly everything else used was taken from the world of OO-scale railway modelling. Though a slightly different scale (OO-scale is 1-76, the Airfix planes are 1-72) they still look about right.
My intention was to create a display, not a diorama. There is no story being told here, no specific moment of action is being captured in model form, and the position of the planes and hut are not totally realistic. Instead, it is a display of two WW2 aircraft as they might have looked in summer 1943, in a setting intended to pay a warm tribute to the airfields of Kent which worked tirelessly to defend the skies of southern England from the Luftwaffe.
Having said that, when I look at the display, a story begins in my own head! I think it is a warm evening in June 1943, about 7pm. After a quiet day the Beaufighter is being readied for a busy nightshift engaging Luftwaffe intruders. The Spitfire is a visitor from another airfield, maybe running an errand or perhaps it stopped short of fuel after a sortie during the day. The black Alvis parked by the briefing room belongs to the Squadron Leader, who has driven over to check up on a War Ministry bulletin or some new intel on enemy tactics. In any case, this green and pleasant idyll among the chalk hills of Kent will echo to the sound of mighty aero engines as crews begin their forays into the darkness to patrol the coast. Soon, the ground crews will grab a few hours’ rest before emerging into a misty dawn to service the returning planes, the pilots hurriedly debriefing in the morning light before eating breakfast and going gladly to their bunks.
The aircraft kits are both inexpensive Airfix kits, and are basic but nice. The Beaufighter in particular appears to be a very old kit, lacking detail (there is no cockpit interior) and needing some work to blend in joints between the parts. The Spitfire Mk. IX is a nicer kit with better detail and parts fit, but is still what you would expect from an older Airfix kit. Both planes were sprayed with an airbrush, the green camouflage on the Spitfire being added with a brush. Ultimately, there are newer and better kits of both planes available but I wanted to go back to my roots and see what could be done with the good old Airfix models, and I have to say I am very glad I did.
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