AFVOA Newletter August 2020

Section 4 – War Diary CV 2 No. 02 / 2020 Page 63 of 237 instructions on how to use it. Ayre comforted us saying it was all part of the procedure since families needed protection. In the evening the air-raid siren sounded. We scrambled out of the barrack and climbed into the trench. We sat against each other with the two sleeping babies, huddled in blankets and unaffected by all this. After what seemed an eternity the all clear sounded and we came out of the trench. The next day the soldier showed a long dead snake coiled at the end of his rifle. Apparently it was lying at the bottom of the trench! Ayre had established a secret knocking code for me to open the barrack door. One night I heard that knock and opened the door to find it pitch dark. There was no sign of Ayre! Trembling I ran inside and brought the empty revolver, when I heard someone laughing. Flt Lt Shyam Hattangadi stood there holding his stomach and laughing. “Mangala, no enemy can survive you like this. Look at the way that pistol is drooping and your hands shaking, is it loaded?” It wasn’t. Still shaking with laughter he said that he came to inform that Ayre would return in the morning and left. Amidst the tension there were such comic moments. Soon it was November and news was getting hotter, while the climate colder. Suddenly there was an alarm that paratroopers had landed on the nearby fields and soon they would enter the base, which turned out to be false. Patti advised me to start the children on solid foods and dry the diapers in occasional patches of sunlight. I constantly wrote letters, addressed to 56 APO, updating the families in Bombay and Bangalore of the situation. With our supplies dwindling we requested the Mess Secretary to add our list to his. Meanwhile Brijmohan Lall Munjal (the patriarch of Hero Cycles) from Ludhiana, a patriotic businessman, volunteered to reach fresh supplies to the ladies and life started becoming better. As December dawned with cold days and colder nights, the tension on the Eastern and Western borders with Pakistan escalated, and we prepared ourselves for the inevitable. December 3rd was another day but by noon we came to know that PAF had bombed Srinagar, Pathankot and Adampur. That day the air-raid siren kept wailing and there was feverish activity on the base. The husbands told the wives to face what came bravely and left to the Operations Room. Patti was reading an Earl Stanley Gardner mystery, and I was reading a Georgette Hayer romance in torchlight when that night we heard the drone of an Wg Cdr & Mrs P K Ayre