Geoffrey Wellum was still eighteen years old when he was flying a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain with No. 92 Squadron.  By early September the squadron was at Biggin Hill and Wellum shot down a Heinkel 111 bomber.  The pressures on one who had been a schoolboy a year earlier were intense and Wellum captures the mood and his own experiences in his evocative memoir First Light, a book described by Max Hastings as ‘one of the best memoirs for years about the experience of flying in war”.  After the Battle, Wellum was awarded the DFC and later flew Spitfires from Malta before he was evacuated home on medical grounds.  He was an instructor and remained in the RAF until 1961.

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