My grandfather Peter Wescombe, who has died aged 89, was 13 when the second world war was declared. During the next seven years, Long Tall Charlie or Lanky, as he was known during his teens, played with war debris on the North Downs, watched the blitz from the top of Reigate Hill, Surrey, and took refuge under the dining-room table with his widowed mother when the sirens sounded.
His father, Charles, a mechanic, had died of peritonitis when Peter was 12. At 17, Peter volunteered to join the RAF, which ignited his lifelong passion for aircraft and aviation. Unfortunately for his mother, Lily (nee Tourle), and future wife, Sue, whom he married in 1947, he was based all over Britain flying Lancasters and Wellingtons. His wartime letters to Sue constantly commented on his unknown destinations and his desire to come home.
Sue’s letters of the period show that all of their friends who met and dated in peacetime saw their social scene of dances, the cinema, trekking over the North Downs and going to church, change utterly.
Up until his last days, Peter spoke fondly of those years, of the camaraderie and the adventure. His early life had been defined by wars; his father driving one of the first tanks during the first world war, his uncles in the Royal Navy, his visits to Wootton Creek, on the Isle of Wight, where his grandfather, who had joined the navy as a boy, would raise the flag in his garden every morning and bring it down at sunset.
After the war Peter applied to join the airline BOAC and to train as a teacher. The Department of Education answered first and so began a lifelong career in teaching. At 29 he was appointed head of Compton and Up Marden Church of England school in the village of Compton, in West Sussex, a place he loved for the rest of his life. He then took up a series of headships in the same area before working as an adviser for Hampshire county council’s education department.
He supported the Labour party and the welfare state was very important to him. He also had a passion for literature, especially Dickens, Austen and Yeats.
Adventurous expeditions abroad with Sue, who was also a teacher, were curtailed in 1984 when she was diagnosed with early onset dementia. She was confined to hospital from 1990 and died in 2006.
Peter subsequently shared a home with an old friend, Mary Poulett.
He is survived by his daughter, Keila, by me, and by a great-grandson, Peter.
