A spring afternoon in early May 1973 in the uninspiring Sussex dormitory town of Haywards Heath. A scruffy, long-haired, Leeds United and David Bowie-obsessed 12-year-old in flared trousers is disconsolately moping along on the way home from school, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone and everyone just days after his team's shock loss to second-division Sunderland in the FA Cup final. Seeking solace at the bottom of a large jar of sherbet strawberries, he ducked into the sort of small, family-run newsagent/sweet shop that was a feature of every residential street back then and spotted, among the mass of lurid comics, science fiction magazines and suffocatingly dull gardening publications on the counter, a colour, head-on flying shot of an aircraft which would have been familiar even to determinedly trendy glam rock Bowie fans: the machine that had achieved star billing in the much-loved and oft-repeated feature film 633 Squadron, and the awful, and thankfully less frequently broadcast follow-up production Mosquito Squadron.
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