As I was approaching the airfield at 6000 feet, I decided to try a new maneuver which might prove useful in combat. It was to be a half loop and then I would roll at the top and fly off in the opposite direction. I pulled her up into a neat half loop but I was going rather slowly and hanging upside down in the air. With an efficient safety belt that would have been no trouble at all. But our standard belts were a 100% unsafe. Mine stretched a little and suddenly I dived clean through it and fell out of the cockpit. There was nothing between me and the ground. The first 2000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably firmer.
As I fell, I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly, I fell back onto her. I was able to grip onto her top plane and that saved me from slithering straight through the propeller, which was glistening beautifully in the evening sunshine. She was now diving noisily at about 140 miles per hour. I was hanging onto her with my left hand, and with one foot hooked into the cockpit, I managed to reach down with my other hand and I pulled her control stick backwards to pull her gently out of her dive. This was a mistake. She immediately went into the most appalling inverted spin. Even with two hands on the top plane I was slipping. I had about two and half thousand feet left. Remembering that everything was inverted, I managed to get my right foot on the control stick and managed to push it forwards. The Camel stopped spinning in half a turn and went into a smooth glide, but upside down. It was now easy to reach my hand down, or up, and pull her gently down and round into a normal glide. I grabbed the seat cushion which was obstructing the cockpit, chucked it over the side, and sat back down.
I was now at about 800 feet, but in spite of the extraordinary battering she had received, my little Camel was flying perfectly. One or two of the wings were a bit loose, but nothing was broken. I turned the engine off in case of strain, so my approach was made in silence. I made an unusually good landing, but there was noone there to applaud. Every man and jack of the squadron had mysteriously disappeared. After about a minute or so, heads began popping up like bunny rabbits from every hole. Apparently as I had pressed my foot on the control stick, I had also pressed both triggers, and the entire airfield had been sprinkled with bullets. Very wisely, the ground crew dived as one man for the nearest ditch.