RECYCLING is nothing new to veteran aero-engineer Robert Nichols. His fascinating wartime stories of rebuilding aircraft from the remnants of crashed fighters in India certainly prove that.

Now 90, Mr Nichols grew up in Hadleigh and spent most of his working years around planes, civil or military.

But it was his time spent in India during the Second World War which was perhaps the most remarkable time of his life.

Aged just 19, he signed up as an engineer and wound up posted to India with an RAF repair and salvage unit.

Based 60 miles inland from Madras, the unit’s job was to recover downed planes, so undamaged parts could be reused.

Ranging across the whole of southern India, the unit targeted Spitfires and American-built P47 Thunderbolts, downed in the war with the Japanese in Burma.

Mr Nichols, who lives in Hadleigh, recalled: “We’d get a signal, giving the latitude and longitude co-ordinates and off we’d go. We’d find the planes and bring them back, if possible.

“The object was then to see what we could make out of the bits.”

His team would often travel as much as 150 miles from base in a Bedford truck to locate crashed fighters amid India’s plains and jungles.

As darkness fell on one trip, Mr Nichols recalled stumbling upon a secret base, set up to study the effects of mustard gas in the jungle.

He said: “The jungle was so thick, I had to pick my way through using a torch, with a pick-up truck following me.

“Suddenly, I put my hands on barbed wire.

“It turned out it was an Army base. The aircraft we had been sent to salvage had been dropping mustard gas and this unit had to see how much fell through the jungle canopy. The blisters on some of the men were horrific.

“I was glad to find the place, because the officer told me where I’d picked my way through the jungle, they’d found tiger footprints.”

Mustard gas was not used used by the Allies in combat.

All the same, Mr Nichols’s memories of the period are happy ones.

He said: “I was in my early twenties, in a foreign country and I was in command of several men. I was in my element.”

After the war, he continued to work with aircraft. Airline entrepreneur Freddie Laker invited him to join his new company, Aviation Traders at Southend Airport.

His job was to convert and then service the planes Laker used fir the Berlin Airlift of 1948 and 1989.

The historic operation flew huge quantities of supplies into West Berlin in defiance of a Soviet blockade which had left the British, American and French sectors of the divided city stranded deep within Soviet-controlled East Germany. Mr Nichols said: “We were all very aware of the significance of it and we were keen to help the people of West Berlin.”

He later became chief engineer and technical manager for a succession of airlines.

Away form work, Mr Nichols shared many happy years with his wife, Vera, who died in 2001.

The couple had two children and Mr Nichols – now a grandfather of two with two great-grandchildren – is truly the proverbial man with a story or two to tell his grandchildren.