If 10-year-old girls from Sageston CP School get their way, the Royal Air Force of the future will be dominated by women rather than men. Volunteers at the wartime museum at Carew Cheriton were grateful that retired Squadron Leader Bryn Evans was on hand to fend off awkward equal rights questions recently.

Squadron Leader Evans, holidaying in Pembrokeshire with his wife Jill, had popped into the former RAF 1940s Air Station, on the same day pupils from the Sageston School were visiting the restored Control Tower museum and he agreed to share with the children some of his experiences in the Air Force.

Locally born Squadron Leader Evans told how he had gone to the local primary school in Burton before undertaking his secondary education in Milford Haven. Bryn explained he left school at the age of 16 on the Friday, was unemployed the following Monday and on the Tuesday started an apprenticeship with the RAF.

The boys from Sageston School wanted to know if Bryn was a pilot, but it was the girls who were most interested to discover if they could follow in his footsteps and become electrical engineers and reach the top in the RAF. Had the Squadron Leader worked with women, did they get paid the same as men and had he ever had a woman as a boss?

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Squadron Leader Evans told how as a five-year-old he remembered watching Sunderland sea planes taking off from Pembroke Dock.

However, with food rationing in 1940s Britain, it was the Catalina aircraft that he remembered most as the Canadian aircrews that flew them would regularly throw chocolate bars to him and other children.