Geoffrey Wellum: Prize fighter

It's the year's most unlikely bestseller. At the age of 80, Geoffrey Wellum has just had his first book published - a memoir of his time as the youngest fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain. In an exclusive interview, he talks to Julia Llewellyn Smith

Twenty-five years ago, Geoffrey Wellum was at the lowest ebb of his life. "The family business was going into liquidation," he recalls, voice quavering. "I was losing my house, my divorce was coming, my son was at university, I had nowhere to live. Everything was pear-shaped."

In despair, he started writing a memoir about his youth. "I just wanted to sit quietly and convince myself..." He takes a deep breath. "That at some point in my life I had been of use."

Wellum had an extraordinary story to tell, and the book he wrote is a huge success – it has reached number three on the non-fiction bestsellers list, behind Antony Beevor's Berlin: the Downfall and The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. Now 80, he was just 18 and straight out of school when he began flying Spitfires, the youngest fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain. It was the crucial point of the Second World War. Britain stood alone. The Nazis, flushed with a series of astonishing victories, appeared invincible, with a far greater number of planes and pilots. Throughout the summer of 1940, in the skies above southern England, Wellum and his comrades battled the Luftwaffe to prevent invasion.

The dangers were huge. The average life- expectancy of a Spitfire pilot was four weeks. Wellum, still a teenager, got used to close friends never returning. How did he cope? "It wasn't going to happen to you," he says, looking me firmly in the eye. "It was always the other chap. My poor parents, they must have been very brave. Every night, listening to the news on the wireless – 'Ten of our Spitfires are missing'."

Sitting in the lobby of a smart London hotel, Wellum is white-haired, smartly dressed and strongly built. He is jovial, charming and lucid, even after three lagers, but his long-suppressed emotions occasionally threaten to overwhelm him.

Wellum never intended his memoir for publication, but two years ago, he gave it to James Holland, a young author researching a novel set during the Second World War. "I didn't expect much," said Holland. "Most fighter-pilot memoirs are fascinating, but they tend to be anodyne, devoid of any emotional punch. But Geoff's was different."

Stunned, Holland showed it to friends at Penguin, who immediately decided to publish it. Everyone who read the manuscript of Wellum's journey from confident 17-year-old schoolboy to his emotional and physical breakdown on Malta three years later, was engrossed. The story is deeply moving and astonishingly evocative. Reading it, you feel you are in the Spitfire with him, thrown around at 20,000ft, chased round by a German Heinkel, with your ammunition gone.

"I see you, you sod," reads one passage as he dives on an enemy bomber. "All at once, crossfire: heavy and pretty close at that. Bloody front gunners. My target, concentrate, the target. Looking at him through the site, getting larger much too quickly, concentrate, hold him steady, that's it, hold it..."

An only child, Wellum grew up in Essex, always dreaming of flying. At 17, in his last year at school and six months before the war began, he applied to the RAF.

"I was a cocky little bastard, a bit full of myself. At school, I was captain of cricket and a monitor." He chuckles. "The Air Force soon knocked that out of me."

Two weeks after leaving school, Wellum was training with the RAF. Within a year, he was sent to join his boyhood heroes in the hellraising 92 Squadron. He was technically inexperienced and emotionally immature. "I'd never seen a Spitfire before, let alone flown one, but there was a war on and they needed pilots."

His first Commanding Officer was Roger Bushell, (later immortalised in The Great Escape), shot down with two others the day after Wellum's arrival, covering the evacuation of Dunkirk. Within days, a bewildered Wellum – nicknamed "Boy" – was joining such missions. He was involved in dozens of dogfights over France and England. "I was shot up badly on three occasions," he says. "One time, I had literally to fight my way back to the White Cliffs; on another, there was a German hanging on my tail, who wouldn't let me go. When I saw him, I felt fear, real stark fear. Not 'Ooh, this is frightening', but 'Oh God, this bloke is going to kill me'. Then I got cross. I thought 'To hell with this, I'm not ready to go yet'. I'll never know how I got away with it."

As the war progressed, so the "Boy" grew up. After two years of near constant action, with dozens of colleagues killed or wounded, Wellum's youthful enthusiasm had disappeared forever, replaced by a weary acceptance of death. He had already begun to experience sharp waves of pain across his forehead when, in 1941, he was sent to help raise the siege of Malta. He reached the island by flying off a lethally short aircraft carrier. Soon after arriving, the doctor told him he was "played out mentally and physically". He was 21 and his war was over.

The book, First Light, ends here and the reader hopes for a happy ending. It should have been. Wellum recovered from his breakdown, married "Grace", his girlfriend in the book, had three children and stayed in the RAF for another 20 years. He then became a commodity broker in the City before setting up his own business.

Yet Wellum struggled in civilian life. His marriage and business collapsed. Even now, he suffers from bad dreams. Like many of his colleagues, Wellum had discovered that nothing could ever compare with the intensity of life as a fighter pilot.

"Even on my way home from Malta, I knew I'd reached the peak of my life," he says. "I was 20 and, since then, everything else has seemed anticlimactic. Many of the chaps became alcoholics."

Today, less than 300 of "the chaps" are still alive. Even at the height of battle, Wellum suspected that their heroism would be forgotten. "Well, it has been," he says without pity. Recent Battle of Britain Association visits of schools revealed that virtually no children were aware of the events of 1940. Nor were their teachers. "It doesn't matter," Wellum says, unconvincingly.

Surprised and gratified by the book's success, he's eager to step down from the publicity bandwagon and return to the Cornish village where he lives. "The Battle of Britain made me want to put a value on life. I decided that if I survived, I wanted to be allowed to relish it. Now, I have a life of deep tranquillity: I sing in the choir, I'm the deputy harbour master, I help out at church."

He's a natural writer, I say, so how about another book? "But what would I write about, darling? Nothing else mattered after that, nothing was worth recording." But was the writing at least cathartic? Wellum looks sad. "No, darling. It unwound me, but it couldn't get it out of my system. People say, 'You've got to forget all this, it was a long time ago'. And I say, 'I quite agree with you, but can you tell me how?'"

'First Light' is published by Viking, £16.99