5 Rubles 1938 "Pilot" Banknote (CCCP / USSR / Soviet Russia),  P-215a, featuring an Airman.

In the first couple of weeks of August 1939 my father used money given him by his aunts on his 21st birthday (maybe £21, quite a sum of money in those days) to go on a short trip to Moscow, Leningrad and Helsinki by boat and train, interested to see what was going on there. He acquired this note during this trip.

At that time he was working in the marketing department of Morlands, the sheepskin boots and coats company operating in Street (where my father was born) and Glastonbury, and studying advertising. I wonder what he made of the pilot on this note staring off into space, and if he guessed that less than two years later he'd be a pilot himself, with the RAF. I doubt it, it was a bit of an unexpected career shift.

WW2 formally started, in Europe anyway, on 1st September 1939... from various pages in my father's passport (see pic of his USSR visa in the photos) he seems to have been out of the USSR on the 9th August and, over the page, passing through Copenhagen on his way home on the 12th, less than three weeks before the war started.

After three years as an RAF flight instructor in Canada he returned to the UK and flew Liberators for Coastal and then Transport Commands - perhaps even wearing Morlands sheepskin coats, as they made plenty for the RAF (a bit controversially, for a Quaker company). He didn't go back to the company though - after five years postwar helping his mother run a hotel in York he took up his flying career again in the 1950s, with Airwork and then Kuwait Airways, retiring on Boeing 707s.

I selected 19:39 as the end of the auction to reflect the year my father's trip took place.