A WARTIME bomber pilot who still plays golf three times a week celebrated his 90th birthday on Monday.

Basil Ambrose, from Langley Hill in Tilehurst, marked the special occasion with a round at Goring and Streatley Golf Club before a party with family and friends.

Basil was playing at Calcot Park Golf Course the day the war broke out when he was just 16, and recalled seeing the bombers flying over Reading two years later when he was walking up Langley Hill in 1941. He said: "It sounded like an express train coming though the air."

He joined the Home Guard and then the RAF that same year, helping to pilot four-engine Stirling and Lancaster bombers while serving with 467 Squadron, based in Lincolnshire.

The grandfather of three and great-grandfather of six said: "One memory that sticks in my mind was when we flew out to eastern Germany on a bombing mission. The engine started rapidly losing oil pressure and eventually blew up. We managed to extinguish it and we got back to England on just three engines.

"People ask me how scared I was, but I was there to do a job, we all were. We didn't want to let anyone down."

By 1944, Basil was flying daylight support operations over the Netherlands and night raids over Germany. Remembering another close shave, he said: "We'd reached our target in Germany. As soon as we dropped the bombs, the rear gunner spotted a fighter coming in and we were covered in searchlights.

"He gave the instruction to corkscrew but the skipper knew that to lose the searchlights he'd have to do something entirely different. He stood the plane on its nose and we dived 5,000 feet.

"I was pinned to the cabin ceiling, when we pulled up, I was forced to the floor. Then we dived another 3,000 feet and the manoeuvre lost both fighter and searchlights and we made it home in one piece."

Basil returned to Reading after the war and qualified as a metal turner, before working at AWE Aldermaston as a mechanical safety officer.

He married his wife Jean Margaret in 1948 and they lived with their two children, Christine and David, in the family home. Jean died in 2007.