The Complete Flying Officer X Stories Read online

  The Complete Flying Officer X Stories

  By

  H. E. BATES

  Contents

  A Note from the Family

  Foreword by Patrick Bishop

  It’s Never in the Papers

  There’s No Future in It

  The Young Man from Kalgoorlie

  It’s Just the Way It Is

  The Sun Rises Twice

  No Trouble at All

  A Personal War

  K for Kitty

  The Greatest People in the World

  MacIntyre’s Magna Charta

  The Beginning of Things

  Li Tale

  The Disinherited

  Sorry, No Saccharine

  Sergeant Carmichael

  O’Callaghan’s Girl

  Yours is the Earth

  Morning Victory

  Free Choice, Free World

  Here We Go Again

  There’s Something in the Air

  How Sleep the Brave

  Croix de Guerre

  Additional Stories:

  Fishers

  Happy Christmas Nastashya

  The Bell

  From This Time Forward

  The Three Thousand and One Hours of Sergeant Kostek

  Glossary of R.A.F. Slang

  A Note on the Author

  A Note from the Family

  My grandfather, although best known and loved by many readers all over the world for creating the Larkin family in his bestselling novel The Darling Buds of May, was also one of the most prolific English short story writers of the twentieth century, often compared to Chekhov. He wrote over 300 short stories and novellas in a career spanning six decades from the 1920s through to the 1970s.

  My grandfather’s short fiction took many different forms, from descriptive country sketches to longer, sometimes tragic, narrative stories, and I am thrilled that Bloomsbury Reader will be reissuing all of his stories and novellas, making them available to new audiences, and giving them – especially those that have been out of print for many years or only ever published in obscure magazines, newspapers and pamphlets – a new lease of life.

  There are hundreds of stories to discover and re-discover, from H. E. Bates’s most famous tales featuring Uncle Silas, or the critically acclaimed novellas such as The Mill and Dulcima, to little, unknown gems such as ‘The Waddler’, which has not been reprinted since it first appeared in the Guardian in 1926, when my grandfather was just twenty, or ‘Castle in the Air’, a wonderful, humorous story that was lost and unknown to our family until 2013.

  If you would like to know more about my grandfather’s work I encourage you to visit the H.E. Bates Companion – a brilliant comprehensive online resource where detailed bibliographic information, as well as articles and reviews, on almost all of H. E. Bates’s publications, can be found.

  I hope you enjoy reading all these evocative and vivid short stories by H. E. Bates, one of the masters of the art.

  Tim Bates, 2015

  We would like to spread our passion for H. E. Bates’s short fiction and build a community of readers with whom we can share information on forthcoming publications, exclusive material such as free downloads of rare stories, and opportunities to win memorabilia and other exciting prizes – you can sign up to the H. E. Bates’s mailing list here. When you sign-up you will immediately receive an exclusive short work by H. E. Bates.

  Foreword

  The war of 1939-1945 required total commitment from British citizens. That included writers. Almost everyone from Noel Coward to George Orwell was anxious to do their bit. Some like Evelyn Waugh saw themselves as men of action rather than scribblers and spurned the pen for the sword – a mistake as it turned out. Most though, decided they could make the most effective contribution by practising what they did best.

  Herbert Ernest Bates was thirty-four years old when the war broke out, and married with four children. He was already a well-known writer and a junior member of the literary establishment with friends like Graham Greene. Despite his age and family responsibilities he first tried for a commission in the Royal Air Force only to be turned down. He spent a frustrating time trying to get worthwhile war work. Eventually, in September, the Air Ministry offered an unusual assignment. They proposed to commission him into the RAF simply as a short story writer, charged with showing the public the private face of the aircrews who by now were engaged in an all out bombing campaign. Bates was alarmed at first – he knew nothing about flying or military aviation. That soon gave way to a feeling of pride and excitement. He left the ministry ‘feeling rather as if I had been awarded a literary Victoria Cross.’ The results, published anonymously at first under the pen name ‘Flying Officer X,’ would enthral hundreds of thousands of readers and delight his superiors.

  The stories are all taken from Bates’s time at bomber stations in the east of England during the autumn and winter of 1941-1942. It was a painful period for the RAF and for Bomber Command in particular. The realisation was dawning that without better navigational aids bombing was hopelessly inaccurate and wasteful.

  Bates’s job was not to analyse operational shortcomings but to anatomise – and celebrate – the character of those doing the flying and dying. He did so triumphantly, subtly exposing the motivations and mindsets of men who spent little time examining their emotions, explaining them in a way they would have been hard pressed to do themselves.

  He spent three months based at Oakington, a newly built station in the flatlands north of Cambridge. It was home to 7 Squadron equipped with the giant new four-engined Stirlings and 101 Squadron flying Wellingtons. During that time they were flying sorties over Germany interspersed with trips to Brest where the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (Salmon and Gluckstein in RAF slang) were berthed, menacing Britain’s vital trans-Atlantic supply line. It was a dismal place and a dismal time. Thirteen aircraft were lost, thirty-eight aircrew were killed and thirteen taken prisoner. The losses achieved little. Bates was profoundly aware of the gap between himself as an observer and those who were taking the risks. He offered a sympathetic ear, rarely probing, and these taciturn men opened up to him over a drink in the mess or the local pub. The stories show that he was not only a great writer, but also a superb listener.

  As a fan of Bates’s writing, I am delighted that the Flying Officer X stories are collected into one volume here for the first time together with some previously unpublished stories from the same period.

  Patrick Bishop, 2015

  It’s Never in the Papers

  Every morning when I came downstairs I sat in the mess and looked for it in the papers. “Last night our bombers …” I would read. “Yesterday evening at dusk a strong formation …” But what I really looked for was never there.

  I used to consider the case of Dibden. Dibden was twenty-five. He was a pilot with thirty-three operational trips and a D.F.C. to his name. He flew Stirlings and looked more than anything else like a dark, very handsome little Eskimo. You felt that it was a pure accident that he was flying a bomber instead of doing a roll in a kayak or having a snooze in an igloo.

  Dibden was a good type, and a very good pilot indeed. But there were some who would not fly with him. Navigators, changed from their own crew, would suddenly develop violent toothache or trouble with their ears. Dibden was rather proud of the way he could land a Stirling in fair imitation of a golf-ball.

  Once, on circuit and bumps, Dibden began to come in for landing with his air-speed down to ninety. He pulled her off again and did a sickly turn over the telegraph posts on the railway line and came back to land on the established golf-ball principle, hastily. “It was quite a moment,” Dibden said.
r />   There was nothing about that in the papers. Nor, of course, was there anything about the way he had all his operational hours carefully added up. His thirty-three trips amounted to a hundred and fifty hours.

  Very soon, with another fifty hours, Dibden would be a veteran — an old man of twenty-five who had watched others do their three and five and perhaps fifteen trips and not return. Dibden always returned; like a ball thrown at a wall he came back, and the harder you threw him, the faster he returned.

  Once or twice a week, when not on ops., Dibden got a little whistled, but the papers, of course, did not mention this either. You came into the mess late at night, tired, perhaps, after a spell of duty, to find Dibden bouncing from chair to chair, table to piano, like a smiling cherubic little Eskimo chasing an invisible bear.

  At intervals he stopped being the Eskimo and became the bear, rushing up to other people, especially newcomers, to embrace them. “Bad type, bad type!” he would say. “Seize him, knock him down. Bad type!” We were all bad types when Dibden was whistled, but the papers, of course, did not mention this either. We are very good types really.

  After these adventures others came down to breakfast with faces looking the colour of the sheepskin on their flying-boots; they looked at the mess of kidneys and bacon and said: “My God, I’ve had it,” and crawled away.

  But not Dibden. He bounced in very late, more cherubic than ever, charmed the first overworked waitress into bringing him crisp rashers, potatoes, kidneys, fresh toast, and coffee, looked at the clock and said something about five minutes to make the hangars, and then began to eat as if he had returned from a hunting expedition. “Pretty whistled last night, boys,” he would say. “Rather off my feed.”

  He spent most of the rest of his life being brassed off. “Good morning, Dibden,” you would say. “How goes it?”

  “Pretty much brassed off, old boy.”

  “Oh, what’s wrong?”

  “Just brassed off, that’s all. Just brassed off.”

  This phrase, which, of course, was never in the papers either, covered all the troubles of Dibden’s life. It covered all his troubles with his kite, his crew, his ops., his leave, his food, his popsy.

  He was brassed off when ops. were on because of the increasing monotony of trying to prang the same target; he was brassed off when ops. were scrubbed because there was no target at all. He was brassed off because there was fog on the drome or because his popsy could not keep her date.

  But however brassed off he was, he succeeded in looking always the same: cherubic, grinning, bouncing, handsome, too irresponsible, and altogether too like a schoolboy to be engaged in the serious business of flying an expensive bomber.

  One afternoon Dibden was out over the coast of Holland on a daylight. It was his thirty-third trip: the veteran adding another four or five hours to his flying time. Down below, off the coast, he saw what he took to be an enemy tanker and he went down to have a look-see.

  The tanker opened up at him with a fury of flak that surprised him, holing his port wing. I do not know what his emotions were, but I imagine that he was, simply, and as always, just brassed off. He went in and attacked the tanker with all he had, bombing first and then diving to machine-gun the deck.

  The tanker hit back very hard, clipping a piece out of the starboard flap, but the more the tanker hit, the more Dibden bounced back, like the ball thrown hard against the wall. His rear gunner was very badly wounded, but Dibden still went in, firing with all he had left until the flak from the tanker ceased.

  The next day there was in fact something about this in the papers. It did not sound very epic. “Yesterday afternoon one of our bombers attacked a tanker off the Dutch coast. After the engagement the tanker was seen to be burning.”

  It did not say anything about the holes in Dibden’s wings or the way the outer port engine had cracked coming home. It did not, in fact, really say anything at all about that brief, bloody, and very bitter affair in which Dibden had bounced back repeatedly like an angry ball, or about the long journey home.

  It did not say anything about Dibden landing on three engines with damaged flaps and a dying rear gunner, or about a very tired, very brassed-off Dibden coming in very late, with an unexpected hour on his flying time, to boiled beef and tea.

  Nor did it say anything about what happened that night. A little after midnight I came into the mess and there, under the bright lights of the anteroom, Dibden was doing some acrobatics. It was a very nice little party. At one end of the room two leather settees were placed endwise against each other, and then against them, endwise again, two chairs.

  As I came in, Dibden, more cherubic, more smiling, more like a handsome Eskimo than ever, took a drink of light ale and then did a running somersault over the long line of furniture, landing with a wild whoop on his feet. His eyes were shining wildly. After him one or two other pilots tried it, but none of them was really good, and the only one who was good landed on his head. Then Dibden tried it again, and the fat, smiling ball of his body went over as easily as a bird.

  Perhaps there was no connection between the schoolboy Dibden joyfully throwing a somersault and the veteran Dibden angrily pranging a tanker. But as I saw Dibden hurling his fat little body into the air I felt suddenly that I understood all about his thirty-three trips, his golf-ball landings, his affairs with the tanker, and the long, hard journey home. I understood why he flew, and why he flew as he did, and I understood the man he was.

  But there was nothing about that, of course, in the papers.

  There’s No Future in It

  The nights he was not flying they would drive back late to the station, using her car. The flare-path would be laid; the lights on the hangars would shine like red stars in the winter darkness above the flat land. Sometimes the searchlights would be up, throwing a blue-white fire that fell widely like moonlight on the dark trees and hedges and on the winding road. They would sit in the car and, holding each other, talk for a long time. Frost on the very coldest nights would form like a silver collar on the glass of the windscreen and sometimes, on very still nights, he would wind down the window of the car and listen for a moment or two to the silence outside. She would lean her head on his shoulder and look upwards into the dark sky and then, listening too, hear the sound of the bombers coming home.

  It did not seem to matter much that they were never likely to be married. He was rather small and compact, with fresh grey eyes that he sometimes did not seem able to focus correctly. He had thirty-one operational trips to his credit, and all that seemed to matter was that he should continue coming back.

  The morning afterwards, perhaps, he would ring the office. He would say simply: “Hello, dear, tonight.” She would try to remain calm, and later, perhaps, if operations were scrubbed, he would ring her again and she would find herself trembling as she put down the telephone, all her pretence of calmness gone.

  She knew generally that he would be briefed in the early afternoon. He would take off about three o’clock or a little later and, according to the target, come back somewhere between eight and ten. It would often be too late to ring her after interrogation, but going to bed she would try to lie awake for the sound of the telephone. Sometimes she would fall asleep with the light still burning and would wake up in the small hours of the morning, bewildered and startled, not knowing where she was. Twice she fell half asleep and did not hear the telephone. Downstairs her father heard it, but after answering it, did not come to tell her who it was.

  Her father was a rather big, grey-haired man with cheeks like loose pink rubber. He rolled his own cigarettes and it seemed to her that she never saw him without a newspaper. He rolled the cigarettes very badly — the tobacco fell wastefully on his clothes. The war had developed in him the latent qualities of the amateur strategist, and he always discussed the war while waving an untidy, wasteful cigarette. “We ought to have cut the Tripoli road long ago. Long ago. You have only to look at the map. The same with the bombing of Berlin. Wha
t’s gone wrong? Why aren’t we over there more? Why aren’t we over there night after night? Striking early and often is the decisive factor. You’d suppose it wouldn’t escape our people.”

  “Perhaps it’s the weather,” she would say.

  “Weather? There’s another thing that beats me. Argue on simple lines, draw some absolutely logical conclusion which ought to be apparent to the merest child, and you always get the same answer. The weather! I don’t doubt the weather is sometimes bad. But far from always, far from always. It’s too often a convenient excuse — like the workman blaming his tools.”

  “Nevertheless it nearly always is the weather.”

  “Oh? Then what about last night? Clear moonlight like day. And was there a single operation? A couple of bombers over Brest.”

  “You talk as if Brest were a seaside resort.”

  “Look at the weather again tonight. Magnificent. And in the morning what shall we hear? The same old story again, I suppose. A handful of bombers over Brest. Or nothing at all.”

  “It’s probably the most heavily defended place in Europe,” she said. “It’s just plain hell.”

  “Kitty, Kitty,” her mother said. She looked up from her knitting, always khaki, and looked down again.

  “Also I think you may find that tonight has been a big thing.”

  “Oh! You know, do you?”

  “No. Not exactly. I’ve an idea, that’s all.”

  “Ah! Your pilot friend.”

  She did not speak.

  “You haven’t brought him in lately.”

  “No, dear,” her mother said.

  “They spend most of their time out,” her father said. “Somewhere.”

  Her mother spoke without looking up from her knitting.

  “Were you at the Red Lion last week?” her mother said. “We heard you were there. Drinking with Air Force officers.”