The Complete Flying Officer X Stories Page 2

  “I was.”

  “Is that the kind of place to be?” her father said.

  “Drinking,” her mother said. “It’s not nice. Do you think so?”

  “I want to be wherever he is.”

  “Even there? Couldn’t you give him up?” her mother said. “He struck me as being older than he said. Do you know much about him? You are only twenty. It’s all so terribly unsure. Perhaps he is married. Do you know?”

  She did not answer.

  “He looks older than twenty-four,” her mother said. “Experienced. His eyes look old.”

  She got up, calmly enraged, definite. “He has done things that make him old,” she said, and went out of the room.

  The following night they drove back late to the station. With the moon rising and the searchlights up, the road shone misty white between the dark hedges. The evening lay behind them, as always, simply secure; a few rounds of light ale at the Red Lion, the boys coming in group by group, the rounds growing, the crews mixing, sergeants with squadron leaders, gunners with navigators, warm broad Canadian voices mingled with English; and then the drive home, the blue lighting of the searchlights, and the moonlight throwing into relief the black winter trees, the hangars lit by red stars, the huge solitary dispersed aircraft in the fields; and lastly the silence after the car had stopped beyond the gate of the station.

  “Was it a good trip, darling?”

  He did not answer.

  “Bad?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “Did you have trouble?”

  “The usual. Ten tenths most of the way and then some hellish flak.”

  She thought of her father. She saw him in an armchair, rolling the cigarettes, waving a newspaper. “Always the weather!”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t ring,” he said. “It was late when we got in for interrogation. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “I was awake,” she said.

  They sat still, not speaking. She thought again of her father.

  “Tell me about the trip.”

  “Nothing to tell. Routine stuff.”

  She did not like the sound of his voice, tired and guarded; the feeling that part of him was deliberately withheld.

  “I can tell when you have trouble.”

  “What trouble? No trouble at all.”

  “Why have you got your hand in your pocket?” she said. “You’ve had it there all the time.”

  “All right,” he said.

  He began suddenly to tell her something about the trip. Though she had heard so much of it before, the awful significance of it was not lessened. He told her about the weather; ten tenths, a bad storm soon after they turned for home, a spot of ice. “They put up a hell’s own flak at us. Just routine stuff, only a bloody sight worse. And they hit my hand. Took the skin off, that’s all.” He kept it in his pocket.

  She knew that he was not telling everything, that he never did, perhaps never would. Routine stuff, hellish flak, a spot of ice; the same words, the same repeated demand on courage, on fear if you like, the same holding back. She thought once more of her father: the world of the newspaper, the protest, the old indignations. To contrast it with the world of flak and ice, the long darkness of endurance, the spell of cold and strain thirty-one times repeated, was so difficult and angrily confusing that she said only: “Does your hand hurt? Can I do anything for you?”

  “Thanks, darling, I’m O.K.”

  She remembered something.

  “What time did interrogation finish? Why were you so late?”

  “It wasn’t so late. Not so very late.”

  “If it wasn’t so late, why didn’t you ring me?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  He looked beyond the car window and said: “We got a bit shot up. Just one of those things.”

  “Bad?”

  “Bad enough. A lump of flak blew a hole as big as a cartwheel in the starboard wing and the transmitter was u.s. Shaky landing. But why pick on me? It happens every day.”

  “Not to you.”

  “It happens,” he said.

  “You hate it, don’t you?” she said.

  “Hate what?” he said.

  “You hate going, don’t you, time after time? The same place. The same job. The same everything. I know you hate it.”

  “I hate it like hell,” he said. He looked beyond the car window again. The diffused lighting of the searchlights and the cloudy moon shone on the misted windscreen. The trees were black against it. “But I hate what they’re doing even more. That’s what I really hate. What they do to me isn’t half of what I mean doing to them. Not half. Not a quarter. Not a hundredth part. Is there anything wrong about hatred?”

  She was thinking of her father, fussy with indignation, and she did not answer.

  “It’s good honest downright emotion, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes I think we want more of it,” he said. “God, sometimes I think we do.”

  When at last she drove back from the station it was later than she thought. But at the house, to her surprise, her father and mother were still up. Her mother looked up from her knitting and her father looked at his watch.

  “Either my watch is fast or it’s ten past twelve.”

  She did not speak.

  “Even the Red Lion closes at ten.”

  “It so happens I haven’t been there.”

  Her father coughed heavily. “Does your pilot friend realise that we sit here waiting?”

  She did not answer.

  “We have a right to be considered.”

  She stood slowly taking off her gloves.

  “You’ll agree that he owes us something, won’t you?”

  She stood thinking of the long flight in the darkness, the hellish flak, the hole in the wing, the shell through the fuselage, the shaky landing; routine stuff; easy, nothing to tell, something done again and again. Her mind became unsteady with hatred. She looked at her mother. The clean prejudiced hands were motionless on the knitting. Her father with the evening newspaper folded between his fingers stood with his back to the dying fire.

  “Is he married?” her mother asked.

  “Does it matter?” she said.

  Her father crackled the newspaper.

  “My dear child, my dear child! Does it matter? I ask you. What about the future? Is there any future in that?”

  “No,” she said; “there’s no future in it.”

  She wanted to go on speaking, but her thoughts were disrupted and dispersed in the corners of her mind and she could not gather them together. She wanted to say why there was no future. She wanted to tell them about the flak, the darkness, and the bitter cold, about the way the tracer bullets came in at you so slowly that you could watch them until suddenly they hurled with red frenzy past your face, about the hatred and the monotony and the courage that was greater because it was rarefied by terror. She wanted to tell them that if there was any future it lay through this.

  She went out of the room and went upstairs instead. She felt stifled by the warmth of the room downstairs and, not putting on the light, she opened the window and stood looking out. The air was bright with frost, and the coldness struck with a momentary shock on her face and hands.

  She stood there for a long time, looking out. The moon was going down beyond the houses. The searchlights were no longer up beyond the town. The sky was clear and calm, and, as if there were no war and as it might be in the future, if there were a future, there was no sound of wings.

  The Young Man from Kalgoorlie

  I

  He lived with his parents on a sheep-farm two hundred miles north-east of Kalgoorlie. The house was in the old style, a simple white wooden cabin to which a few extensions had been added by successive generations. On the low hills east of the farm there were a few eucalyptus trees; his mother grew pink and mauve asters under the house windows in summer; and in spring the wa
ttle was in blossom everywhere, like lemon foam. All of his life had been lived there, and the war itself was a year old before he knew that it had even begun.

  On the bomber station, surrounded by flat grey English hills cropped mostly by sugar-beet and potatoes and steeped in winter-time in thick windless fogs that kept the aircraft grounded for days at a time, he used to tell me how it had come to happen that he did not know the war had started. It seemed that he used to go down to Kalgoorlie only once, perhaps twice, a year. I do not know what sort of place Kalgoorlie is, but it seemed that he did there, on that one visit or so, all the things that anyone can do on a visit to almost any town in the world. He used to take a room for a week at a hotel, get up at what he thought was a late hour every morning — about eight o’clock — and spend most of the day looking at shops, eating, and then looking at shops again. In the evenings he used to take in a cinema, eat another meal, have a couple of glasses of beer in the hotel lounge, and then go to bed. He confessed that it wasn’t very exciting and often he was relieved to get back into the Ford and drive steadily back to the sheep-farm and the familiar horizon of eucalyptus trees, which after the streets of Kalgoorlie did not seem a bad prospect at all. The truth was that he did not know anyone in Kalgoorlie except an aunt, his mother’s sister, who was very deaf and used a patent electrical acoustic device which always seemed to go wrong whenever he was there and which he had once spent more than a day trying to repair. He was very quiet and he did not easily get mixed up with people; he was never drunk and more than half the time he was worried that his father was making a mess of things at home.

  It was this that was really the cause of his not knowing about the war. His father was an unimaginative and rather careless man to whom sheep were simply sheep, and grass simply grass, and who had kept sheep on the same two thousand acres, within sight of the same eucalyptus trees, for thirty years and expected to go on keeping them there for the rest of his life. He did not understand that two years of bad luck had anything to do with his having kept sheep in the same way, on the same grass, for so long. It was the son who discovered that. He began to see that the native grasses were played out, and in their place he decided to make sowings of Italian rye grass and subterranean clover; and soon he was able to change the flocks from one kind of grass to another and then on to a third, and soon he could see an improvement in the health of every breed they had.

  After that he was virtually in charge of the farm. His parents, who had always thought him a wonderful person, now thought him more wonderful still. When neighbours came — and this, too, was not often, since the nearest farm was another thirty miles up country — they talked of nothing but Albert’s achievement. The sheep had improved in health, the yield of wool had increased, and even the mutton, they argued, tasted sweeter now, more like the meat of thirty years ago. “Got a proper old-fashioned flavour,” his mother said.

  It was about a year after these experiments of his — none of them very original, since he had simply read up the whole subject in an agricultural paper — that war broke out. It seemed, as he afterwards found out, that his mother first heard of it on an early-morning news bulletin on the radio. She was scared and she called his father. The son himself was out on the farm, riding round on horseback taking a look at the sheep before breakfast. When he came in to breakfast he switched on the radio, but nothing happened. He opened up the radio and took a look at it. All the valves were warm, but the detector valve and another were not operating. It seemed a little odd, but he did not take much notice of it. All he could do was to write to Kalgoorlie for the spare valves, and he did so in a letter which he wrote after dinner that day. It was three miles to the post-box and if there were any letters to be posted his mother took them down in the afternoon. His mother took this letter that afternoon and tore it up in little pieces.

  That must have happened, he discovered, to every letter he wrote to the Kalgoorlie radio shop in the next twelve months. No valves ever came and gradually, since it was summer and sheep-shearing time and the busiest season of the year, the family got used to being without the radio. His father and mother said they even preferred it. All the time he had no idea of the things they were doing in order to keep the war from him. The incoming post arrived once a week, and if there were any letters for him, his mother steamed them open, read them, and then put the dangerous ones away in a drawer upstairs. The newspapers stopped coming, and when he remarked on it his father said he was tired of wasting good money on papers that were anyway nearly a week old before they came. If there were visitors his mother managed to meet them before they reached the house. In October the sheep-shearing contractors came and his father, ordinarily a rather careful man, gave every man an extra pound to keep his mouth shut. All through that summer and the following winter his mother looked very ill, but it was not until later that he knew the reason of it — the strain of intercepting the letters, of constantly guarded conversation, of warning neighbours and callers, of making excuses, and even of lying to him, day after day, for almost a year.

  The time came when he decided to go to Kalgoorlie. He always went there about the same time of the year, in late August, before the busy season started. His parents must have anticipated and dreaded that moment, and his father did an amazing thing. In the third week of August, early one morning, he put two tablespoonfuls of salt in a cup of hot tea and drank it, making himself very sick. By the time Albert came in to breakfast, his father was back in bed, very yellow in the face, and his mother was crying because he had been taken suddenly ill. It was the strangest piece of deception of all and it might have succeeded if his father had not overdone things. He decided to remain in bed for a second week, making himself sick every third or fourth day, knowing that once September had come, Albert would never leave. But Albert was worried. He did not like the recurrent sickness which now affected his father and he began to fear some sort of internal trouble.

  “I’m going to Kalgoorlie whether you like it or not,” he said, “to get a doctor.”

  II

  It was on the bomber station, when he had become a pilot, that he used to tell me of that first day in Kalgoorlie, one of the most remarkable in his life. When he left the farm his mother seemed very upset, and began crying. He felt that she was worried about his father; he was increasingly worried too and promised to be back within three days. Then he drove down to Kalgoorlie alone, perhaps the only man in Australia who did not know that the war was a year old.

  He arrived at Kalgoorlie about four o’clock in the afternoon and the town seemed much the same as ever. He drove straight to the hotel he always stayed at, booked himself a room, and went upstairs to wash and change. About five o’clock he came down again and went into the hotel lounge for a cup of tea. Except for a word or two with the cashier and the lift-boy he did not speak to a soul. He finished his tea and then decided to go to the downstairs saloon, as he always did, to get himself a haircut. There were several people waiting in the saloon, but he decided to wait too. He sat down and picked up a paper.

  He must have gone on staring at that paper, not really reading it, for about ten minutes. It was late August and the Nazis were bombing London. He did not understand any of it — who was fighting or what were the causes of it. He simply took in, from the headlines, the story of the great sky battles, the bombing, the murder and destruction, as if they were part of a ghastly fantasy. For the moment he did not feel angry or sick or outraged because he had been deceived. He got up and went out into the street. What he felt, he told me, was very much as if you were suddenly to discover that you had been living in a house where, without knowing it, there was a carrier of smallpox. For months you have lived an ordinary tranquil life, unsuspecting and unafraid, and then suddenly you made the awful discovery that every fragment of your life, from the dust in your shoes to the air you breathed, was contaminated and that you had been living in danger. Because you knew nothing you were not afraid; but the moment you knew anything all the fears and terrors
you had not felt in the past were precipitated into a single terrible moment of realization.

  He also felt a fool. He walked up and down the street. As he passed shops, read placards, saw men in service uniform, fragmentary parts of his life during the past year became joined together, making sense: the broken radio, his unanswered letters, the newspapers, his mother’s nervousness, and the fact, above all, that they had not wanted him to come to Kalgoorlie. Slowly he understood all this. He tried to look on it as the simple cunning of country people. He was still too confused to be angry. But what he still did not understand, and what he had to find out about soon, was the war. He did not even know how long it had been going on. He stopped on a street-corner and bought another newspaper. The day before, he read, eighty-seven aircraft had been shot down over England. His hands were trembling as he read it, but it did not tell him the things he wanted to know. And he realised suddenly, as he stood there trembling in the hot sunshine, so amazed that he was still without feeling, that there was no means of knowing these things. He certainly could not know by asking. He imagined for a moment the effect of asking anyone, in the street or the hotel or back in the barber’s saloon, a simple question like: “Can you tell me when the war began?” He felt greatly oppressed by a sense of ridicule and bewilderment, by the fear that now, any time he opened his mouth, he was likely to make a ghastly fool of himself.

  He walked about for an hour or more, pretending to look at shops, before it occurred to him what to do. Then it came to him quite suddenly that he would go and see the only other person he knew who, like himself, could be cut off from the world of reality: the deaf aunt who lived in Kalgoorlie.

  So he spent most of that evening in the old-fashioned parlour of her house, drinking tea, eating custard tarts, lightly brown with veins of nutmeg, and talking as steadily as he could into the electrical acoustic device fixed to the bodice of her dress. From such remarks as “Things look pretty tough in England. Let’s see, how long exactly has it been going on now?” he learned most of the elementary things he wanted to know. But there were still things he could not ask, simply because he had no knowledge of them. He could not ask about France or Poland or Holland or Norway. All that he really understood clearly was that England and Germany were at war; that England was being bombed every day by great forces of aircraft; that soon, perhaps, she would be invaded. The simplicity and limitation of his knowledge were in a way, as he said, a good thing. For as he ate the last of the old lady’s custard tarts and drank the last cup of tea and said goodnight to her he changed from being the man who knew least about the war in all Australia to the man who had perhaps the clearest, simplest, and most vivid conception of it in the whole continent. Forty years back his father and mother had emigrated from Lincolnshire to Kalgoorlie. Young, newly wed, and with about eighty pounds apart from their passage money, they started a new life. Now the roots of their existence, and so in a way the roots of his own existence, were being threatened with annihilation. This was the clear, simple, terrible thing he understood in such a clear, simple, terrible way.