The Complete Flying Officer X Stories Read online

  I didn’t say anything, and she said: “They are putting you in Room 20 this time, sir.”

  “Thank you. I’ll go up,” I said.

  As I went upstairs and as I bathed and changed I made calculations. It was half past three in the afternoon, and the winter sun was already growing crimson above the blue edges of flat ploughed land beyond the station buildings. I reckoned up how far it was to Brest. If you allowed half an hour over the target and a little trouble getting away, even the stragglers should be back by four. It seemed, too, as if fog might come down very suddenly; the sun was too red and the rim of the earth too blue. I realised that if they were not back soon they wouldn’t be back at all. They always looked very beautiful in the sun, as the little W.A.A.F. said, but they looked still more beautiful on the ground. I didn’t know who the pilot of L for London was; but I knew, and was remembering, that K for Kitty was my friend.

  By the time I went downstairs again, the lights were burning in the anteroom but the curtains were not drawn and the evening, sunless now, was a vivid electric blue beyond the windows. The little W.A.A.F. still sat by the telephone and as I went past she looked up and said:

  “L for London is back, sir.”

  I went into the anteroom. The fire was bright and the first crews, back from interrogation, were warming their hands. Their faces looked raw and cold. They still wore sweaters and flying-boots, and their eyes were glassy.

  “Hello,” they said. “You’re back. Good leave?” They spoke as if it was I, not they, who had been three hundred miles away.

  “Hello, Max,” I said. “Hello, Ed. Hello, J.B.”

  I had been away for five days. For a minute I felt remote; I couldn’t touch them.

  I was glad when someone else came in.

  “Hello. Good trip?”

  “Quite a picnic.”

  “Good. See anything?”

  “Everything.”

  “Good show, good show. Prang them?”

  “Think so. Fires burning when we got there.”

  “Good show.”

  I looked at their faces. They were tired and hollow. In their eyes neither relief nor exhilaration had begun to filter through the glassiness of long strain. They talked laconically, reluctantly, as if their lips were frozen.

  “Many fighters?”

  “Hordes.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “The whole bloody crew was yelling fighters. Came up from everywhere.”

  “Any Spits?”

  “Plenty. Had five M.E.’s on my tail. Then suddenly wham! Three Spits came up from nowhere. Never saw anything like those M.E.’s going home to tea.”

  “Good show. Good show.”

  The evening was darkening rapidly and the mess steward came in to draw the curtains. I remembered K for Kitty and suddenly I went out of the anteroom and stood for a moment in the blue damp twilight, listening and looking at the sky. The first few evening stars were shining and I could feel that later the night would be frosty. But there was no sound of a plane.

  I went back into the anteroom at last and for a moment, in the bright and now crowded room, I could not believe my eyes. Rubbing his cold hands together, his eyes remote and chilled, his sweater hanging loose below his battle dress, the pilot of K for Kitty was standing by the fireplace. There was a cross of flesh-pink plastic bandage on his forehead and I knew that something had happened.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” he said. “You’re back.”

  For a minute I didn’t say anything else. I wanted to shake his hand and tell him I was glad he was back. I knew that if he had been in a train wreck or a car crash I should have shaken his hand and told him I was glad. Now somebody had shot him up and all I said was:

  “When did you get in?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “Everything O.K.?”

  “Wrapped her up.”

  “Well,” I said. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” he said.

  I looked at his eyes. They were bleared and wet and excited. He had made a crash landing; he was safe; he was almost the best pilot in the outfit.

  “Anyone see me come in?” he said.

  “Saw you from Control,” someone said.

  “How did it look?”

  “Perfect until the bloody air-screw fell off.”

  Everyone laughed — as if air-screws falling off were a great joke. Nobody said anything about anybody being lucky to be back, but only:

  “Have an argument?”

  “Flak blew bloody great bit out of the wing. The inter-comm. went and then both turrets.”

  “Many fighters?”

  “Ten at a time.”

  “Get one?”

  “One certain. Just dissolved. One probable.”

  “Good show. What about the ships?”

  “I think we pranged them.”

  “Good show,” we said. “Good show.”

  We went on talking for a little longer about the trip: beautiful weather, sea very blue, landscape very green in the sun. And then he came back to the old subject.

  “How did I land? What did it look like?”

  “Beautiful.”

  “I couldn’t get the tail down. Both tires were punctured.”

  “Perfect all the same.”

  He looked quite happy. It was his point of pride, the good landing; all he cared about now. With turrets gone, fuselage like a colander, wings holed, and one air-screw fallen off, he had nevertheless brought her down. And though we all knew it must have been hell, no one said a word.

  Presently his second dicky came into the anteroom. He was very young, about nineteen, with a smooth aristocratic face and smooth aristocratic hair. He looked too young to be a part of a war and he was very excited.

  “Went through my sleeve.”

  He held up a cannon shell. Then he held up his arm. There was a neat tear in the sleeve of his battle dress. He was very proud.

  “And look at this.”

  Across the knuckles of his right hand there was a thread line of dried blood, neat, fine, barely visible. He wetted his other forefinger and rubbed across it, as if to be sure it wouldn’t wash away.

  “Came in on the starboard side and out the other.”

  “Good show,” said somebody quite automatically. “Good show.”

  “Anybody hurt?” I asked.

  “Engineer.”

  “Very bad?”

  “Very bad. I bandaged him and gave him a shot coming home.”

  As he went on talking I looked down at his knees. There were dark patches on them where blood had soaked through his flying-suit. But all that anyone said was:

  “Think you pranged them?”

  “Oh, sure enough! They’ve had it this time.”

  “Good show,” we said. “Good show.”

  Now and then, as we talked, the little W.A.A.F. would come in from the telephone to tell someone he was wanted. With her quiet voice she would break for a moment the rhythm of excitement that was now rising through outbursts of laughter to exhilaration. She would hear for a second or two a snatch of the now boisterous but still laconic jargon of flight, “Think we may have pranged in, old boy. Good show. Piece of cake. No trouble at all,” but there would be no sign on her calm and rather ordinary face that it conveyed anything to her at all. Nor did the crews, excited by the afternoon, the warmth, and the relief of return, take any notice of her. She was an automaton, negative, outside of them, coming and going and doing her duty.

  Outside of them, too, I listened and gathered together and finally pieced together the picture of the raid; and then soon afterwards the first real pictures of operations were brought in for the Wing Commander to see, and for a moment there was a flare of excitement. We could see bomb-bursts across the battleships and the quays and then smoke over the area of town and docks. “You think we pranged them, sir?” we said.

  “Pranged them? Like hell we did.”

  “Good show. Bloody good show
.”

  “Slap across the Gluckstein.”

  “No doubt this time?”

  “No doubt.”

  “Good show,” we said. “Good show.”

  At last, when the photographs had been taken away again, I went out of the anteroom into the hall. As I walked across it, the little W.A.A.F., sitting by the telephone, looked up at me.

  “A wonderful show, sir,” she said.

  I paused and looked at her in astonishment. I wondered for a moment how she could possibly know. There had been no time for her to hear the stories of the crews; she had not seen the photographs; she did not know that K for Kitty had been wrapped up and that it must have been hell to land on two dud tires and with a broken airscrew; she did not know that the ships had been hit or that over Brest, on that bright calm afternoon, it had been partly magnificent and partly hell.

  “How did you know?” I said.

  She smiled a little and lifted her face and looked through the glass door of the anteroom.

  “You can tell by their faces, sir,” she said.

  I turned and looked too. In the morning we should read about it in the papers; we should hear the flat bulletins; we should see the pictures. But now we were looking at something that could be read nowhere except in their eyes and expressed in no language but their own.

  “Pretty good show,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “No trouble at all.”

  A Personal War

  He is a little fellow with an oval head that is quite bald except for a few feathery wisps of grey hair. He has a small tobacco-gold moustache and sharp blue eyes and a way of bowing slightly when he speaks to you, as if he were nothing but the receptionist of a hotel, or a cashier at a bank, or a travelling salesman in toys.

  It is not until you look at his hands that you realise that they are not the hands of a man who assigns rooms to guests or counts money or winds up the keys of little engines. They are very short and thick and powerful hands and the fingertips protrude unusually far beyond the small tight nails. Then after you have looked at his hands, which are so small yet so muscular and aggressive, you look back at his face, and you see then that the little stiff moustache and the sharp blue eyes and even the bald grey head are aggressive too, and that even the short and charming bow has another meaning. After talking to him for a little while you realise what this meaning is. He is a traveller in a Stirling, and his toys are guns.

  We sit talking for a long time before he tells me this. It is winter and at the moment there are no operations. Still grey mists hang far over the flat land, and pools of yellow mud cover the track along which the bombers are lined up. It has been raining for a long time and there is no wind to drive the mist away.

  Suddenly, for no reason, he talks of America.

  “You have been there?” I say.

  “For a long time,” he says. “I was born here, but mostly I have lived there.”

  “Where?”

  “In Texas mostly.”

  “Which is why they call you Tex?”

  “Which is why they call me Tex,” he says, with a smile.

  “And how,” I say, “do you feel about America?”

  “America or Americans?”

  “Americans.”

  “Which Americans?” he says.

  We both laugh. I look out of the window and watch for a moment the rain dripping down through the mist on the huge iron-coloured wings of the Stirlings, and when I look back at him again, I see that he has stopped laughing and is serious again.

  “You think they don’t understand?” I say.

  “Not only that.”

  “What else?”

  “It’s not only time they understood,” he says, “it’s time they got angry. It’s time they got good and angry too.”

  “Like you?”

  “A bit more like me,” he says.

  He smiles and we sit without talking for a little while and I watch his hands. He has a way of crooking the fingers of his right hand into the fingers of the left, and then pulling them, as if they were triggers. Finally I ask him if he will have a drink, and with a charming smile but without uncrooking his hands he says: “Possibly. Thank you. Possibly I will. It is very kind of you. Thank you.”

  “What will it be?”

  “Thank you,” he says, “a beer.”

  When the beer comes I ask him what it is like up there in the rear turret on ops. — if he gets bored or tired or very cold; and he says: “No. Only just angry. Very good and angry all the time.” I listen and soon he goes on to tell me about the flak: how it seems to come up slowly, very slowly, as if it will never climb into the darkness.

  “Very bad too?”

  “Not at all polite,” he says.

  “And in Texas,” I say — “what were you doing there?”

  “Sheriff.”

  “Gun and all?”

  “Why, sure,” he says, “gun and all. Notches and all.”

  So he goes on to tell me about the life in Texas, the life of a boy’s dream: the gun and the notches, the sheriff and the posse, the remote, enormous country. As he talks I try to see the life as something real, but it unfolds itself to me only like a series of glimpses into a dusky unreality. I cannot believe in the gun, the little sheriff’s office in the little town, the dusty plains, the posse, and the notches whittled on the gun-stock. I cannot believe in the life of his America any more than he can understand, now, the minds of so many who go on living it.

  So we talk about flying again. He has not flown for a week, and as I look at him I see that the small blue eyes are sharp and fretful with impatience as much as with anger. “My God, if I don’t soon fly,” he says, “I’ll be swinging on the bloody chandelier.”

  He finishes the beer. “You will have another? Please. This time on me?”

  I thank him, and when the beer comes he talks a little more. There is a medal ribbon on his chest. It seems more real than the notches in the gun, but I do not ask about it. Instead he tells me about a time when they stooged above the Scharnhorst at Brest. It was the day they scored a hit, and he talks for a time about this, casually, without anger, as if it were an afternoon picnic. It is as though battleships were impersonal things and I know suddenly that what he likes is the personal feeling about it all: the feeling of cold isolation in the rear turret, the sight of the flak climbing up in the darkness in slow coloured curls, the feeling of his own thick powerful hands on the guns.

  I know that this is what he likes, but I still do not understand why he likes it. I do not understand why he likes it more than the life of a sheriff in a little Texas town, with his posse and his gun and the notches on the gun, as if he were a hero in a film. I do not understand why he has left that life, to fly in a country that is only half his own. I do not understand why he does not remain, like so many others, isolated, apart, away from it all.

  And finally I ask him. “You really like it up there, don’t you?” I say.

  “Like it?”

  “Yes.”

  For a moment he does not speak. Then he looks at me with a fierce little smile, his fingers tightly crooked into each other, his eyes screwed up, hard and intense.

  “Like it?” he says. There is nothing of the receptionist or the bank cashier or the traveller in toys about him now. He is far removed even from the little sheriff in the little Texas town. His eyes are furious and the smile in his face is quite deadly. He is caught up by a raw hatred of someone or something that is almost sublime and he no longer leaves me in any doubt as to who it is.

  “Like it? I was just born with a natural hatred of these swabs. I was born with it and all my life I’ve been living to work it off. Like it?” he says. “It’s a personal argument with me. It’s a personal war!”

  Now I understand, and suddenly I feel quite small and there is nothing I can say.

  I can only look out of the windows at the huge dark Stirlings shining dully on the perimeter in the rain, and hope that soon there will be a wind that w
ill drive the mist away.

  K for Kitty

  Harrison was one of those lean, brown, old-eyed Australians who seem to accept England with a tolerance that Canadians never know. If there were things about England that needed changing or setting right Harrison rarely talked about them. If there were better pilots I rarely met them. Harrison was quiet, modest, friendly, and as tough as hell.

  It was not Harrison, but someone else, who first talked to me of the idea that planes and ships have the same delicate and temperamental ways. Just as you find no two ships alike, so you find no two planes alike; just as you find ships that are heavy, graceless, unalive, so you find planes that are dull and wooden in the air. In the same way that seamen come to know, trust, and finally get fond of a ship, knowing that she is a living thing and will never fail them, so pilots come to know and trust and get fond of a plane, knowing she will bring them home. In every squadron there is, I suppose, a plane that everybody hates. Then one day somebody quietly wraps it up in a distant corner of the drome and everybody is relieved and glad. But in every squadron there is a plane that everyone likes, that is something more than a pattern of steel and wood and instruments and mechanism, that is a living, graceful, fortunate, and ultimately triumphant thing, and this was the sort of plane that Harrison had.

  Harrison’s plane was a big four-engined Stirling called K for Kitty. The kite, like Harrison, was no stranger to the shaky do. On a trip to Brest the bomb doors froze up and would not release. This was bad enough. But the starboard outer also failed on the journey home, so that Harrison was obliged to land on three engines, with a full bomb load, in darkness — the sort of heroism for which, at the moment, we have struck no special gong. On other trips other things happened. Something happened to the flaps; the undercarriage jammed; the radio went u.s. — it does not matter. For the heroism of overcoming such minor misfortunes there are no gongs either.

  After such trips Harrison naturally trusted and grew fond of K for Kitty. Not that I think he ever said so. He would call the kite a good kite or perhaps, if he were a little happy, a wizard kite. These events in K for Kitty bore, after all, only a very slight relation to suicide. It was not until the big Brest trip that anything really serious happened to the plane.