The Complete Flying Officer X Stories Read online

  He expected to be grounded any moment after that. His despair was sour and keen and personal; he could tell no one about it. For about a week he did not sleep much. He did not dream either. He re-created the few moments of ill luck until they were moments of positive and monstrous failure. And as if this were not enough, he created new moments, sharp and terrible seconds of stalling, ground-looping, crash-landing, overshooting the drome. He imagined himself coming in too slow, another time too fast. It never mattered much. He was going to prang control tower in any case, killing the occupants there as they drank their last over-sweetened steaming tea.

  Then by accident he discovered it possible to get some sleep. He began to sleep with the light on. The station at that time was not very crowded; later two and even three people slept in a room. But now no one could see him giving way — not that he was ever the only one — to the fear of sleeping in the dark. In this way he slept quite well for about a week; it was fairly peaceful; he was not cold; he did not have the recurrent dreams. And, above all, they did not ground him.

  I don’t know if they were ever thinking of it, but it never in fact became necessary. Another thing happened: this time not just ill luck, frustration, a mistake, a private illusion about something, but a simple and terrible fact. It was a telegram from the rector of his village in Somerset. His parents had been killed in a raid.

  After that telegram he got compassionate leave and went home. The next morning he stood in the garden of the house, staring at the bony, burnt roof timbers, the red-grey dust and rubble, the bare scorched blue wallpaper of the two rooms where the cheap little oil lamp had once been carried to and fro. It was winter-time. Red dust lay on the frozen leaves of the Brussels sprouts; the hawthorn twigs, fancifully clipped by his father above the line of hedge, were almost the only things about the place that remained untouched and as before. He did not stay very long; but while he stayed there, he thought he saw his mother working in the fields, skirt pinned behind her, and his father with the hedge-hook in his hand and the black twigs flying in the air. He saw for a moment their lives with the simple clearness of grief, the lives remote from his own, so utterly simple and so utterly remote, yet bound to him elementally.

  When he went back to the station three days later, he had forgotten about the dreams, the illusions, and all the rest of it; or at least it was as if he had forgotten. All the reality of the bad moments, if it had been reality, was now obscured by the simple reality of the dusty and fire-blackened little house.

  All that he had to do now seemed also quite simple and clear; terribly simple and terribly clear. If he ever had been afraid, there was no longer any sign of it as he took off for a daylight raid over northern Germany two days later. It was a cold, clear winter afternoon; there was just enough power in the sunlight to reveal the colours of the fields. He used to say it was one of those trips where you felt the aircraft had been shot from a gun. You got away clean and smooth and easy; there was no hitch. Instinctively, from the first, you knew it was a piece of cake. You went over and did the job and no matter what came up at you, you knew that, ultimately, it would be all right. That afternoon flak tore a strip off his flaps and for about half an hour his crew did nothing but yell gloriously through the inter-comm. that fighters were coming up from everywhere. Cannon fire hit his middle turret and put it out of action and sprayed the fuselage from end to end with raw ugly little holes. Inland over Germany he lost a lot of height chasing and finally shooting down an M.E. 109, and he discovered he could not regain this height as he came back over the coast and sea. But even that did not trouble him then. Everything was clear at last. His whole life was clear.

  He came over the English coast and then the English fields, at about two or three hundred feet. The sun was still shining, but sometimes there were clouds and then it was light in patches on the fields below and dark in the upper air. He roared over fields and woods and roads and over the little dusty blue towns and over remote farms where he could even see the hens feeding and scuttling in the dark winter grass.

  He came so low once that for a second or so he saw people in the fields. For an instant he saw a man and a woman working. They raised flat, astonished faces to look at the great plane overhead. The woman perhaps was picking sticks and he thought he saw the man lean for a moment on a fork. They might have been old or young, he could not tell; they lifted their heads and in a second were cut off by the speed of the plane. But in this second, as he saw them transfixed on the earth below him and before the speed of the plane cut them off for ever, he remembered his own people. He remembered them as they had lived, simple and sacrificing, living only for him, and he saw them alive again in the arrested figures of the two people in the field below; as if they were the same people, the same simple people, the same humble, faithful, eternal people, giving always and giving everything: the greatest people in the world.

  MacIntyre’s Magna Charta

  Joe MacIntyre, who is a navigator, comes from the wheat country east of Edmonton, Alberta. There are some things that make MacIntyre madder than Nazism, and one is Magna Charta.

  “Heck, are we still tied up with Magna Charter?” he says. “Sometimes I think we’re bloody well fightin’ the war with bows and arrows.”

  Possibly MacIntyre thinks of Magna Charta as a game, like crib or knockers or poker, that was played a long time ago. It is anyway something identified in his mind with bows and arrows, cavalry charges, muzzle loaders, brass hats, and other generally obsolete tactics of war. MacIntyre, who is a large straightforward man from a large straightforward country, understands only one tactic of war. It, too, is very large and straightforward; it is so large and straightfoward and so devastating that he cannot understand why other people do not understand it as well as he does. MacIntyre’s tactic of war is the bomb.

  It is a very long way from Edmonton, Alberta, to the place in England from which MacIntyre navigates Stirlings. Everything is different too. London and Edmonton are not the same.

  “Jeez,” MacIntyre says to me, “you know this Whitehall?”

  No need to tell him that.

  “Heck,” he says, “out in Canada I heard all about this Whitehall. So as soon as I get my first leave I go tearing down there to have a look at it. Jeez, boy, I never seen nuthin’ like it. I walk up and down it once and by that time I ain’t got a right arm left. The damn thing’s dropped off, saluting brass hats. If it ain’t brass hats it’s admirals. Jeez, no wonder they’re crying out for ships. They got so many goddam spare admirals around.”

  MacIntyre sometimes makes a snorting noise, like a prize-fighter going into action.

  “And then I go on to Westminster. I heard all about that too. And jeez, boy, the guys I seen there walkin’ in and out of the House of Commons. Jeez, I guess some guy does an awful good trade in bath-chairs around there.”

  MacIntyre makes another noise like a snorting prizefighter.

  “And, for Pete’s sake, these are the guys who are running the war! Sometimes I think all I need is one hell of a good big bomb.”

  “Design one,” I say.

  “I’m doin’ better. I’m designing a bomb-sight. It keeps me awake nights.”

  “What will it do?”

  “Well,” MacIntyre says, “if it acts the way I figure, it’ll do more to shorten the war than these bow-and-arrow guys’ll do in a couple of centuries.”

  Presently I try to explain to MacIntyre that when you get six or seven hundred men together, if you ever get them together, it takes time for everyone to speak his mind. “And everyone’s got a right to speak his mind,” I say. “You know that.”

  “Then, for Pete’s sake, why don’t they damn well speak it?” he says. “Instead of fooling around with this tradition stuff.”

  “Well, it’s an old institution,” I say, “with old laws, old customs, old privileges.”

  “Jeez, every goddam thing you got’s old. You got old schools, old ideas, old men, old heroes, old every damn thing.”

&nb
sp; “It’s an old country.”

  “Jeez, you’re telling me it’s old. Back out there we got a brand-new spanking country that nobody knows anything about. Jeez, boy, we got no Whitehall nor no Westminster. But we got some swell wheat land and swell hamburgers, and that ain’t all.”

  So MacIntyre goes on pretending, for some reason or other, that he doesn’t like us much. Now and then he goes out on an operational trip, in a good big Stirling, to drop several good big bombs on Brest or Emden or Berlin or Hamburg, and after these trips he comes back to work with renewed vigour on his bomb-sight, feeling better. It is clear that he lives almost solely for his bombsight and his bombs. He lives for the day when he can drop forty-thousand-pounders. All I want to ask him is why, if he does not like us, he has come so far to fight for what we stand for.

  One evening MacIntyre and I are sitting in the lounge of the Angel Hotel; we are in the lounge, which is reputedly a select place, because we have with us the little blonde W.A.A.F. officer who is our friend. We think of her as a lady; we expect the lounge to be a decent, well-mannered place. We like the little W.A.A.F. officer for several reasons. She too is in the war because she hates something; she too would like to see the war more directly, more vigorously, more angrily conducted; she too has given up the things which are dear to her, soft frocks, gay hats, fur coats, the chance of a home where she can fry eggs for breakfast and bake scones for tea and sun-bathe on the lawn in summer, and she too, young, pretty, disillusioned, sometimes bitter, has come a long way from the life she knew, the life where the smallest things, but above all friendship, seemed to have a fair prospect of permanency.

  “What about something to eat?” I say. “Some sandwiches?”

  “O.K.,” MacIntyre says, “you fix them.”

  I walk to the other end of the lounge, hoping to find a waiter. The lounge is very crowded; the waiters are old and few. I stand for a moment looking about me. Then suddenly I look back across the lounge, and I see that something has happened. The little W.A.A.F. is standing up and looks frightened. MacIntyre is also standing up and his cap is far on the back of his head. I know that attitude.

  I go back across the bar. “What’s up?” I say. “What’s going on?”

  “Just a little matter,” MacIntyre says. “This guy thinks Blondie is public property.”

  “Don’t fight,” Blondie says. “Please.”

  “The runt,” MacIntyre says, “the dirty dead-beat.”

  “All I did was sit down!”

  “Yeah, but in the wrong goddam place.”

  “All I —”

  “And undressing the lady with your eyes, too.”

  “I resent that! I hope I’m a gentleman, I —”

  “You hope. You dirty dead-beat,” MacIntyre says, “get out.”

  “Who’re you talking to? Who’re you talking to? I got my rights!”

  “Yeah, you got your rights,” MacIntyre says. “Bloody well stand up for them now!”

  This reasonable, simple proposition, so much a fundamental part of MacIntyre’s nature, does not seem to appeal to the man. He is thin and tall and his civilian clothes look loose and out of date, almost as if belonging to another age. Behind him stand five or six of his friends; their clothes look loose and flabby too. Now and then the man strikes a dramatic attitude of injured perplexity and his friends look on with the immobile glumness of scene-shifters standing just off the stage.

  “Please don’t fight,” Blondie says.

  “Nobody’s fighting,” MacIntyre says, “yet. All I’m asking this guy is to apologise or else.”

  “Apologise?” the man says. “Apologise? Apologise to a bloody pilot officer?”

  “Oh, God,” I say.

  It seems for a moment as if the faces in the lounge are part of a coloured wheel. They spin violently, and when I can look clearly again neither MacIntyre nor the man is among them. Standing silent, still like scene-shifters, the dead-beats look uneasy, nervous of what may happen. Only Blondie and I, looking at each other, thinking perhaps of the same thing, thinking of MacIntyre lying on his belly for forty trips in the bombing hatch over ghastly fountains of fire, can measure the extent of what MacIntyre may do.

  When he finally comes back into the lounge, MacIntyre is alone.

  “Where is he? What happened?” I say.

  “It’s O.K.,” MacIntyre says. “I don’t hit guys who won’t stand up even for their goddam mistakes.”

  Soon we drive home in the darkness. We do not talk a great deal; we do not talk at all of what we are really thinking. And unless I am mistaken MacIntyre is thinking of the way he has come six thousand miles from home, to lie on his belly in a bomb-hatch and dream in his spare moments of an apparatus that would miraculously end the war he hates; and unless I am mistaken Blondie is thinking also of the life she knew, where friendship had its tolerable chance of endurance, and not of the life she knows, where the friendships she makes are destroyed day by day as relentlessly as the castles of a small child are destroyed on the shore by the tide.

  And thinking of this and remembering what has happened, I seem to know MacIntyre better. I know that if I ever shot up or shot down, if there is invasion, if I am about to lose something, if my rights are to be questioned or lessened or taken from me or if there is to be any trouble at all, I should like MacIntyre to be somewhere close to me.

  For MacIntyre has a Magna Charta of his own. And it involves things so deep, so simple, and so clear that perhaps it would be foolish to put them down.

  The Beginning of Things

  The sudden arrival of M.E. 109’s over the island in these early days was not pleasant. Even when they ran away they were good. They were very fast and after the Macchis they seemed very formidable, and in the evenings there used to be long discussions in the squadron on how to get them down.

  McAlister was then about twenty — one of those people who are learning elementary physics one day, while a war is being planned by older men, and who are wearing medals the next, by which time older men are already discussing what should happen when the war is over. The war was not over for McAlister by any means. The war and his life were the same thing; he did not want either to end. A D.F.C. and bar and four Macchis and six dive-bombers down were only part of life: a few strips torn off, a wizard time, the beginning of things. He had been very scared most of the time, and at the same time very eager, very tense, and very excited. He had a nice word for being scared, but it is not printable, and he had another for the war, but that is not printable either. Unfortunately I do not know what he thought of the men who made it, but no doubt that is unprintable too.

  The spring weather was already hot on Malta when the first M.E.’s began to appear. The young wheat was high and green in the fields, and the sea very blue on the hot afternoons beyond the harbour. It was cool at night and on the nine o’clock watch in the mornings.

  One morning the Hurricanes scrambled shortly after nine. Soon they were over Luca at twenty thousand. Far over Luca they were still climbing when the first M.E.’s swooped down on them out of the sun. They swooped down very fast, screaming, and the Hurricanes split apart into a circle. This was as they had planned and McAlister took his place in the circle and looked about him. Just then the second M.E.’s came down out of the sun, screaming like the first, trying to break the segment of the circle where McAlister was.

  It all happened very quickly. McAlister turned back under the M.E.’s and they overshot him. He looked round and there was nothing to see. And then he turned back and there in front of him was the M.E. he wanted. It was the M.E. he had wanted for a long time, the one they had all wanted. He felt that if he could shoot it down, it would be more than a personal triumph. It would be perhaps even more than a squadron triumph. It would be the first M.E. shot down over the island and it would be a victory for morale. He wanted it very badly. His hands were shaking and his blood was thumping very heavily in his throat, and his mouth was sour as it watered. He was closing in very fast and he felt t
hat nothing could stop him now.

  The moment the crash came in his own cockpit he knew what an awful fool he had been. He had been much too excited to look in the mirror. And now he had made that utterly foolish, perhaps utterly fatal mistake. The cockpit was full of flying metal and the spray of blood. He went at once into a steep spiral dive. He was very angry with himself — very, very angry that he had been such a fool and had been beaten so easily, for the first time, at his own game.

  When he came out of the dive, he saw that his left arm was dripping with blood, and when he tried to lift it, it would not move. He did not know quite what else was happening. He afterwards remembered standing up in the cockpit. He remembered quite clearly, before that, how he opened the hood and disconnected his oxygen. He remembered making the R/T connections too. But between the moment of standing up and the moment of seeing his kite dive away from him and of hearing the fading roar of the engines as it fell to earth he did not remember anything at all. He remembered nothing of being angry any longer, or scared, or even in pain.