Going Solo (14 page)

‘Try to keep calm,’ she said. ‘Stop jumping up and down. It’s not good for you.’

‘But nurse, I really can see something! Don’t you believe me?’

‘Is this what you are seeing?’ she asked me, and now part of a hand and a pointing finger came into my line of sight. ‘Is it this? Is it these?’ she said, and her finger pointed at the three beautiful things of many colours that lay there shimmering against a background of purest white.

‘Yes!’ I cried. ‘It’s those! There are three of them! I can see them all! And I can see your finger!’

When many days of blackness and doubt are pierced suddenly by shining images of red and gold, the pleasure that floods into your mind is overwhelming. I lay propped up on my pillows gazing through the tiny crack in one eye at these amazing sights and wondering whether I wasn’t
perhaps catching a glimpse of paradise. ‘What am I looking at?’ I asked her.

‘You are looking at a bit of my white uniform,’ Mary Welland said. ‘It’s the bit that goes across my front, and the coloured things you can see in the middle of it make up the emblem of the Royal Naval Nursing Service. It is pinned to the left side of my bosom and it is worn by all nurses in the Royal Navy.’

Alexandria
20 November 1940

 

Dear Mama,

I sent you a telegram yesterday saying that I’d got up for 2 hours & had a bath – so you’ll see I’m making good progress. I arrived here about 8½ weeks ago, and was lying on my back for 7 weeks doing nothing, then sat up gradually, and now I am walking about a bit. When I came in I was a bit of a mess. My eyes didn’t open (although I was always quite concious). They thought I had a fractured base (skull), but I think the Xray showed I didn’t. My nose was bashed in, but they’ve got the most marvellous Harley Street specialists out here who’ve joined up for the war as Majors, and the ear nose & throat man pulled my nose out of the back of my head, and shaped it and now it looks just as before except that its a little bent about. That was of course under a general anesthetic.

 

My eyes still ache if I read or write much, but they say that they think they’ll get back to normal again, and that I’ll be fit for flying in about 3 months. In between I
still have about 6 or more weeks sick leave here in Alex when I get out, doing nothing in a marvellous sunny climate, just like an English Summer, except that the sun shines every day.

 

I suppose you want to know how I crashed. Well, I’m not allowed to give you any details of what I was doing or how it happened. But it occurred in the night not very far from the Italian front lines. The plane was on fire and after it hit the ground I was just sufficiently concious to crawl out in time, having undone my straps, and roll on the ground to put out the fire on my overalls which were alight. I wasn’t burnt much, but was bleeding rather badly from the head. Anyway I lay there and waited for the ammunition which was left in my guns to go off. One after the other, well over 1000 rounds exploded and the bullets whistled about seeming to hit everything but me.

 

I’ve never fainted yet, and I think it was this tendency to remain concious which saved me from being roasted.

 

Anyway luckily one of our forward patrols saw the blaze, and after some time arrived and picked me up & after much ado I arrived at Mersa Matruh, (you’ll see it on the map – on the coast, East of Libya). There I heard a doctor say, ‘Oh, he’s an Italian is he’ (my white flying overalls weren’t very recognizable). I told him not to be a B.F., and he gave me some morphia. In about 24 hours time I arrived where I am now, living in great luxury with lots of very nice English nursing sisters to look after me …

 

P.S. The air raids here don’t worry us. The Italians are very bad bombaimers.

‘But they are so
beautiful
!’ I cried, staring at the emblem. There were three separate parts to it, all of them heavily embossed in raised embroidery. On top there was a golden crown with scarlet in the centre and small bits of green near its base. In the middle, below the crown, there was a gold anchor with a scarlet rope twined around it. And below the anchor there was a golden circle with a big red cross in the middle. These images and their brilliant colours have been engraved on my memory ever since.

‘Keep still,’ Mary Welland said. ‘I think we can open this eyelid a bit more.’

I kept still and waited, and a few minutes later she succeeded in getting the eyelid wide open and I saw the whole room through that one eye. In the forefront of everything I saw Nursing Officer Welland herself sitting very close and smiling at me. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Welcome back to the world.’

She was a lovely looking girl, much nicer than Myrna Loy and far more real. ‘You are even more beautiful than I imagined,’ I said.

‘Well, thank you,’ she said.

The next day she got the other eye open as well and I lay there feeling as though I was about to start my whole life over again.

Mary Welland was certainly lovely. She was gentle and kind. She remained my friend all the time I was in hospital. But there is a world of difference between falling in love with a voice and remaining in love with a person you can see. From the moment I opened my eyes, Mary became a human instead of a dream and my passion evaporated.

All the time I was in hospital, my one obsession was to
get back to operational flying. The doctors told me there was virtually no hope of that. They said that even if I managed to get back perfect vision, I would still have the head injuries to contend with. Severe head injuries are not easily overcome, they said, and I had better resign myself to being shipped home eventually as a non-combatant. I admit now, although I didn’t tell them at the time, that for several weeks after I had regained my sight I suffered from the most appalling headaches, but even these began gradually to grow less and less severe.

Alexandria
6 December 1940

 

Dear Mama,

I haven’t written to you since my one and only letter some weeks ago, chiefly because the doctors said that it wasn’t good for me. As a matter of fact I’ve been progressing very slowly. As I told you in my telegram I did start getting up, but they soon popped me back to bed again because I got such terrific headaches. A week ago I was moved back into this private room, and I have just completed a whole long 7 days lying flat on my back in semi darkness doing absolutely nothing – not even allowed to lift a finger to wash myself. Well, that’s over, and I’m sitting up today, (its 8 o’clock in the evening actually) and writing this and incidentally feeling fine. Tomorrow I think they are going to give me intravenal saline and pituatory injections & make me drink gallons
of water – its another stunt to get rid of the headaches. You needn’t be alarmed – there’s nothing very wrong with me, I’ve merely had an extremely serious concussion. They say I certainly won’t fly for about 6 months, and last week were going to invalid me home on the next convoy. But somehow I didn’t want to – once invalided home, I knew I’d never get on to flying again, and who wants to be invalided home anyway. When I go I want to go normally …

 

After four months in hospital I was allowed out of bed, and I used to stand for hours in my dressing-gown looking out of my window at the view. The only view I had was the courtyard of the hospital, and that wasn’t much to look at, but directly across the courtyard I could see through a huge window into a long wide corridor. On morning I saw a medical orderly coming down this corridor carrying a very large tray with a white cloth over it. Walking in the opposite direction towards the orderly, was a middle-aged woman, probably somebody from the hospital clerical staff. When the orderly came level with the woman, he suddenly whipped away the cloth from the tray and pushed the tray towards the woman’s face. On the tray there lay the entire quite naked amputated leg of a soldier. I saw the poor woman reel backwards. I saw the foul orderly roar with laughter and replace the cloth and walk on. I saw the woman stagger to the window-sill and lean forward with her head in her hands, then she pulled herself together and went on her way. I have never
forgotten that little illustration of man’s repulsive behaviour towards woman.

I was finally discharged from hospital in February 1941, five months after I was admitted. I was given four weeks’ convalescence which I spent in Alexandria living in total luxury in the magnificent house of a charming and very wealthy English family called Peel. Dorothy Peel was a regular hospital visitor at the Anglo-Swiss, and when she heard that I was soon to be allowed out, she said, ‘Come and stay with us.’ So I did, and I was a lucky fellow to have found such a splendid place among such kind people in which to gather myself together for the next round.

After four weeks with the Peels, I reported to the RAF medical examiners in Cairo, and it was a great day for me when I was once again passed fully fit for flying duties.

But where were my old squadron now?

Eighty Squadron, as it turned out, were no longer in the Western Desert. They were far across the water in Greece, where for some weeks they had been flying valiantly against the Italian invaders. But now the German armies and air forces had joined the Italians in Greece and were rapidly over-running the little country. It was obvious to everybody, even then, that the tiny token British Expeditionary Force and the handful of RAF planes in Greece were not going to be able to last long against the German juggernaut.

Where did they want me to go? I asked.

To Greece, of course, they said. They told me that 80 Squadron were no longer flying Gladiators. They were now equipped with Mark 1 Hurricanes. I must learn very quickly to fly a Hurricane and then I must take it to Greece and rejoin the squadron.

When I got this news I was in Ismailia, a large RAF aerodrome on the Suez Canal. A Flight-Lieutenant pointed to a Hurricane standing on the tarmac and said, ‘You can have a couple of days to learn how to fly it, then you take it to Greece.’

‘Fly that to Greece?’ I said.

‘Of course.’

‘Where do I stop to refuel?’

‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘You go non-stop.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘About four and a half hours,’ he said.

Even I knew that a Hurricane had fuel for only one and a half hours’ flying, and I pointed this out to the Flight-Lieutenant. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘We’re fitting extra fuel tanks under the wings.’

‘Do they work?’

‘Sometimes they work,’ he said, smirking. ‘You press a little button and if you’re lucky a pump pumps petrol from the wing-tanks into the main tank.’

‘What happens if the pump doesn’t work?’

‘You bale out into the Med and swim,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Be serious. Who picks me up?’

‘Nobody,’ he said. ‘It’s a chance you have to take.’

This, I told myself, is a waste of manpower and machinery. I had no experience at all in flying against the enemy. I had never been in an operational squadron. And now they wanted me to jump into a plane I had never flown before and fly it to Greece to fight against a highly efficient air force that outnumbered us by a hundred to one.

I was petrified as I strapped myself into the Hurricane for the first time. It was the first monoplane I had ever flown. It was without a doubt the first
modern
plane I had ever flown. It was many times more powerful and speedy and tricky than anything I had ever seen. I had never flown a plane with a retractable undercarriage before. I had never flown a plane with wing-flaps which had to be used to slow down your landing speed. I had never flown a plane with a variable pitch propeller or one that had eight machine-guns in its wings. I had never flown anything like it. Somehow I managed to get the thing off the ground and back down again without smashing it up, but for me
it was like riding a bucking horse. I was just beginning to learn where most of the knobs were located and what they were used for when my two days were up and I had to leave for Greece.

Ismailia
12 April 1941

 

Dear Mama,

A very short note to say that I’m going north across the sea almost at once to join my squadron. I telegraphed this to you today & told you where to send my letters. You may not hear much from me for quite a long while so don’t worry …

 

Baling out into the Mediterranean didn’t worry me nearly as much as the thought of spending four and a half hours squashed into that tiny metal cockpit. I was six feet six inches tall, and when I sat in a Hurricane I had the posture of an unborn baby in the womb, with my knees almost touching my chin. I was able to put up with that for short flights, but four and a half hours clear across the sea from Egypt to Greece was something else again. I wasn’t quite sure I could do it.