The Complete Flying Officer X Stories (17 page)

For a few more minutes the trimming of coast lay dead below us and then, in a moment, was gone past us altogether. For just a few minutes longer the misty cotton-wool of the snow over Europe meant something, and then I looked and could see it no longer. Darkness seemed to have floated suddenly between the snow and the Stirling. What was below us was just negative. It was not snow, or land, or Europe. It was just the negative darkness that would flare any moment into hostility.

This darkness was to be ours for five hours or more. I was already cold and the aircraft was bumping like a goods train. The most violent
bumps seemed to jerk a little more blood out of my feet. I remembered this sensation from other trips and now tried moving my toes in my boots. But the boots were too thick and my toes were already partially dead. This was my fifteenth trip as flight engineer but even now I could not get rid of two sensations that had recurred on all those trips since the very first: the feeling that I had no feet and the feeling, even more awful than that, that I had swallowed something horribly sour, like vinegar, which had now congealed between my chest and throat. I never thought of it as fear. I was always slightly scared, in a numb way, before the trips began, and before Christmas, before the snow fell, I had been more scared than hell on the Brest daylights. But now I only thought of this sourness as discomfort. It always did something to my power of speech. I always kept the inter-comm. mouthpiece ready, but I rarely used it. I could hear other voices over the inter-comm. but I rarely spoke, unless it was very necessary, in reply. It wasn't that I didn't want to speak, and it had little to do with the fact that Ellis, Captain of K. 42, did not encourage talking. I think I was scared that by speaking I might give the impression that I was scared. So I kept my mouth shut and let the sourness bump in my throat and pretended, as perhaps the other six of us pretended, that I was tough and taciturn and did not care.

“A lot of light muck on the port side, skipper.”

“O.K.”

The voice of Osborne, from the rear turret, came over the inter-comm., the Northern accent sharp and cold and almost an order in itself. Ossy, from Newcastle, five feet six, with the lean Newcastle face and grey monkey-wrinkled eyes, was the youngest of us. In battle-dress the wads of pictures in his breast pockets gave him a sort of oblong bust.
In his Mae West this bust became quite big and handsome, so that he looked out of proportion, like a pouter pigeon. We always kidded Ossy about giving suck. But in his Mae West there was no room for his photographs; so always, before a trip, Ossy took them out and put them in his flying boots, one in each leg. In one leg of his boots he also carried a revolver, and in the other an American machine spanner. No one knew quite what this spanner was for, except perhaps that it was just one of those things that air-crews begin to carry about with them as foolish incidentals and that in the end become as essential as your right arm. So Ossy never came on trips except he had with him, in the legs of his boots, the things that mattered: the revolver, the spanner, and the pictures of a young girl, light-haired, print-frocked, pretty in a pale Northern way, taken in the usual back-garden attitudes on Tyneside. “She's a wizard kid,” he said.

As for the spanner, if it was a talisman, I knew that Ed Walker, the second dickey, carried two rabbits' feet. You might have expected the devotion to a good-luck charm from Ossy, who anyway had the good sense to carry a spanner. But it surprised you that Winchester hadn't taught Ed Walker anything better than a belief in rabbits' feet. They were very ordinary rabbits' feet. The tendons had been neatly severed and the hair was quite neat and tidy and smooth. Ed kept them hidden under his shirts in a drawer in his bedroom and he didn't know that anyone knew they were there. I shared the room with him and one day when I opened the wrong drawer by mistake there were the rabbits' feet under the shirts, hidden as a boy might have hidden a packet of cigarettes from his father. Ed was very tall and slow-eyed and limp. He took a long time to dress himself and did not talk much. Between
Winchester at eighteen and a Stirling at nineteen there wasn't much life to be filled in. He was so big that sometimes he looked lost; as if he had suddenly found himself grown up too quickly. And sometimes I used to think he didn't talk much solely for the reason that he hadn't much to say. But just because of that, and because of the rabbits' feet and the big lazy helplessness that went with them and because we could lie in bed and not talk much and yet say the right things when we did talk, we were fairly devoted.

Between the coast of Holland and the first really heavy German flak I always felt in a half - daze. I always felt my mind foreshorten its view. It was like travelling on a very long journey in a railway train. You didn't look forward to the ultimate destination, but only to the next station. In this way it did not seem so long. If it were night you could never tell exactly where you were, and sometimes you were suddenly surprised by the lights of a station.

We had no station lights: that was the only difference. We bumped on against the darkness. I don't know why I always felt it was against the darkness, and not in it or through it. Darkness on these long winter trips seemed to solidify. The power we generated seemed to cut it. We had to cut it to get through.

If we got through—but we did not say that except as a joke. At prayer meeting, in intelligence room, before the trips, the Wing-Commander always liked that joke. “When you come back—
if
you come back”. But he was the only one, I think, who did like it, and most of us had given up laughing now. It might have been rather funnier if, for instance, he had said he hoped we had taken cases of light ale on board, or that we might get drunk on Horlick's tablets and black coffee. Not that this would
have been very funny. And the funniest joke in the world, coming from him, wouldn't have given us any more faith than we had.

Faith is a curious thing to talk about. You can't put your hand on it, but there it is. And I think what we and that crew had faith in was not jokes or beam-approach or navigation or the kite itself, but Ellis.

“It's like a duck's arse back here,” Ossy suddenly said. “One minute I'm in bloody Switzerland and the next I'm up in the North Sea.”

We laughed over the inter-comm.

“It's your ten-ton spanner,” Ellis said.

“What spanner, Skipper, what spanner?”

“Drop it overboard!”

“What spanner, what——”

“Go on, drop it. I can feel the weight of the bloody thing from here. You're holding us back.”

“There's flak coming up like Blackpool illuminations, Skip. Honest, Skip. Take plenty of evasive action——”

“Just drop the bloody spanner, Ossy, and shut up.”

We all laughed again over the inter-comm. There was a long silence, and then Ossy's voice again, now very slow:

“Spanner gone.”

We laughed again but it was broken by the voice of Ellis. “What about this Blackpool stuff?”

“It's all Blackpool stuff. Just like the Tower Ball-room on a carnival night.”

They were pumping it up all round us, heavy and light, and for a few minutes it was fairly violent. We were slapped about inside the kite like a collection of loose tools in a case.

Then from the navigation seat came the voice of Mac, the big Canadian from Winnipeg, slow and sardonic:

“Keep the milk warm, Ossy dear. It's baby's feed time.” And we laughed again.

After that, for a long time, none of us spoke again. I always noticed that we did not speak much until Ellis started the talk. The voice of Ellis was rather abrupt. The words were shot out and cut off like sections of metal ejected by a machine. I sometimes wondered what I was doing on these trips, in that kite, with Ellis, as flight-engineer. He knew more about aero-engines generally, and about these aeroengines particularly, than I should ever know. If ever a man had a ground-crew devoted by the terror of knowledge it was Ellis.

We too were devoted by something of the same feeling. He was a small man of about thirty, two years younger than myself, with those large raw hands that mechanics sometimes have: the large, angular, metallic hands that seem to get their shape and power from the constant handling of tools. These hands, his voice, and finally his eyes were the most remarkable things about him. They were dark eyes that looked at you as impersonally as the lens of a camera. Before them you knew you had better display yourself as you were and not as you hoped you might be.

If Ed Walker had not begun to live, Ellis had lived enough for both of them. For so small a man it was extraordinary how far you had to look up to him, and I think perhaps we looked up at him because of the fullness of that life. A man like Ed would always be insular, clinging to the two neat rabbits' feet of English ideals. The sea, on which Ellis had served for five or six years before the war, had beaten the insularity out of him. It had given him the international quality of a piece of chromium. He was small but he gave out a feeling of compression. You had faith in him because time had tested the pressure his resistances could hold. He did not
drink much: hardly at all. Most of us got pretty puce after bad trips, or good trips too if it comes to that, and sometimes people like Ossy got tearful in the bar of The Grenadier and looked waterily into the eyes of strangers and said “We bloody near got wrapped up. Lost as hell. Would have been if it hadn't been for the Skipper”, and probably in the morning did not remember what they said.

But all of us knew that, and did remember. We knew too why Ellis did not drink. It was because of us. The sea, I think, had taught him something about the cold results of sobriety.

The flak was all the time fairly violent and now and then we dropped into pockets of muck that lifted the sourness acidly into my throat and dragged it down again through my stomach. It was always bad here. We were a good way over now and I remembered the met. reports at prayer-meeting: about seven-tenths over Germany and then clearing over the target. We had many bombers out that night and I hoped it would be clear.

Thinking of the weather, I went for a moment into one of those odd mesmeric dazes that you get on long trips, and thought of myself. I was the eldest of the crew: thirty, with a wife I did not live with now. I had been, a successful under-manager in Birmingham and we had at one time a very nice villa on the outskirts. For some reason, I don't know why, we quarrelled a lot about little things like my not cleaning the bath after I'd used it, and the fact that my wife liked vinegar with salmon. We were both selfish in the same ways. We were like two beans that want to grow up the same pole and then strangle each other trying to do so. I had been glad of the war because it gave me the chance to break from her, and now flying had beaten some of the Selfishness out of me. My self was no longer assertive. It had lost part of its identity, and I
hoped the worst part of its identity, through being part of the crew. It had done me good to become afraid of losing my skin, and my only trouble really was that I suffered badly from cold. I now could not feel my feet at all.

Suddenly I could not feel anything. Something hit us with a crack that seemed to lift us straight up as if we had been shot through a funnel. The shock tore me sideways. It flung me violently down and up and down again as if I had been a loose nut in a revolving cylinder.

“O.K. everybody?”

We had been shaken like that before, on other trips, but never with quite that violent upward force. I lay on the floor of the aircraft and said something in answer to Ellis' voice. I hadn't any idea what it was. I wasn't thinking of myself, but only, at that moment, of the aircraft. I felt the blow had belted us miles upward, like a rocket.

I staggered about a bit and felt a little dazed. It seemed after a few moments that everybody was O.K. I looked at Mac, huge face immobile over the navigator's table, pinning down his charts and papers even harder with a violent thumb. I looked at his table and it was almost level. It did not tilt much with the motion of the aircraft and I knew, then we were flying in a straight line. I looked at Allison, the radio operator, and his eyes, framed in a white circle between the earphones, looked back at me. He did not look any paler than usual. He did not look more fixed, more vacant, or more eaten up by trouble than usual. That was just the way he always looked. There had been a kind of cancerous emptiness on his face ever since a blitz had killed his child.

I grinned at him and then the next moment was
not thinking of what had happened. The kite was flying well and I heard Ellis' voice again.

“Must be getting near, Mac?”

“About ten minutes, flying time.”

“O.K.”

She bumped violently once or twice as they spoke and seemed to slide into troughs of muck. The sick lump of tension bumped about in my throat and down into my bowels and up again.

“If I see so much as a flea's eyelash I'll feel bloody lucky,” Mac said.

He got up and began to grope his way towards the forward hatch. In those days the navigator did the bomb aiming. Huge and ponderous and blown out, he looked in the dim light like the man in the adverts, for Michelin tyres. I sat down at his table. I felt sick and my head ached. Once, as a boy, I had had scarlet fever and my head, as the fever came on, seemed to grow enormous and heavy, many times too large for my body. Now it was the same. It seemed like a colossal lump of helpless pulp on my shoulders. The light above the table seemed, to flicker and splinter against my eyes.

I knew suddenly what it was. I wasn't getting my oxygen. It scared me for a moment and then I knew it must have been the fall. I don't quite know what I did. I must have fumbled about with the connections for a time and succeeded in finding what was wrong at last.

I felt as if I began to filter slowly back into the aircraft. I came back with that awful mental unhappiness, split finally apart by relief, that you get as you struggle out of anæsthesia. I came back to hear the voices of Ellis and Mac, exchanging what I knew must be the instructions over the target. They seemed like disembodied voices. I tried to shake my brain into clarity. It seemed muddy and weak.