The Complete Flying Officer X Stories (2 page)

It did not say anything about Dibden landing on three engines with damaged flaps and a dying rear gunner, or about a very tired, very brassed-off Dibden coming in very late, with an unexpected hour on his flying time, to boiled beef and tea.

Nor did it say anything about what happened that night. A little after midnight I came into the mess and there, under the bright lights of the anteroom, Dibden was doing some acrobatics. It was a very nice little party. At one end of the room two leather settees were placed endwise against each other, and then against them, endwise again, two chairs.

As I came in, Dibden, more cherubic, more smiling, more like a handsome Eskimo than ever, took a drink of light ale and then did a running somersault over the long line of furniture, landing with a wild whoop on his feet. His eyes were shining wildly. After him one or two other pilots tried it, but none of them was really good, and the only one who was good landed on his head. Then Dibden tried it again, and the fat, smiling ball of his body went over as easily as a bird.

Perhaps there was no connection between the schoolboy Dibden joyfully throwing a somersault and the veteran Dibden angrily pranging a tanker. But as I saw Dibden hurling his fat little body into the air I felt suddenly that I understood all about his thirty-three trips, his golf-ball
landings, his affairs with the tanker, and the long, hard journey home. I understood why he flew, and why he flew as he did, and I understood the man he was.

But there was nothing about that, of course, in the papers.

The nights he was not flying they would drive back late to the station, using her car. The flare-path would be laid; the lights on the hangars would shine like red stars in the winter darkness above the flat land. Sometimes the searchlights would be up, throwing a blue-white fire that fell widely like moonlight on the dark trees and hedges and on the winding road. They would sit in the car and, holding each other, talk for a long time. Frost on the very coldest nights would form like a silver collar on the glass of the windscreen and sometimes, on very still nights, he would wind down the window of the car and listen for a moment or two to the silence outside. She would lean her head on his shoulder and look upwards into the dark sky and then, listening too, hear the sound of the bombers coming home.

It did not seem to matter much that they were never likely to be married. He was rather small and compact, with fresh grey eyes that he sometimes did not seem able
to focus correctly. He had thirty-one operational trips to his credit, and all that seemed to matter was that he should continue coming back.

The morning afterwards, perhaps, he would ring the office. He would say simply: “Hello, dear, tonight.” She would try to remain calm, and later, perhaps, if operations were scrubbed, he would ring her again and she would find herself trembling as she put down the telephone, all her pretence of calmness gone.

She knew generally that he would be briefed in the early afternoon. He would take off about three o'clock or a little later and, according to the target, come back somewhere between eight and ten. It would often be too late to ring her after interrogation, but going to bed she would try to lie awake for the sound of the telephone. Sometimes she would fall asleep with the light still burning and would wake up in the small hours of the morning, bewildered and startled, not knowing where she was. Twice she fell half asleep and did not hear the telephone. Downstairs her father heard it, but after answering it, did not come to tell her who it was.

Her father was a rather big, grey-haired man with cheeks like loose pink rubber. He rolled his own cigarettes and it seemed to her that she never saw him without a newspaper. He rolled the cigarettes very badly — the tobacco fell wastefully on his clothes. The war had developed in him the latent qualities of the amateur strategist, and he always discussed the war while waving an untidy, wasteful cigarette. “We ought to have cut the Tripoli
road long ago. Long ago. You have only to look at the map. The same with the bombing of Berlin. What's gone wrong? Why aren't we over there more? Why aren't we over there night after night? Striking early and often is the decisive factor. You'd suppose it wouldn't escape our people.”

“Perhaps it's the weather,” she would say.

“Weather? There's another thing that beats me. Argue on simple lines, draw some absolutely logical conclusion which ought to be apparent to the merest child, and you always get the same answer. The weather! I don't doubt the weather is sometimes bad. But far from always, far from always. It's too often a convenient excuse — like the workman blaming his tools.”

“Nevertheless it nearly always is the weather.”

“Oh? Then what about last night? Clear moonlight like day. And was there a single operation? A couple of bombers over Brest.”

“You talk as if Brest were a seaside resort.”

“Look at the weather again tonight. Magnificent. And in the morning what shall we hear? The same old story again, I suppose. A handful of bombers over Brest. Or nothing at all.”

“It's probably the most heavily defended place in Europe,” she said. “It's just plain hell.”

“Kitty, Kitty,” her mother said. She looked up from her knitting, always khaki, and looked down again.

“Also I think you may find that tonight has been a big thing.”

“Oh! You know, do you?”

“No. Not exactly. I've an idea, that's all.”

“Ah! Your pilot friend.”

She did not speak.

“You haven't brought him in lately.”

“No, dear,” her mother said.

“They spend most of their time out,” her father said. “Somewhere.”

Her mother spoke without looking up from her knitting.

“Were you at the Red Lion last week?” her mother said. “We heard you were there. Drinking with Air Force officers.”

“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.

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 wattle 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.