The Complete Flying Officer X Stories (11 page)

Capek alone was not like this. He did not seem bored or irritable or rotten or temperamental. He did not play billiards and he did not seem interested in the bodies of the girls on the walls. He was never asleep on the beds. He never played cards or argued about the merits of this or that. It seemed sometimes as if he did not belong to us. He sat apart from us, and with his white hair, cultured brown face, clean fine lips, and the dark spectacles he wore sometimes against the bright spring sunlight, he looked sometimes like a middle-aged provincial professor who had come to take a cure at a health resort in the sun. Seeing him in the street, the bus, the train, or the tram, you would never have guessed that he could fly. You would never have guessed that in order to be one of us, to fly with us and fight with us, Capek had come half across the world.

There was a time when a very distinguished personage came to the station and, seeing Capek, asked how long he had been in the Air Force, and Capek replied: “Please, seventeen years.” This took his flying life far back beyond the beginning of the war we were fighting; back to the years when some of us were hardly born and when Czechoslovakia had become born again as a nation. Capek had remained in the Air Force all those years, flying heaven knows what types of plane, and becoming finally part of the forces that crumbled away and disintegrated and disappeared under the progress of the tanks that entered
Prague in the summer of 1939. Under this progress Capek was one of those who disappeared. He disappeared in a lorry with many others and they rode eastward towards Poland, always retreating and not knowing where they were going. With Capek was a man named Machakek, and as the retreat went on, Capek and Machakek became friends.

Capek and Machakek stayed in Poland all that summer, until the chaos of September. It is not easy to know what Capek and Machakek did, whether they were interned, or how, or where, because Capek's English is composed of small difficult words and long difficult silences, often broken only by smiles. “All time is retreat. Then war start. Poland is in war. Then Germany is coming one way and Russia is coming another.” So Capek and Machakek had no escape. They could go neither east nor west. It was too late to go south, and in the north Gdynia had gone. And in time, as Germany moved eastward and Russia westward, Capek and Machakek were taken by the Russians. Capek went to a concentration camp, and Machakek worked in the mines. As prisoners they had a status not easy to define. Russia was not then in the war, and Czechoslovakia, politically, did not exist. It seemed in those days as if Russia might come into the war against us. It was very confused, and during the period of classification, if you could call it that, Capek and Machakek went on working in the concentration camp and the mine. “We remain,” Capek said, “one year and three quarter.”

Then the war clarified and finally Capek was out of the concentration camp and Machakek was out of the mine. They were together again, still friends, and they moved south, to the Black Sea. Standing on the perimeter track, in the bright spring sun, wearing his dark spectacles, Capek had so little to say about this that he looked exactly like a blind man who has arrived somewhere, after a long time, but for whom the journey is darkness. “From Black Sea I go to Turkey. Turkey, then to Syria. Then Cairo. Then Aden.”

“And Machakek with you?”

“Machakek with me, yes. But only to Aden. After Aden, Machakek is going to Bombay on one boat. I am going to Cape Town on other.”

“So Machakek went to India?”

“To India, yes. Is very long way. Is very long time.”

“And you — Cape Town?”

“Yes, me, Cape Town. Then Gibraltar. Then here. England.”

“And Machakek?”

“Machakek is here too. We are both post here. To this squadron.”

The silence that followed this had nothing to do with the past; it had much to do with the present; more to do with Machakek. Through the retreat and the mine and the concentration camp, through the journey to Turkey and Cairo and Aden, through the long sea journey to India and Africa and finally England, Capek and Machakek had been friends. When a man speaks only the small
words of a language that is not his own, he finds it hard to express the half-tones of hardship and relief and suffering, and most of what Capek and Machakek had suffered together was in Capek's white hair. But now something had happened which was not expressed there, but which lay in the dark wild eyes behind the glasses and the long silences of Capek as he sat staring at the Hurricanes in the sun. His friend Machakek was dead.

The handling of night fighters is not easy. It was perhaps hard for Capek and Machakek that they should come out of the darkness of Czechoslovakia, through the darkness of the concentration camp and the mine, in order to fight in darkness. It was hard for Machakek, who, overshooting the drome, hit a telegraph post and died before Capek could get there. It was harder still for Capek, who was now alone.

But the hardest part of all, perhaps, is that Capek cannot talk to us. He does not know words that will express what he feels about the end of Machakek's journey. He does not know words like endurance and determination, imperishable, undefeated, sacrifice, and honour. They are the words, anyway, that are never mentioned at dispersals. He does not know the words for grief and friendship, homesickness and loss. They are never mentioned either. Above all, he does not know the words for himself and what he has done.

I do not know the words for Capek either. Looking at his white hair, his dark eyes, and his long hands, I am silent now.

I knew Pop and Ethel fairly well. As for themselves, they never met each other.

Pop, who was a flight lieutenant and acted sometimes as adjutant when he was not in admin or accounts or somewhere else, was sixty. Ethel, who was a W.A.A.F., was nineteen. Pop was rather seedy and grizzly and looked too bony for his blue service uniform. When he had first ridden down through Pretoria, as a mounted trooper, in his first war, he was just Ethel's age, and Ethel was not born. Back in England, Ethel's mother was a small girl of ten watching the herring fleets come in at Yarmouth and the Scottish fisher-girls packing the fish in barrels in late summer. Pop had probably been very handsome in those days and Ethel was rather pretty now. Pop's trouble now was that he snored very heavily and talked in his sleep and did not get much rest, for various causes, after two or three o'clock in the morning. I dare say Ethel slept very well, and almost the only thing she grumbled about
was the wage she used to earn in Civy Street. Pop had a great many medals, but it was doubtful if Ethel could ever get one. All together, they were not very much alike. The only thing you could say about both of them was that they were both in the same service, on the same station, in the same war.

In case there should be any misunderstanding, Ethel was married. At nineteen Pop was riding across the veldt; he kept a picture of himself, youthful and brawny on a horse, in the chest of drawers in his bedroom. At nineteen Ethel had a husband she never saw.

Most of the time Ethel did not know where her husband was; she guessed Cairo, then Malta, then Iraq. Wherever it was, the days were hot and the names on the map confused her. She did not understand much about Africa. It was a long way off, but she did not know how far. It would have been nice if she could have met Pop, who might have explained what it was like to be in the Army in Africa, but she never did.

As it was, she felt alone. On an operational station the W.A.A.F.'s live away from the station. Ethel lived in an old Victorian house, with twenty other girls, two miles away. It was winter; it was dark when she set out for the station in the early mornings. The wind blew bitterly from the east, and the bombers at dispersal were frosted over, the colour of lead.

Pop did not arrive at H.Q. till nine. A man who has been in three wars has a right to think he knows something about it. From Pretoria to Mons and the Somme to
Bomber Command, Pop had been through something. “You ought to know, Pop,” people said. Pop spent most of his day filling up forms, or refilling the forms other people had filled up wrongly. Perhaps for this reason Pop liked to sit on the edge of the bed late at night and talk about himself and the Boers.

“Yes, I'm sixty. You wouldn't think it, would you? I got grandchildren. That's one for you.”

Later, if you woke up, you would see the glow of Pop's cigarette in the darkness. Pop could not sleep, and you wondered what he was thinking.

Downstairs, perhaps, Ethel was on late duty in the mess. The flying crews would be coming in to eat, tired, still in flying-kit, still rather cold, a little keyed up, talking about the flight. They rattled the cups when the food did not come. “Hey, sweetheart, some coffee. Please. And more butter.”

Serving with Ethel, perhaps, would be the W.A.A.F. whom everyone called Baby Dumpling. She had a mild moon-face; she could not hear very well. She moved slowly, and whenever you asked for anything, she almost always smiled softly and said, not understanding:

“Sorry, no saccharine.”

In time this became a catchword for anything you hadn't got. “Sorry, no saccharine.” Ethel knew all the flying crews very well, by sight and name. There was Mr. Christopher, who had dropped one down the funnel of the
Scharnhorst;
and Mr. Ward, who tried to shoot out every searchlight for fifty miles along the German coast;
and Mr. Marlow, who was raging mad because he had been put on instructional. Ethel, serving in the mess, heard a strange, abrupt unheroical language.

“Wrap up, old boy. Pranged it. Everything was u.s. See Jackson go off on full flap? Soared like a Spitfire. Like Johnnie's landing. Any moment now! Thought he'd had it. But no. Piece of cake. No trouble at all. Must try it some time. See your popsy?”

Ethel waited on the flying crews week after week. She did not understand much about flying and understood still less the language of flight. She was always rushed off her feet; but now and then she became aware that someone whose face and name she knew was there no longer. Soon she was saying: “Sorry, no saccharine,” to somebody new.

Probably Pop didn't understand much about flying either. It wasn't like the last war. There were no horses to ride. There was a big difference between riding across the veldt on a bay charger and filling up Air Force forms, and sometimes it was hard to know why he was there. Sometimes he looked like a savage old dog who cannot get his teeth into a bone.

Perhaps it is as well that Pop and Ethel never met. At nineteen Pop was riding across the heart of Africa in his first war; at nineteen Ethel has a husband who is in Africa and whom she never sees. There is something heroic about riding a horse into battle, but there is nothing very heroic about having a husband who is too far away to love. At nineteen Pop had to be careful of dysentery
in the heart of Africa; at nineteen Ethel is whipped by the easterly winds that freeze the bombers and she catches cold in her chest. They have not much in common. The only thing you can say about both of them is that Pop will hardly get a medal for filling up forms and that Ethel will hardly get one for waiting on flying crews and smiling back with the catchword:

“Sorry, no saccharine.”

In that case what have Pop and Ethel to do with each other? Why have I put them together? What am I trying to say?

I don't quite know. I keep trying to make up my mind between the courage of the old, who think they know, and of the young, who do not understand.

For some time he had had a feeling that none of them knew where they were going. They had flown over France without seeing the land. Now they were flying in heavy rain without a glimpse of the sea. He was very young, just twenty, and suddenly he had an uneasy idea that they would never see either the land or the sea again.

“Transmitter pretty u.s., sir,” he said.

For a moment there was no answer. Then Davidson, the captain, answered automatically: “Keep trying, Johnny,” and he answered: “O.K.,” quite well knowing there was nothing more he could do. He sat staring straight before him. Momentarily he was no longer part of the aircraft. He was borne away from it on sound-waves of motors and wind and rain, and for a few minutes he was back in England, recalling and reliving odd moments of life there. He recalled for a second or two his first day on the station; it was August and he remembered that some straw had blown in from the fields across the runways
and that the wind of the take-offs whirled it madly upward, yellow and shining in the sun. He recalled his father eating red currants in the garden that same summer and how the crimson juice had spurted on to his moustache, so that he looked rather ferocious every time he said: “That, if you want it, is my opinion.” And then he remembered, most curiously of all, a girl in a biscuit-yellow hat sitting in a deck-chair on the sea-front, eating a biscuit-yellow ice cream, and how he had been fascinated because hat and ice were miraculously identical in colour and how he had wanted to ask her, with nervous bravado because he was very young, if she bought her hats to match her ice cream or her ice cream to match her hats, but how he never did. He did not know why he recalled these moments, clear as glass, except perhaps that they were moments of a life he was never going to see again.

He was suddenly ejected out of this past world, fully alert and aware that they were not flying straight. They had not been flying straight for some time. They were stooging round and round, bumping heavily, and losing height. He sat very tense, and became gradually aware that this tension was part of the plane. It existed in each one of them, from Davidson and Porter in the nose, down through Johnson and Hargreaves and himself, to Carmichael in the tail.

He heard Davidson's voice. “How long since we had contact with base?”

He looked at his watch; it was almost midnight. “A little under an hour and three quarters,” he said.