The Complete Flying Officer X Stories (14 page)

“I haven't bought a drink for your birthday,” he said, and walked away to the bar.

When he had gone, the girl looked up at me.

“His father is still there,” she said. “They've got him in a concentration camp. You see?”

I felt suddenly that I knew all about O'Callaghan: why he was flying, why he was always so far away, why there was bitterness on his face. I knew too something about the girl. At the aircraft factory, making Stirlings, she thought of O'Callaghan, who flew them. She spoke French with him; she thought of the France they had known and was happy.

O'Callaghan seemed to be a long time buying the drinks, and at last the girl left me and went over to the bar. She found him talking to the barman there, and when she came back with him, her arm was round his waist.

“Oh, Cally, you bad person, you bad person,” she said, “why do you hide yourself away from me?”

O'Callaghan only smiled and looked his old shy self again.

Two nights later they pranged him over Hamburg. They blew him to pieces because he came in too low, machine-gunning the lights because his bombs were gone. It was hard to believe so fierce an attack by so shy a man.

After that I often looked out for Françoise. Every night
I was in Mullins's bar I used to look for her, hoping to tell her how it happened. I wanted to tell her that it was moonlight and that, by some chance, someone had seen him go.

But I never saw her and now, at last, I have given up looking. Instead I think of her happy face, the way she and O'Callaghan talked of a France that had gone, and the winds that seem now more than ever to be her own.

“Oh, why do you hide yourself away from me?”

He used to fly one of the morning mails to the Continent before the war — a steady and at the same time a shaky job, done in all sorts of weather, that finally built for him a total of three thousand hours. He must have known the way across the Channel as a man knows the way, in light or darkness, up his own garden path. As pilots go he was really quite old too: over thirty, really quite old. He had a wife and family too, and when the Nazis killed them in a blitz, there was no longer anything to be done with him. He became one of those legendary figures that read alone in their rooms and fret to be flying and curse the controller and the weather — one of those who ask only to be free for revenge, who are slightly insane in their desire to equal the score and who are talked about in messes long after they are dead.

They are the sort of individualists — sometimes exiles, sometimes men with lost limits — whom you seem to find always among the night fighters. They are those who, because
they have lost countries or limbs or families or perhaps hope, do not want very much to be disciplined. The war for them has become very personal. For them night is more free than day: free darkness, free stars, free moon, free space for the expression of a feud. They find raiders in the moon above low cloud, shadows in the flare of ack-ack and above the glare of ground fires. They are the intruders who look for Christmas trees: the dromes with their landing-light burning and the red and green and yellow eyes of returning planes.

It is often the quietest who hate most, and his reticence was very typical. It really concealed a great ferocity. But when he knocked down eight raiders in one night, he gave all the decoration to the Hurricane. “She'll fly through anything,” he said, not then really knowing how true it was.

He did not really know that until one night in the early summer of 1941. That night he chased a Heinkel over France and then stalked it, coming very close. Often it is possible to get a Heinkel with a one-second burst; but though he was very close he pressed the button a little longer. The explosion in the Heinkel was immense. It seemed to lift him out of the sky. He seemed to be projected violently upwards and then fall through the vacuum created by the explosion down on to a table of flame. He seemed to skid along this surface of flame, seeing it gradually break and rise until it grew into walls of fire about him. This fire, after a few seconds, blinded him, so that for a long time afterwards his sight was partially blacked
out, his night vision gone. He had only the most confused and painful impression of flying through the flames and out of it and beyond it, upside down.

It was all very fantastic. He flew on for what seemed a long time, practically blind. When his night vision came back at last, he saw oil spurting and streaming all over the cockpit. He knew that he had to get down. He was a very long way from home, and his only hope was a strange aerodrome. He did not know the approaches, but somehow he got down at last, still confused and blinded by that fantastic inverted projection along a table of flame.

The quiet night of the summer seemed fantastic in an opposite way after that. He did not like the nights of inactivity. He was always restless, hating and cursing the weather, the long periods of non-operational calm. He must have felt that it needed many nights, many moons, many lights shaken from the Christmas trees before he could come to within even a remote distance of making his revenge complete, if it could be made complete. He had seen his family deprived of the earth and he must have felt that any night when he did not fly was a whole life of wasted opportunity. It was for this impatient anxiety that there was no discipline. To fly, to kill, to smash the pretty lights on the most sinister of all Christmas trees for God's sake — what had the weather to do with that? Hadn't he flown the mail in all sorts of weather? If you could risk your life to fly to safety the trivial correspondence of peacetime just because somebody was impatient for an answer, then you could fly through hell because
you yourself were impatient for an answer that could be given only by you and only in one way.

He went on in this fretful and furious way all summer. “Oh, yes, he was quite mad,” they say of him now. “Quite mad.” You couldn't tell him what not to do, or if you did he wouldn't do it. He would go off on his own and you couldn't stop him. He was quite mad and he had reason to be. They had already decorated him handsomely; now they decorated him again. But what he needed, all that summer, was not decoration but simply the chance to fly, to kill and blow out a few more lights in the darkness across the water.

The chance did not come until the end of the summer. He was out on the sea beyond the Norfolk coast and they say he actually screamed at the sight of a Heinkel. It was the scream of a man who does not find it possible, even by time and bloodshed, to neutralise a hatred. It was the scream of a whole summer of released fury and boredom and inactivity. He drove the Heinkel inexorably down to sea-level. As it jettisoned its bombs, which threw up huge columns of water, he rose away from these spouts and then when they cleared at last closed in again and opened fire. The moment when the Heinkel struck the sea in clouds of smoke and steam was the moment for which he had waited. It did something to set him free.

They decorated him again for that. And then, as always when fighters become very expert, very successful, and very intent on bloody results, they gave him a special mission.

He went off to do it in the calm twilight of an autumn evening. The time between departure and return, for a Hurricane, is not long. The time went by and the short margin of time behind it went by until it became clear that the anger, the hatred, and the desire for revenge had been dissipated at last.

He is the dead now — you are the living. His was the sky — yours is the earth because of him!

When the winter broke up at last and the weather became mild and soft and very clear again and the Spitfires shone like gulls in the sunlight as they flew above the creeks, we began the first of the assaults over the sea. Lying in the shelter of the hills, the earth of the drome had become dried by sun, and whenever the planes took off, three at a time, the spring dust was scattered in a furious pale brown cloud. The planes always went inland over the hills to formate, and for a time you lost them there. Then all at once they came back, beautiful and orderly and clean in formation, sliding across the air as if tied together and drawn along by one piece of invisible string, and in a few moments you lost them altogether over the sea.

The Spitfires are still the most beautiful planes in the world; in the bright spring air it was always hard to think of them as fighters. The light shone on the pale green fuselage and softened still further the sweeping soft line,
and as they turned together over the bright light of the coast they looked as if made for nothing else but showing the beauty of flight.

The morning of the first big assault was calm and clear and there was a little cloud, ruffled and broken, far above. It was early morning and the sunlight slanted in under the cloud. The squadrons went out like two flocks of birds flying southward, one at three thousand, the other much higher, just under the cloud. As I saw them go I could not help thinking of the long, arduous, cumbersome flight of the bombers: how you saw them take off in the afternoon and how you then went away to work or to eat or to see a film and how you came back long afterwards, almost forgetting they had gone, and heard them droning in above the flare-path in the cold darkness. But now no sooner had the Spits melted away into the warm air than you began to listen for the sound of them coming back.

That morning some enemy shipping was steaming up the French coast, and the Spits could see an odd enemy fighter circling above. But it was not until a few moments later that they saw the main fighter force coming out to sea from the coast and it was not until then that the Spits went in to attack. They went in swiftly and confidently — confidently because far up above, just under the cloud, the second squadron sat watching, and because while they sat there, protecting, nothing hostile would come down. It was a little ironical that that squadron should be sitting there, protecting the other; for there had been, until that day, a little embittered feeling between them. It
was a little thing that no one else would understand. It was a little grain of friction about a dispersal hut. The hut was dirty and cramped and the winter rain used to come in the roof and lie in pools on the concrete floor about the coke stove. It was either sleepy and hot in there or cold and raw and wet. There was no colour except the faded green of the chair cushions and no decoration on the walls except the usual pictures of naked girls with their breasts uplifted against the light and a diagram showing how your oxygen works at thirty thousand feet and another asking: “Will
your
guns fire?” It was just a place for pilots to sit and read and change their clothes and go to sleep and be rude to one another, if they felt like that, between flights. It was the sort of place you would think no one would get fond of; it was the sort of place you could never imagine causing a minor war if one party took it away from another.

But that's how fighter pilots are. They are in a sense like race-horses: touchy and high-strung and finicky and, justifiably of course, a little proud. They like the stall they're used to; they kick if it's taken away. Very likely they would hate it if you called them creatures of temperament; but there they are, flying one moment like wild geese over the sea, disciplined and remote, quarrelling the next because someone takes away from them a dirty little hut that let in the winter rain and is warmed by a smoky stove.

Perhaps neither squadron was thinking about this that morning over the sea. Like most dog-fights it was over
quite quickly. The first M.E.'s came out of the sun. In the squadron there was a little fair-haired pilot named Chalky. Chalky looks rather mild and debonair and harmless. It is sometimes extraordinarily surprising what people will do. As the M.E.'s came out of the sun, Chalky turned and attacked them with great ferocity. You do not need to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds and have the strength of a professional wrestler in order to press successfully the teat of a gun, and the target was easy for Chalky at about a hundred and fifty yards. The M.E. pulled up, stalled very suddenly, and went straight down; long trails of black and white smoke wound downward to the calm surface of the sea. Two minutes later Chalky did the same thing again and, looking down, saw the first big double white splashes, like smoke, breaking the face of the water far below. All about him the same sort of thing was happening, until finally no M.E.'s were left in the air. It was all very swift and positive and devastating. You read about it in the papers.

You read about it in the papers, but the papers did not tell you how one squadron sat over another and gave it confidence and made its achievement possible. They did not tell you that these were the squadrons between whom there was a little friction about a hut that let in the winter rain. They are not concerned with the significance of a little thing like that.

Coming back, the two squadrons were broken up. The Spits came back singly or perhaps two at a time, circling the drome and darting away over the hills and then coming
in low between the red spring elms to bounce exuberantly across the field. They seemed to have a certain furious individual excitement as they bounced in alone.

In the afternoon they were out together again. The papers did not tell you about that. The weather was like spring and the air was warm and the sky clear and cloudless for miles over the sea. The squadrons went out as they had done in the morning, one above the other, over the coast, the sea, and then the coast again. But this time there were no ships, no planes, and no battles.

They came back together late in the afternoon. The spring sunlight was golden on the hills, and the sky very clear and blue. The squadrons flew close now, almost at the same height, bright in the clear air and in formation. The planes looked so perfect and impersonal, flying and turning confidently together as if drawn along by an invisible thread of string, that they seemed to have nothing to do with men. You could never have guessed from their impersonal and long order that there were men in them who had felt rather keenly, for some time, the friction about a dirty little hut that let in the rain.