The Dust That Falls from Dreams (39 page)

D
aniel forewent the opportunity to go to Argentina with Fluke, because Rosie had bluntly refused to accompany him. The thought of South America filled her with horror, because she had read accounts of missionaries being eaten by cannibals in the Amazon. She could not be persuaded that the Argentines were just like the Italians, but much more prosperous and civilised, even ignoring the firm opinions of her own father, who was still making decent sums from developing the Argentine railways. He had been quite taken with the idea of having his own daughter on the spot, as a kind of ambassador. She was not, in fact, inclined to go anywhere at all, because of worries that she had been keeping close to her chest, for good reasons of her own that she was frightened to divulge.

The night before Fluke and Daniel left the Royal Air Force, there took place the most marvellous binge since the German surrender. Their mess had been removed from the cricket pavilion because of the danger to it brought about by binges, and was now a small complex of Nissen huts and temporary sheds set up on railway sleepers at the furthest corner of the vast playing field, lest the schoolboys fall witness to the antics of the gallant aviators, and be tempted to emulate them. The food was ordered from a nearby hotel, arriving in aluminium vessels resembling enormous mess tins, and the alcohol was brought in from its cellars.

After a comparatively civilised feast of roast beef, followed by bread-and-butter pudding, and after the loyal toast, Fluke made a speech in honour of Daniel, comparing him to Albert Ball, and Daniel made a speech in honour of Fluke, comparing him to Billy Bishop. These were accompanied by jeers and cheers, and the hurling of buns at the speakers. The Wing Commander, who had arrived in his personal Sopwith Pup for the occasion, stood
up and made an elaborate speech in honour of them both, describing them as stout fellows and Hun-getters the like of which we will never see again, now that the Huns have all been got, and mighty pippers and balloonatics before the Lord. He proposed a toast to ‘Good old Boom and Baring’.

Then the ragging began. Pilot Officer Jenkins played cakewalks on the piano until someone kicked the stool from under him. Daniel stood on the table and sang ‘She Was Poor But She Was Honest’ in the filthiest and longest version he knew, and then sang it again, accompanied by a banjo player who was playing something else altogether, in a different key. They all sang ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, and Jenkins woke up and played ‘Any Time’s Kissing Time’ and then passed out again. Inspired by this, Fluke took his turn on the table and danced an imaginative Highland fling, like a grasshopper in a frying pan, until the table collapsed, amid great splintering. Not to be undone, the Wing Commander, who was a real Scot, crossed two knives on the rug and demonstrated how to do the Highland fling properly.

Fluke climbed on the piano and tried a Cossack dance, but it was an upright, and the top was hardly wide enough, so his left foot became jammed between it and the wall. Carter and Bressingham cleared everyone to the perimeter of the room and had a duel with chairs, which Bressingham won, to great acclamation.

Then Bressingham proposed a bullfight, and brandished the tablecloth as everyone in turn put their fingers to their foreheads and charged him at a crouch. ‘Olé, olé, olé!’

The gramophone was wound up and Wootton demonstrated how to dance whilst performing a handstand. A small group of them played Cardinal Puff, with champagne and whisky, until there was no choice but to go outside and vomit in the fresh air.

‘Drunk last night, drunk like the night before,

And we’re going to get drunk again tonight

If we never get drunk no more.’

Daniel shouted for silence and said, ‘Brothers, over many months I saw many empty chairs, and nothing gives a sentimental
airman like me a greater pain than the sight of empty chairs in the mess. Tomorrow there will be two empty chairs. But grieve not! Fluke and I will return, yea, just like Robin Hood, in the hour of need. We are not dead. We are merely sleeping in the wings.’

‘Like King Arthur, you BF,’ said Bressingham.

‘Like King Arthur,’ said Daniel. ‘I said King Arthur. Robin Hood? Who said Robin Hood?
Nunc est bibendum!
’

‘Nunc est bibendum!’
they roared, and, at this signal, the rumpus began with high cockalorum, and continued with Harry Kelly’s tank game. Fluke emptied out the coal scuttle into a corner, and Daniel went to his hut to fetch another. Then he and Fluke went to one end of the mess and put the empty scuttles on their heads. The sky pilot blew the whistle for the commencement of battle, and Daniel and Fluke charged blindly for the other end of the room whilst their baying and jeering comrades pelted them with coal. It pinged and clanged on the scuttles, and Fluke and Daniel blundered about trying to find the surviving table.

At last the table was found, climbed upon and occupied, and the ammunition had run out and needed to be gathered up. Daniel and Fluke had won, as they always did, once again proving the invincibility of the tank, even when the drivers can’t see anything.

There was a wheelbarrow race round the huts clockwise, and then a three-legged race around them anticlockwise. Somebody ripped up the ludo board, and somebody else poured the chess pieces in the piano to see if he could make it jangle.

Boom alert! Take a note, Baring! The Wing Commander will now make shampoo! Orderly! Fetch the whisky and the champagne! Yes, sir! Two bottles, orderly! Yes, sir! Orderly, fetch the sponge and the bucket! Yes, sir!

The Wing Commander emptied the whisky and champagne into the bucket, the sponge was dipped, and the Wing Commander ceremoniously baptised each in turn. The men attempted to catch the drips that ran past their mouths.

We shall each sup in turn from the bucket! Orderly! Time to pass the bucket! Yes, sir!
Dis manibus! Deo invicto Mithrae!
To us!
To the dead Huns! To good old George! To Albert and Mick and Arthur and James and the whole damn lot of ’em! Orderly! Whisky, champagne! Yes, sir! Orderly, arm us with siphons! Yes, sir! Let battle commence! B flight against A and C! Wait…wait…stand by…on my order…Open fire! Orderly, the fire extinguisher, the fire extinguisher! Yes, sir, the fire extinguisher, sir!

There was a treetop battle. Men climbed on the shoulders of another, and a general melee ensued, which did not finish until the last pair remained standing. Carter broke his wrist and did not realise until the following morning, when the pain of it surpassed that of his hangover. When it was clear that no more mayhem was conceivable or possible, and that they could not be more sodden, they sang to the melody of ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ their own squadron’s version of the Flying Corps anthem.

‘A poor aviator lay dying

At the end of a bright summer’s day.

The weeping ack emmas had gathered

To carry his fragments away.

The engine was piled on his wishbone

His Vickers was wrapped round his head,

A spark plug he wore on each elbow,

’Twas plain he would shortly be dead.

He spat out a valve and a gasket,

And stirred in the sump where he lay,

And then to his wondering comrades

These brave parting words he did say.

“Take the magneto out of my stomach,

And the butterfly valve from my neck,

Extract from my liver the crankshaft,

There are lots of good parts in this wreck.

Take the manifold out of my larynx,

And the cylinders out of my brain,

Take the piston rods out of my kidneys,

And assemble the engine again.

Pull the longeron out of my backbone,

The turnbuckle out of my ear,

From the small of my back take the rudder,

There’s all of my aeroplane here.”

So hold all your glasses right steady,

And let’s drink a toast to the sky,

And here’s to the dead already,

And here’s to the next man to die.’

‘Encore! Encore!’ cried Fluke, and they sang it over and over until at last, for the first time in years, it seemed funny again.

Then the Wing Commander ordered a rag, A and B flights against C flight, and Fluke grabbed a cushion. They scrummed down, arms locked about each other, and the Wing Commander tossed the cushion into the middle. Until the cushion burst apart and filled the air with white feathers, they had as good and rowdy a game of indoor rugby as one could possibly hope for inside a large wooden hut. The Wing Commander got a black eye, even though he was non-combatant.

Finally there was no one left standing except Daniel and Fluke, staggering with their arms about each other’s shoulders as they surveyed the spillage and the ruin of the furniture and the fallen. Even the gramophone was wrecked.

They collapsed side by side against the wooden wall, sliding down it together, and Fluke put his head back and sighed. ‘Ripping binge. The rippingest. Verily, I am by the waters of Babylon.’

‘It’s the saddest day of our lives,’ said Daniel.

‘It’s all postscript now,’ said Fluke. ‘Nothing but bloody postscript. We got matched to the hour, thanked God for it, got through it, binged and biffoed, cursed God and the politicians and generals, shouted and laughed, lost our friends, hurtled about in the sky, slaughtered and murdered and nearly got killed God knows how many times, got the gust up so we could hardly drink for the shakes, and now it’s all gone. Do you remember Albert,
lighting a magnesium flare in the dark and walking round it ’til it went out, playing his violin? And Mick playing that “Caprice Viennoise” on his violin and always saying it was too hard? Do you remember the bombing raids with fruit? I got a rigger with an orange, once. What happened to Mick’s cat?’

‘Piddle the Puss? Don’t know, old chap,’ said Daniel. ‘I always expected to go underground in a wooden kimono. What are we supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over?’

‘I expected to go down in a flamerino. Sizzle sizzle wonk. Good God! The thought of it! I dream about it every night, and I dream about all the boys roast-pigged and sent west, and now I can’t remember which ones are alive and which are dead. The nightmares have got everything muddled up. Sometimes I’m surprised to see you. How many friends did we lose? A hundred and fifty? How many got sent west in a couple of days, and now we can’t remember them? Tell me, what now? For what have we been spared?’

‘I just asked the same question. Buck up,’ said Daniel.

‘Nothing to buck up about,’ said Fluke.

‘We could have ended up as penguins.’

‘Fie upon thee.
Quel horreur!’

‘Do you remember Room 613A? Lord Hugh Cecil?’

‘Christ, it seems like a lifetime ago. Another life altogether. Have you got a gasper?’

‘All gone. Do you remember how we all got worked up over “The Song of the Sword”, and thought what a fine piece of work it was? How inspired we were? Look at it now, and it’s utter bilge and bunkum,’ said Daniel. ‘Do you remember “The Abode of Love”? And how utterly ghastly the depot at Candas was?’

‘Frolicking in the river in midsummer,’ said Fluke.

‘The crack of Spandaus. Crickety-crack.’

‘Won’t miss that much.’

‘Needing to piss at twenty thousand feet,’ said Daniel. ‘What did you do? Funnel and rubber tube?’

‘Just pissed on the joystick. Devil of a job buttoning and unbuttoning. No feeling in the fingers at all.’

‘Christ, I’ve never been so cold.’

‘You didn’t go to Harrow,’ said Fluke.

‘At Westminster we had frost on the inside of the windows,’ said Daniel. ‘Wish I’d known about whale grease back then.’

‘Par for the course,’ replied Fluke. ‘At Harrow we had lumps of ice in our tea in place of lumps of sugar.’

‘I won’t miss the stench of whale grease,’ reflected Daniel. ‘Did you take chlorodyne, before long flights?’

‘Had to. Castor oil plus wind up equals runs,
n’est-ce pas
?’

‘I didn’t take chlorodyne,’ said Daniel. ‘I always made a point of going before I went, so to speak.’

‘No more
Comic Cuts
,’ said Fluke.

‘Wish I’d kept them. I’ve got some
Wipers Times
.’

‘No more DOPs, thank God. Or trench-strafing. Or tennis with the padre. Wonderful forehand.’

‘Wait for the next war, old fellow.’

‘God forbid,’ said Fluke. ‘Did you know that No. 9’s leaving? Going to set up a surgery in Fife, apparently.’

‘You know,’ said Daniel, ‘I never felt so lonely in my life as when we were flying, even in a flight formation.’

‘It was the awful distortion of time that got me muddled,’ said Fluke. ‘All that hanging around from dawn ’til dusk, going on missions at a moment’s notice, having two breakfasts and no lunch and sleeping whenever you could. Time stopped. Or it stretched. Like knicker elastic.’

‘And then the time had all suddenly gone,’ said Daniel. ‘Did I tell you about my horrible dream?’

‘Lots of times.’

‘It’s vile. Keeps coming back, just about every night. And now you’re going to be split-arsing all over the pampas.’

‘So I am. Lucky I’m fond of beef. I think I’m going to be sick.’

‘It might be warmer in Argentina. Does one’s moustache freeze at twenty thousand feet in Argentina?’

‘What happened to the Wing Commander?’

‘Tight as a tick. Passed out. By the piano.’

‘Let’s cut off half his moustache.’

‘I’ve got some nail scissors in my hut. Back in a jiffy.’

Having accomplished the evil deed without opposition, they
settled back against the wall of the hut and set about downing a jug of water. With great pathos Fluke sang:

‘Wrap me up in my old yellow jacket,

Give me my joystick to hold, to hold,

Let me fly once again o’er the trenches,

And thus shall my exploits be told, be told.

‘Let’s drink more water,’ he said. ‘We shall be peeing all night, but we might get away with not having a hangover.’