The Last Flight of Poxl West (19 page)

What I can tell you from that period is that when I was lucid, each time I watched Hamlet fail to express his love before Ophelia's horrid act; each time Niny read to me the last lines we hear from Desdemona before Othello's green-eyed monster overtakes him; even in those moments when Jessica is courted on the periphery as her father is forced to give up his pound of flesh—each time I began to have an image return to me, one that grew stronger at night. In the cobblestones of memory, cobblestones that had been relegated to that part of memory where image cannot gain purchase, swimming images began to return, and chief among them was Françoise's face. My thoughts were so given over to what I'd lost in Glynnis's death, it took me some time to realize that when Niny left and the sun settled below the horizon outside and I absconded to the half-life of my morphine drip, it was not only Glynnis Goldring's face that arose in mind. There was another face that came, too, returned to me with the atavistic pull of a love that won't leave. Perhaps it seems indiscreet to say that it was not only Glynnis's face I saw then, in the days just after her death—when I should most have been mourning—or too honest. Cold even.

But nothing bears truth so wholly as the truth love tells. And as Françoise's face arose in my memory the gravity of my leaving her in Rotterdam began to pull me deep into its grasp. I'd had few moments since I arrived in London to sit with my thoughts. Now that I was confined to a hospital bed, I had nothing but them.
Regret
,
remorse
—these are not the right words here. But Glynnis was gone and I'd left Françoise without so much as a good-bye. Gravity is a funny word here, as the gravity of it began to push so hard, it seemed it might grind me to dust as I lay in that bed.

4.

My lungs took a long time to come around. Once they did I was forced to endure a painfully slow convalescence. It would be many months before I could fly. By then, war had advanced under its own ineluctable motion. News of bombing successes came by radio every evening. Soon Bomber Command had entered what would come to be known as the Battle of the Ruhr. RAF bombers opened the western border of Germany in what we all prayed was the prelude to a land invasion. The United States joined the war. I was only half-conscious of this moment when we could begin to feel all that hunkering down in London, living in Underground stations and driving the battered streets seeking survivors, fleeing to the east to live like our ancestors in caves paid proper recompense.

Once I was back on my feet I was posted again to 100 Squadron. Our aerodrome had been relocated to a small town not far to the north of the very port at Grimsby where I first arrived in England. Within my first months of returning to the cockpit I began my training on a four-engine Lancaster. This required me to log months more air time—flying a bomber was very different from piloting a Spitfire. It was a bit unusual, this move from a fighter to a bomber, but the focus of the air campaign had shifted in those months I'd spent in convalescence. Bomber Harris had grown obsessed with a blanket-bombing attack on virtually every German city, and the RAF needed all the bomber pilots it could muster. Soon enough, my initial disappointment at not returning to a fighter was quickly erased by my relief to be flying again.

Soon I came to know the crew members with whom I'd be flying. Our rear gunner, Parkington, was from Manchester. He took the first afternoon of my arrival to show me our surroundings—the Nissen hut where I was to sleep, a billeted country house we used as mess—and that evening Parkington took me along to a pub called the Rooster's Peck, where lately we would often find ourselves in those languid days just after I'd accrued my next hundred hours in the air, awaiting flight briefings.

After we'd had a few, our navigator and flight engineer, a pair of Londoners both with the last name Smith, who had been educated together and had known each other for many years, arrived.

“So this is our new Polish Yid pilot,” Navigator Smith said. This Smith was a gangly agglomeration of limbs and teeth and appeared as if his only reason for not going for pilot was the sheer length of his legs. He sat in front of a warm Watney's, elbows on knees.

I told him I would be second pilot on the first couple of runs, until I'd come to know the Lancaster enough to have a crew under my tutelage. I wasn't a Polack but a Czechoslovak—Poxl West, a young Jew from Leitmeritz, arrived via Rotterdam to London in the interest of killing Germans.

“Tutelage!” Navigator Smith said. “Big word for a Polack.”

“But I'm not Polish. I'm Czech.”

The rest of the crew had arrived already besotted from having been to a pub down in Grimsby. My complaint was lost amid their din. On this first night I wasn't able to discern the names of every man I was to fly with—a dozen officers from other crews in our wing had arrived along with the rest of ours. While Navigator Smith might have enjoyed poking fun, when drunken Brits got to talking I found myself swept away in a sluice of words. I receded into my warm pint and observations of these men in their dark blue uniforms.

Next morning we went to the mess for a light load before briefing for that night's run, at 1300 hours. This being my first run, I listened to the chatter of the crewmen around me. We were to take a quick run over the Channel, to the small Hanseatic city of Bremen. Other than Bremen's being near the northern coast of the country, this destination meant little to me. As my crew departed I came to try to get some sense of the significance of this path.

“Our plan,” Navigator Smith said when I asked about our mission, he being navigator and so the most obvious person to ask about a flight path, “is to fly in an aeroplane and drop some four-thousand-pound blockbusters on Jerry's head. What more do you need to know?”

I said nothing, finding Navigator Smith unlikely to be my ally, and was ready to depart when another of our crew came up alongside us.

“Ease up, Percy,” he said. This new face belonged to our bomb aimer—and also the front gunner, as that crew member did double duty on a Lancaster. He was a troll at just under five feet, a Canadian called John Gallsworthy. Within moments of meeting him I came to see he would be the antidote to the absence in my routine of Clive Pillsbury. Gallsworthy was an oafish, pigeon-toed nineteen-year-old who acted and spoke with the benefit of an education far beyond his years. Not long after we met we would find we had in common a great love of the classical and contemporary painters my mother had introduced me to when I was a boy. Gallsworthy had taken two years of courses in the history of art at McGill before the war. He stashed by his bed half a dozen books full of the paintings of Constable, Géricault, David, and Delacroix, and I came by a redoubled education in the history of British and French painting from my acquaintance with this thick-bodied pug.

We returned to our Nissen hut to begin flight preparations.

“To start,” Gallsworthy said, “you should know that not only is our navigator Percival Smith a difficult case, but the pilot you're replacing was his closest friend all the way back to their days at Eton. He's predisposed to a certain acrimony toward you. A number of the boys in One Hundred Squadron were with them in a first-year class at King's College, and after training they were left to pick crews. They all chose to stay together—but you and I and the Aussie, Ford, were forced upon them.”

As he would be every time I saw him, Gallsworthy was smoking. He took a deep drag. In my memory I see a middle-aged man drawing upon his ancient cigarette, though Gallsworthy wasn't yet twenty.

“Losing Binghamton has been very hard on Percy Smith. Don't take what you get from him to heart. But, still, you might prepare to be at the center of his sights for the coming weeks.”

All the men in the crew, with the exception of their pilot, had been flying together for the past year. They were the only Lancaster crew to have remained intact since the beginning of the bombing of the Ruhr Valley, having spent better than four months flying in Lancaster S859, S-Sugar. Having lost Binghamton only a week before had undone their imperturbable sense of identity—as flies to wanton boys we are to the gods. They kill us for their sport.

I was to be the new face in this bunch, a group that before my arrival had been on one of the first bombers in the now-famous Thousand Bomber Raid on Cologne—the greatest success of the bombing campaign to date. There was a level of upheaval from having lost one of theirs, and a pride for their successes.

In addition to providing this reading of Navigator Smith, Gallsworthy proceeded to run through the unofficial flight preparation with me, reminding me of what I'd learned more than a year ago in elementary training: One must shave to maintain a proper seal on the oxygen mask he would need above five thousand feet. Most of the gunners wore three pairs of socks, and I might consider doing the same. Above all, one had to know where his parachute was at all times and where his Mae West—what we called the inflatable jacket for a water landing—was, for as S-Sugar had been flying patched up but intact for dozens of runs, its luck was bound to shift.

Gallsworthy interpreted apprehension on my face and finished by saying, “Tonight is to be an easy run.”

I took this as a great relief, and I said so.

“Don't go taking it as that,” Gallsworthy said. “Just hold yourself together. We always draw an easy run before a serious one, to boost morale.”

5.

At 1700 hours Gallsworthy and I jumped a truck to the airfield. Navigator Smith was focused, along with Flight Engineer Smith, on securing something under the nacelle on our side of the plane. Erks performed a check of escape hatches, panels, tires. We climbed into the waist of the plane. I moved up to the cockpit, where I took my place next to the pilot I would soon take over from, the Aussie, Mark Ford, who was to become an officer and would move on to training new pilots. He had huge hands, was notorious for demanding silence from his crew, and I was to learn before long that as much enmity as I'd experienced from the rest of his crew, doing away with him would come as a kind of welcome departure for many men in S-Sugar.

We taxied behind another Lancaster. As we began to roll there was a great noise from the engines and into our headsets Ford said, “Six oh five,” and I looked at my watch and repeated it. Ford said, “Check the oil” and I said, “Oil okay,” and he said, “Flaps twenty-five degrees,” and I repeated it, and he said, “Radiator shutters automatic,” and I repeated that. We taxied farther and a flash of light came from the flight tower, and while Ford pushed the throttle forward with his right hand, I took it palm-up with my left and pushed it full again, an activity I found easiest done with my right glove off, just as I had for that switch back in my Spitfire.

Our path to the North Sea was conducted in Ford's officious silence, save for the moment when we rose past five thousand feet and he called for us to put on oxygen masks. We'd lifted off with the sun at our backs. As we passed over the verdant landscape on our way southeast again, my memory was granted a new layer: In odd-shaped green field after odd-shaped green field were the dark borders of a Cézanne, whose paintings Gallsworthy had lingered upon in his books. Forever the face of each crew member is reconstituted in my mind now in the image of those plots of land. As we traversed the easternmost airspace over England, Navigator Smith called out our coordinates at each turning point and Ford and I made our turns until we were over the North Sea.

Gallsworthy had made clear after the briefing that defenses would be densest over Cuxhaven. We were to be on the alert.

We rendezvoused with a squadron of Spitfires to our starboard, who waggled their wings in greeting and joined us as we came into formation with the rest of our bomber squadron. Our wings were not ten yards from theirs. At altitude, I replaced my glove. It was cold up there. I buttoned the fur collar of my jacket and every few minutes I thought to waggle my toes like the Spitfires' wings. Gallsworthy had warned me the night before of pilots who had been taken off flights for weeks because of frostbite they'd received at thirty thousand feet. I'd been in hospital enough and wasn't going to take any chances.

“Open eyes and clear minds,” Ford said. “Coming up, Cuxhaven.”

Thirty seconds later, orange bursts lighted within clouds below. The closer we came in our approach to Cuxhaven, the more we heard the explosion of flak, until for the first time I felt our plane concuss—Ford banked left. We were so tight in formation we nearly clipped the wing of a bomber not ten feet from the Perspex of our cockpit.

McSorely came over the interphone: “Jerry—port quarter—two o'clock—closing.”

Messerschmitt 110's arose in echelons so close I could see each pilot's face and they opened their guns: a fluid expansion of night against dark crepuscular sky. In the brown light, flak explosions lit the double-finned tails of three Me110's. Red and orange tracers corkscrewed and bullets plinked our side. I dropped my right glove again. I was about to jam hard against the control column and bolt to the airspace below, far out of formation, when a Spitfire came hard on that Me110's starboard. A contrail of smoke leaked from its back. It turned straight down on a perpendicular vector in the half-lit evening sky toward the dark earth.

“Got those fuckers!” Gallsworthy called.

Ford admonished him to keep off the phones unless there was imminent news—I thought to argue that my friend the front gunner's comment
was
news, and imminent at that, but now I was caught in reverie at how we would soon enough be plummeting toward German soil just as that Me110 had. I rode the rest of the way to our target in a state of tense readiness, having for the first time been hit by Luftwaffe fire. In my months of desire to join the RAF, I'd thought of nothing but the chance to kill Nazis who had sent my parents to their deaths, who had dropped the bomb that had killed Glynnis, and the one I felt must have killed Françoise. But there was no German here, no Nazi—just aeroplanes and flak as likely to destroy us as we were them, and the darkening evening. Amid this trance I was barely even cognizant of the moment Gallsworthy called out over the interphone, “Bombs away!” and we gained altitude, my feet pushing down ever so slightly in my boots, our Lancaster relieved of six four-thousand-pound blockbusters and dozens of incendiaries.