Every morning when I came downstairs I sat in the mess and looked for it in the papers. “Last night our bombers …” I would read. “Yesterday evening at dusk a strong formation …” But what I really looked for was never there.
I used to consider the case of Dibden. Dibden was twenty-five. He was a pilot with thirty-three operational trips and a D.F.C. to his name. He flew Stirlings and looked more than anything else like a dark, very handsome little Eskimo. You felt that it was a pure accident that he was flying a bomber instead of doing a roll in a kayak or having a snooze in an igloo.
Dibden was a good type, and a very good pilot indeed. But there were some who would not fly with him. Navigators, changed from their own crew, would suddenly develop violent toothache or trouble with their ears. Dibden was rather proud of the way he could land a Stirling in fair imitation of a golf-ball.
Once, on circuit and bumps, Dibden began to come in for landing with his air-speed down to ninety. He pulled her off again and did a sickly turn over the telegraph posts on the railway line and came back to land on the established golf-ball principle, hastily. “It was quite a moment,” Dibden said.
There was nothing about that in the papers. Nor, of course, was there anything about the way he had all his operational hours carefully added up. His thirty-three trips amounted to a hundred and fifty hours.
Very soon, with another fifty hours, Dibden would be a veteran — an old man of twenty-five who had watched others do their three and five and perhaps fifteen trips and not return. Dibden always returned; like a ball thrown at a wall he came back, and the harder you threw him, the faster he returned.
Once or twice a week, when not on ops., Dibden got a little whistled, but the papers, of course, did not mention this either. You came into the mess late at night, tired, perhaps, after a spell of duty, to find Dibden bouncing from chair to chair, table to piano, like a smiling cherubic little Eskimo chasing an invisible bear.
At intervals he stopped being the Eskimo and became the bear, rushing up to other people, especially newcomers, to embrace them. “Bad type, bad type!” he would say. “Seize him, knock him down. Bad type!” We were all bad types when Dibden was whistled, but the papers, of course, did not mention this either. We are very good types really.
After these adventures others came down to breakfast with faces looking the colour of the sheepskin on their flying-boots; they looked at the mess of kidneys and bacon and said: “My God, I’ve had it,” and crawled away.
But not Dibden. He bounced in very late, more cherubic than ever, charmed the first overworked waitress into bringing him crisp rashers, potatoes, kidneys, fresh toast, and coffee, looked at the clock and said something about five minutes to make the hangars, and then began to eat as if he had returned from a hunting expedition. “Pretty whistled last night, boys,” he would say. “Rather off my feed.”
He spent most of the rest of his life being brassed off. “Good morning, Dibden,” you would say. “How goes it?”
“Pretty much brassed off, old boy.”
“Oh, what’s wrong?”
“Just brassed off, that’s all. Just brassed off.”
This phrase, which, of course, was never in the papers either, covered all the troubles of Dibden’s life. It covered all his troubles with his kite, his crew, his ops., his leave, his food, his popsy.
He was brassed off when ops. were on because of the increasing monotony of trying to prang the same target; he was brassed off when ops. were scrubbed because there was no target at all. He was brassed off because there was fog on the drome or because his popsy could not keep her date.
But however brassed off he was, he succeeded in looking always the same: cherubic, grinning, bouncing, handsome, too irresponsible, and altogether too like a schoolboy to be engaged in the serious business of flying an expensive bomber.
One afternoon Dibden was out over the coast of Holland on a daylight. It was his thirty-third trip: the veteran adding another four or five hours to his flying time. Down below, off the coast, he saw what he took to be an enemy tanker and he went down to have a look-see.
The tanker opened up at him with a fury of flak that surprised him, holing his port wing. I do not know what his emotions were, but I imagine that he was, simply, and as always, just brassed off. He went in and attacked the tanker with all he had, bombing first and then diving to machine-gun the deck.
The tanker hit back very hard, clipping a piece out of the starboard flap, but the more the tanker hit, the more Dibden bounced back, like the ball thrown hard against the wall. His rear gunner was very badly wounded, but Dibden still went in, firing with all he had left until the flak from the tanker ceased.
The next day there was in fact something about this in the papers. It did not sound very epic. “Yesterday afternoon one of our bombers attacked a tanker off the Dutch coast. After the engagement the tanker was seen to be burning.”
It did not say anything about the holes in Dibden’s wings or the way the outer port engine had cracked coming home. It did not, in fact, really say anything at all about that brief, bloody, and very bitter affair in which Dibden had bounced back repeatedly like an angry ball, or about the long journey home.
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.