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!