The sea moved away below us like a stream of feathers smoothed down by a level wind. It was grey and without light as far as we could see. Only against the coast of Holland, in a thin line of trimming that soon lost itself in the grey coasts of the North, did it break into white waves that seemed to remain frozen between sea and land. Down towards Channel the sun, even from six thousand feet, had gone down at last below long layers of cloud. They had been orange and blue at first, then yellow and pale green, and then, as they were now, entirely the colour of slate. Above them there was nothing but a colourless sky that would soon be dark altogether.
There had been snow all over England that week. For two nights it had drifted against the huge wheels of the Stirlings, in scrolls ten feet high. The wind had partially swept it from the smooth fabric of fuselages as it fell and then frost had frozen what remained of it into uneven drifts of papery dust. In the mornings gangs of soldiers worked at the runways, clearing them to black-white roads edged with low walls of snow, and lorries drove backwards and forwards along them, taking away like huge blocks of salt the carved-out drifts. In two more days the thaw came and yellow pools of snow-water lay in the worn places of the runways. It froze a little again late at night, leaving a muddy skin of ice on pools that looked dangerous with the sunlight level and cold on them in the early morning. It wasn’t dangerous really and the wheels of the Stirlings smashed easily through the ice, splintering it like the silver glass toys on a Christmas tree. Then in the daytime the pools thawed again and if you watched the take-off from the control tower through a pair of glasses you saw the snow-water sparkle up from the wheels like brushes of silver feathers.
And now, beyond the hazy coast of Holland, with its thin white trimming that grew less white in the twilight as we flew towards it, we could see what reports had already told us. There was snow all over Europe. The day was too advanced to see it clearly. All you could see was a great hazy field of cotton-wool that had fewer marks on it than a layer of cloud. Far ahead of us, south and southwest and east, it ceased even to be white. It became the misty, colourless distances of all Europe, and suddenly as I looked at it, for almost the last time before darkness hid it altogether, I thought of what it would be like to fly on, southward, to the places I had never seen, the places without flak, the places in sunshine, the places beyond the war and the snow. It was one of those detached ideas that you get when flying, or rather that get you: a light-headed idea that seems to belong to the upper air and is gone as soon as its futility has played with you.
For a few more minutes the trimming of coast lay dead below us and then, in a moment, was gone past us altogether. For just a few minutes longer the misty cotton-wool of the snow over Europe meant something, and then I looked and could see it no longer. Darkness seemed to have floated suddenly between the snow and the Stirling. What was below us was just negative. It was not snow, or land, or Europe. It was just the negative darkness that would flare any moment into hostility.
This darkness was to be ours for five hours or more. I was already cold and the aircraft was bumping like a goods train. The most violent bumps seemed to jerk a little more blood out of my feet. I remembered this sensation from other trips and now tried moving my toes in my boots. But the boots were too thick and my toes were already partially dead. This was my fifteenth trip as flight engineer but even now I could not get rid of two sensations that had recurred on all those trips since the very first: the feeling that I had no feet and the feeling, even more awful than that, that I had swallowed something horribly sour, like vinegar, which had now congealed between my chest and throat. I never thought of it as fear. I was always slightly scared, in a numb way, before the trips began, and before Christmas, before the snow fell, I had been more scared than hell on the Brest daylights. But now I only thought of this sourness as discomfort. It always did something to my power of speech. I always kept the inter-comm. mouthpiece ready, but I rarely used it. I could hear other voices over the inter-comm. but I rarely spoke, unless it was very necessary, in reply. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to speak, and it had little to do with the fact that Ellis, Captain of K. 42, did not encourage talking. I think I was scared that by speaking I might give the impression that I was scared. So I kept my mouth shut and let the sourness bump in my throat and pretended, as perhaps the other six of us pretended, that I was tough and taciturn and did not care.
“A lot of light muck on the port side, skipper.”
“O.K.”
The voice of Osborne, from the rear turret, came over the inter-comm., the Northern accent sharp and cold and almost an order in itself. Ossy, from Newcastle, five feet six, with the lean Newcastle face and grey monkey-wrinkled eyes, was the youngest of us. In battle-dress the wads of pictures in his breast pockets gave him a sort of oblong bust. In his Mae West this bust became quite big and handsome, so that he looked out of proportion, like a pouter pigeon. We always kidded Ossy about giving suck. But in his Mae West there was no room for his photographs; so always, before a trip, Ossy took them out and put them in his flying boots, one in each leg. In one leg of his boots he also carried a revolver, and in the other an American machine spanner. No one knew quite what this spanner was for, except perhaps that it was just one of those things that air-crews begin to carry about with them as foolish incidentals and that in the end become as essential as your right arm. So Ossy never came on trips except he had with him, in the legs of his boots, the things that mattered: the revolver, the spanner, and the pictures of a young girl, light-haired, print-frocked, pretty in a pale Northern way, taken in the usual back-garden attitudes on Tyneside. “She’s a wizard kid,” he said.
As for the spanner, if it was a talisman, I knew that Ed Walker, the second dickey, carried two rabbits’ feet. You might have expected the devotion to a good-luck charm from Ossy, who anyway had the good sense to carry a spanner. But it surprised you that Winchester hadn’t taught Ed Walker anything better than a belief in rabbits’ feet. They were very ordinary rabbits’ feet. The tendons had been neatly severed and the hair was quite neat and tidy and smooth. Ed kept them hidden under his shirts in a drawer in his bedroom and he didn’t know that anyone knew they were there. I shared the room with him and one day when I opened the wrong drawer by mistake there were the rabbits’ feet under the shirts, hidden as a boy might have hidden a packet of cigarettes from his father. Ed was very tall and slow-eyed and limp. He took a long time to dress himself and did not talk much. Between Winchester at eighteen and a Stirling at nineteen there wasn’t much life to be filled in. He was so big that sometimes he looked lost; as if he had suddenly found himself grown up too quickly. And sometimes I used to think he didn’t talk much solely for the reason that he hadn’t much to say. But just because of that, and because of the rabbits’ feet and the big lazy helplessness that went with them and because we could lie in bed and not talk much and yet say the right things when we did talk, we were fairly devoted.
Between the coast of Holland and the first really heavy German flak I always felt in a half - daze. I always felt my mind foreshorten its view. It was like travelling on a very long journey in a railway train. You didn’t look forward to the ultimate destination, but only to the next station. In this way it did not seem so long. If it were night you could never tell exactly where you were, and sometimes you were suddenly surprised by the lights of a station.
We had no station lights: that was the only difference. We bumped on against the darkness. I don’t know why I always felt it was against the darkness, and not in it or through it. Darkness on these long winter trips seemed to solidify. The power we generated seemed to cut it. We had to cut it to get through.
If we got through—but we did not say that except as a joke. At prayer meeting, in intelligence room, before the trips, the Wing-Commander always liked that joke. “When you come back—if you come back”. But he was the only one, I think, who did like it, and most of us had given up laughing now. It might have been rather funnier if, for instance, he had said he hoped we had taken cases of light ale on board, or that we might get drunk on Horlick’s tablets and black coffee. Not that this would have been very funny. And the funniest joke in the world, coming from him, wouldn’t have given us any more faith than we had.
Faith is a curious thing to talk about. You can’t put your hand on it, but there it is. And I think what we and that crew had faith in was not jokes or beam-approach or navigation or the kite itself, but Ellis.
“It’s like a duck’s arse back here,” Ossy suddenly said. “One minute I’m in bloody Switzerland and the next I’m up in the North Sea.”
We laughed over the inter-comm.
“It’s your ten-ton spanner,” Ellis said.
“What spanner, Skipper, what spanner?”
“Drop it overboard!”
“What spanner, what——”
“Go on, drop it. I can feel the weight of the bloody thing from here. You’re holding us back.”
“There’s flak coming up like Blackpool illuminations, Skip. Honest, Skip. Take plenty of evasive action——”
“Just drop the bloody spanner, Ossy, and shut up.”
We all laughed again over the inter-comm. There was a long silence, and then Ossy’s voice again, now very slow:
“Spanner gone.”
We laughed again but it was broken by the voice of Ellis. “What about this Blackpool stuff?”
“It’s all Blackpool stuff. Just like the Tower Ball-room on a carnival night.”
They were pumping it up all round us, heavy and light, and for a few minutes it was fairly violent. We were slapped about inside the kite like a collection of loose tools in a case.
Then from the navigation seat came the voice of Mac, the big Canadian from Winnipeg, slow and sardonic:
“Keep the milk warm, Ossy dear. It’s baby’s feed time.” And we laughed again.
After that, for a long time, none of us spoke again. I always noticed that we did not speak much until Ellis started the talk. The voice of Ellis was rather abrupt. The words were shot out and cut off like sections of metal ejected by a machine. I sometimes wondered what I was doing on these trips, in that kite, with Ellis, as flight-engineer. He knew more about aero-engines generally, and about these aeroengines particularly, than I should ever know. If ever a man had a ground-crew devoted by the terror of knowledge it was Ellis.
We too were devoted by something of the same feeling. He was a small man of about thirty, two years younger than myself, with those large raw hands that mechanics sometimes have: the large, angular, metallic hands that seem to get their shape and power from the constant handling of tools. These hands, his voice, and finally his eyes were the most remarkable things about him. They were dark eyes that looked at you as impersonally as the lens of a camera. Before them you knew you had better display yourself as you were and not as you hoped you might be.
If Ed Walker had not begun to live, Ellis had lived enough for both of them. For so small a man it was extraordinary how far you had to look up to him, and I think perhaps we looked up at him because of the fullness of that life. A man like Ed would always be insular, clinging to the two neat rabbits’ feet of English ideals. The sea, on which Ellis had served for five or six years before the war, had beaten the insularity out of him. It had given him the international quality of a piece of chromium. He was small but he gave out a feeling of compression. You had faith in him because time had tested the pressure his resistances could hold. He did not drink much: hardly at all. Most of us got pretty puce after bad trips, or good trips too if it comes to that, and sometimes people like Ossy got tearful in the bar of The Grenadier and looked waterily into the eyes of strangers and said “We bloody near got wrapped up. Lost as hell. Would have been if it hadn’t been for the Skipper”, and probably in the morning did not remember what they said.
But all of us knew that, and did remember. We knew too why Ellis did not drink. It was because of us. The sea, I think, had taught him something about the cold results of sobriety.
The flak was all the time fairly violent and now and then we dropped into pockets of muck that lifted the sourness acidly into my throat and dragged it down again through my stomach. It was always bad here. We were a good way over now and I remembered the met. reports at prayer-meeting: about seven-tenths over Germany and then clearing over the target. We had many bombers out that night and I hoped it would be clear.
Thinking of the weather, I went for a moment into one of those odd mesmeric dazes that you get on long trips, and thought of myself. I was the eldest of the crew: thirty, with a wife I did not live with now. I had been, a successful under-manager in Birmingham and we had at one time a very nice villa on the outskirts. For some reason, I don’t know why, we quarrelled a lot about little things like my not cleaning the bath after I’d used it, and the fact that my wife liked vinegar with salmon. We were both selfish in the same ways. We were like two beans that want to grow up the same pole and then strangle each other trying to do so. I had been glad of the war because it gave me the chance to break from her, and now flying had beaten some of the Selfishness out of me. My self was no longer assertive. It had lost part of its identity, and I hoped the worst part of its identity, through being part of the crew. It had done me good to become afraid of losing my skin, and my only trouble really was that I suffered badly from cold. I now could not feel my feet at all.
Suddenly I could not feel anything. Something hit us with a crack that seemed to lift us straight up as if we had been shot through a funnel. The shock tore me sideways. It flung me violently down and up and down again as if I had been a loose nut in a revolving cylinder.
“O.K. everybody?”
We had been shaken like that before, on other trips, but never with quite that violent upward force. I lay on the floor of the aircraft and said something in answer to Ellis’ voice. I hadn’t any idea what it was. I wasn’t thinking of myself, but only, at that moment, of the aircraft. I felt the blow had belted us miles upward, like a rocket.
I staggered about a bit and felt a little dazed. It seemed after a few moments that everybody was O.K. I looked at Mac, huge face immobile over the navigator’s table, pinning down his charts and papers even harder with a violent thumb. I looked at his table and it was almost level. It did not tilt much with the motion of the aircraft and I knew, then we were flying in a straight line. I looked at Allison, the radio operator, and his eyes, framed in a white circle between the earphones, looked back at me. He did not look any paler than usual. He did not look more fixed, more vacant, or more eaten up by trouble than usual. That was just the way he always looked. There had been a kind of cancerous emptiness on his face ever since a blitz had killed his child.
I grinned at him and then the next moment was not thinking of what had happened. The kite was flying well and I heard Ellis’ voice again.
“Must be getting near, Mac?”
“About ten minutes, flying time.”
“O.K.”
She bumped violently once or twice as they spoke and seemed to slide into troughs of muck. The sick lump of tension bumped about in my throat and down into my bowels and up again.
“If I see so much as a flea’s eyelash I’ll feel bloody lucky,” Mac said.
He got up and began to grope his way towards the forward hatch. In those days the navigator did the bomb aiming. Huge and ponderous and blown out, he looked in the dim light like the man in the adverts, for Michelin tyres. I sat down at his table. I felt sick and my head ached. Once, as a boy, I had had scarlet fever and my head, as the fever came on, seemed to grow enormous and heavy, many times too large for my body. Now it was the same. It seemed like a colossal lump of helpless pulp on my shoulders. The light above the table seemed, to flicker and splinter against my eyes.
I knew suddenly what it was. I wasn’t getting my oxygen. It scared me for a moment and then I knew it must have been the fall. I don’t quite know what I did. I must have fumbled about with the connections for a time and succeeded in finding what was wrong at last.
I felt as if I began to filter slowly back into the aircraft. I came back with that awful mental unhappiness, split finally apart by relief, that you get as you struggle out of anæsthesia. I came back to hear the voices of Ellis and Mac, exchanging what I knew must be the instructions over the target. They seemed like disembodied voices. I tried to shake my brain into clarity. It seemed muddy and weak.
At last I got some sense into myself, but it was like exchanging one trouble for another. By the voices over the inter-comm. I knew that we had trouble. The weather was violent and sticky and Mac could not see. Something very dirty and unexpected had come up to change that serene met. forecast at prayer-meeting: clearing over the target. It was not clearing. We were in the middle of something violent, caught up by one of those sinister weather changes that make you hate wind and rain and ice with impotent stupidity.
“Try again, Skip? I can’t see a bloody thing.”
“O.K. Again.”
Whether it cleared or not I never knew. Ellis took her in hand and it was something like driving a springless car down a mountain pass half blocked by the blast of rocks. We went in as steadily as that. The flak beat under the body of the aircraft and once or twice seemed to suck it aside. I held myself tense, throttling my whole body back. If all you needed was good insides and no capacity for thought I was only half equipped. I was not thinking, but my’ emotions had dissolved into my guts like water.
“Bombs gone!”
“O.K.” Ellis said. “Thank Christ for that.”
A second later I felt the aircraft pull upward, as if, bombless, she were suddenly more powerful than the weather. The force of that upward surge seemed to pull me together. It seemed to clean the heaving taste of oil and sickness out of my throat. I was glad too of the voice of Ellis, ejecting smoothly the repeated “O.K. everybody?” We rocked violently, but I did not mind it. Whatever came now must be, I thought, an anti-climax to that moment. We had been in twice and out again. It was all that mattered now.
After two days digging the rescue squad found the body of Allison’s child, untouched but dead, pinned down into a cavity by a fallen door; and then Allison himself, his clothes plastered white as a limeworker’s from the dust of debris washed by rain, crawled into the ruins and carried out the child in his own arms. She was still in her night-dress and she must have died as she was, the door falling but not striking her, making the little protective cavity, like a triangular coffin, in which she lay until they found her. Allison walked out of the bombed house and then, not knowing what he was doing, began to walk up the street, still carrying the, child. He must have walked quite a long way, and quite fast, before anyone could stop him. He did not know what he was doing. He vaguely remembered a policeman and he remembered another man who took the child out of his arms. His idea was to take the child to his wife, who lay in hospital with a crushed shoulder and who had been crying out for the baby constantly for two days. He had an idea that it might help her if she saw the face of the child again.
It was my job among other things to watch the dials of the various engine pressures on the panel before me and to switch over the fuel tanks as and when it became necessary. On me depended, to a large extent, the balance of the aircraft. Sometimes you got a tank hit and the business of transferring the weight of fuel from one wing to another needed skill. There had been records of flight-engineers who, in situations of this kind, and by their skill, had really brought an aircraft home.
I had never done anything as important as that and as I sat watching the dials on the panel I was thinking of Allison. You could never tell by his calm, white face what Allison was thinking. After the bomb had destroyed his house and child he had been away from the station for a couple of weeks. His wife got slowly better. He went back to see her quite often, for some days at a time, during the next six months. During this time he had fits of mutinous depression in which he wrote long letters to the boys, myself among them. They were always the same letters: the story of the child. He had nothing else to say because, obviously, there was nothing else in his life. He would always go back, for ever, to that moment; the moment when he carried the child from the house and up the street, himself like a dead person walking, until someone stopped him and took the child away. When he came back to operations with us he never once spoke of this; and none of us ever spoke of it either. I tried to understand for a time what Allison felt. Then I gave it up. I should have been surprised if he had felt anything at all. All that could be felt, whether it was fear or terror or anger or the mutilation of everything normal in you to utter despair, must have already been felt by Allison. He was inoculated for ever against terror and despair.
“Hell, it’s the bloodiest night you ever saw,” Mac said.
“I could have told you that,” Thompson said. The voice of the sergeant in the mid-upper turret came over the inter-comm. “And Skip., they’ll have us in a bloody cone any minute.”
“God, it’s dirty,” Mac said.
“They’re heading for the straight,” Ossy said. “Arse-end Charlie two lengths behind. Sergeant Thompson well up——”
“Stop nattering!” Ellis said.
We were hit a moment later. It was not so violent as the hit which had forced us upward, earlier, as in a funnel. It seemed like a colossal hand-clap. Terrific and shattering, it beat at us from both port and starboard sides. There was a moment as if you were in a vacuum. Then you were blown out pf it. It was like the impact of an enormous and violent wave at sea.
I don’t know what happened, but the next moment we were on fire. The flames made a noise like the hiss of a rocket before it leaves the ground. They shot with a slight explosive sound all along the port side of the fuselage, forward from where I sat. I yelled something through the inter-comm. and I heard Mac yelling too. I got hold of the fire extinguisher and began to work it madly. I remember the aircraft bumping so violently that it knocked my hands upward and I shot the extinguisher liquid on the roof. I fell down and got up again, still playing the extinguisher. Then I got the jet straight on to the flames and for a moment it transformed them into smoke, which began to fill the fuselage, so that we could not see. Then the flames shot up again. They blew outward suddenly and violently like the blowback from a furnace. I felt them slap my face, scorching my eyeballs. Then I saw them shoot back and they ran fiercely up the window curtains. At that moment the extinguisher ran dry and I began to tear down the curtains with my bare hands, which were already numb with cold so that I could not feel the flames. I don’t know quite what I did with those curtains. I must have beaten the flames out of them by banging them against my boots because I remember once looking down and seeing the sheepskin smouldering, and I remember how the idea of being on fire myself terrified me more than the idea of the plane itself being on fire.
Some time before this the inter-comm. had gone and suddenly I saw Ellis, who until that moment could not have known much of what we were doing back there, open the door behind the pilot’s seat. His face ejected itself and remained for a second transfixed, yellow beyond the smoke. I shall never forget it. I saw the mouth open and move, and I must have yelled something in reply before the door closed again. I had an awful feeling suddenly that Ellis had gone for ever. We were shut off, alone, with the fire, Mac and Allison and myself, and there was nothing Ellis could do.
All this time Allison sat there as if nothing was happening. You hear of wireless operators at sea, when the ship is sinking, having a kind of supernatural power of concentration. Allison had that concentration. Mac and I must have behaved like madmen. We hit the flames with the screwed-up curtains and with our bare hands and once I saw Mac press his huge Michelin body against the fuselage and kill the flames by pressure as he might have killed an insect on his back. The flames had a sort of maddening elasticity. It was like putting back the inner tube of a bicycle tyre. You pushed it back in one place and it leapt out again in another. Several times the aircraft rocked violently and we fell on the floor. When we got up again we fell against each other. All the time Allison sat there. And I knew that although it was amazing it was also right. He had to sit there. Somehow, if it killed us, we had to keep the flames from him. There was no room for three of us in the confined space of the fuselage, and it was the best thing that Allison should sit there, as if nothing had happened, clamped down by his earphones, as if in a world of his own. Allison was our salvation.
It was very hot by this time and suddenly I was very tired. I could not see very clearly. It was as if the blow-back of the flames had scorched the pupils of my eyes. They were terribly raw and painful, and the smoke seemed to soak into them like acid. I had no idea where we were. There were no voices in the inter-comm., but after a time the pilot’s door opened and Ed Walker crawled back to Allison, with a written message. Allison read it and nodded. I tried to shout something at Ed, but I began to cough badly and it was useless. Then the flames broke out in two new places; on the port side, aft of where I had been sitting, and in the roof above my head. When I went to lift my hands to beat the flames they would not rise. It was like trying to lift the whole aircraft. I felt sick and the sickness ran weakly and coldly down the arteries of my arms and out of the fingers.
Then suddenly I made a great effort. I had been standing there helplessly for what seemed a long time. It could not have been more than a few seconds but it was like a gap of agony in a dream. I wanted to move but I could not move, and so at last because I could not throw my hands against the flames I threw my whole body. I let it fall with outstretched arms against the fuselage and I felt the slight bounce of my Mae West as it hit the metal. I lay there for about a second, very tired. My head was limp against the hot metal of the fuselage and my eyes were crying from the acid of the smoke. Then I raised my head. I had come to the moment of not caring. The flames were burning my legs and I was too tired to beat them out again. I was going to burn and die and it did not matter.
Then I lifted my eyes. Shrapnel had torn a hole in the fuselage and I could just see at an angle through the gap. It was like looking out of a window and seeing out in the darkness the reflection of the fire in the room. It was only that this fire was magnified. It was like a huge level dish of flame. It was horizontal and the edges of it were torn to violent shreds in the night.
“Oh! Christ,” I said. “Oh! Christ, Christ Jesus!”
I expected at any moment to see that burning wing tear past my face. It was fantastic to see it riding with us. It did not seem part of us. It was like an enormous orange and crimson torch sailing wildly through the darkness.
All the time I knew that it must split and break, that in a moment now we were at the end. And in some curious way the idea gave me strength. For the first time since the fire began I could think clearly. My hands and my mind were not tired. I thought of my helmet and took it off. The fire must have burnt a hole in the fuselage somewhere forward, for air was now blowing violently in, clearing a gulley through the smoke. I held my helmet and then swung it. The moment was very clear. The flames crawled like big, yellow insects up the slope of the fuselage and I began to hit them, with a sort of delirious and final calm, with the helmet. At the same time I saw the face of Mac and Allison. Mac too must have known about the fire on the wing. His eyes were big and protuberant with desperation. But Allison still sat there as if nothing had happened; thin, pale, his head manacled by the earphones.
Then something happened. It was Ed Walker, coming in through the pilot’s door with a message. I saw him go to Allison and again I saw Allison nod his head. Then he beckoned us and we went to Allison’s seat. Leaning over, we read the message. “Over the sea. Take up ditching stations. Stand by for landing.” We were coming down.
I must have put my helmet back on my head. I must have strapped it quite carefully in the few seconds’ interval between reading the message and beginning to haul out the dinghy. Then Ed Walker came back with Ossy, the rear-gunner, and then the mid-upper gunner climbed down. The five of us stood there, braced for about a minute. The fuselage was still burning and through the window the flat plate of flame along the wing had thickened and broadened and looked more fantastic than ever.
I stood braced and ready with the axe. I no longer felt tired and I knew that I might have to hit the door, if it jammed, with all the strength I had. As we came down, throttled back, but the speed violent still, I drew in my insides and held them so taut that they seemed to tie themselves in a single knot of pain.
Next moment we hit the water. And in that moment, as the violence of the impact lifted all of us upward, I looked at Ossy. It was one of these silly moments that remained with me, clear and alive, long after the more confused moments of terror.
Ossy too was clenching something tightly in his hand. It was the spanner.
K. 42 went down almost immediately, and except for a second or two when she was caught up in the light of her own fire, we never saw her again. I heard the port wing split with a crack before she went down, and I heard the explosive hiss of the sea beating over the flames. I could smell too the smell of fire and steam, dirty and hot and acid, blown at us on the wind. It remained in my mouth, sharp with the sourness of the sea-water, for a long time.
The next thing I knew was that we were in the dinghy. It was floating; it was right side up; and we were all there. I never knew at all how it happened. It was like a moment when, in a London raid, I had dived under a seat on a railway station. One moment I was standing waiting for the train; the next I was lying under the seat, my head under my arms, with a soldier and a girl. When I finally got up and looked under the seat it did not seem that there was room under it for a dog.
“Everybody O.K.?” Ellis said. “I can’t see you. Better answer your names,”
“I got a torch,” Mac said.
“O.K. Let’s have a look at you.”
He shone the torch in our faces. The light burnt my eyes when I looked up.
“O.K. Everybody feel all right?”
“No, sir,” Ossy said. “I’m bloody wet.”
We all laughed with extra heartiness at that.
“What was the last contact with base?”
“Half an hour before we hit the drink,” Allison said.
“You think they got you?”
“They were getting me then,” Allison said. “But afterwards we were off course. The transmitter was u.s. after the fix.
“All right,” Ellis said. “And listen to me.” He shone the torch on his wrist. “It’s now eleven ten. I’m going to call out the time every half hour.”
The torch went out. It seemed darker than ever. The dinghy “rocked on the sea.
“Remember what the wind was, Mac?”
“She was north north-east,” Mac said. “About thirty on the ground.”
“Any idea where we should be?”
“We were on course until that bloody fire started. But Jesus, you did some evasive action after that. Christ knows where we went.”
“We ought to be in the North Sea somewhere, just north-west of Holland.”
“I guess so,” said Mac.
“North north-east—that might blow us down-Channel.”
“In time it might blow us to Canada,” Mac said.
“As soon as it gets light we can get the direction of the wind,” Ellis said. “We’ll use the compass and then you’ll all paddle like hell.”
I sat there and did not say anything. I knew now that my hands were burnt, but I did not know how badly. I tried putting them in my pockets, but with the rocking of the dinghy I could not balance myself. The pain of my hands all that night was my chief concern. The pain of my eyes, which were scorched too, did not seem so bad. I could shut them against the wind, and for long intervals I did so, riding on the dinghy blindly, the swell of the wave magnified because I could not see. It was better to close my eyes. If I did so the wind, cold and steady but not really strong, could not reach the raw eyeballs. The sea-spray could not hit them and pain them any more.
But I could not shut my hands. Fire seemed to have destroyed the reflex action of the muscles. The fingers stood straight out. It was not so much the pain of burning as the pain of a paralysis in which the nerves had been stripped raw. I had to hold them in one position. In whatever way my body moved my hands remained outstretched and stiff. When the sea broke over the dinghy, as it did at the most unexpected moments, the spray splashed my hands and the salt was like acid on the burns and I could riot dry it off. I had to sit there until the wind dried it for me. And then it was as if the wind was freezing every spit of spray into a flake of ice and that the flakes were burning my hands all over again.
I sat there all night, facing the wind. Every half hour Ellis gave out the time. He said nothing about rations or about the rum. From this I gathered that he was not hopeful about our position. It seemed to mean that he expected us to be a long time in the dinghy and that we must apportion rations for two, three, or perhaps four days. I had noticed too that all through the period of snow, for the last week, the wind rose steadily with the sun. By mid-afternoon, on land, it blew at forty or fifty miles an hour, raising white frozen dust in savage little clouds on the runways. Then it dropped with the sun. So if in the morning the wind strengthened we should I thought, have a hard job to paddle crossways against it; which was our way to England. We should drift towards the Channel into the Straits, and then down Channel. Nothing could stop us. The wind would be strongest when we could paddle best, and weakest when we could not steer well. I saw that we might drift for days and end up, even if we were lucky, far down the French coast, certainly not east of Cherbourg. I did not see how we could reach England.
Perhaps it did me good to think like this. I know that afterwards Ellis thought much like it; except that he had a worse fear—that we might be so near the coast of Europe that, that night before we could realise our position, we might be blown into the shore of Germany or Holland. It was at least better than thinking like Ossy, who seemed so sure he would be in England in the morning and in Newcastle, on crash leave, in the afternoon.
And to think of this kept me from thinking of my hands. My mind, thinking of the possibility of future difficulties, went ahead of my pain. All night, too, there was little danger from the sea. It was, very cold but the dinghy rode easily, if rather sluggishly, in the water. Our clothes were very wet and I could feel the water slapping about my boots in the well of the dinghy. We simply rode blindly in the darkness, without direction, under a sky completely without stars and on a sea completely without noise except for the flat slapping of waves on the rubber curve of the dinghy.
After a time I managed to bandage my hands very roughly with my handkerchief. The handkerchief was in my left trouser pocket. I could not stand up or, in the confined space of the well that was full of feet, move my leg more than a few inches. But at last I straightened my thigh downwards a little, and then my left hand downward against my thigh. The pain of touching the fabric filled my mouth with sickness. It was like pushing your hand into fire. When I pushed my hand still further down the sickness dried in my mouth and the roof of it and my tongue were dry and contracted, as if with alum. Then I pushed my hand further down. I could just feel the handkerchief between the tips of my fingers. I drew it out very slowly. The opening of the pocket, chafing against my hand, seemed to take off the flesh. The raw pain seemed to split my hand and long afterwards, when my hands were covered by the handkerchief and warm and almost painless, my head was cold with the awful sweat of pain.
I sat like that for the rest of the night, my hands roughly bound together.
We were all quite cheerful in the morning. The sky in the east was split into flat yellow bars of wintry light. As they fell on the yellow fabric of the dinghy it looked big and safe and friendly. The wind was not strong and the air no colder. The sea was everywhere the colour of dirty ice.
Ellis then told us what our position was.
“I am dividing the rations for three days,” he said. I knew afterwards that this was not true. He was reckoning on their lasting for six days. “We eat in the morning. You get a tot of rum at midday. Then a biscuit at night. That’s all you’ll get.”
We did not say anything.
“Now we paddle in turns, two at a time, fifteen minutes each. If the wind is still north north-east it means steering at right angles across it. We can soon check the wind when the sun comes up. It ought to come almost behind the sun. It means paddling almost north. The risk is that we’ll bloody well go down Channel and never get back.”
None of us said anything again.
“I’ll dish the rations out and then we’ll start. We’ll start with a drop of rum now, because it’s the first time. Then Ossy and Ed start paddling; then Mac and Ally; then Thompson and—what’s the matter with your hands?” he said to me.
“Burnt a bit,” I said.
“Can you hold anything?”
“They won’t reflex or anything,” I said. “But my wrists are all right. I could hold the paddle with my wrists.”
“Don’t talk cock!” he said.
“I can’t sit here doing nothing,” I said.
“O.K.” he said, “you can call out the time. Every hour now. And anyway it’ll take us an hour to bandage those hands.”
Ossy and Ed started paddling. They were fresh and paddled rather raggedly at first, over-eager, one long-armed and one short so that the dinghy rocked.
“Take it steady,” Ellis said. “Keep the sun on your right cheek. Take long strokes. You’ve got all day.”
“Not if I know it,” Ossy said. “I got crash-leave coming, so I’ll catch the midnight to Newcastle.”
“You’ve got damn all coming if you don’t keep your mouth shut. Do you want your guts full of cold air?”
Ellis got out his first-aid pack and peeled off the adhesive tape. He had changed places with Thompson and was sitting next to me.
“What did you do?” he said. “Try to fry yourself?”
“I dropped my gloves,” I said.
“Take it easy,” he said. “I’ll take the handkerchief off.”
He took off the handkerchief and for some moments I could not move my hands. The air seemed to burn again the shining swollen blisters. I sat in a vacuum of pain. Oh! Christ, I thought: Oh, Jesus, Jesus! I fixed my eyes on the horizon and held them there, blind to everything except the rising and falling line below the faint yellow bars of sun. I held my hands raw in the cold air and the wind savagely drove white hot needles of agony down my fingers. Jesus, I thought, please, Jesus. I knew I could not bear it any more and then I did bear it. The pain came in waves that rose and fell with the motion of the dinghy: The waves swung me sickeningly up and down, my hands part of me for one second and then no longer part of me, the pain stretching away and then driving back like hot needles into my naked flesh.
I became aware after a time of a change of colour in the sea. This colour travelled slowly before my eyes and spewed violently into the dinghy. It was bright violet. I realised that it seemed one moment part of the sea and one moment part of the dinghy because it was, in reality, all over my hands. The motion of the dinghy raised it to the line of sea and spewed it down into the yellow wall of fabric.
I was not fully aware of what was happening now. I knew that the violet colour was the colour of the gentian ointment Ellis was squeezing on my hands; I knew that the pure whiteness that covered it was the white of bandage. For brief moments my mind was awake and fixed. Then violet and white and yellow and the grey of the sea were confused together. They suddenly became black and the blackness covered me.
When I could look at the sea again and not see those violent changes of colour the sun was well above the horizon and Mac and Allison were paddling. I did not then know they were paddling for the second time. I held my hands straight out, the wrists on my knees, and stared at the sea. It was roughened with tiny waves like frosted glass. I did not speak for a long time and the men in the dinghy did not speak to me. There was no pain in my hands now. And in my mind the only pain was the level negative pain of relief, the pain after pain, that had no violence or change.
I must have sat there all morning, not speaking. We might have drifted into the coast and I shouldn’t have known it. I watched the sun clear itself of the low cloud lying above the sea, and then the sky itself clear slowly about the sun. It became a pale wintry blue and as the sun rose the sea was smoothed down, until it was like clean rough ice as far as you could see.
It must have been about midday that I was troubled with the idea that I ought to paddle. From watching the sea I found myself watching the faces of the others. They looked tired in the sun. I realised that I had been sitting there all morning, doing nothing. I did not know till afterwards that I had called out the time, from the watch on my wrist, every hour.
But now I wanted to paddle. I had to paddle. I had to pull my weight. It seemed agonizing and stupid to sit there, not moving or speaking, but only watching with sore and half-dazed eyes that enormous empty expanse of sea and sky. I had to do something to break the level pain of that monotony.
Thinking this, I must have tried to stand up.
“Sit down, you bloody fool! Sit down!” Ellis yelled. “Sit down!”
The words did not hurt me. I must have obeyed automatically, not knowing it. But in the second that Ellis shouted I was myself again. The stupefaction of pain was broken. For the first time since daybreak I looked at the men about me. They ceased being anonymous. I really saw their faces. They were no longer brown-yellow shapes, vague parts of the greater yellow shape of the dinghy. They were the men I knew, and I was consciously and fully with them, alive again.
“You feel better?” Ellis said.
“I’m all right.”
“I gave you a shot,” he said.
“I’m all right. I could paddle.”
“You could bloody hell,” he said.
“I could do something,” I said. “I want to do something.”
“O.K. Keep a look-out. Bawl as soon as you see anything that looks like a kite or a sail.”
From that moment I felt better. I could not use my hands, but I had something on which to use my eyes. The situation in the morning had seemed bad. Now I turned it round. There was nothing so bad that it couldn’t be worse. Supposing my eyes had been burnt out, and not my hands? I felt relieved and grateful and really quite hopeful now.
At one o’clock exactly we had a small tot of rum. The wind had risen, as I thought it would with the sun. But there was no cloud and no danger, that afternoon, of snow. Visibility was down to two or three miles and in the far distance there was a slight colourless haze on the face of the sea. But it was, as far as you could tell, good flying weather.
“So,” as Ellis said, “there is a chance of a patrol. The vis. isn’t improving, but it ought to be good enough. It all depends anyway on the next two hours.”
No one paddled as we drank the rum. We rested for ten minutes. Then Ossy and Ed began paddling again. Helped by the rest, the rum, and the fact that the sun was so clear and bright on the water, we all felt much more hopeful. Occasionally a little water swilled over into the dinghy, but the next moment Allison, calm and methodical, baled it out again with his hands.
I kept watching the sea and the sky. At two o’clock I called out the time. The hour seemed to have gone very quickly. I realised that we had one more hour in which we could hope to be seen by an aircraft; only two in which we could hope, even remotely, to be picked up. But I was not depressed. I do not think any of us were depressed. It was good that we were together, dependent, as we always had been, on each other. And we were so far only looking forward, not backward. We had no disappointment to feed on, but only the full hope of the afternoon. None of us knew that Ellis had already prepared himself, as early as one o’clock, for another night in the dinghy.
It must have been about half-past two when Allison shouted. He began waving his hands, too. It was the most excitable Allison I had ever seen, his hands waving, and his head thrown backward in the sun.
“You see it? “he shouted. “You see it?”
I saw the kite coming from north-westwards, about right angles to the sun. It was black and small, and flying at about six thousand.
“It’s a single-engine job,” Ossy said.
“A Spit,” Thompson said.
She came towards us level and straight, not deviating at all. I felt the excitement pump into my throat. She seemed to be about a mile or two away and was coming fast. It was not like the approach of a ship. In a few seconds she would pass over us; she would go straight on or turn. It would be all over in a few seconds. “Come on, baby,” Mac said. “For Pete’s sake don’t you know you got too much altitude? Come on, baby,” he whispered, “blast and damn you, come on.”
We had ceased paddling. The dinghy rocked slowly up and down. As the Spitfire came dead over us our seven faces must have looked to its pilot, if he had seen us at all, like seven empty white plates on the rim of a yellow table. They must have looked for one second like this before they tilted slowly down, and then finally upside down as we stared at our feet in the well of the dinghy.
“He’ll be back,” Ossy said. “He’s bound to come back.”.
None of us spoke in answer, and it was some time after I heard the last sound of the plane that Mac and Allison began paddling again.
The plane did not come back and the face of the sea began to darken about four o’clock. From the colour of slate on the western horizon the sunset rose through dirty orange to cold pale green above. The wind had almost dropped with the sun and except for the slap of the paddles hitting the water there was no sound.
Soon Ellis ordered the paddling to cease altogether. Then we sat for about half an hour between light and darkness, the dinghy rocking sluggishly up and down, and ate our evening meal.
To each of us Ellis rationed out one biscuit and one piece, about two inches square, of plain chocolate. I could not hold either the biscuit or the chocolate in my hands, which Ellis had covered with long white muffs of bandage. Ellis therefore held them for me, giving me first a bite of chocolate, then a bite of the biscuit. I ate these very slowly, and in between the mouthfuls Ellis did something to my hands. “If she comes rough in the night you may get them wet,” he said.
In the morning Ellis had saved the fabric of the first-aid pack and the adhesive tape that bound the biscuit tin. Now he undid another pack and put the bandages and the ointments and the lint inside his Mae West. Then with the two pieces of fabric he made bags for my hands. I put my hands into these bags and Ellis bound them about my wrists with the adhesive tape. It was a very neat job and I felt like a boxer.
“Now we’ll work the night like we did the paddling,” he said. “We’ll split it into one hour watches with two on a watch.”
He gave me the last of the chocolate before he went on speaking. It clung to the roof of my mouth and I felt very thirsty. Below the taste of the chocolate there was still a faint taste, dry and acrid, of the burning plane.
“Ed and Ossy begin from five o’clock. Then Ally and Mac. Then Thompson and myself.”
“What about me? “I said. “I’m all right.”
“You’ve got your work cut out with your hands,” he said.
“I’m O.K.,” I said.
“Look after your hands,” he said. “And don’t go to sleep. You’re liable to get bounced off this thing before the night’s gone.”
You did not argue with Ellis when the tone of his voice was final. Now it was very final and without answering I sat watching the western sky. It was colourless and clear now, with the first small stars, quite white, beginning to shine in the darker space about the sunset. I don’t know how the others felt about these stars or if they noticed them at all, but they gave me a sense of comfort. I was determined not to be downcast. I was even determined not to be hopeful. My hands did not seem very bad now and I felt no colder than I had always been. I knew we should not be picked up that night; or even perhaps the next day. So as darkness came on and the stars increased until they were shining so brightly that I could see the reflection of the largest of them brokenly tossed like bits of phosphorescence in the sea, I did as I had always done on a long trip to Germany. I foreshortened the range of my thoughts. I determined not to think beyond the next hour, when the watch would be changed.
Being in that, dinghy, that night, not knowing where we were or where we were going, all of us a little scared but all of us too scared to show it, was rather like having an operation. It smoothed the complications of your life completely. Before the operation the complication from all sorts of causes, small and large, income tax, unanswered letters, people you hated, people who hurt you, bills, something your wife said about your behaviour, seemed sometimes to get your life into an awful mess. Many things looked like small catastrophes. It was a catastrophe if you were late at the office, of if you couldn’t pay a bill. Then suddenly you had to have your operation. And in a moment nothing mattered except one thing. The little catastrophe were cancelled out. All your life up to the moment of lying on the stretcher dissolved away, smoothed and empty of all its futilities and little fears. All that mattered was that you came through.
My attitude on the dinghy that night became like that. Before the moment we had taken off, now more than a day ago, and had flown out towards the snows of Europe, there was little of my life that seemed to matter. You hear of people cast away in open boats who dream sadly of their loved ones at home. But I didn’t dream of any one. I felt detached and in a way free. The trouble with my wife—whether we could make a go of it or whether we really hated each other or whether it was simply the strain of the war—no longer mattered. All my life was centred into a yellow circle floating without a direction on a dark sea.
It must have been about midnight when we saw, in what we thought was the east, light fires breaking the sky in horizon level. They were orange in colour and intermittent, like stabs of morse. We knew that it was light flak somewhere on a coast, but which coast didn’t really trouble us. The light of that fire, too far away to be heard or reflected in the dark sea, comforted us enormously.
We watched it for more than two hours before it died away. Looking up from the place where the fire had been and into the sky itself, I realised that the stars had gone. I remember how the sudden absence of all light, first the far-off flak, then the stars, produced an effect of awful loneliness. It must then have been about three o’clock. During the time we were watching the flak we had talked a little, talking of where we thought it was. Now, one by one, we gave up talking. Even Ossy gave up talking, and once again there was no sound except the slapping of the sea against the dinghy.
But about an hour later there was a new sound. It was the sound of the wind rising and skimming viciously off the face of the sea, slicing up glassy splinters of spray. And there was now a new feeling in the air with the rising of the wind.
It was the feeling of ice in the air.
When day broke, about eight o’clock, we were all very cold. Our beards stood out from our faces and under the bristles the skin was shrunk. Mac, who was very big, looked least cold of all; but the face of Allison, thin and quite bloodless, had something of the grey-whiteness of broken edges of foam that split into parallel bars the whole face of the sea. This grey-whiteness made Allison’s eyes almost black and they sank deep into his head. In the same way the sea between the bars of foam had a glassy blackness too.
The wind was blowing at about forty miles an hour and driving us fairly fast before it. The sky was a grey mass of ten-tenths cloud, so thick that it never seemed to move in the wind. Because there was no sun I could not tell if the wind had changed. I knew only that it drove at your face with an edge of raw ice that seemed to split the skin away.
Because of this coldness Ellis changed his plans. “It’s rum now and something to eat at mid-day. Instead of the other way round.”
As we each took a tot of rum Ellis went on talking.
“We’ll paddle as we did yesterday. But it’s too bloody cold to sit still when you’re not paddling. So you’ll all do exercises to keep warm. Chest-slapping and knee-slapping and any other damn thing. It’s going to get colder and you’ve got to keep your circulation.”
He now gave us, after the rum, a Horlick’s tablet each.
“And now any suggestions?”
“It’s sure bloody thing we won’t get to Newcastle at this rate,” Ossy said.
“You’re a genius,” Ellis said.
“Couldn’t we fix a sail, Skip?” Ossy said.
“Rip up a parachute, or even use a whole chute?”
“How are you going to hold your sail?” Ellis said. “With hay-rakes or something?”
All of us except Allison made suggestions, but they were not very good. Allison alone did not speak. He was always quiet, but now he seemed inwardly quiet. He had scarcely any flesh on his face and his lips were blue as if bruised with cold.
“O.K., then,” Ellis said. “We carry on as we did yesterday. Ossy and Ed start paddling. The rest do exercises. How are your hands?” he said to me.
“O.K.,” I said. I could not feel them except in moments when they seemed to burn again with far-off pain.
“All right,” he said. “Time us again. A quarter of an hour paddling. And if the sea gets worse there’ll have to be relays of bailing too.”
When Ossy and Ed started paddling I saw why Ellis had talked of bailing. The dinghy moved fast and irregularly; it was hard to synchronise the motions of the two paddles when the sea was rough. We were very buoyant on the sharp waves and sometimes the crests hit us sideways, rocking us violently. We began to ship water. It slapped about in the well of the dinghy among our seven pairs of feet. It hit us in the more violent moments on the thighs and even as far up as our waists. We were so cold that the waves of spray did not shock us and except when they hit our faces we did not feel them. Nevertheless I began to be very glad of the covers Ellis had put on my hands.
Soon all of us were doing something: Ossy and Ed paddling; Thompson and Ellis bailing out the water, Thompson with a biscuit tin, Ellis with a small tobacco tin. They threw the water forward with the wind. While these four were working Mac and Allison did exercises, beating their knees and chests with their hands. Mac still looked very like the Michelin tyre advertisement, huge, clumsy, unsinkable. To him the exercises were a great joke. He beat his knees in dance time, drumming his hands on them. It kept all of us except Allison in good spirits. But I began to feel more and more that Allison was not there with us. He slapped his knees and chest with his hands, trying to keep time with Mac, but there was no change in his face. It remained vacant and deathly; the dark eyes seemed driven even deeper into the head. It began to look more and more like a face in which something had killed the capacity for, feeling.
We went on like this all morning, changing about, two exercising, two paddling, two bailing out. The wind did not rise much and sometimes there were moments when it combed the sea flat and dark. The waves, short and unbroken for a few moments, then looked even more ominous. Then with a frisk of the wind they rose into fresh bars of foam.
It was about midday when I saw the face of the sea combed down into that level darkness for a longer time than usual. The darkness travelled across it from the east, thickening as it came. Then as I watched, it became lighter. It became grey and vaporous, and then for a time grey and solid. This greyness stood for a moment a mile or two away from us, on the sea, and then the wind seemed to fan it to pieces. These millions of little pieces became white and skimmed rapidly over the dark water, and in a moment we could not see for snow.
The first thing the snow did was to shut out the vastness of the empty sea. It closed round us, and we were blinded. The area of visible sea was so small that we might have been on a pond. In a way it was comforting.
Those who were paddling went on paddling and those who were bailing went on bailing the now snow-thickened water. We did not speak much. The snow came flat across the sea and when you opened your mouth it drove into it. I bent my head against it and watched the snow covering my hands. For the last hour they had begun to feel jumpy and swollen and God knew what state they were in.
It went on snowing like that for more than an hour, the flakes, big and wet and transparent as they fell. They covered the outer curve of the dinghy, on the windward side, with a thick wet crust of white. They covered our bent backs in the same way, so that we looked as if we were wearing white furs down to our waists, and they thickened to a yellow colour the sloppy water in the dinghy.
All the time Allison was the only one who sat upright. At first I thought he was being clever; because he did not bend his back the snow collected only on his shoulders. That seemed a good idea. Then, whenever I looked up at him, I was struck by the fact that whether he was paddling or bailing, his attitude was the same. He sat stiff, bolt upright, staring through the snow. His hands plunged down at his side automatically, digging a paddle into the water, or scooping the water out of the dinghy and bailing it away. His eyes, reflecting the snow, were not dark. They were cold and colourless. He looked terribly thin and terribly tired, and yet not aware of being tired. I felt he had simply got into an automatic state, working against the sea and the snow, and that he did not really know what he was doing. Still more I felt that he did not care.
I knew the rest of us cared very much. After the first comfortable shut-in feeling of the snow had passed we felt desperate. I hated the snow now more than the sea. It shut out all hope that Air-Sea Rescue would ever see us now. I knew that it might snow all day and I knew that after it, towards sunset, it would freeze. If it snowed all day, killing all chances of rescue, and then froze all night, we should be in a terrible state the next morning, our third day.
The thought of this depressed me, for a time, very much. It was now about half-past twelve. The time seemed crucial. Unless it stopped snowing very soon, so that coastal stations could send out patrols in the early afternoon, we must face another night on the dinghy. I knew that all of us, with the exception of Allison, felt this. We were very tired and cold and stiff from not stretching our bodies, and the snow, whirling and thick and wet, seemed to tangle us up into a circle from which we were never going to get out.
In such moments as this Ellis did the right thing. He had driven us rather hard all morning, getting us out of small depressed moments by saying: “Come on, we’ve got to keep going: Come on,” or with a dry joke, “No fish and chips for Ossy if’ we don’t keep going. It’s tough tit for Ossy if he doesn’t get his fish and chips.” He knew just when he could drive us no longer. Now he let up.
“O.K.,” he said. “Give it a rest.”
“Holy Moses,” Mac said “I used to love snow. Honest, I used to love the bloody stuff.”
Even Mac looked tired. The snow had collected, on his big head, giving him the look of an old man with white hair.
“Jesus,” he said. “I’ll never feel the same way about snow again.”
“What time do you make it?” Ellis said to me.
“Twelve forty-five coming up to six—now,” I said.
“O.K.,” he said. “Set your watches.”
While we set our watches, synchronising them, calling out the figures, Ellis got out the rum, the chocolate and the biscuits. Afterwards I looked back and knew it was not so much the food, as Ellis’s order to synchronise the watches, that made me feel better at that moment. Time was our link with the outside world. From setting our watches together we got a sense of unity.
Ellis gave out the chocolate and the biscuits, in the same ration as before.
“Everybody all right? Ossy?”
“I’m a bloody snowball, if that’s anything,” Ossy said.
“Good old Ossy.”
Ellis looked at each of us in turn. “All right, Ally?” he said.
Allison nodded. He still sat bolt upright and he still did not speak.
Ellis did not speak either until it was time to tot out the rum. He used the silver bottom of an ordinary pocket-flask for the rum and this, about a third full, was our ration. He always left himself till last, but this time he did not drink. “God, I always hate the stuff. It tastes like warm rubber,” he said.
“Drink it, Ally,” he said.
Allison held out his hand. I could see that the fingers were so cold that, like my own after the burning, they would not flex. I saw Ellis bend them and fold them, like a baby’s, over the tot. I saw the hand remained outstretched, stiff in the falling snow, until finally Allison raised it slowly to his lips. I think we all expected to see that cup fall out of Allison’s hands, and we were all relieved and glad when at last Ellis reached over and took it away.
As we sat there, rocking up and down, there was a slight lessening of the snow. Through the thinning flakes we could see, soon, a little more of the sea. No sooner could I see more of it than I hated it more. I hated the long troughs and the barbarous slits of foam between them and the snow driving, curling and then flat, like white tracer above. I hated the ugliness and emptiness of it and above all the fact of its being there.
That afternoon a strange thing happened. By two o’clock the snow grew thinner and drew back into a grey mist that receded over the face of the sea. As it cleared away altogether the sky cleared too, breaking in a southerly direction to light patches of watery yellow which spread under the wind and became spaces of bright blue. Across these, spaces the sun poured in misty shafts and the inner edges of cloud were whiter than the snow had been. Far off, below them, we saw pools of light on the sea.
We were now paddling roughly in a straight line away from the sun. We were all, with the exception of Allison, quite cheerful. There was something tremendously hopeful about this breaking up of the sky after snow.
Allison alone sat there as if nothing had happened. He had not spoken since morning. He still looked terribly cold and tired and yet as if he did not know he was tired.
Suddenly he spoke.
“Very lights,” he said.
“Hell!” Mac said. “Where?”
“Look,” Allison said.
He was pointing straight before us. The sky had not broken much to the north and the cloud there was very low.
“I don’t see a bloody thing,” Mac said.
“Christ, if it is,” Ossy said. “Christ, if it is.”
We were all very excited. The paddling and bailing stopped, and we rocked in the water.
“Where did you see this? “Ellis said,
“There,” Allison said. He was still pointing, but his eyes were as empty as they had always been.
“You’re sure they were Very lights?”
“I saw them.”
“How long were they burning?”
“They just lit up and went out.”
“But where? Where exactly?”
“You see the dark bit of cloud under there? They came out of that.”
We all looked at that point for a long time. I stared until my eyeballs seemed to smart with hot smoke again.
“Ally, boy,” Mac said. “You must have awful good eyesight.”
“What would Very lights be doing at this time of day? “Ed said.
“I can’t think,” Ellis said. “Probably Air-Sea Rescue. It’s possible. They’d always be looking.”
“A kite wouldn’t be dropping them unless it saw something.”
“It might. Funny things happen.”
“Hell they do,” Mac said.
“You couldn’t expect even Air-Sea Rescue to see us in this muck,” I said.
Ossy and Ed began to paddle again. As we went forward we still kept our eyes on the dark patch of cloud, but nothing happened. Nor did Allison speak again; nor had any of us the heart to say we thought him mistaken.
For a time we hadn’t the heart for much at all. The situation in the dinghy now looked messy and discouraging. The melting snow was sloppy in the bottom, a dirty yellow colour; there were too many feet. It was still very cold and when we tried to do exercises—I could only beat my elbows against my sides—we knocked clumsily against each other. We had done that before, in the morning, and once or twice it had seemed mildly funny. Now it was more irritating than the snow, the cold and the disappointment of Allison’s false alarm.
All this time the sky was breaking up. In the west and south, through wide blue lakes of cloud, white shafts of sun fell as bright and cold as chromium on the sea. These shiny edges of sunlight sometimes produced an hallucination. They looked in the distance like very white cliffs, jagged and unbelievably real. Staring at them, it was easy to understand why Allison had seen a Very light in a cloud.
So we paddled until three o’clock; and I knew it was hopeless. We had another hour of daylight: the worst of the day. The sea, with the sun breaking on it, looked terribly empty; but with the darkness on it we should at least have nothing to look for. Ellis, as always, was very good at this moment. His face was red and fresh and his eyes, bright blue, did not look very tired. He had managed somehow to keep neater than the rest of us. You felt he had kept back enormous reserves of energy and hope and that he hadn’t even begun to think of the worst. And now he suddenly urged us to sing. “Come on, a sing-song before tea, chaps,” he said. “Come on.”
So we began singing. We first sang Shenandoah and Billy Boy. Then we sang other songs, bits of jazz, and Daisy, Daisy, then we came back to Shenandoah. We sang low and easy and there was no resonance about it because of the wind. But it was a good thing to sing because you could sing the disappointment out of yourself and it kept you from thinking. We must have gone on singing for nearly an hour and the only one of us who didn’t sing much was Allison. From time to time I saw his mouth moving. It simply moved up and down, rather slowly, erratically, out of tune. Whatever he was singing did not belong to us. He was very pale and the cavity of his mouth looked blue and his eyes were distant and dark as if they were still staring at those Very lights in the distant cloud.
It must have been about four o’clock when he fell into the dinghy. The sea pitched us upward and Allison fell forward on his face. He fell loosely and his head struck the feet crowded in the bottom of the dinghy, which rocked violently with the fall.
Ellis and Mac pulled him upright again. His face was dirty with snow water and his eyes were wide open. Ellis began to rub his hands. The veins on the back of them were big and blue, the colour of his lips, and he began to make a choking noise in his throat. His body was awkward and heavy in the well of the dinghy and it was hard to prevent him from slipping down again. The dinghy rocked badly and I thought we might capsize.
“Put him between my knees,” I said. “I can hold him like that.”
They propped him up and I locked his body with my knees, keeping it from falling. I held my bandaged hands against his face and he made a little bubbling noise with his mouth, not loud, but as if he was going to be gently sick.
As I held him like that and as we bumped about in the dinghy, badly balanced, swinging and rocking like one of those crazy boats at a fun fair, I looked at the sky.
The sun had suddenly gone down. Already above the sunset the sky was clear and green and I could feel the frost in the air.
I held Allison’s body with my knees all that night and his face with my damaged hands. My legs are long and gradually the feeling went out of them. But once I had got into that position it was too complicated to move.
As darkness came down ice began to form like thin rough glass on the outer sides of the dinghy, where the snow had first settled and thawed. Frost seemed to tighten up the rubber, which cracked off the ice as it moved with the waves. It was bitterly cold, very clear and brittle, without much wind. The sky was very clear too and there was a splintering brightness in the stars.
At intervals of about an hour we gave Allison drinks of rum. At these moments he did not speak. He would make the gentle, bubbling noise with his lips and then leave his mouth open, so that a little of the rum ran out again. I would shut his mouth with my hand. Sometimes I put my unbandaged wrists on his face and it was as cold as stone.
All that night, in between these times, I thought a lot. The cold seemed to clear my brain. All the feeling had gone from my hands and from my legs and thighs, and my head seemed almost the only part of me alive. For the first time I thought of what might be happening, or what might yet happen, at home. I thought of base, where they would be wondering about us. I could see the Mess anteroom: the long cream room with the fire at one end, the pictures of Stirlings on the walls, the chaps playing cards, someone drumming to a Duke Ellington record on the lid of the radio. I wondered if they had given us up. I wondered too about the papers. If they had already said anything about us it could only be in the dead phrase: one of our aircraft is missing. Hearing it, did anyone think about it again? We had been drifting for two days on the sea and for a long time we had been on fire in the air. If we didn’t come back no one would ever know. If we did come back the boys at the station would be glad, and perhaps the papers would give us a line in a bottom corner. I didn’t feel very bitter but that night, as I sat there, holding Allison with my burnt hands, I saw the whole thing very clearly. We had been doing things that no one had ever done before. Almost every week you read of aircraft on fire in the air. You read it in the papers and then you turned over and read the sports news. You heard it on the radio and the next moment you heard a dance band. You sat eating in restaurants and read casually of men floating for days in dinghies. God, I was hungry. I began to think of food, sickly and ravenously, and then put it out of my mind. You read and heard of these things, and they stopped having meaning. Well, they had meaning for me now. I suddenly realised that what we were doing was a new experience in the world. Until our time no one had ever been on fire in the air. Until our time there had never been so many people to hear of such things and then to forget them again.
I wanted to speak. Where my stomach should have been there was a distended bladder of air. I pressed Allison’s head against it. I must have moved sharply, not thinking, and he groaned.
“Ally?” I said. “Are you all right, Ally?”
He did not answer. Ellis gave him a little more rum and then I held his mouth closed again.
I looked at the stars and went on thinking. The stars were very frosty and brittle and green. One of them grew bright enough to be reflected, broken up, in the black water. Did my wife care? This, I thought, is a nice moment to reason it out. Neither of us had wanted to have children. We hadn’t really wanted much at all except a flat, a lot of small social show, and a good time. Looking back, I felt we were pretty despicable. We had really been attracted by a mutual selfishness. And then we got to hating each other because the selfishness of one threatened the selfishness of another. A selfishness that surrenders is unselfishness. Neither of us would surrender. We were too selfish to have children; we were too selfish to trouble about obligations. Finally, we were too selfish to want each other.
All this, it seemed, had happened a long time ago. Life in the dinghy had gone on a thousand years. I had never had the use of my hands, and I had never eaten anything but chocolate and biscuit and rum. Curious that they were luxuries. I had never sat anywhere exception the edge of that dinghy, with the sea beating me up and down, the ice cracking on the sides, and my feet in freezing water. I had never done anything except hold Allison with my hands and knees. And now I had held him so long that we seemed frozen together.
Every time we gave Allison the rum that night, I smelled it for a long time in the air, thick and sweet. Once it ran down out of his open mouth over my wrists and very slowly, so as not to disturb him, I raised my wrists and licked it off. My lips were sore with salt and, because it was not like drinking from a cup, the rum burnt the cracks in them. I was cold too and moving my hands was like moving some part of Allison’s body, not my own.
Then once more the rum ran out of Allison’s mouth and poured over my hands, and suddenly I thought it strange that he could not hold it. I waited for Ellis to crawl back across the dinghy and sit down. Then I tried to find Allison’s hands. They were loose and heavy at his sides. I tried to move his head, so that I could speak to him. His face was white in the starlight. I bent down at last and touched it with my own.
“Ally,” I thought. “Jesus, Ally. Jesus, Jesus.”
His mouth was stiff and open and his face was colder than the frost could ever make it.
I held him for the rest of that night, not telling even Ellis he was dead. It was then about three o’clock. I felt that it was not the frost or the sea or the wind that had killed him. He had been dead for a long time, He had been dead ever since he walked out of the bombed house with the child in his arms.
The death of Allison made me feel very small. Until morning, when the others knew, it did not depress me. For the rest of the night, in the darkness, with the frost terribly vicious in the hours up to seven o’clock, my jacket stiff with ice where the spray had frozen and the ice thin and crackling in the well of the dinghy, I felt it was a personal thing between myself and Allison. I had got myself into the war because, at first, it was an escape from my wife. It was an escape from the wrong way of doing the toast in the morning, the way she spilled powder on her dressing-gown, the silly songs she sang in the bathroom. It was an escape from little things that I magnified by selfishness into big things. I think I wanted to show her, too, that I was capable of some sort of bravery; as if I had any idea what that was.
Now, whatever I had done seemed small beside what Allison had done. I remember how Allison and his wife had wanted the baby, how it had come after Allison had joined up, how its responsibilities excited them. I saw now what he must have felt when he walked out of the bombed house with all his excitement, his joy and his responsibilities compressed into a piece of dead flesh in his hands. I understood why he had been dead a long time.
Just before seven o’clock, when it became light enough for us to see each other, I called Ellis and told him Allison was dead. The thing was a great shock to the rest of us and I saw a look of terror on Ossy’s face. Then Ellis and Mac took Allison and laid him, as best they could, in the bottom of the dinghy. None of us felt like saying much and it was Mac who covered Allison’s face with his handkerchief, which fluttered and threatened to blow away in the wind.
“It’s tough tit, Ally boy. It’s tough tit,” he said.
I felt very lonely.
The wind blew away the handkerchief about ten minutes later, leaving the face bare and staring up at us. The handkerchief floated on the sea and floated away, fast on bars of foam that were coming up stronger now with the morning wind. We stared for a moment at the disappearing handkerchief, because it was a more living thing than Allison’s face lying in the sloppy yellow ice water in the dinghy, and then Thompson, who never spoke much unless he had something real to say, suggested we should wrap him in his parachute.
“At least we can cover him with it,” he said.
So while Ed and Ossy paddled and Thompson baled what water he could and I sat there helpless, trying to get some flexibility into the arms cramped by holding Allison all night, Mac and Ellis wrapped the body roughly, as best they could, in the parachute. Mac lifted the body in his arms while Ellis and Thompson baled ice and water from the dinghy, and then Ellis spread the parachute. Together they wrapped Allison in it like a mummy.
“Christ, why didn’t we think of this before?” Ellis said. “It would have kept him warm. I blame myself.”
“He died a long time ago,” I said.
“He what?”
“You couldn’t have done anything,” I said. Soon they finished wrapping him in the parachute and he seemed to cover almost all the space in the dinghy, so that we had nowhere to put our feet and we kept pushing them against him. The sun was up now, pale yellow in a flat sky, but it was still freezing. The sea seemed to be going past at a tremendous pace, black and white and rough, as if we were travelling with a current or a tide.
I could see that Ossy and Ed, Walker were terribly dejected. We were all pale and tired, with bluish dark eyes, and stubby beards which seemed to have sucked all the flesh from our cheek-bones. But Ossy and Ed, partly through the intense cold, much more through the shock of Allison’s death, seemed to have sunk into that vacant and silent state in which Allison himself had been on the previous afternoon. They were staring flatly at the sea.
“O.K., chaps,” Ellis said, “breakfast now.”
He began to ration out the biscuits and the chocolate, One piece of chocolate had a piece of white paper round it. As Ellis unwrapped it the wind tore it overboard. It too, like the handkerchief, went away at great speed, as if we were travelling on a tide.
Suddenly Ellis stopped in the act of holding a piece of chocolate to my mouth. I opened my mouth ready to bite it. So we both sat transfixed, I with my mouth open, Ellis holding the chocolate about three inches away.
“You see it?” he said. “You see it? You see?”
“Looks like a floating elephant,” Mac said.
“It’s a buoy!” Ellis said. “Don’t you see, it’s a buoy!”
“Holy Moses,” Mac said.
“Paddle!” Ellis said. “For Christ’s sake, paddle! All of you, paddle.”
I made a violent grab at the chocolate with my mouth, partly biting it and Ellis’s finger before it was snatched away. Ellis swore and we all laughed like hell. The sight of that buoy, rocking about half a mile westwards, like a drunken elephant, encouraged us into a light-hearted frenzy, in which at intervals we laughed again for no reason at all.
“We’re going in with the tide,” I said. “I’ve been watching it.”
“Paddle like hell!” Ellis said. “Straight for the buoy. Paddle!”
I paddled with my mind. They said afterwards that I paddled also with my hands. The buoy seemed to go past us, two or three minutes later, at a devil of a speed, though it was we who were travelling. The wind had freshened with the sun and we seemed to bounce on the waves, shipping water. But we had forgotten about bailing now. We had forgotten almost about the body of Allison, rolling slightly in the white parachute in the dirty sea water at our feet. We had forgotten about everything except frantically paddling with the tide.
It was likely that we should have seen land a long time before this, except that it was without cliffs and was a low line of sand unlit by sun. In the far distance there was a slight haze which turned to blue and amber as the sun rose. Then across the mist and the colour, the line of land broke like a long wave of brown.
Ten minutes later there was hardly any need to paddle at all. The tide was taking us in fast, in a calmer stretch of water, towards a flat, wide beach of sand. Beyond it there was no town. There were only telegraph wires stretching up and down the empty coast, and soon we were so near that I could see where the snow had beaten and frozen on the black poles, in white strips on the seaward side.
I looked at my watch as we floated in, not paddling now, on the tide. It was about eight o’clock and we had been, as far as I could tell, nearly sixty hours in the dinghy.
Then as we came in, and the exhilaration of beating in towards the coast on that fast tide began to lessen, I became aware of things. I became aware of my hands. They were swollen from lack of attention and stiff from holding Allison. I became aware of hunger. The hollowness of my stomach filled at intervals with the sickness of hunger and then emptied again. I became aware again of Allison, wrapped in the parachute, once very white, now dirty with sea-water and the excited marks of our feet, and I became aware, in one clear moment before the dinghy struck the sand, of Ellis and Mac and Ed and Thompson and all that they now meant to me. I became aware of Ossy, standing in the dinghy like a crazy person, waving his spanner.
When the dinghy hit the sand and would go no further I jumped overboard. There was no feeling of impact as my legs struck the shore. They seemed hollow and dead. They folded under me as if made of straw and I fell on my face on the wet sand of the beach, helpless, and lay there like a fool.
And as I lay there, the sand wet and cold and yet good on my face, I became aware of a final thing. We had been out a long way, and through a great deal together. We had been through fire and water, death and frost, and had come home.
And soon we should go out again.