He is a little fellow with an oval head that is quite bald except for a few feathery wisps of grey hair. He has a small tobacco-gold moustache and sharp blue eyes and a way of bowing slightly when he speaks to you, as if he were nothing but the receptionist of a hotel, or a cashier at a bank, or a travelling salesman in toys.
It is not until you look at his hands that you realise that they are not the hands of a man who assigns rooms to guests or counts money or winds up the keys of little engines. They are very short and thick and powerful hands and the fingertips protrude unusually far beyond the small tight nails. Then after you have looked at his hands, which are so small yet so muscular and aggressive, you look back at his face, and you see then that the little stiff moustache and the sharp blue eyes and even the bald grey head are aggressive too, and that even the short and charming bow has another meaning. After talking to him for a little while you realise what this meaning is. He is a traveller in a Stirling, and his toys are guns.
We sit talking for a long time before he tells me this. It is winter and at the moment there are no operations. Still grey mists hang far over the flat land, and pools of yellow mud cover the track along which the bombers are lined up. It has been raining for a long time and there is no wind to drive the mist away.
Suddenly, for no reason, he talks of America.
“You have been there?” I say.
“For a long time,” he says. “I was born here, but mostly I have lived there.”
“Where?”
“In Texas mostly.”
“Which is why they call you Tex?”
“Which is why they call me Tex,” he says, with a smile.
“And how,” I say, “do you feel about America?”
“America or Americans?”
“Americans.”
“Which Americans?” he says.
We both laugh. I look out of the window and watch for a moment the rain dripping down through the mist on the huge iron-coloured wings of the Stirlings, and when I look back at him again, I see that he has stopped laughing and is serious again.
“You think they don’t understand?” I say.
“Not only that.”
“What else?”
“It’s not only time they understood,” he says, “it’s time they got angry. It’s time they got good and angry too.”
“A bit more like me,” he says.
He smiles and we sit without talking for a little while and I watch his hands. He has a way of crooking the fingers of his right hand into the fingers of the left, and then pulling them, as if they were triggers. Finally I ask him if he will have a drink, and with a charming smile but without uncrooking his hands he says: “Possibly. Thank you. Possibly I will. It is very kind of you. Thank you.”
“What will it be?”
“Thank you,” he says, “a beer.”
When the beer comes I ask him what it is like up there in the rear turret on ops. — if he gets bored or tired or very cold; and he says: “No. Only just angry. Very good and angry all the time.” I listen and soon he goes on to tell me about the flak: how it seems to come up slowly, very slowly, as if it will never climb into the darkness.
“Very bad too?”
“Not at all polite,” he says.
“And in Texas,” I say — “what were you doing there?”
“Sheriff.”
“Gun and all?”
“Why, sure,” he says, “gun and all. Notches and all.”
So he goes on to tell me about the life in Texas, the life of a boy’s dream: the gun and the notches, the sheriff and the posse, the remote, enormous country. As he talks I try to see the life as something real, but it unfolds itself to me only like a series of glimpses into a dusky unreality. I cannot believe in the gun, the little sheriff’s office in the little town, the dusty plains, the posse, and the notches whittled on the gun-stock. I cannot believe in the life of his America any more than he can understand, now, the minds of so many who go on living it.
So we talk about flying again. He has not flown for a week, and as I look at him I see that the small blue eyes are sharp and fretful with impatience as much as with anger. “My God, if I don’t soon fly,” he says, “I’ll be swinging on the bloody chandelier.”
He finishes the beer. “You will have another? Please. This time on me?”
I thank him, and when the beer comes he talks a little more. There is a medal ribbon on his chest. It seems more real than the notches in the gun, but I do not ask about it. Instead he tells me about a time when they stooged above the Scharnhorst at Brest. It was the day they scored a hit, and he talks for a time about this, casually, without anger, as if it were an afternoon picnic. It is as though battleships were impersonal things and I know suddenly that what he likes is the personal feeling about it all: the feeling of cold isolation in the rear turret, the sight of the flak climbing up in the darkness in slow coloured curls, the feeling of his own thick powerful hands on the guns.
I know that this is what he likes, but I still do not understand why he likes it. I do not understand why he likes it more than the life of a sheriff in a little Texas town, with his posse and his gun and the notches on the gun, as if he were a hero in a film. I do not understand why he has left that life, to fly in a country that is only half his own. I do not understand why he does not remain, like so many others, isolated, apart, away from it all.
And finally I ask him. “You really like it up there, don’t you?” I say.
“Like it?”
“Yes.”
For a moment he does not speak. Then he looks at me with a fierce little smile, his fingers tightly crooked into each other, his eyes screwed up, hard and intense.
“Like it?” he says. There is nothing of the receptionist or the bank cashier or the traveller in toys about him now. He is far removed even from the little sheriff in the little Texas town. His eyes are furious and the smile in his face is quite deadly. He is caught up by a raw hatred of someone or something that is almost sublime and he no longer leaves me in any doubt as to who it is.
“Like it? I was just born with a natural hatred of these swabs. I was born with it and all my life I’ve been living to work it off. Like it?” he says. “It’s a personal argument with me. It’s a personal war!”
Now I understand, and suddenly I feel quite small and there is nothing I can say.
I can only look out of the windows at the huge dark Stirlings shining dully on the perimeter in the rain, and hope that soon there will be a wind that will drive the mist away.