Harrison was one of those lean, brown, old-eyed Australians who seem to accept England with a tolerance that Canadians never know. If there were things about England that needed changing or setting right Harrison rarely talked about them. If there were better pilots I rarely met them. Harrison was quiet, modest, friendly, and as tough as hell.
It was not Harrison, but someone else, who first talked to me of the idea that planes and ships have the same delicate and temperamental ways. Just as you find no two ships alike, so you find no two planes alike; just as you find ships that are heavy, graceless, unalive, so you find planes that are dull and wooden in the air. In the same way that seamen come to know, trust, and finally get fond of a ship, knowing that she is a living thing and will never fail them, so pilots come to know and trust and get fond of a plane, knowing she will bring them home. In every squadron there is, I suppose, a plane that everybody hates. Then one day somebody quietly wraps it up in a distant corner of the drome and everybody is relieved and glad. But in every squadron there is a plane that everyone likes, that is something more than a pattern of steel and wood and instruments and mechanism, that is a living, graceful, fortunate, and ultimately triumphant thing, and this was the sort of plane that Harrison had.
Harrison’s plane was a big four-engined Stirling called K for Kitty. The kite, like Harrison, was no stranger to the shaky do. On a trip to Brest the bomb doors froze up and would not release. This was bad enough. But the starboard outer also failed on the journey home, so that Harrison was obliged to land on three engines, with a full bomb load, in darkness — the sort of heroism for which, at the moment, we have struck no special gong. On other trips other things happened. Something happened to the flaps; the undercarriage jammed; the radio went u.s. — it does not matter. For the heroism of overcoming such minor misfortunes there are no gongs either.
After such trips Harrison naturally trusted and grew fond of K for Kitty. Not that I think he ever said so. He would call the kite a good kite or perhaps, if he were a little happy, a wizard kite. These events in K for Kitty bore, after all, only a very slight relation to suicide. It was not until the big Brest trip that anything really serious happened to the plane.
I am not sure if this raid, made on a clear blue winter afternoon when the sunlight was light orange-coloured and the horizon peaceful with light haze, was the biggest ever made on Brest. But that night many bottles were opened and many songs sung, and I conclude from that, at least, that it was very big. And among the many planes that went Harrison was in K for Kitty.
Nor am I sure if they tried to blow Harrison to small pieces before he bombed or after. Possibly both. Finally a force of Messerschmitts attacked him, in a rapid succession of ten, and put out of action every turret he had. Tracer tore at all angles through the nose and body of the plane. It shaved the skin off the knuckles of Harrison and his second dicky. It smashed the inter-comm. and mortally wounded the engineer. Blood flowed over the floor of the plane, mingling stickily with oil. It was hard to stand up and the gunners could not fire and there were no warning voices in the inter-comm.
Many other things had happened that Harrison did not then know about, but was to know about later. He was glad enough to see Spitfires coming up as escort, and the Messerschmitts diving home to tea. He was glad to be out of it and setting course for home again. He was quite glad that K for Kitty was his plane.
At home, in the bright calm golden air of the late winter afternoon, Harrison brought her down gently and beautifully, making a perfect landing. He even succeeded in holding for some distance to the runway. And then everything that had not already happened began to happen at once. It was as if the kite had blown home held together only by strips of sticky plaster and string; as if she were a toy plane, put together by children, that could not withstand the vibration of contact with earth.
She began to fall to pieces suddenly, terrifyingly, and almost systematically. The starboard outer air-screw fell off, and then the starboard inner engine fell out completely. Then the complete starboard wing fell off, and then both the fallen wing and the fallen engine caught fire. Just before she came to rest, the port wing was flung high into the air like the arm of someone drowning, and remained there, high and stiff and awkward and dead.
I do not know how Harrison and the crew got out of the plane, slipping and skidding in the oily blood and lifting the wounded engineer, then skidding and falling down in the blood again, the plane burning all the time, the main door jammed and only the forward hatch available for lifting to safety the heavy wounded man. It seemed at any moment that the plane might blow up. But somehow Harrison and the crew and the wounded man got out and the plane did not blow up.
She was still there, in that lop-sided, high-flung position, flat-tired, partially burnt, when I went across the field next morning. Harrison was there too, looking at her. He was pacing up and down. The burnt, ash-coloured wreckage of the plane lay scattered in an almost straight line across the grass. Beyond the last grey scraps of wreckage the tire marks of the plane made brown parallel lines in the muddy grass as far as the runway. Harrison walked up the tracks made by the flattened tires, stooped down to look at them, and then walked back, stooping down again. Finally he came back to the plane.
We stood there for a long time together, looking at the plane. We picked up scraps of wreckage and dropped them again in the grass. We looked at the flattened tires and the broken undercarriage and the splintered turret. We examined the ugly rising lines of tracer holes, neat and straight as the crotchets of a rising scale punched everywhere across the flat face of the fuselage. We stood under the high, up-flung wing, smashed by flak, that looked more than ever like a stiff dead arm. We looked at everything in amazement and unbelief and then looked again.
Long after I left, Harrison was still standing by the plane. And once, as I walked across the field, I turned and looked back.
He was still standing there in the same attitude, looking at K for Kitty. I could not see his face, but it seemed as if he were looking at something rather distantly. It seemed even possible that he was looking at something he could not see.
It was like the attitude of a seaman who looks across empty water, for the last time, and sees his ship no longer there.