The Dust That Falls From Dreams

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘Piddle the Puss? Don’t know, old chap,’ said Daniel. ‘I always expected to go underground in a wooden kimono. What are we supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over?’

  ‘I expected to go down in a flamerino. Sizzle sizzle wonk. Good God! The thought of it! I dream about it every night, and I dream about all the boys roast-pigged and sent west, and now I can’t remember which ones are alive and which are dead. The nightmares have got everything muddled up. Sometimes I’m surprised to see you. How many friends did we lose? A hundred and fifty? How many got sent west in a couple of days, and now we can’t remember them? Tell me, what now? For what have we been spared?’

  ‘I just asked the same question. Buck up,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Nothing to buck up about,’ said Fluke.

  ‘We could have ended up as penguins.’

  ‘Fie upon thee. Quel horreur!’

  ‘Do you remember Room 613A? Lord Hugh Cecil?’

  ‘Christ, it seems like a lifetime ago. Another life altogether. Have you got a gasper?’

  ‘All gone. Do you remember how we all got worked up over “The Song of the Sword”, and thought what a fine piece of work it was? How inspired we were? Look at it now, and it’s utter bilge and bunkum,’ said Daniel. ‘Do you remember “The Abode of Love”? And how utterly ghastly the depot at Candas was?’

  ‘Frolicking in the river in midsummer,’ said Fluke.

  ‘The crack of Spandaus. Crickety-crack.’

  ‘Won’t miss that much.’

  ‘Needing to piss at twenty thousand feet,’ said Daniel. ‘What did you do? Funnel and rubber tube?’

  ‘Just pissed on the joystick. Devil of a job buttoning and unbuttoning. No feeling in the fingers at all.’

  ‘Christ, I’ve never been so cold.’

  ‘You didn’t go to Harrow,’ said Fluke.

  ‘At Westminster we had frost on the inside of the windows,’ said Daniel. ‘Wish I’d known about whale grease back then.’

  ‘Par for the course,’ replied Fluke. ‘At Harrow we had lumps of ice in our tea in place of lumps of sugar.’

  ‘I won’t miss the stench of whale grease,’ reflected Daniel. ‘Did you take chlorodyne, before long flights?’

  ‘Had to. Castor oil plus wind up equals runs, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘I didn’t take chlorodyne,’ said Daniel. ‘I always made a point of going before I went, so to speak.’

  ‘No more Comic Cuts,’ said Fluke.

  ‘Wish I’d kept them. I’ve got some Wipers Times.’

  ‘No more DOPs, thank God. Or trench-strafing. Or tennis with the padre. Wonderful forehand.’

  ‘Wait for the next war, old fellow.’

  ‘God forbid,’ said Fluke. ‘Did you know that No. 9’s leaving? Going to set up a surgery in Fife, apparently.’

  ‘You know,’ said Daniel, ‘I never felt so lonely in my life as when we were flying, even in a flight formation.’

  ‘It was the awful distortion of time that got me muddled,’ said Fluke. ‘All that hanging around from dawn ’til dusk, going on missions at a moment’s notice, having two breakfasts and no lunch and sleeping whenever you could. Time stopped. Or it stretched. Like knicker elastic.’

  ‘And then the time had all suddenly gone,’ said Daniel. ‘Did I tell you about my horrible dream?’

  ‘Lots of times.’

  ‘It’s vile. Keeps coming back, just about every night. And now you’re going to be split-arsing all over the pampas.’

  ‘So I am. Lucky I’m fond of beef. I think I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘It might be warmer in Argentina. Does one’s moustache freeze at twenty thousand feet in Argentina?’

  ‘What happened to the Wing Commander?’

  ‘Tight as a tick. Passed out. By the piano.’

  ‘Let’s cut off half his moustache.’

  ‘I’ve got some nail scissors in my hut. Back in a jiffy.’

  Having accomplished the evil deed without opposition, they settled back against the wall of the hut and set about downing a jug of water. With great pathos Fluke sang:

  ‘Wrap me up in my old yellow jacket,

  Give me my joystick to hold, to hold,

  Let me fly once again o’er the trenches,

  And thus shall my exploits be told, be told.

  ‘Let’s drink more water,’ he said. ‘We shall be peeing all night, but we might get away with not having a hangover.’

  ‘It’s me I feel sorry for,’ said Daniel. ‘I’m dreading saying goodbye to my bus. There’s nothing worse than bidding farewell to your bus. I still miss my Pup. What a sweetheart it was.’

  ‘You got over it when you swapped your Camel.’

  ‘I loved my Camels, by God, I loved my Camels, but I did get through three of them, and I had to crash one on purpose because it was such a dud and they wouldn’t give me another. Now I love my Snipe. Let’s go upstairs in the morning. One last time. Say goodbye to my bus. And you say goodbye to yours.’

  ‘The only answer is to marry a rich woman and buy one.’

  ‘You can buy them for a song these days. But where would I put it? And I’m married already.’

  ‘So you are. Poor bugger. So am I. Poor bugger. Thank God for the children, eh? Only thing that makes it worthwhile.’

  ‘Thank God for the children,’ said Daniel, thinking of Esther, tucked up and asleep in Eltham.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ said Fluke.

  ‘You know what, Fluke? We did win an astounding victory.’

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘Against ourselves. We did reckless things, got terrified for months on end ’til we were so FSD’d that we came out the other side in a loop and did it all some more and again and again, and we did it by always winning against our sensible selves. We beat the Huns too. That’s something.’

  ‘Did we beat them enough, though? The beaten always come back for another try. It’s a matter of honour, isn’t it? I come back when I get beaten. That’s how I got that bright green Fokker that forced me down at Amiens. And they still think they’re better than us. I blame Beethoven.’

  ‘Beethoven?’

  ‘Bound to make you arrogant if you’ve got the best composer.’

  ‘I expect we’ll get the woofits now, ad aeternitatem,’ said Daniel sadly.

  87

  Here’s to the Boys

  Daniel Pitt left the RAF with great misgivings and much heartsickness. He had loved the wild and thrilling times he had recently passed through, but like everyone else who survives in an armed service after the end of a war, he had realised that the last thing anyone wants in such a peacetime service is a warrior with real combat experience. After the fighting, the time arrives for merely keeping things running smoothly. If it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t, polish it. People who remember how things were done, what works and what does not, are of no further use to those who are compiling books of regulations, and watching their own backs as they enforce them. Daniel realised that there was no point whatsoever in being a warrior when there was no war to speak of.

  In addition he knew that the last two years of the war had taken a terrible toll on him. The stress of fighting is cumulative, and the measures you take to deal with it never quite meet the need. There are a few men who are utterly fearless, but most men have a bank of courage which one can only draw upon until the account is empty. An overdraft on this bank is an impossibility. Like everyone else in the mess he had, almost every night, consumed pints of whisky that should have killed him, and like everyone else he had smashed up the furniture and made a fool of himself every time there was a binge, and you had a binge every time one of your comrades was posted away or survived a crash. He had sung idiotic songs, danced on tables, fallen off tables, woken up in the wrong hut, vomited, gone out and railed at the Hun night bombers, got sentimental and maudlin before passing out, had diarrhoea almost every morning, gone looking for local girls or WAACs from a Waacery because tomorrow we die, cursed the
staff officers who stayed behind the lines and awarded themselves medals. He had flown missions blind blotto, stupefied and hilarious, and never been able to get out of his memory’s vision the dozens of comrades he had grown to love or had only known for two days who had crashed to earth, leaving behind them fob watches, books, cigarette cases, accordions and violins, and bundles of letters that they had always asked should be destroyed in the event of their deaths.

  Daniel had been both lucky and unlucky to have been a Camel pilot. Lucky because for many months the Camel was more split-arse than any other aircraft. It had all the heavy equipment packed into one area. It was built to be unstable, was prone to a sudden right-hand spin, and responded instantaneously to the slightest touch of the controls, which was why it took three months to learn to fly it, and killed many unfortunate beginners. Once you had learned, it became an extension of the body. It could do the most amazing manoeuvres. If it were half rolled onto its back, the nose would drop, and you could loop up behind the very machine that had been chasing you. The pursuer would have no idea what had happened or where you had gone until you came up behind and got him in your Aldiss sights. The Albatri and Pfalz fighters had no chance against it, and the Germans stuck to defensive tactics that did not work, lurking behind the lines in huge formations. The Camels shot them down in droves, and then, months later, the even more split-arse Fokker DV 11 arrived too late to make enough difference to a lost cause, and in any case they themselves would have been up against the new Sopwith Snipes that also arrived too late.

  It had been unlucky because the Camel was useful for strafing. The most nightmarish period had been during the last great German offensive. The Camels had gone out several times a day with their ingenious Cooper bombs, and had been shot down by the dozen by hidden machine guns that had only to execute the simplest of deflection shots. Survival had nothing to do with skill. The pilots suffered the roiling of their intestines and the wrenching fear, and then came home and raged against the horror and danger and sheer strain of it, and yearned to get back up high in the sky to engage in honest jousting with the Hun. When you bombed and machine-gunned the troops, you could see your victims reeling and dying, you saw the horses rearing up and falling over, the lorries catching fire, and if you had any sense you got away as soon as you could, went home, got tight, and tried not to think about what you had just done to other human beings, about what had happened to your friends who never returned, and you tried not to ask too many questions, not about what it was all for, because in reality few people questioned the righteousness of the cause, but rather about whether it was all being done in the most intelligent way. You could tie yourself up in knots. How often Daniel had sat alone, his head in his hands, in a hut with three newly empty beds, and then filled his nights with parades of terrifying dreams and the faces of the looming dead. There was a ground-attack machine being manufactured now, everyone said, called the Salamander, which had 650 pounds of armour-plating, and when it arrived the Camels could go back to the empyrean, where they belonged, but the Salamanders arrived too late, and so the Camels continued to fall to earth, sacrificing the marvellous skill of their pilots for the small reward of spreading terror amongst the enemy.

  When the last great German offensive failed and the Allies began to roll the Boche back across the old killing fields of the Somme, the ground attacks eased up, but then you had your memories and your fear to contend with. You blessed the dud days when the cloud was too low, or it was raining, or the wind too strong. You accepted your day off gratefully, except that you felt hard done by if it was raining and you wouldn’t have gone up anyway. During the worst times you even hoped to get influenza or a Blighty wound. You spent the rainy days wondering if everybody else had the wind up as badly as you did, and you discussed it only with those to whom you were closest, or you walked out into a field and talked to the cows and horses. You reflected that perhaps it was better to die young and strong, in your prime, as long as it was not, please God, by being burned alive. It might be better if you did die, because, after this, what else could there possibly be? You took your leave and your time on Home Establishment, because it was rightly believed that a pilot could only stand six continuous months at the front, but then you were back, and quite often you were killed on the first day, like McCudden in his SE5, who hit a tree on take-off, perhaps because he had forgotten about the extra weight of bombs, or perhaps because his engine failed whilst he banked steeply away.

  Daniel knew that the memories would remain indelibly with him as long as he lived: the little estaminets where you could eat good food and drink good wine under the admiring eye of a mother and her daughters; the little propeller that drives the oil pressure on a Camel; the pressure gauge that cuts out in a dive so that you have to pump by hand and switch over to gravity; the days as orderly dog; the pitot, the efell that would one day become the windsock; the conversations through the canvas walls of the latrine, where you would never know who else was there until they spoke; the trigger on the joystick; pushing up goggles to see better; rubbing Vaseline all over your face on freezing days; the use of the thumb to block out the sun so that you could spot the enemy machines coming down on you; the configuration of the instruments in your ‘office’; the way that batmen are really better than women, because they don’t expect any appreciation; the woofing and clanging and coughing of archie; the crumping of shells; the pleasing novelty of Camel cigarettes when the Yanks arrived; the dud engine signal; the flight leader’s streamers; the waggling of wings to warn of a Hun; the horror of your first spin; toasting bread on the fire of the mess; burning out the colonies of earwigs with a candle; turning over and breaking the prop if you have to land in a ploughed field; happy hours with your ack emmas and riggers when they have your machine up on a trestle to simulate the conditions of flight; happy desperate hours talking rot when blotto; the black smudges of archie as the Germans warned their own aircraft of your approach, and the white smudges of Allied archie that warned Allied pilots of Huns; the sharply painful changes of pressure in the ears on a dive; listening to Chu Chin Chow on the gramophone a hundred thousand times; bully beef; the terrifying but ineffective blobs of phosphorous that rose into the sky in strings and were known as flaming onions; the superstitions that came out of nowhere; being trapped in a shell hole between the lines when your engine failed; the horrendous mess bills that soaked up all your pay; the pilot who used to do a loop on take-off and could pull off a perfect Gosport landing; the happy hours of rifle practice trying to detonate a Very light from a hundred yards; the roar and clatter and blue exhaust of the Crossley tender; the shows and sallies during leave in London; being hung-over and biffo; the complete absence and preciousness of sugar; the rumours that the Huns were reduced to eating rats because of the naval blockade; beef that was really horsemeat, and why not? with so many horses killed each day; the overwhelming wonderfulness of the Bristol Fighter that was as good as a scout as it was for reconnaissance; Enos and aspirins for days after the nights before; the constant racket of night bombing and the glow like a rising sun on the horizon when an ammunition dump exploded; the unsubstantiated rumours of how the fleeing Portuguese soldiers were shot down by their contemptuous British allies; the blessed stays in hospital where the night nurses clumping around with their lamps turned out to be as inimical to sleep as heavy guns and Gotha bombers and night Camels and Fes and all the other minions of the moon; putting on a split-arsing show for the villagers on Sunday afternoons; chaperoning the Quirks and Harry Tates on reconnaissance; the pale earnest young patriots who could quote Shakespeare and Sophocles, who you took on Cook’s tours of the lines to show them the ropes and then died on take-off in their second week; and above all the friends who were better than any friends you would ever have again, who died just when it seemed that they never could, and left a hole in your being like the absence of God. Well my lads, here’s to the boys in the Bone Orchard.

  88

  Henley Motorcycles

 
So it was that Daniel, through the good offices of his father-in-law, found himself on a train to Birmingham, to visit the Henley premises in Doe Street. Birmingham was a city more filthy than most, on account of its many coal-fired heavy industries that added immeasurably to the smoke of domestic fires. There were days when the yellow smog was so bad that the vulnerable might drop dead in the streets, but on days when the wind blew it was a city as pleasant as any other.

  Daniel liked the people at Henley, even though he found that the local accent took a great many months of getting used to, and it was utterly impossible that anyone might ever think it lovely. Henley was an up-and-coming company that produced beautiful machines and was keen on constant innovation. They had been looking for a man who could contribute on a number of fronts. In the first place they needed a safe driver who could deliver machines in pristine condition to the various dealerships around the country. In the second place they needed a man who was both bright and honest, to act as a salesman, and in the third place they needed a man who was an excellent engineer. Having spent so much time with the fitters during the Great War, when the other pilots were in the mess, there was not much that Daniel did not know about machinery. Perhaps what most persuaded Henley to employ him was his deeply respectable middle-class military accent and his astonishing war record. Fluke’s enthusiastic letter of recommendation, on the other hand, carried no weight with them at all, since it was so plainly exaggerated.