The Complete Flying Officer X Stories

by H. E. Bates

  “Could I talk to her?” I said.

  “Talk to her, please,” the Lieutenant said. “Talk to her by all means.”

  But when I went over to her I did not know what to say. The piece of rye crust in my teeth kept bothering me and I kept stabbing at it with my tongue, unable to get it out. It made me more nervous than the girl, who simply looked up at me with cold, placid, shiny eyes.

  “Where do you come from?” I said at last.

  “Voznesensk,” She said

  “Ah, Voskressensk,” I said. “That’s near Moscow.”

  “No,” She smiled. “Not Voskressensk, that’s another place. Not the same. Mine is Voznesensk.”

  “I don’t know it,” I said.

  “It’s just a little place,” she said. “That’s where I really come from.”

  “Near here?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s the other side of Moscow. But I’ve been living here with my brother until he was killed.”

  We were about ten miles behind the lines and I wondered how old she was. Still worried by the piece of bread in my tooth I stood thinking, looking at her, wondering if she could be more than eighteen. Very often, especially in the mornings, you could hear the noise of shelling from the west or, if they were bombing, the linked-up crump of bombs, but this afternoon was very quiet and you could hear nothing but the wind beating at the line of birch-trees beyond the main track and then whining down the narrow spaces between the huts, scattering snow.

  “You have toothache?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “I thought you must have toothache,” she said. “You can open your mouth and the cold will give you toothache.”

  “It’s a piece of bread in my tooth,” I said.

  “Oh! I know. Like when you eat sunflower seeds,” she said. “It just aggravates you.”

  She laughed and she took off one of her gloves and put her hand in her pocket.

  “This is what you want,” she said.

  I smiled and took the toothpick she gave me and thanked her.

  “You can make them out of feathers,” she said. “I like making them. When we’re waiting and there’s nothing to do I sit and pick my teeth. It passes the time.”

  “It’s out!” I said.

  “Good.” We laughed again. “Now you can keep the toothpick for next time.”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I stood with the toothpick in my hand and once again I did not know what to say to her. At last I thought of something.

  “Are you the only girl in this company?” I said.

  “Oh! no,” she said. “There’s three others. Over there. See? But I’m the youngest.”

  I did not even look at the other girls and again I did not know what to say.

  “We’ll soon be going now, I expect,” she said. “I see Yakov has gone for the orders.”

  “Yakov?”

  “Our leader, he was talking to the Lieutenant.”

  “Oh! yes,” I said.

  For some moments longer I stood talking to her, never quite knowing what to say. The wind was blowing more strongly now and once it came round the corner of the nearest hut in a violent gust of bitter dusty snow that caught the girl unbalanced and almost blew her down.

  “You go behind the lines?” I said.

  “Behind the lines,” she said.

  I had not time to ask her anything more before I saw Yakov, the leader, striding back to us. There was a slight commotion in the group as he reached us and the girl hitched her rifle farther on her shoulder.

  “All right,” Yakov said.

  He stood talking a moment or two longer to the Lieutenant. Most of the men lengthened the slings of their rifles now and slung them full across their shoulders so that their hands were free. But Nastashya kept hers on her left shoulder, so that the butt still almost touched the ground.

  “All right! Ready!” Yakov said.

  Immediately the whole group began to shuffle in the snow.

  “Goodbye,” Nastashya said. She smiled.

  “Goodbye,” I said. I smiled too.

  Before I had time to speak again she moved off with the others, as they shuffled in a kind of rough formation down the track between the huts. On this main track a few transport lorries were passing westward and the group of partisans halted until the last of the lorries had gone by. In the lorries some of the drivers lifted their hands and a few of the partisans waved their hands in reply.

  It was not until they began to move again, stringing out in the now empty road, that the Lieutenant spoke to me.

  “They have a good journey,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Through the lines. They’re going to blow up a bridge beyond Vyazna.”

  I did not speak as we watched them marching down the road. The wind was beating at them sideways, from the north, and the snow was hurled at them like bursts of smoky dust. All the time I was able to tell which was Nastashya because hers was the only rifle that almost touched the ground. All the time too I must have stood with the toothpick in my hand. I did not notice it until the moment when the girl turned to wave her hand and I lifted my own in reply.

  “Happy Christmas, Nastashya,” I said.

  I stood watching them a little longer, holding the toothpick in my hand. The sharp wind blew tears of pain into my eyes again as I stood there, and my lips felt frozen as I spoke. But in that moment, above all, my heart was cold.

  The Bell

  We drove along the ferry road in the spring twilight and parked the car on the flat bank by the river, where the ferry bell hung on a sort of wooden gallows directly opposite the pub and a boat-landing by sallow-trees. I pulled the bell twice and the big sound donged over the water and the flat meadows and the fields of young corn beyond. The sallows were honey-cream with flower, and when finally the boy began to pull the ferry across to us I could see the yellow reflections of them pouring brokenly away behind the boat. In a few moments we were being ferried over.

  In the bar of the pub we could look out of the windows, across the water, and see the ferry bell reflected, black and still, below the bare flat bank and the empty sky. I looked at it and it was like the old days again.

  “Well, what will it be, sir?” Alf said. He flattened his hands on the bar.

  “You don’t remember me, Alf,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” Alf Said. He looked at me, large grey eyes screwed up. “I seem to remember your face. But I get so many Air Force boys in here.”

  So I told him who I was. “You remember,” I said. “I used to come in a year or so back. With Mr. Taylor and Mr. Baker and Mr. Dibdin and Mr. Lockley. You remember. The boys of the old squadron,” I said. “You remember.”

  “Well, bless my heart an’ life,” Alf said. He wiped his right hand across his apron and held it across the bar.

  “How are you, sir? How are you? Fancy me forgettin’.” He looked up at me with eyes large and tender with regret. We shook hands. “But you know, sir, they come an’ go. That’s the truth. They come an’ go.”

  “Yes,” I said. “They come and go.”

  “Missus!” Alf shouted into the back of the bar. “Come an’ look who’s here! Come on.”

  And in a moment or two Mrs. Alf came into the bar. She was dressed in black. Her hair was the colour of the sallow-blooms by the landing-stage outside, and the flesh of her face hung in loose powdered folds on the high lace collar of her dress.

  “They y’are,” Alf said. “There’s a gentleman I bet you don’t remember.”

  Mrs. Alf put her head on one side and smiled, pouting her scarlet lips.

  “Don’t talk so wet!” she said. “Course I remember. Talk so wet. He’s a friend of Mr. Lockley’s.”

  “Well!” Alf said. “Well! If that don’t call for one all round.”

  “How de do,” Mrs. Alf said. “How de do.”

  She held out her flabby white hand to me and smiled. The flesh of her hands wa
s so thick that it had pressed the three rings on her marriage finger deep and tight, until they were like a small coiled gold spring locked on her fingers.

  “How d’ye do,” I said. We shook hands, and I felt her hand over-soft and warm in mine.

  “And this is Mr. Whitworth,” I said.

  “How de do,” she said to my friend, and smiled.

  “Well!” Alf said. “Well!”

  He had drawn four light ales, and now he set them on the bar. We took them up and held them for a moment in the air.

  “Well! Here’s to everybody!” Alf said.

  “And here’s to you,” I said.

  “And here’s to the boys of the old squadron,” Mrs. Alf said. “God bless them.”

  We drank and smiled at each other. Alf wiped his mouth with his hand and breathed hard. “Ever see anything of the old squadron now, sir?”

  “I saw Mr. Taylor the other day,” I said. “Back from Canada. Mr. McIntyre, he’s a prisoner.”

  “No camp will hold him long,” Alf said.

  “No,” I said. “And Mr. Armstrong—you remember Maxie—he’s an instructor. Mr.Butterworth, he’s a squadron leader. Mr. Colton, he went back to Canada too.”

  “Scattered all over the place,” Alf said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Mr. Feddington, he’s with the Americans.”

  “But there’s something I wanted to ask you,” Mrs. Alf said. “What happened to Mr. Lockley, sir? We never heard. What happened to Mr. Lockley?”

  “He was a cough-drop,” Alf said.

  “Oh, a nice boy!” Mrs. Alf said. “You could always reckon on fun when Mr. Lockley was here.”

  “You could an’ all,” Alf said.

  “Always up to some game. The number of glasses he broke in here is nobody’s business. Always larkin’ about. Never took nothing serious. Acrobats on the bar. Swimming the river at midnight. All the capers you could think of. I bet he never took nothing serious in his life, that boy.”

  I did not say anything now.

  “I tell you a thing he used to do,” Alf said, “last thing at night I’d ferry him and the boys over. Shortest way home for ’em. I’d come back and lock the boat up. And then about a quarter of an hour later the bell would ring.”

  “Mr. Lockley,” I said.

  “Well, I ain’t goin’ to say it was and I ain’t to say it wasn’t,” Alf said. “For whenever I got over there, after unlocking the boat an’ everything, there was never anybody there. And that was him all over.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Him all over,” Alf said. “I bet he never took nothing serious in his life. I bet he never took his flying serious. You couldn’t imagine him. I bet he thought that was a lark.”

  I put the glass down on the bar and looked at Alf, big and heavy like a boxer, and Mrs. Alf, simple and florid, her rings coiled tight on her fingers.

  “The trouble was he took it too seriously,” I said.

  “Ah, go on,” Alf said.

  “He never had any luck,” I said. I looked at the glass on the bar, and then up at Alf and his wife again. Their eyes were big with surprise and a sort of vacant tenderness as I began to tell them how it had been with Mr. Lockley. I began to tell them how, both in his personal life and his service life, Mr. Lockley had never had much luck: how he had lost his family in an air raid in London, how when he had come to the squadron he had never seemed to be able to land an aircraft as it should be landed, how little incidents and little accidents seemed to fill his life with a sort of haunting fatalism until he was almost afraid to fly. I told them how hard he tried; and how, the harder he tried, the worse it seemed to get for him. I told them how, through one of those unaccountable misjudgements, he landed a Halifax fifty feet off the runway and survived to face the problem of his own utter despair.

  “Well, you wouldn’t hardly credit it,” Alf said. “You wouldn’t hardly credit it.”

  And finally I told them how, behind all the foolery and the larking and the tipsy lightheartedness and the practical joking, Lockley went out over Bremen and conquered at last the fears and failures and the accidents and incidents of despair.

  “He rang the bell alright that night,” I said. “His leg was smashed by flak but he didn’t say anything. He went on and made one bombing run, and then another. His leg was very bad and the aircraft was falling to pieces. But he let all the crew get out, and then, at the very last, got out himself. He baled out with a smashed leg and they took him prisoner.”

  There was silence in the bar as I finished speaking. I looked up at the big eyes of Alf, big and stupid and friendly, and of Mrs. Alf, florid and kind-hearted and full of wonder. They were shining with unfallen tears.

  “It just shows you, don’t it?” Alf said.

  “They gave him a medal for it,” I said.

  “He earned it,” Alf said.

  I looked at Mrs. Alf, tenderhearted behind all the powdered floridity, the lipstick cracked on her big lips, the tight rings on her too-fat fingers. “He earned more than that,” she said.

  A little later Alf himself ferried us back over the river. We shook hands and then at last drew slowly away along the river banks as Alf began to pull the ferry boat back towards the sallow-trees, glowing now like misty cream dust by the dark walls of the pub.

  “Good night, sir,” Alf said. “Nice to see you. Nice to hear about Mr. Lockley.”

  “Good night, Alf,” we said. “Good night.”

  We drove away along the empty river bank. The water was dark and smooth in the falling light. We drove about a mile and then stopped before making a turn in the road. And as we stopped I could hear a sound coming up way we had come, over the darkening water.

  Someone was ringing the bell.

  From This Time Forward

  In the late autumn when Bradshaw was killed the beech-woods in the hills beyond the ’drome were bronze with frost and rain. The leaves were falling fast and the Hurricanes looked blacker than ever they did in the light of summer. If Bradshaw had lived a little longer he would have been twenty.

  The week after we knew he was dead I had a long letter from his sister. It seemed that she was some years older than Bradshaw and the letter was bitter, painful and disjointed. It placed what seemed to me a slightly hysterical emphasis on the futility of things. It seemed also that she had written to the Authorities. I did not know quite whom she meant by the Authorities, but I knew what she wanted them to say. She wanted them to say, as she now wanted me to say, that he was not dead. “I cannot sleep at night,” she said. “I can’t do anything. I feel I shall never do anything again.” It seemed that they had been much more than brother and sister. “We knew each other,” she wrote. “We knew each other as no two people ever did. He belonged to me. We were sort of telepathic. I knew when he was coming home. I knew everything about him. He was clean and decent and good. And sometimes I know he isn’t dead. I know. I know.”

  A week later there was another letter: this time from his mother. It was very short. “Perhaps you would come to see us,” it said.

  Three days later I went down to see them in Hampshire. It was one of those houses with a big white drawing-room and French windows leading to a gravel terrace outside. There were many large photographs on the black grand piano under the window, and on the white mantelpiece, above the fire and the little silver spirit kettle that was never used, there were more photographs in silver frames. Among them were several photographs of Bradshaw. Bradshaw as a baby with no hair, as a small boy in a school football team, as a larger boy with a soft, blond face, and thick, blond hair, as a young man in pilot’s uniform. They were all very carefully and beautifully displayed, but I could not see in any one of them the Bradshaw I knew.

  For a long time during tea we did not talk about Bradshaw. The sister had a fair, plain, rather aristocratic face, with pale golden eyebrows and eyes that had a steadfast hostility. She was older than Bradshaw, I felt, by about eight or nine years. She was conscious that she was not very good loo
king. It was not only easy to see that she did not like men, but it was still easier to see that she wanted men to like her and had not succeeded. So she sat rather aloof from me, pretending not to watch, but watching, pretending not to care, but caring very much for what I had to say.

  “I’m afraid there’s not much for tea,” she said. “Not very lavish. I know what you men are.”

  Suddenly the mother spoke.

  “How long have you been on the station?” she said.

  She was rather tall and thin, her face and hair both quite colourless. She had high cheek-bones and wore gold pince-nez on a gold chain, but she kept them mostly in her hands, opening and shutting the glasses with her long, cold, colourless fingers.

  “Three months,” I said.

  “Then you were there when Roger had the accident with the tail-wing.”

  I sat trying to remember.

  “He told us how he was standing by the tail-wing of a ’plane and how it swung round and hit him. It hashed his forehead. Another fraction of an inch and it would have been his temple.”

  “Yes, oh, yes,” I said.

  I sat still trying to remember. All I could remember was a time when we were arguing with a man in a snack bar and how he said: “I’m asking you where the bloody R.A.F was at Dunkirk? Go on, I’m asking you,” and how Bradshaw, who was not very sober, got up to hit him and how the man, who was not very sober either, seized a fork from the snack counter and struck him across the forehead.

  I did not think either the mother or the sister knew about this. Bradshaw often got into a violent temper with dead-beats.

  “You can’t be too careful near aircraft,” I said.

  At this moment there was a whining from outside the French windows, on the terrace. I looked up and saw a big cream collie breathing a grey cloud against the glass.

  “It Caesar,” the mother said. “Let him in.”

  The sister got up, opening the windows, and let in a delicate and excitable dog who lashed his tail against the chintz chairs and the leg of the tea-table.