The Complete Flying Officer X Stories (20 page)

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.