Fellows - That Quiet Earth: A First World War Tale

One

The great lime at the end of the garden is begnning to shed its leaves. They swoop and pirouette in the breeze like carefree souls until they end their brief careers in stillness on the grass. They fill me with a strange foreboding. On the table at my side is a three-line item from The Times . It stopped me short the other day and hurled me back, as vividly as if it were yesterday, to the clear sky over France on that evening in November 1918 when I led the days final patrol.

The sky was a blue parasol above. The earth from so high was slightly curved at the horizon. England was a low smudge faintly visible far away west. A deafening roar from the engine filled my head. A leather helmet gave little protection against it. Obeying Mitchs precepts and using the only sense useful to me in the icy cold of eighteen thousand feet, I constantly scanned the sky in front and below, but especially behind and above. I was seeking the enemy I was supposed to kill but particularly searching for those who might want to kill me. I was conscious above all of my responsibility towards the men who followed me that no enemy should surprise us.

Just behind me, twenty yards away on either side, rising and falling as if on a gentle invisible swell were two olive drab SE5s identical to mine. Their pilots, Zin Zan and Telfer, togged up like me in fur helmet, goggles and face mask, also quartered the sky. From time to time their wings would rock and glint sunshine at me from taut canvas surfaces.

Then to the east, a thousand feet below and perhaps three miles distant, I picked out dots against the sky. I rocked my wings and turned away, raising the nose to climb. Three minutes later and a thousand feet higher, I slowly edged back towards the dots. The sun was safely behind us as the dots slowly became aeroplanes and their top wing extensions became obvious. A group of six Fokker DVIIs was flying two thousand feet below. I checked obsessively behind and all around, cocked both guns, and prepared for my stomach to rise into my chest and the pain to start in my ears as I put the nose down.

The dive would have taken thirty or forty seconds. Our speed reached a hundred and sixty perhaps. That was time enough to see the dark shapes beneath us grow, take colour and become swaying, bobbing, almost living things hanging nearly motionless in relation to us, as they flew seventeen thousand feet above the grey-green patchwork far below.

I chose the leader. His tailplane was painted dragonfly blue. The straight black crosses on the upper wings were outlined in white on the pink, purple and green of the camouflage the Germans habitually used. I put my face to the Aldis sight and watched him fill it. I fired Vickers and Lewis guns together. Their chatter rose above the engines roar. I smelt the cordite and saw my tracers converge on the fuselage and spray around the cockpit. The machine below me at once turned to the right. I thought Id missed and the pilot was warned but instantly the machine turned again and then again and was spinning, making a spiral of the smoke that was pouring from the engine. The pilot was wounded or dead, and the spin was involuntary or a hopeless attempt to escape despite having a smoking engine three miles up.

I dived on down, screaming from the pain in my ears but also from bestial triumph. I was too fast to turn and wed tracked the Huns till almost the end of our patrol. As I pulled out, I looked behind and saw only the other SEs following. Two trails of smoke had formed behind us, marking against the celestial blue the killings that we fled homewards from.

For some reason it was that fight of many that the article in The Times brought to my mind. Perhaps because that was when I fulfilled my ambition to dive on a Fokker and send it down, as we had wanted to, Billy and I, and as he already had. I read the article over and over.

The Victoria Cross won in September 1918 by 2nd Lieut. William Love RAF, has been sold in auction at Sothebys for a record 65,000 by Loves elderly niece .

Loves elderly niece could only be Pippa, a six year old elf when I first saw her.

The article occupied my thoughts all through that day and so clouded my sleep that I dreamt that night that Jessica returned to me. Her face had the look it had that ravishing day that Billy and I passed through the archway, luscious with the scent of honeysuckle, and crossed the lawn towards her in the sun. At his call, she started up from the rose she was kneeling at and, turning, bathed us in her sudden joyful smile.

I woke at once, damp with anxious sweat, and got out of bed. At ninety-seven, that has become a very slow and precarious business. I went to the cane chair by the window and sat with a blanket around me, watching the sun appear and banish shadows from the garden. I spent those first hours of the day composing a letter for the small girl to whom, if youth had the wisdom of old age, I would perhaps have been stepfather. It was a letter full of memories and some regret, which Pippa answered on the telephone.

How wonderful that you should write, she shouted, we are both a little deaf, and how wonderful that we should still both be alive, she might have added. Mother passed on twenty years ago. I hadnt really feared a centenarians reproaches and I felt a pang that I had missed Constance.

For years, Pippa said, you were like a legend to me, half-remembered, and I used to wonder why your name was mud. Later of course, I came to realise why from things that mother said. I used to see your name at the flicks just before the directors, written by George Bridge, and Id wonder if it was you. I knew youd gone to America you see. Then I learnt it was you and you grew still more glamorous in my eyes. Was Carole Lombard as lovely in the flesh?

She was of course but it was at Myrna Loys house on a St Patricks Day in the late thirties, after the premiere of Seven Deadly Sinners , which Id written for her, that someone sang Danny Boy and wartime ghosts thronged in. They drew such weeping from me that I was packed off in Miss Loys limousine to come to later amid empty bottles and the remains of smashed up furniture in my rented apartment. After that I was able to admit to my mind again memories Id repressed for many years, though all my life Ive never learnt to master them.