Authors and Aviators

by EDWARD WEEKS

1

You cannot travel through the British Isles without encountering some of the great stories that wait to be written about the ships. But wait they will until the last U-boat has surfaced. Not all of these have to do with battlewagons. There is the story of the Liverpool Docks and of the 50,000 longshoremen who kept those docks working under the worst of the blitz.

There is the story of the old sea captains — Captain David Bone in his middle seventies is only one of many — who came back from permanent shore leave to command the convoys. Somehow they seem to get younger in uniform.

There is the story of the Ship Exchange, that roomful of forty men at a spot marked “X,” who direct each convoy as it comes within forty hours of the Isle, splitting it so as to miss the raiders, berthing it in big ports and little, and having trains on the sidings as the ships come in, so that no cargoes are lost to weather or bombs.

And there is the story of the London harbor master in his shiny, shabby uniform and his breast of old ribbons — the story of how freighters loaded with high explosive were piloted by him coolly and accurately through the narrow London locks while sparks hissed into the water from the falling walls and the Isle of Dogs went up in flames.

Navy reticence being what it is, I am sure I should never have heard his story, had it not been for H. M. Tomlinson. Tomlinson, having secured Admiralty passes for us both, had been walking me through the streets of his childhood along Limehouse, through the St. Catherine Docks and from quay to quay until we had reached the inner locks. Tanks with the maple leaf insignia of Canada were beetling off a transport, and to our left a landing barge, spick in its blue paint and with its new crew aboard, was making stealthily for the open river. We stood evidently where civilians were conspicuous, for there came running feet and a voice saying, “Here now, have you a camera?” It was the harbor master, but his grimness relaxed when he recognized Tomlinson. They had grown up on those docks, fished from them together in the 1880’s.

We approached the docks down narrow streets along which the dockworkers once lived. Those endless rows of dingy homes were now crippled or in nibble, and through the cavities one caught glimpses of the river.

Tomlinson was looking for something. “I don’t know whether it has survived,” he said. “I can’t believe it has come through the blitz.” But it had. A little old pub which Dickens used to visit. “That’s it! My father used to come here when I was a boy.” The neat, burnished taproom was still being used, though no one was in it when we entered. I was led farther along the corridor and out upon a little balcony hanging right over the water. “Now look,” said my guide. “There is Limehouse Reach. And this is where Whistler made his etchings.” The tide was low, below us lay the barges, and the pictures came back like echoes. Only the big ships were missing.

The great gates of St. Catherine’s Dock, the little round guardhouse, and such fragments of the warehouses as were still standing, were of old, yellow brick built when Napoleon was a threat. In the broad cobblestone yard cats were sunning. “Are those cats still on rations?” Tomlinson asked an inspector. “Yes, sir, they keep down the rats.”

To our right was a large inlet, a quadrangle of bare quays info which ships passed, through a narrow lock. “Look there,” said Tomlinson, and he pointed to the quadrangle. “The American clippers used to dock there. On those quays were three tiers of warehouses with arcades and pillars. The ships lay along the walls beside the big arcades, with the masts above the top — and it was a sight. I’ve seen so many ships there you could walk from deck to deck, half across the water. Their bowsprits were like the boughs of trees.” Now there was not a ship in sight. “Gone — it’s all gone,” said Tomlinson.

We stepped out of the hot sunlight and descended into the cool chambers of the Crescent Wine Vaults, where, with our candles on the yard-long sticks, we poked for a little among the twenty acres of monastic tomb in which still lie sleeping tuns of old Madeira and Sherry, soft and mossy to the touch, with the sugary stalagmites at the bottom to show the half century of aging. “A man could get lost down there,” said the old caretaker. “Forty miles of tracks. That’s why we give you a candle — can tell you’re missing if you don’t return it.”

So on to the Spice Docks and the Ivory Docks and then down to the quay where a rusty freighter was unloading Demerara sugar. “Below here,” Tomlinson pointed, “was where the Torrens moored — I have seen her here, when Conrad was her mate. . . . But you can’t see it as I see it,” he added. “All you can see is what’s left.” And glancing at his face, I knew I couldn’t. For what he was seeing was a small boy there, with his father, and the ships and the barges and the bustle, and the bowsprits and broad-beamed men in dark blue. They were all gone, not even the landmarks left.

I think we forget what strength there is in age. We are so used to having men burn themselves out, we forget the light that can be rekindled by crisis. Men of Tomlinson’s generation have seen two worlds go by the board, and their loss should be double ours. But while there is still hope for a third, they have no time for repining. They are not watching from the city walls: they are working with all the strength of their experience to preserve what must not be lost while the younger men are away.

2

CAMBRIDGE has always grinned at Baedeker’s preference for Oxford. It was one more illustration of how the Dark Blue has been invaded by worldliness; whereas Cambridge was in a realm by itself. Today the distinction has been still further intensified. Oxford is in a turmoil indeed, for when Hitler was knocking at the door, departments of the government moved down to the colleges to be out of reach, and there they still remain.

I arrived in the midst of examinations, with the colleges half full of schoolboys trying for scholarships and exhibitions. “Aren’t they going straight into the army?” I asked. “Of course,” said the don, “but we want to make sure that the true scholars will come back to us afterwards. Their scholarships will wait.” Meantime, the Masters and Fellows were teaching two shifts of eighteen-yearolds, cramming their utmost into those six intensified months before the boy goes into uniform.

An Oxford classicist like Sir Richard Livingstone faces the daily exasperation of trying to teach so much in so little, and he directs the activities of his college, Corpus Christi. So much is routine. In addition — and daily — he is experimenting to see how education can be broadened so as to reach those who most need it, here and now, in the Kingdom. That means talking up and down the line from Scotland to Dover, to any group of workers or teachers who need him.

What worries him is that in this new ferment Britain will concentrate on the machinery but miss the true objectives of education. And to prevent that, he has found time (out of his sleep, I imagine) to write his two new books, The Future in Education and Education for a World Adrift. If we go on as at present, we shall probably decline into an economic religion worshiping material prosperity; the alternative which he sums up in his chapter, “Education for Citizenship,” rings out in the words of Pericles: —

Fix your eyes on the greatness of your country as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that her greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honour in action.

Tall, ruddy, with the kindly eyes of a great teacher, he embodies that hope in the future which will bring the boys back. In case you are curious, he also keeps hens, the coops sitting majestically on the old city wall of Oxford.

From Oxford it is eight miles to Abingdon-nearBurcot, where the Poet Laureate lives. My old roommate at Trinity, now one of the librarians at the Bodleian, and I were on our way to see John Masefield. As our bus swam through the crowded Oxford streets, I admired the skill with which the English girls handle their bicycles. We came into the open country and passed between airfields unquestionably American in their occupation. So to a crossroads, where we dismounted and walked down the little lane with hedgerows which led to the Park in Dorchester.

It was the poet himself who let us in. Time and photographers had prepared me for a frail man with a tired face, but the Masefield who welcomed us was in the pink. He had just come in from boating on the river, and his fresh color, his dark eyes and white thatch, were a picture of health.

He asked about Boston and New York and was curious to know of the big developments going on in Texas, the Golden Gate (which he remembered from his shipping days), and the Mormon Valley.

While Mrs. Masefield made tea, my librarian spoke his heart’s wish: how eager he was to secure for the Bodleian one of Masefield’s manuscripts. The poet smiled, and for a time there was a discussion as to which manuscript it should be. Then Masefield said hesitantly that he wondered if they would also be interested in his correspondence with Thomas Hardy. He had always kept Hardy’s letters, and at the novelist’s death had returned them to Mrs. Hardy. Now the literary executor had returned them to him, and he would be glad to place them in the library — if they were interested.

Then he spoke about poets and painters. Both, he said, had felt the disrepute into which they had been forced in the boom years. When industry was in the ascendancy the artists had been ignored, and it was then that they had taken to writing and painting for each other. I asked about his own work and he said he was writing a long poem. “What is it about?” I asked. He said, “About myself — my youth, from one to six. It is quite long.” No matter how long, I wanted it for the Atlantic.

A flight of what proved to be Fortresses flew over low, and this drew us out of the library to the lawn where the curve of the Thames lay ahead. I asked if the country hereabouts had been blitzed. “Indeed yes,” he said. “You may have noticed our blackout. The bombers have been over again and again. I remember one time when Mrs. Masefield and I were inside there and the room was as black as pitch. We could hear a single raider circling around and around, looking for a target. Aid finally, as if in plain exasperation, he let her go — right across there, right over the river beyond the bend, in the big field. It broke every window on that side.”

3

DRIVE in any direction from Cambridge or Oxford and you will reach the air front. Arrive with the sun if you can — the sun and no clouds. I paid my first visit to our bomber command on that clear July Sunday which was to celebrate the first raid on Hamburg. The men had been alerted the night before. (“How well do you sleep when you’ve been told it’s coming up?” I asked. “Kind of jumpily,” was the answer.)

Now it is going on 9.00 A.M. — and the gunners, who have had their breakfast, are being briefed. Through the windows of the headquarters you see the knots of men at the six tables, each leaning attentively toward the officer who is talking. You imagine what he is saying. “The escorts will leave you here. . . . Here you make your feint. . . . Look out for interceptors from this point on. . .”As fast as the groups dissolve, new ones take their places. Twenty-eight Forts are going up from this Wing, — and that’s a lot of gunners.

Outside, the sun feels hotter. It is going to be a perfect day. The roads converging where you stand are alive with bicycles, jeeps, and trucks. For now the pilots and navigators are beginning to arrive and their briefing will take longer. You stand talking to the colonel who is to lead them in, — an old man of twenty-six. He brought the last Fortress out of Java; he has done eighteen missions in the Pacific. Now he is in the Big League. His soft mustache doesn’t conceal the firm lines of the mouth which seem so emphatic in these young faces. His eyes have that fixity which you are to notice later in the day. But now the men are re-emerging from the low pine building. The Colonel turns you over to his master mechanic and you decide to have a look at the lead plane.

Joe drives you in his jeep and it is quite a way to the island where the Colonel’s plane is parked. The realization suddenly hits you of how much space these four squadrons need. The main runways are larger than the average airport, but the Forts don’t show there. The forty of them have been dispersed in little islands surrounding the cut surface. They snuggle right against the hedgerows. Their wing tips are ten yards away from the ripening wheat. Farmers live right in the midst of all this, and you hear the church bells ringing just as Joe curves you in a swoop beneath “The Raunchy Wolf.”

The ground crew, the men who nurse the plane but don’t fly it, are off to one side. They are suspicious of you. You might bring bad luck; they wish you would get the hell out. But Joe is a good chaperon. Quite casually he cuts you in to his conversation with the pilot. Most of the crew you notice have stripped to their shorts — it is that hot. You move over to the navigator, just as the tail gunner rides up. “He is a real Indian,” says the navigator under his breath. And he is — a fullblooded American Indian, a lieutenant, riding up on an English woman’s bicycle with two 50-millimeter machine guns on his shoulder. He leans the bicycle against the hedge.

Time is getting short. And how they hate the wait. You dig the runway with your toe, or saunter. The mechanic begins to clown — the burly guy with the ham hands. He has climbed into his electrified suit and he does a monkey act with a plug wire as his tail. And now the Colonel is here, and the men are pulling on their flying clothes, and the boots, and the parachute harness, and the helmets, and the Mae Wests — and the pilot is dealing out flat cellophane packages, like a woman’s handbag, containing drugs, the concentrated food, and the unmentionables they will need if they have to bail out.

“Better go,” says Joe. And in the jeep we scurry down to the crossroads where the feedway joins the main take-off. We drive into the field and park beside the radio control, a little boxcar painted in yellow and black squares. Next door is an ambulance and beyond that a fire-fighting crew. “Move those people away from that hedge, will you?” says the sergeant with the earphones, and as he directs the MP you notice the English villagers who are standing with their youngsters all down the hedgerows. Church is over and they have come to see the boys take off — the boys who sometimes help them with the reaper and to whom they sell their eggs.

The props begin to turn and then the air is shuddering. You stand beside Joe on the seat of the jeep and watch as twenty-eight Fortresses file into line and come taxiing toward you down the runway. The four motors are roaring now, the windows are open, and as the pilots go by, they give us thumbs up. I saw one radio operator sitting on the cowling clasping his hands in the old prize-fight gesture to a boy two ships ahead. You can’t hear yourself shout. The first eight are Joe’s special charge and I see him tremble as they come up to the line — “Lazy Suzy,” “Big Stink,” “Hesitating Hussy,” “Grim Reaper,” “Yank and Reb.” They halt thirty yards from us and all turn at an angle to keep the slip stream out of each other’s teeth. The waist gunners lean out of their great open bays and thumb their noses.

And then with a roar the first takes off — and the flight goes up.

Two of our twenty-eight never make the run. They turn off to the left and go slowly back, one motor dead. “Abortioned,” said Joe. “Tough.”

I look away, up at our twenty-six as they circle and circle the field, gaining altitude. Other flights are rising to the west and south of us, and even from where we stood you could see the beginning of that great formation, a flying arrowhead with height and depth, which was weaving together higher and closer as it neared the sea. Then they were gone from sight.

“Now you will know what it is to sweat it out,” said the doctor as we sat together at mess. Lunching with us were crews who had come in the night before from Norway and were being rested for the next day’s raid. Automatically you checked off their records. Those blue and gold ribbons beneath the wings told that the wearer had returned from five missions. The Air Medal with the little cluster meant ten missions. When a boy has twenty-five missions to his credit, he is in line for the D.F.C. and a long leave.

Time dragged that afternoon. I spent most of it with the mechanics. (There were over two thousand ground men on this field.) I watched them salvaging parts from a wrecked ship — “cannibalizing” they called it. I watched a new tail being fitted on to “The Careful Virgin” while up at the nose the artist of the outfit stood, brush in hand, painting a large “X” over that word “Careful.” She would be the “X-Virgin” from that time forth. I heard the tall stories, and overhead I heard those two unhappy crews who had abortioned, lost their mission, and were now struggling to get their motors into condition.

By six the camp is restive; by seven the exodus begins — on jeeps, bicycles, on trucks — to the vantage points, to see the boys come in. Joe drove me back to the same crossroads. I noticed that the silent rows of English had returned.

“Here they come,” said the radio operator, and swiftly, straight out of the horizon, swept over us in wing-tip formation twelve of our big boys. Everywhere you could see the faces upturned, the fingers counting. Twice they circled the field. “Now watch,” said the radio voice. And with that, one of the Forts peeled off, rose sharply to break his speed, leveled out of sight and then came in, smooth as cream from a jug. “They are coming in hot,” he said. “Hot?” I asked. “Yes, fast — and thank God they are turning left, — the ambulances are up there to the right,” he added, for my benefit.

And now the second group swung into view, thirteen this time. One after the other they peeled off, swung out, and came in on the run. We had sent up twenty-six, and only twenty-five had come back. Where was the other, was the thought in my mind as we raced back across the field.

Now the taxi line was forming again, the big fellows like tired elephants coming home. “The Raunchy Wolf” settled into the center of her space, the pilot cut the motors, and after an instant long legs began to dangle from the hatches. Stiff-kneed, their faces flushed and sweaty from the seven hours of oxygen, their eyes looking fixedly not through you but at something you could not see, the kids came back to earth and began to talk. Joe had the first crack at each pilot as he came out. “Anything wrong?” he asked. He took down their answers on a big board and then raced to the next island.

The tired men with their heavy gear over their shoulders sat down on the hardpan, to wait for a lift. The Indian with his two gun barrels mounted his bicycle. Crew by crew they would go back to headquarters to be interrogated until every last scrap of information had been gleaned about their mission. And then some of them would be alerted for the next day’s raid.

Back at headquarters I talked with a number of the airmen from New England. “Cold up there?” “Forty below.” “Ack-ack bad?” “Worst we’ve seen.” “Coming up like giant Roman candles,” said one. “Like trying to walk on a bead curtain,” said another. I began to jot down messages for their home folk and I remember one boy, Jack Leahy from Norwood, pausing before he spoke. He had given me his mother’s address. “Tell her I like it over here,” he said. “Tell her there are the same kind of people to fight for we have back home.”

I don’t think it is misty-eyed of me to see a relation between these old men of twenty-three and these Englishmen of seventy, between those who are living literature and those who are protecting it. They see each other occasionally: Cambridge is a leave area for our Eighth Bomber Command and both universities have opened refresher courses for our men on leave. But the affiliation goes deeper than a chance encounter or a lecture; it is felt in the blood, like a common danger: it is the active courage of youth calling out the passive courage of age; it is fortitude drummed into the brain and heart ceaselessly by the motors which pass over you — American by day, British by night.