101 Nights

by Ray Ollis

  Ray was more focused on Europe, his education was European; while in Britain and France he had collected, in a modest way, rare art and books.9 While Adelaide and Ray shared an intellectual dilletantism which harboured a strong Romantic tendency, Ray had seen too much political reality to be swayed by gatherings of leftish theosophers.

  Ray applied for copyright for several plays and musicals, each tinged with shades of his own life, but it seems they were never performed; Ray approached theatrical agents but Adelaide audiences would have found his work too morally challenging.

  Gestetner promoted him to advertising copywriter, and the couple joined Adelaide’s large dance and art scenes. A local newspaper featured a series of articles on the looted, possibly Van Dyck, painting he purchased in Europe. The couple reached the final of a national dancing competition, but Ray’s 1951 letter to the Mail spoke of a disgruntled restlessness with tidy, provincial Adelaide.

  In March 1952 Ray applied for copyright for another musical, Sunbeams from Above, with the same dispiriting result. Three months later, having sold the ‘Van Dyck’, Marjorie and Ray sold up and took a passenger liner to England. It is hard to avoid the feeling that Ray was escaping back to the Europe he knew, to the grander, bigger stage he expected.

  The world was about to change. Stalin, the ‘Man of Steel’, died on 5 March 1953, Kenya was beginning to rebel, Elizabeth II was crowned in June, the Korean War grudgingly ground to a cease-fire in July and the following year saw the French defeated in Vietnam.

  Although Nevil Shute and James Riddell’s flight from England to Australia (in a Percival Proctor) in late 1948 was given coverage interstate, it was not covered in Adelaide newspapers.10 As Shute said to one Australian newspaper, ‘If you stay too long in one place, you get run down. The battery needs recharging.’

  Escape to Write

  Sometime in late 1953, after somehow wangling a trip as ‘2nd navigator’ on a round trip from Topcliffe to Tokyo, Gestetner gave Ray a three-year contract to the British colony of Kenya.

  On 26 November 1953, about the time the politicians in London were realising they needed to deal with the problem in Kenya, Ray Ollis arrived in Nairobi where, it seems, his friends were friends with Sir Evelyn Baring, Governor-General of Kenya (1952–1959); Ray apparently enjoyed parties and receptions in their circle.11

  ‘Ray drove an old diesel-run Mercedes around East Africa with a shotgun under the seat’, visiting countries such as Rhodesia and Uganda (Margaret Ollis), where ‘most Europeans carried a gun at all times’, but ‘things weren’t so bad so long as you were prepared for anything, and took no chances.’

  He also embarked on a novel; there were things he wanted to say which, were they to appear in an autobiography, might be questioned—if not denied. Ray may also have read Long’s Greece, Crete and Syria; which includes several remarkable survival stories not unlike Farlow’s (such as Private Carroll).

  Kenya between 1954 and 1956 was a time and place of muddy colonial morality and no small danger.12 Appropriately, 101 Nights portrays a muddy, dangerous moral quagmire from an operative’s perspective, especially since Ludford’s nickname, ‘Mudford Magma’ had been awarded with good reason.

  With only a few years to gain perspective on his years in Bomber Command, it is fair to say that much of 101 Nights was culled from Ray’s still-fresh memory, his logbook and his lengthy diaries. For colour, he also drew on some of his greatest influences.

  Ray chose a forceful and lyrical image to weave into 101 Nights; initially a literal reference to the West Wind, which several times forced Bomber Command into a chaotic night. However, the West Wind was also Bomber Command, battling the night-fighters and the flak with their ‘violent tempest of hail and rain … attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning’ (Shelley’s note to Ode to the West Wind).13

  Ray depicts the operational and moral complexity of Bomber Command, the vast scale of wartime operations in a way that, until then, had not appeared before the public. He makes it clear that bombing dealt in death and destruction, that he knew he had killed not just the enemy, but civilians as well.14

  It is our own perception of ourselves which tends to dominate our more rational capabilities. This is one major reason for depression, that the mind finds too easily the gap between expectation and miserable reality. It may be observed that, no matter what it is they are writing, a writer always writes about an aspect of themselves, often confessing their darkest truths in the guise of fiction.

  Writing in a new world, in a colonial corner where old ways were dying and new dynasties were bubbling up, Ray Ollis’s depiction of the crusading knights of the air is provocative and thoughtful, as much a part of the story of modern alienation as it is of Bomber Command.

  World War Two was a time for heroes. Mostly they were created for public consumption in aid of the war effort; journalists and writers went out to find them. Leonard Cheshire’s Bomber Pilot was regarded by his peers as letting the side down, ‘shooting a line’ (or grandstanding). Realising this, Cheshire was embarrassed by its publication.

  Ray’s Farlow is a war-damaged hero who describes his bravery as ‘failure’; in best T.E. Lawrence style, Farlow must be heaved into the limelight; his modesty making him more heroic. In Farlow Ray writes about himself; he does not want to say that he wants fame and the approval of the masses, public success, yet he clearly feels that what he is and what he is capable of merits all these things.

  Ray creates another doomed hero, Jackal, one of thousands of ordinary heroes, and his flipside, Hyde, a man who is two men; the capable, roistering warrior who becomes the crippled, fearful man who is no longer as capable as he once was. Hyde dies like warrior knight Richard Hillary, wrestling at the controls of his aircraft with clumsy, burn-cramped hands. In Hyde, Ray reveals his manic and depressive selves, his capable and incapable selves. Hillary’s The Last Enemy was a story loosely based on fact; Hillary disguised his ambitious nature with a heroic, moving tale of a reluctant hero facing up to his fears and weaknesses, mirroring the plight of the public at the time.

  Ray compares Jackal and Hyde with the methodical ambition of Chiltern, his lack of regard for the stuff of life, while Jackal and Hyde plunge into the warp and weft of wartime night-life. However much Chiltern is based on Warner, in Chiltern Ray also tells us of his own determined ambition, and his luxury-loving, lascivious side. 101 Nights reads like an encoded memoir; it would be as unjust to assume that Farlow is pure Ollis as it would to assume that Chiltern is pure Warner. Ollis has altered his memoir to serve his story.

  In quoting Shakespeare, Ray chose fiercely appropriate lines. Take ‘With busy hammers closing rivets up/ Give dreadful note of preparation’ from Part One. Taken from Shakespeare’s patriotic play Henry V, the quote refers to the construction of knight’s armour and other preparations prior to battle, but a fuller quotation may as well be a slice of everyday life in Bomber Command;

  Now entertain conjecture of a time

  When creeping murmur and the poring dark

  Fills the wide vessel of the universe.

  From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night

  The hum of either army stilly sounds

  That the fix’d sentinels almost receive

  The secret whispers of each other’s watch

  Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames

  Each battle sees the other’s umber’d face;

  Steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs

  Piercing the night’s dull ear, and from the tents

  The armourers, accomplishing the knights

  With busy hammers closing rivets up

  Give dreadful note of preparation.

  Ollis directly aligns the bomber crews with the medieval British knights.

  There is a sense of despair and bitterness which runs through 101 Nights. Kubler-Ross remarks that death ‘is an integral part of our lives that gives meaning to human existence. It sets a limit on our time in this life, urging us
on to do something productive with that time as long as it is ours to use.’

  Few of us comprehend this in our day to day lives, even if we work among the doomed or dying ourselves, as everyone did at an operational airfield in WW2. Ollis refers to suicide so often one wonders just how bad his depressions really were; his quotations from Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth snarl at the waste and loss.

  Ollis pays much attention to the women on the ground, many of whom lived a nightmare of anxiety each time their man flew on a raid. Barbara Cunard comforts the distraught Mrs Hardy by saying, ‘It might kill me to stay silent, but I would let nothing hurt that memory.’ When she hears about her husband’s death, Cunard immediately kills herself, in her mind perhaps preserving her memory of him forever.

  Ollis describes Jeschonnek’s suicide as an expression of failure to maintain a chosen life.

  Schydt and Yarpi’s acts are so self-destructive they may as well be suicides; if taken to courts-martial, both would have been found guilty and probably shot.

  These impulsive suicidal acts reject the cards fate has laid, reject the truth of things. As if a risk is only acceptable if it brings dividends; if the result is unbearably negative, ‘there’s always one way out, and they can’t stop me’. Suicide is a mortal sin against God, and God’s will is not considered; here Ray Ollis is a modern writer, balancing the debt to the past and the everyday wonder of the present.

  At some point during the late 1960s, Ray Ollis’s mental health began to break down, and at this point he appears to have been diagnosed as manic-depressive, which goes a long way to explain why he was unable to focus on a relationship and why, increasingly as he arrived in one country, he felt so restless he would board another ship to escape. Timothy Ollis noted: ‘He liked being shot at! He loved the adrenalin, of putting himself in danger. Look at his three years in Kenya …’, during the Mau-Mau Uprising, his dangerous journey in a Proctor called ‘Old Gert’, courting danger …

  Once committed to a psychiatric institution, Ray exercised all his skill and powers of persuasion to be released, legally sane in 1972. Deciding to kill himself, he then annotated a will, wrote a letter to his brother Ron, loaded his shotgun, and headed to see Margaret and the children for a final showdown.

  Ray Ollis took his own life in a moment of dreadful impulse. For decades he had combatted an unspeakable urge; insanity was the end.

  It is true that we cannot know a man by his words alone, but also by his actions. In analysing his words, we may read too much into Ray Ollis, or reveal too much which he would have preferred to have kept hidden. Songwriter Rowland S. Howard observed: ‘people don’t understand that if something has been written in an oblique way, it’s oblique for a reason’.15

  Don Bennett’s Pathfinder was published the year after 101 Nights;

  … the second German war was officially fought as a ‘war without aim’ … [Churchill] made frequent statements to the effect that Germany would never rise again to be a scourge against mankind. Thus we asked our young men to fight and die without any clear ideals such as liberty, fair play or justice …

  For an individual, whether they be within the organisation as Dyson and Bennett were, or operating at its edge, as Ray Ollis was, perspective is difficult to maintain at the best of times.

  Some historians compare numbers. British deaths through German bombing were much lower than German deaths through RAF bombing. But again we must return to the intent behind the bombing.

  Grayling puts his finger on the main problem when he writes:

  if Allied bombing in the Second World War was in whole or part morally wrong, it is nowhere near equivalent in scale of moral atrocity to the Holocaust of European Jewry, or the death and destruction all over the world for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was collectively responsible: a total of some twenty-five million dead, according to responsible estimates. Allied bombing … claimed the lives of about 800,000 civilian women, children and men … [to say] nothing about the injured, traumatised and homeless, who in many respects suffered worse … The bombing of the aggressor Axis states was aimed at weakening their ability and will to make war; the murder of six million Jews was an act of racist genocide. There are very big differences here.

  It is the intent which still separates the acts of evil men from evil acts by men. There was a moral crusade, certainly, but the crusade bore a momentum which prevented effective analysis of intent versus results.

  Lowe remarked:

  many people do not care if the Germans suffered or not. During my research I have spoken to scores of people—Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Danes, Dutchmen, Frenchmen … who have listened to my descriptions of the Hamburg firestorm and merely shrugged their shoulders. ‘It was their own fault,’ is the standard reply. ‘They started it.’

  ‘They started it’. And ‘it’ was not just bad, but indecently bad, evil almost beyond imagining. The trouble with evil is that once evil has been seen, we become accustomed to it. This is essentially both the truth of and the emotional justification why the Allies, in particular Britain, expanded the bombing war in Europe, and why the USA firebombed Japanese cities with no pretence of precision targeting.

  ‘They started it’ was partly the reason why Roosevelt demanded ‘unconditional surrender’, regardless of the tactical necessities or realistic consequences.

  Interestingly, Lowe also finds that the Germans’ response ‘exactly mirrors the sentiments of their enemies’: “We started it.” Or, even more tellingly, “We deserved it.”’

  101 Nights was written less than a decade-and-a-half a world away from a 1945 when Ollis and thousands of men peered down upon Duisburg. Jean Calmel wrote:

  The spectacle was grandiose, but it was no longer human. Against the blood red of the city the latticework of streets was marked by black lines which at times were effaced by an avalanche of flames. … Immense spirals of smoke rose to the sky, almost tangible in their density.

  In the same way as the fighter who has just shot down his opponent in flames savours his triumph, we had accomplished an identical exploit and felt the same moral satisfaction.

  The grim, determined misery of ‘survivor’s guilt’, when you are the only survivor out of hundreds of men … this guilt drove men to apply for Pathfinders, returning to ops again and again to atone for the dreadful indecent sin of living while their comrades died, often in flames …

  These men, who had become one with the wild West Wind of Bomber Command, were they Eliot’s ‘hollow men’ who forgot that they fought for decency, because they had become indecent, corrupt?

  Despite Blake’s view that experience may not always corrupt, in the real world this is but wishful thinking, there can be no return to innocence from a state of corruption.’

  Ray’s wartime experiences, as well as his time in Kenya, would seem to embody such an ongoing moral battle, a world where ‘even the good … were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity’.

  Bomber Command operated with optimism, with the best of intentions, but a primary policy insufficiently flexible to force the war to a more rapid conclusion.

  ‘They deserved it’ may have been the driving force behind Bomber Command’s West Wind, and Ray ends 101 Nights with the future:

  Men should mourn their friends, but they must not go on mourning, piling grief upon grief, lamenting more and ever more dead comrades. That way madness lies: a madness that in war is suicide.

  By August 1956 Ray had mailed his novel to Cassell in London, received a positive reply and written his ‘Briefing’ from Fort Smith. It is likely he had also written—in Swahili—the bulk of his notes for a second book, on the Mau-Mau Uprising. However, Cassell were about to release Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel The Tribe that Lost Its Head, and translating Ray’s book from Swahili might have seemed an expensive risk; Ray never translated it himself.

  Ray Ollis left Africa when his contract with Gestetner expired; Kenya was granted independence in 1963 and declared itself a republic a
year later.16

  Publication … and After

  For the next few years Ray’s passage is vivid, bright; however, afterwards, real information is sketchy. Ray bounces between Africa, Britain and Australia, even navigating on a long-distance flight from London to Darwin in emulation of the pioneer aviators.

  Ray, ‘nightclub singer’ Geoff Layton (owner-pilot) and dentist Matt Deen (second pilot) arrived in Layton’s Mew Gull in Darwin on 22 November 1956, their epic 13,000 mile journey having taken the three musketeers a little over 106 hours.

  Decorators were repainting the hotel in Darwin where we called to celebrate. On the walls were signatures of Ross and Keith Smith, Amy Johnson, Kingsford-Smith, Bert Hinkler, Jean Batten … and, while we drank, a workman painted them over. He was a young workman and our protests puzzled him—perhaps he had never even heard of Amy Johnson.16

  These names were instantly recognisable to the three fliers, in particular Ray, who makes it clear he was following in the footsteps of his boyhood heroes.

  Ray’s restlessness continued as he worked his passage as a steward between the continents on the cruise ships. In one letter, dated 3 May 1957, he writes,

  I’d love to fall in love right now. It’s exactly what I need … for my morale and my work. Sydney is so DULL. … There was a time when I had hopes of fixing a flight back to London about this time. But it’s fallen through. So I’m thrown back onto the ships …

  His letters and logbook make him appear extremely restless. The next day Ray went on a 42 minute ‘flip in Australia’s first (1929) plane’, Genairco VH-UOD, his duty (still) being navigator to Dr Morris’s pilot. This was the first single-engined aircraft built in Australia; production was limited and ceased in the early 1930s.

  A few weeks later, Ray had again worked his way back to England on a cruise ship where he attended Cassell’s publication event for 101 Nights, which did well enough to earn a reprint, a paperback and a translated paperback; even a radio serial was considered.