Descent

by Michael Wombat

for him to die in Drachten.

  Oh God, he really was about to die. It would actually happen, and soon. Peter's calm suddenly spiralled away as the reality of his situation fully hit home. Oh bugger, oh bugger! He felt dizzy, disoriented and sick. He flung out his arms like a drowning man trying desperately to find something to grab. There was nothing of course, but at least the action stabilised his body so that he was no longer spinning head over heels. Arms and legs outstretched, he fell face down, gazing wide-eyed and flooded with dread at the approaching world beneath him. Oh sweet God have mercy. He was plummeting to his doom.

  Or was he actually falling? There seemed little change in the landscape laid out below. The fields, the lines and dots, all stayed in place, all looked much the same from one moment to the next. Peter had the distinct impression that he was floating motionless above the earth, gazing down like an angel on high.

  Now there was a thought. What if he had, in fact, died along with his crew, and was now, by the power of God's mighty hand, returned as an angel, albeit one lacking a harp and dressed in a flying suit? If that were indeed the case, and at this point he was perfectly willing to entertain any idea, then might he not be able to affect his flight? How would an angel manage that?

  Perhaps it was as simple as using the sheer power of his angelic will. He screwed up his eyes, wrinkled his forehead and concentrated hard. Up! Up! Rise, you bugger! He tried to force his body to lift away from the earth. Surely such a thing was no less likely than that the tons of steel, rubber and glass that made up a Lancaster should lift into the thin air? After all, he was far lighter than a bomber. Hesitantly he opened his eyelids a little and squinted below. Had that made a difference? Uncertain.

  Do use full sentences, Peter darling.

  What was that? Mother? He was sure that he had just heard... no. He swivelled his head, but of course he was alone. A mirage, then. Or whatever the aural version of a mirage was. Let’s just call it a hallucination. Or was it ‘an hallucination’? He never had been quite sure.

  Stop wittering, Peter.

  Mother. Oh God, Mother. Mother taking him to the park in the huge perambulator. Mother kissing childhood hurts better. Mother feeding him bread and dripping in the scullery. Mother lifting him above her head as he wildly waved his arms up and down, playing at being a bird, and unknowingly instilling in him a love of flight that had led him to volunteer for the RAF. Mother crying down the telephone after he had passed out from the Lancaster Finishing School at Syerston. She would be devastated, destroyed. First a husband, now a son, lost to brutal war. Boom.

  He tried flapping his arms briefly, in the vague hope that Mother could still lift him across the miles between them, but to no obvious effect. No surprise there, since they were arms rather than wings.

  You are a dimwit, Peter. Obviously flapping your arms will not stop you falling. Nothing will stop you falling.

  And yes, he was definitely falling. He could see that now. He could feel the wind whistling past his ears, the air pressure against his chest. Blimey, he was freezing.

  You have only yourself to blame. You volunteered to fight in the air, after all.

  True. When his seventeenth birthday came with no sign of the war ever ending, he had decided to volunteer for service rather than wait for conscription. That way at least he would have some small control over where he might end up. Before offering his services to the RAF, he had toyed briefly with the idea of joining the brown jobs like Father, but the Major's lurid tales of his time in the trenches almost thirty years before had soon stifled that idea. In particular, Father's story about his close friend Chalky, often told after dinner complete with sound effects and wild waving of the arms, put paid to any idea that Peter's war would be fought on the ground.

  Father's sonorous growl wormed into Peter's ears, and he could see the bristling of that huge moustache as the gruesome tale was recounted once again, despite Mother's objections.

  “November of Seventeen,” Father declaimed, “Trenches. Mud, gore, bollock-deep. Whizz-bangs, screaming ninnies, constant bloody racket. Sarnt-Major Bastard screams. Screams! 'Crighton-Biggie, White! Move arses! Lay telegraph wire! Frenchie trench on right flank!' Pointless bloody task. Wire wouldn’t last an hour. Had to do it though. Had to. Else shot at dawn. Me, Chalky, roll of wire. Crawl hundred yards, maggoty mud. Filth up nose, in mouth, down throat. Filth! Hour and a bloody half. Almost there, BOOM! Bloody Bosche shell right up jacksies. Me, thrown in air, flew! Flew! Yet fell unhurt. Not a scratch. Chalky, eye blown out of socket. Dangling wet thing, still attached. Like pickled egg on string. Egg! Chalky, screaming, still see out of it. Saw shirt and feet one eye, me t'other. Told him. Stop screaming, you girl! Wrapped eyeball hanky, carried him back our trench. Orderly, resourceful chap, popped eye back with teaspoon. Plop! Sort of sucking noise actually. Chalky right as ninepence next day. Said he'd kept eye out for me. Cheeky sod! Kept eye out! Got Jerry bayonet up arsehole week later, poor bugger. Never got me hanky back.”

  No, flying would be Peter's war, high in the clean air, far removed from the filth and ordure suffered by the poor bloody infantry. Not that flying a Lancaster was an entirely pristine experience, mind. Many a time one or more of the crew had vomited, through nerves or dodgy NAAFI food. And yes, more than once from the effects of far too many beers at The Pig and Whistle the previous night. Not much you could do about that except leave it lying where it had landed until you got home, which could be hours, then tell the ground crew to clean it up. They loved that job.

  Then there was the Elsan. The chemical toilet located in the mid-section. When Doris was flying through rough air, this devil's convenience often shared its contents with the floor of the aircraft, the walls, even the ceiling, as well as the arse of whoever was desperate enough to be using it. That activity in itself was a nightmare, trying to combat fear and airsickness, struggling to remove enough clothing in cramped quarters, then trying to use the cursed Elsan. Sitting in the frigid cold mid the racket of roaring engines and whistling air, freezing your bits off, briefly away from the war for what should have been one of life's peaceful moments, you had a chance to fully ponder the miserable condition of your life while your bollocks were liberally coated with other men's evacuations. This was why Peter never ate before a mission. He had no intention of baring his buttocks to that noisome chaos.

  Wait, where was he? Oh. Yes. Damn.

  The fields looked larger. Lines beneath him were resolving themselves into rivers and roads, dots into buildings. How long would this death plunge take anyway? He felt as if he had been up here for an age. How many minutes of precious life did he have left?

  You were always a whizz at sums, dear, work it out.

  “Arithmetic, Mother. I'm good at arithmetic. Sums are additions only, just one particular mathematical function.”

  You know best, Peter.

  Mother was right, however, he should be able to work it out, surely? Mathematics had always been his forte at school. Hmm. He would need to factor in drag coefficients and surface area to work out his terminal velocity. He weighed twelve stone, and his surface area was, um, about five square feet, say. The drag of a human is what, one? Terminal velocity therefore should be roughly... seventy-three and a bit. Call it seventy-five feet a second to make the calculation easier, therefore his quickest fall would be twenty thousand divided by seventy five. About two hundred and seventy seconds. Four and a half minutes of precious existence. Actually, he now realised, the larger he could make his surface area, the slower would be his fall and the longer he would live. Even one extra second would be worth the effort. He stretched out his limbs as far as he could.

  Surely though, far more than four minutes had already passed since he had left Doris behind? The distant earth below seemed a little closer, true, but not by much. Off to the left he could still see the arc of the horizon, the distant sea. That meant he still retained not inconsiderable height. He considered this for a moment.

  Perhaps time itself had become stret
ched for him, now that he was flying solo as it were. He would experience this fall, this plunge, in slow motion. In which case, he could no longer trust his sense of the passage of time. For all he knew, it had actually been tens of minutes since Doris went down in flames. Possibly even a matter of hours. By now, if they had escaped the German fighters, he would probably be pencilling in the squadron log book:

  5/6 Aug 42 Bombed Hamburg. Flight time 5 hours 38 minutes. Pilot S/L Crighton-Biggie. One 4000lb `cookie' and 8 x 30 lb bombs. Slight flak damage.

  Then the crew would tootle off to the NAAFI for breakfast. Perhaps he would telephone June, to let her know that he was OK. Fanny would have made a joke about the awful powdered egg. Zappo would have laughed along with them, although not fully understanding the jest. That daft Pole would eat any old rubbish. Tripe, boiled beef and carrots. Peter began to taste boiled beef right now, rich and earthy on his tongue. He took another slice and looked for the carrots. There were no carrots.

  “I want my carrots!” he complained, stamping his feet.

  Peter! Calm yourself this second. Now ask politely or remain silent.

  “Please may I have some carrots, please?” he requested meekly.

  Far better, my boy. There