by H. E. Bates
“It’s really Roger’s dog,” the mother said.
“He loved animals,” the sister said. “He’d never see one hurt. He’d never kill anything or see anything killed. Do you remember how he cried, Mother, when Ranger had to be killed? He hated the thought of anything being killed.”
I did not say anything; it was simply that I did not know this Bradshaw. The Bradshaw I knew had killed a great many people. His job was night intrusion; he had shot up a great many trains, cannon-gunned many aerodromes. He had taken ruthless delight in attacking small ships. I had never thought of him as having been sensitive about killing things, and if he seemed to place less value on human life than apparently he had placed on the lives of dogs you could excuse him this because he was, after all, very young. At the time of Munich he was sixteen; he could not have understood or cared very much about what was going on. At nineteen he had begun to kill things.
My tea got cold in my cup, and Mrs. Bradshaw asked if she could pour out some more. I gave her my cup and she put the milk into the cup very slowly, and then sat with a lump of sugar poised between the tongs. I knew that the time was coming when she was going to ask me if Bradshaw was really dead.
But it was not she who asked, after all, but the sister.
“I know you’ll think this is foolish,” she said. “But I don’t believe Roger is dead. In fact, I know he isn’t. I know.”
There was nothing I could say. I knew that Bradshaw was very dead. He had gone out in a full moon with a very good pilot, Sergeant Thompson, over Northern France, on intruder patrol. It was so light that you could see the lines of the railway tracks running like silver pipes across the flat countryside road as Bradshaw went down to machine-gun a north-bound train. Thompson saw him hit the telegraph post and burst into flame. After this, Thompson went down very low himself and circled over the tracks, looking out, but there was no one beside the burning ’plane.
Bradshaw was very dead and I had liked him. The tea was quite cold now as I sipped it. It was hard to say why we had liked each other. He was quite mad and had a violent temper and no values at all; in the evenings after the day’s operations one of the things he liked to do most was to drive fast in the darkness down to an hotel by the sea. He drove very fast going down, never slowing up at cross-roads, often jumping traffic lights, behaving most of the time as if the car were an aircraft and the road simply the sky; and he drove even faster coming back. He had already shot down three by night and two by day, and he began to have some of that aristocratic arrogance that the fighter-boy often acquires after success. He was something of the hero. The hotel was a place for drinking: the darkness was the place to take a girl. He liked the kind of girl his mother and his sister probably did not really believe existed: big blonde girls with cherry squash lips and short fur coats that they kept undone as they leaned loosely on the bar. He treated them all as they had no identity except the identity of ripe flesh; he gave them nothing of what was inside himself, no thought, no emotion, no consideration, and there was only one who ever got under his skin. She was a big shrewd girl, older than himself, who decided she wanted to possess him because he was fresh, aristocratic, and a fighter. She wanted something like a permanent attachment. Because of this he decided not to see her again. “O.K.” she said, “you lead me to expect you want to go steady, and then all you want is a date just when you fancy it. I’ve a damn good mind to write to your mother and tell just what sort of a son she’s got.” I was waiting by the car in the darkness outside the hotel as the argument went on, and I heard his voice beseeching her almost hysterically in answer: “Please,” he said. “Please. My God, don’t do that. Do what you like, but don’t do that. Please don’t!”
I set my cup on the table and Mrs. Bradshaw, slightly inclining her head again, asked me if I would like more tea. I said no, thank you, and I saw her take a long deep breath, her face growing suddenly rigid with the effort of what she had to say.
“It’s the uncertainty,” she said, “the awful uncertainty.”
Suddenly I felt it was hypocrisy, and in a sense of betrayal of him, not to tell her that he was dead.
“There was not uncertainty.” I tried to tell her tenderly and quietly what I knew. “He was seen to crash. We know. He was seen by a very experienced pilot who couldn’t be mistaken.”
“Why couldn’t he have been mistaken?” The sister’s voice was suddenly very hard and hostile. “Why not?”
“Because it was full moon. The pilot was very experienced. He circled and searched until he couldn’t stay any longer.”
“But he’s only human. He could make a mistake.”
“I don’t think he could.”
“You think! But you don’t know, do you?” she said.
“You don’t know! You don’t know!”
“We do know,” I said. “So far as is humanly possible”
“Then you don’t know, do you? Not finally. Not absolutely. Not finally.”
“well—”
“No! But I know. I know. I know in here.” She put her hand on her chest and clenched her thin fingers and tapped her chest with them. “In here, that’s where I know, and I shall always know. I always have known because I knew him better than anyone ever did. But I always shall know.”
“Dorothy,” the mother said, “Dorothy.”
“I can’t take that from you,” I said.
“I’m glad you think that,” she said bitterly. “I’m glad, I’m glad you grant me that.” She stood up. She was very excited now and she could not have known how much she was trembling. “And I know something else.”
“Dorothy, Dorothy,” the mother said.
“I know it was wrong for him to be doing what he was doing. He was young and clean and decent and he hated killing. He did it because he had to, not because he liked it. He wasn’t like that. He was just a clean, decent, honest boy. You never saw him cry when his dog died, did you? No! But I did! I did, and I know! I know!”
She began to go out of the room and just before she finished speaking, and the mother sat staring silently at the tea-table after she had gone.
“I’m very sorry,” I said.
The mother did not speak. Very slowly she began to pack one saucer on top of another, and then the plates and the cups and the spoons together. The noise of crockery was harsh in the silence left by the upraised voice of the sister. I waited a little longer, watching the mother and now thinking again of Bradshaw. I was not thinking of him now as the wild person he was in the evenings at the hotel by the sea, with his drinking and his arrogance and the blondes; or as he was when he was afraid that someone would reveal him to his mother; or as he was when the newspaper printed him as a night-fighter hero with eyes that saw in the dark; or as he was as his sister knew him, decent and brotherly and very much the product of his class, coming home on leave to behave as the clean and virgin idol of youth who cried over the death of a dog.
I was trying to think of him as he was when alone, flying by night, when no one could see his face or guess his thoughts; when he was by himself, someone apart, too young to have lived very much, too preoccupied with the question of killing and being killed to be oppressed by any obligations about the lives of others. But it was no use thinking any longer.
“I think I must go,” I said.
Mrs. Bradshaw got up. The pince-nez swung on the gold chain. “It is very kind of you to have come,” she said. “I appreciate it. It is very kind.”
“Not at all.”
“I’ll walk with you as far as the gate,” she said.
We walked out of the French windows and along the gravel path of the house, towards the gate at the end of the garden. Our feet made a loud noise on the gravel. The sky was grey with cloud and it was already twilight under the lime trees by the path.
“The days are getting very short,” she said.
We stood at the gate for a moment to say good-bye. Yes, the days were getting short. There were no leaves on the limes. From this time forwar
d we should notice the darkness much more each day.
“Good-bye,” she said. “You have been very kind.” We shook hands. Her hand was very cold and I said good-bye.
“You knew him very well, didn’t you?” she said.
“In a way quite well,” I said.
She looked away from me, slightly lifting her face, looking up through the bare trees towards the empty sky, and then spoke quite slowly.
“I sometimes think,” she said. “I never knew him at all.”
The Three Thousand and One Hours of Sergeant Kostek
On wet afternoons or when cloud base was low and visibility bad and there was no flying, we used to sit in the dispersal hut over the coke stove, eating chocolate, talking, and listening in at intervals to whatever conversation there was on the telephone. You had a cosy feeling in the little hut of belonging to a party of marooned explorers, marooned because the hut was isolated in a corner of the bare field, explorers because whoever was in the hut would be wearing flying jacket and dirty flying boots and looking as if he had just come in from a long march across a dirty and deserted land.
Through the windows on those days you could see the rain pelting down on dispersed Lysanders, making the dull fuselages shine like grey-green oilcloth, the water lying in thick yellow pools on the black perimeter. The ugly friendly Lysanders looked like large awkward hens standing forlornly in the rain. There were mostly sergeants at that dispersal, flying monotonous aircraft on monotonous sorties without even firing a gun, and in time, if you hung about there long enough, you would meet Sergeant Kostek—no decorations, no honours, no happy pictures in the paper—had done three thousand and one hours.
Sergeant Kostek did not look much like a Pole. He did not, in fact, look much like any sort of person in particular; except Sergeant Kostek. He looked more than anything perhaps like a Red Indian who had travelled a long way from home by way of China, Tibet and the Eastern Archipelagos, picking up a little of one civilization and the other on his way. His red, ugly, big-boned face, flat as a Mongolian porter’s, had a huge and smiling mouth with thick lips and large teeth like rows of carved white letters. All along the front these letters had been filled with gold and they flashed brilliantly whenever Sergeant Kostek smiled. And since Sergeant Kostek was always smiling, it was these teeth, flashing gold and ivory, that gave him more charm than any ugly man you ever saw.
“How are you, Serge?”
“Me? Oi!” he would say. “I don’t know. May be all right.”
“No flying?”
“Is too dirty.”
“How low is she?” We were asking it for something to say.
“Is very low. Four hundred I think.”
“Better tomorrow.”
“May be better. May be worse. I don’ know. Just like England.”
“You don’t like England?”
“Me? Not like? Is very nice. Is very good. I like it.”
So then I would ask him: “Of all the places you’ve ever been in, Serge, which do you like best? Apart from the girls.”
“England.” Sergeant Kostek would smile an enormous gold and ivory smile. “Don’t include the girls.”
“You just say that. In France you say France, in England you say England. You say it to please the girls.”
“No. Is true. I don’ just say. England is best.”
“You mean it?”
“Is true. Is really true.”
“Of all the countries you’ve been in? Every one?”
“Every one. Yes. Is really true.”
“Why do you like England best?”
The smile on Sergeant Kostek’s face would fade for a moment and then brighten again, in a flash of white and gold. It was a very sardonic smile.
“I think maybe because not so many people get shot in England.”
So if there were enough rainy days and you talked to Sergeant Kostek long enough you would get to know something of himself, his bravery and the hours he had flown. You would get to know something of the three thousand hours he had done on Hurricanes and Lysanders and all the now forgotten types broken in the Battle of Poland. And you might also get to know something of the odd hours when Sergeant Kostek, with his feet firmly on the ground, had flown higher than any flight since he had first begun to fly as a boy from school.
Kostek had been born somewhere in the south of the country, about fifty miles from the Russian border, not far from the mountains. He was one of those people you cannot see as a child. You thought of him as having always the big, smiling, gold-stopped teeth. You thought of him as having always the cumbersome jacket and boots of the flyer. You thought of him as having always sat in the crowded dispersal hut, over the little coke stove, smiling and joking and trying to kid some new comer, like myself, into taking a trip with him over the sea.
“Tomorrow will be very nice. You come up with me?”
“No.”
“Is very nice in Lizzie. I take you over the sea-side.”
“No.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“No.”
“You think I tip you out?”
“Yes.”
It was nice to be warned about Kostek, who found daily reconnaissance trips in Lysanders so boring that now and then he was glad to give trips to those who wanted them. You came back from those trips like a green and yellow frog; cold and flabby and pop-eyed, with pale and feeble hands. It was better to sit in the warm hut, out of the rain, eating and talking, until finally Sergeant Kostek talked of another hour.
“How I escaped from Poland? Oh! Like all the rest—is long story.”
“They say you shot a couple of people in Hungary. Is it true?”
“Hungary?” The big white teeth would smile. “Hungary? Maybe was. I don’t know. Possibly I should shoot somebody. I don’t know is long time ago.”
“What about Poland?”
“Poland?” His smile would flash and darken again, bright and sardonic. “That is where they nearly shot me.”
Then for a few moments Kostek would take you back to Poland; to a small white farmhouse with a low wall running along the cow-yard. It was the late dry summer of the invasion and the leaves of the willows by the house were already yellow on the trees. Mountains in the distance, not high enough for snow, had the quality of opaque blue grass in the summer air. The Germans were running all over the country, and there, by the small farmhouse, in the cow-yard under the willow trees in the bright summer weather, they were going to shoot Sergeant Kostek by the wall.
Sergeant Kostek did not describe himself standing by the wall. Hard as it used to be for me to imagine Sergeant Kostek with his big teeth showing anything but a gold and ivory smile, I did not see him smiling now. I saw him standing there rather like a Mongolian porter, impassive and ugly, with his eyes partly on the opaque blue mountains and partly on the firing squad about to lift their rifles. I did not imagine what Sergeant Kostek’s thoughts were; whether they were of Poland, of his mother, of the Cross of Christ, or simply of all the hours he had flown; and he never told me. What he did tell me was how long that final moment of waiting seemed; how very much like an hour and not a minute it seemed as the firing squad got ready to raise their rifles, and how as they raised them one German soldier, more nervous than Kostek himself, touched the trigger, and how the rifle went off and there was great confusion and how in that moment Sergeant Kostek, his white teeth possibly smiling now, leapt over the wall and ran.
“Now you know,” he would say, “why I like to be in England.”
“I know,” I said.
And I knew also that that was Sergeant Kostek’s hour.
Glossary of R.A.F. Slang
a shaky do — a doubtful, strange, or unpopular happening; also an aircraft that is shot up in a raid
ammo — Army term for ammunition
be u.s. — be unserviceable
be whistled — be drunk (intoxicated)
brass off — same as “brown off” — to be fed up
briefing — giving final instructions in secret before a raid
brown off — see brass off
D.F.C. — Distinguished Flying Cross
erks — beginners
inter-comm. — intercommunications
Macchi — an Italian type of plane
M.E.’s — Messerschmitts
met. — meteorological
ops. — flight operations
piece of cake — too easy
popsy — girl friend
prang — blast or smash
R/T connections — Radio-telephony connections
scrubbed — cancelled
second dicky — second pilot
stooge — deputy; i.e., second pilot or any assistant
stooge round — fly slowly over an area; patrol; delay landing
tootle in — fly back to base and land
W.A.A.F. — Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
wrapped up — smashed up
A Note on the Author
H. E. Bates was born in 1905 in the shoe-making town of Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and as a clerk in a leather warehouse.
Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands, particularly his native Northamptonshire, where he spent many hours wandering the countryside.
His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926) was published by Jonathan Cape when he was just twenty. Many critically acclaimed novels and collections of short stories followed.
During WWII he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories, which were published under the pseudonym “Flying Officer X”. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France (1944), followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949) and one set in India, The Scarlet Sword (1950). Other well-known novels include Love for Lydia (1952) and The Feast of July (1954).
His most popular creation was the Larkin family which featured in five novels beginning with The Darling Buds of May in 1958. The later television adaptation was a huge success.