The Last Flight of Poxl West

by Daniel Torday

  When I got the report back a week later, my teacher had written on the last page, “Impressive research, impressive topic, impressive writing, impressive, impressive, impressive. And above all, impressive company you’ve been keeping. Meticulous work: A−. Keep up the good work.”

  ACT THREE

  1.

  My first few weeks after enlisting in the RAF were taken up with logistics. I was given an examination in math, which I passed with ease. I was issued a respirator and identity disks, eating utensils, and a whole new set of vaccinations should I be shot down over North Africa. An officer in his RAF blues gave me and three other recruits a lecture about how short we should keep our hair, how it was imperative that a pilot shower after each run, and bathe himself every other day on any account.

  “If you meet some young thing in the NAAFI, you’re to use protection,” this officer said. The idea of meeting any “young thing” was far from my mind at that moment. This officer was tall, and broader across the chest than the Elbe near Brüder Weisberg, and of a British type who, frankly, scared me. “We don’t need any more of our crew walking around with balls swollen with disease, if you see what I’m bloody saying.”

  We saw.

  The walls grew brighter and my palms began to sweat, thinking what diseases I myself might have acquired, having spent more than a year sleeping with Françoise and now Glynnis. It was as if the world before me was succumbing to splashes of color, and a kind of spasm shook my eyeballs so that I could not focus. I could think now of what diseases I might have, but had I thought before of what the experience was to them? I didn’t even know what Françoise’s fate was, let alone what she might be thinking now.

  In a room with dun-colored floors, which smelled antiseptic and vaguely of man sweat, an officer shouted that I was to take off my clothing. Soon he hit me with a painful spray from a hose to assure I was rid of any bugs. From there I was whisked off to a Nissen hut where I was to spend the night, before moving along to begin my training.

  Next day I rode by train down to the southern coast, where I was plied further with a trainee’s gear at the Initial Training Wing to which I was assigned. It was the same train Glynnis and I had ridden to visit Mrs. Goldring not three months earlier. Water still lay in the fields, and now the fields, which only rarely had been scarred by bombs, were torn up, as if plagued by some infernal vermin. I pulled down my rucksack to inventory my new possessions. Everything seemed to come in threes: three navy blue sweaters, three pairs of heavy socks (“You’ll need those up there, it’s cold as hell at thirty thousand feet”), three service collars, and three service shirts, stiff and itchy on those first days I donned them. I’d received fork and knife, and today a heavy navy blue wool sweater with a cable-knit collar, which I would later learn was named after the British isle of Guernsey. Again hygiene was a major concern, and while I found the treatment of the RAF officer rather lax compared to those conventional views one is given of the rigor of military life, I received bristled items of all varieties—one for my clothing, one for my boots, even one to keep the buttons of my uniform clean.

  After that train ride east—after our path departed from those tracks Glynnis and I had once traveled on and dipped farther south—my memory consists only of the chaos of orientation and more lectures on basic personal comportment before I was soon on a train headed north, this time to RAF Cranwell. There I was stationed in yet another Nissen hut. During the days I rose at seven and was in the classroom in yet another Nissen hut where starting at eight every morning I was plied with a deluge of English words—nacelles, ailerons, throttles, glycol; cumulus, stratus, cirrus—and where I earned mediocre scores at gunnery (I never got comfortable with the Browning automatic) and in my use of the Morse buzzer, which in the end was of far greater use to the navigator than it was to me.

  From there I was sent back even farther north to Lincolnshire, where my training group practiced flying Tiger Moths. Did I think of that story Glynnis Goldring had told of her ancestor who had centuries earlier seen an imp carved in stone in some Anglican church in this very Lincolnshire where I was now to be stationed? Was a certain compassion not evoked in me, a sense that the hope for love I’d left to the south might outweigh what was ahead of me here in the north? If such clarity of emotion was available to you when you were twenty-one years old, I can only convey to you my most sincere, ardent jealousy. No matter the upheavals of my most recent years, I was still a young man bent on moving forward. When I returned to London after my service, perhaps I would fulfill the suggestion that Glynnis and I could marry. I would write her letters.

  For now my mind drew northward.

  As for my arrival there, I can say only that these Tiger Moths we were soon to train on were quite familiar from my time flying in Czechoslovakia. This was an updated model, but it was very similar to my father’s. I felt I knew what I was doing. Soon enough I was faced only with the formality of recording two hundred hours in the little blue logbook.

  In a matter of months, I wasn’t far from taking to the air for battle.

  In the classrooms and briefing rooms where we were to study the visual differences between Messerschmitt 109’s and Junker Ju 88’s and Dorniers and Focke-Wulfs, I looked up when our training officers would place long pieces of yarn on large maps of Western Europe to show us routes we might take in flying over the Channel and into the Ruhr Valley. What I would see there were flight paths traversing the airspace over much of England; over the North Sea; directly over Rotterdam and over German soil. I was ready to take flight.

  2.

  Near the end of my training, my time to strike against the Nazis would be delayed. I had nearly logged my two hundred hours on that Tiger Moth to take the Pilot Navigator Test. There had been much talk of who would pilot bombers and who fighters, who would go up with half a dozen of their fellow fliers to drop bombs on those German cities from four-engine Lancasters and Manchesters—and those who would engage the Luftwaffe in Spitfires. But this decision so important to my fate wasn’t mine to make. My experience flying solo was noted in my blue logbook by my superiors. I was to fly a Spitfire.

  At that aerodrome in Lincolnshire, I took one of those sleek machines skyward, just twenty hours short of fulfilling my training. Below me were fields, one of which might still provide feed for the very cattle that Glynnis had once fed when she was a girl, pushing her along her own path to medicine. An early fog fought the high sun all morning. The low clouds we’d been taught to fear hadn’t abated by late afternoon. Training in these fighters was limited to night flying, as we would be escorting bombers to their targets over Germany. At 2100 hours I readied for takeoff, through darkness and clouds. As the flight progressed and I began to run low on petrol and prepared to return, clouds near what I thought was our aerodrome were so thick they wholly obscured the ground. Even as I sank below ten thousand feet, I passed through opaque clouds, and soon found myself hopelessly lost. The coordinates I was meant to follow had me nowhere near the aerodrome, but deeper and deeper into the dark sky above western England. I would have to guess my way back to base.

  I got on the radio, calling, “Hello, darky,” “Hello, darky,” seeking an operator.

  The night was a blank, unyielding future. I had come to see my destiny as a line stitched in a glove: bending and bobbing above and below leather—but always by design. The night’s darkness and the clouds’ opacity seemed, if anything, a benefit. On occasion a light would brighten a section of cloud below, but a single flash of light is not enough to sustain a life.

  Soon I was down to my last ten minutes of petrol. Faltering on the wind, with only my ailerons and the growing certainty of my hand to reach my destination, the aqueous, impermanent world washed away from me and then back. There was a particular switch that always gave me trouble, and I found it easier to remove my right glove to flip it. In the cold of that cockpit, I bared skin to metal. Off in the distance, to match the flashing lights behind my eyelids, I espied two spotlights: a runwa
y, and at its end a red flare not unlike the markers the Pathfinders would use later in the war to mark my bombing targets in the Ruhr Valley.

  I was out of petrol and forced to land with only the wind to propel me. So I landed heavy. My underbelly scraped hard, calling sparks up from the pavement below. The control column drove into my ribs. My entire chest was imploding, and before me every dream and desire I’d harbored for now months and even years was growing diffuse, distant. Before I was even debriefed I was taken to a hospital, where after a number of days I was diagnosed with pleurisy, which I was now suffering from as a result of an infection that developed from my injuries.

  During the months following this landing, I had a great deal of time for thinking, and I thought often of how different the experience of physical pain as an adult was than it had been when I was a boy. When I was eight and broke my wrist, physical pain still contained that singular didactic ability to transform action. So much of life is defined by the acceptance of pain. When I was four I put my hand on a teapot and burned my fingers. The raised red imprints are still seared onto my pinkie and ring fingers, and at the heel of my left palm. I was still learning from pain, conditioned to understand what to touch, what not, how to proceed as a human.

  Pain had a single lesson: Some things must be avoided. One kind of pain was the pain you received when you burned your hand; another kind of pain was the pain of bad decisions rued for years to follow. What pain do I feel now, decades later, when I think of that day I left Rotterdam? What pain did I feel when I lay in that hospital bed, trying to imagine Françoise now in life or in death? It was Glynnis I should have been thinking of, but something in the indeterminacy of what I’d left in Rotterdam kept my mind returning to it much as my mind returned to that day I’d gripped the teapot.

  This inauguration into the experience of human-being had not yet ended when I was thirteen and traversing Prague with my mother, when the sometimes unbearable sexual desire I’d coupled with my experiences then arose in me. I wonder even now at what point in our development pain becomes something one endures, at times something one comes even to learn to enjoy—if only to test one’s stamina, if only to remember once more that the routine of one’s days has brought about in one the forgetfulness of death. Forgetfulness at the mind meeting each coming moment. Being itself becomes an attempt to skirt pain at all costs—when from the start that experience has been the siren informing us we are interacting with the world in the first place. And isn’t that the experience of new love: knowing that once again it may end in just the pain it ended in the last time? No matter what I’d felt in leaving Françoise, when I saw Glynnis, some part of me was prepared to believe it would end better. Or that I would see Françoise again. Who could predict the line one’s life would follow? Was I the child fearing the reprisal he had experienced when blisters formed on his fingers, or a masochist drawn into the web whose creator awaits with numbing, fatal venom? Surely it was this that tracked me in the moments when I strapped on my safety belt in that plane, tracked me that first night I saw Glynnis Goldring’s pale, beautiful face in the half-light of a tube station, tracked me when I met Françoise and even when I left her. Surely.

  3.

  I was confined to six months in an army hospital outside London. Clive and my cousins were able to visit on weekend passes from their respective areas of service—Johana and Niny had joined the WAAF, each working the radios at RAF Turnbull. Niny herself had visited three or four times before I’d recovered enough—frankly, before I was weaned from morphine enough to converse coherently—to wonder aloud about the most conspicuous absence of that time: Glynnis’s having failed to come see me.

  “Poxl,” Niny said. “Poxl. I’ve been waiting until you were lucid.”

  A Luftwaffe bomb had struck Glynnis’s hospital, she said. Just three weeks prior. Papers reported three nurses had died, all of them “very suddenly.”

  Glynnis.

  The sill of the window by my bed bore no flowers. I was glad. It was the only thing that made me glad. Creeping up at the edges of my mind were those hollyhock blossoms the last moments when I saw Glynnis, the black ant crawling about them. I had told her that day that when I returned from my service I might marry her. I don’t know if I meant it then, and I don’t know what I would have done had she survived the war. Now I was not even well enough to attend her wake.

  Niny left me that afternoon. I was alone for days with my thoughts of Glynnis, thoughts of my dreams both of her and of flying a Spitfire dashed. During the night I beckoned the nurse to increase my morphine. Like my mother, Glynnis was gone. Like those women I’d known in Rotterdam, Glynnis was gone. No occasion marked her passing. In the nighttime’s opiated haze, the cold, wet air that lifted off cave walls touched my cheeks again. During the days I did my best to achieve coherence. On one of her many visits, on a day of decreased morphine, Niny brought me my own edition of the Shakespeare plays Mrs. Goldring and I had read aloud to each other on so many occasions, and while the book itself held the same words as Mrs. Goldring’s copy, this version was somehow inferior. Still I read. Now Niny herself took up the parts opposite mine. That seemed appropriate.

  What I can tell you from that period is that when I was lucid, each time I watched Hamlet fail to express his love before Ophelia’s horrid act; each time Niny read to me the last lines we hear from Desdemona before Othello’s green-eyed monster overtakes him; even in those moments when Jessica is courted on the periphery as her father is forced to give up his pound of flesh—each time I began to have an image return to me, one that grew stronger at night. In the cobblestones of memory, cobblestones that had been relegated to that part of memory where image cannot gain purchase, swimming images began to return, and chief among them was Françoise’s face. My thoughts were so given over to what I’d lost in Glynnis’s death, it took me some time to realize that when Niny left and the sun settled below the horizon outside and I absconded to the half-life of my morphine drip, it was not only Glynnis Goldring’s face that arose in mind. There was another face that came, too, returned to me with the atavistic pull of a love that won’t leave. Perhaps it seems indiscreet to say that it was not only Glynnis’s face I saw then, in the days just after her death—when I should most have been mourning—or too honest. Cold even.

  But nothing bears truth so wholly as the truth love tells. And as Françoise’s face arose in my memory the gravity of my leaving her in Rotterdam began to pull me deep into its grasp. I’d had few moments since I arrived in London to sit with my thoughts. Now that I was confined to a hospital bed, I had nothing but them. Regret, remorse—these are not the right words here. But Glynnis was gone and I’d left Françoise without so much as a good-bye. Gravity is a funny word here, as the gravity of it began to push so hard, it seemed it might grind me to dust as I lay in that bed.

  4.

  My lungs took a long time to come around. Once they did I was forced to endure a painfully slow convalescence. It would be many months before I could fly. By then, war had advanced under its own ineluctable motion. News of bombing successes came by radio every evening. Soon Bomber Command had entered what would come to be known as the Battle of the Ruhr. RAF bombers opened the western border of Germany in what we all prayed was the prelude to a land invasion. The United States joined the war. I was only half-conscious of this moment when we could begin to feel all that hunkering down in London, living in Underground stations and driving the battered streets seeking survivors, fleeing to the east to live like our ancestors in caves paid proper recompense.

  Once I was back on my feet I was posted again to 100 Squadron. Our aerodrome had been relocated to a small town not far to the north of the very port at Grimsby where I first arrived in England. Within my first months of returning to the cockpit I began my training on a four-engine Lancaster. This required me to log months more air time—flying a bomber was very different from piloting a Spitfire. It was a bit unusual, this move from a fighter to a bomber, but the focus of the air cam
paign had shifted in those months I’d spent in convalescence. Bomber Harris had grown obsessed with a blanket-bombing attack on virtually every German city, and the RAF needed all the bomber pilots it could muster. Soon enough, my initial disappointment at not returning to a fighter was quickly erased by my relief to be flying again.

  Soon I came to know the crew members with whom I’d be flying. Our rear gunner, Parkington, was from Manchester. He took the first afternoon of my arrival to show me our surroundings—the Nissen hut where I was to sleep, a billeted country house we used as mess—and that evening Parkington took me along to a pub called the Rooster’s Peck, where lately we would often find ourselves in those languid days just after I’d accrued my next hundred hours in the air, awaiting flight briefings.

  After we’d had a few, our navigator and flight engineer, a pair of Londoners both with the last name Smith, who had been educated together and had known each other for many years, arrived.

  “So this is our new Polish Yid pilot,” Navigator Smith said. This Smith was a gangly agglomeration of limbs and teeth and appeared as if his only reason for not going for pilot was the sheer length of his legs. He sat in front of a warm Watney’s, elbows on knees.

  I told him I would be second pilot on the first couple of runs, until I’d come to know the Lancaster enough to have a crew under my tutelage. I wasn’t a Polack but a Czechoslovak—Poxl West, a young Jew from Leitmeritz, arrived via Rotterdam to London in the interest of killing Germans.

  “Tutelage!” Navigator Smith said. “Big word for a Polack.”

  “But I’m not Polish. I’m Czech.”