Fly

by Michael Veitch

  ‘Sorry about that, Pat,’ I replied. ‘So when did you join up?’

  ‘26 June 1942,’ he rattled off in a flash. Somehow I didn’t think his memory would present too much of a problem. I’d got onto Pat via his mate, Max Durham, who I’d spoken to some months earlier. Max had been awarded the DFC for his tour as a Lancaster pilot but never wore it, in deference to the many others who, in his words, deserved it at least as much as he did. And one of the most deserving, he says, was Pat. It was quite a recommendation.

  I’m glad we agreed to meet in the Victoria Hotel. It has always been one of my favourite spots in a city where favourite spots abound. As its name suggests, this old hotel has long been favoured by country people coming down to the city, who contribute, I think, to its unpretentious atmosphere. It began its days in the 1880s as a respectable monument to the teetotalling temperance movement and, minor updates aside, its decor has remained unchanged for decades. It’s full of brass and terrazzo, big staircases and all sorts of odd little nooks, including a tiny upstairs bar that brings to mind a cruise ship in the 1960s. For years I have been waiting for, dreading, the day they knock it all down, or transform it into another steel and white-marble monument to functional blandness. Although perhaps now, at last, the Victoria has survived just long enough to come back into itself, an inviolable oddity in its own right. I’m ever the optimist.

  But back to Pat: ‘I did transport driving for a while, then initial training at Somers where we were categorised. I was fortunate enough to be categorised as a pilot …’

  ‘And a bloody good one, too!’ adds Nobby, leaning forward.

  We sit around a low table and order tea as Anzac Day eve evolves around us. ‘Stan, ya bastard!’ shouts one man to another as they encounter each other in a corridor, followed by the sounds of hands slapping on the backs of woollen jackets, then laughter which fades after a moment, replaced by the serious murmur of plans for the morrow.

  Nobby and Pat are laughing too. Nobby speaks with the deep rounded tones of south-west England. ‘He won’t tell you, but I will,’ he says, indicating his friend. ‘He passed top of his course in aerobatics and was going to be a fighter pilot.’

  ‘That’s right,’ says Pat. ‘But by the time I got to England I got the message that if I wanted to see some action, I’d better go onto the bombers.’

  The two men, from opposite sides of the world, talk in, over and around each other like an old married couple. They first met in the summer of 1944 at their Operational Training Unit at Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire when crewing up to train on Wellingtons. They are at complete odds as to how it actually happened.

  ‘A couple of cheeky gunners came up to me and declared they were the best in the RAF,’ says Pat.

  ‘Hang on,’ says Nobby, ‘I distinctly remember you coming up to us at the table and saying, “How would you blokes like to be my gunners?” ’ ‘No, that was after …’ and on it goes until they both concede the other is probably right.

  Nobby joined up later than Pat, sewing his Air Gunner brevet onto his sergeant’s tunic two days after his nineteenth birthday. ‘I didn’t have the ability to be a pilot,’ he says. ‘I was offered an air gunner’s job and I took it.’ As a boy, he’d watched Messerschmitts being chased low over the rooftops of his home town of Portsmouth by Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, and had even been an auxiliary firefighter when it was heavily bombed. ‘I remember being called down to the docks once,’ he says. ‘There was a destroyer lying on its side on the quay, virtually intact. The bomb blast had lifted it clean out of the water.’ Perhaps this is what made him choose the air force over the navy.

  Pat, Nobby and the rest of their crew were posted to No. 115 Squadron at Witchford, just outside Ely in the Cambridgeshire fens. ‘The whole place was as flat as a pancake,’ says Nobby. ‘Ideal for airfields.’ Airfields, indeed, were everywhere. Witchford’s next-door neighbour was the New Zealand No. 75 Squadron, located at another temporary wartime base, Mepal. At one point, the perimeters of the two aerodromes converged, and on more than one occasion, incoming aircraft would mistakenly land at the wrong one, then have to wait hours before being allowed to take off again and land over the fence. We chat about the area, the famous Ely Cathedral, and I show off by mentioning it was also the home of Oliver Cromwell.

  ‘Yes, that was name of the pub we used to go to,’ says Pat. ‘You remember, Nobby, Ely Brown Ale. I can see all the bottles lined up.’ Nobby nods towards Pat.

  ‘Thursday was our drinking night down there, but if we were on ops that night, he’d do a low pass over the pub to let them know we weren’t coming.’ The young men of Bomber Command were good customers.

  Pat has brought along his logbook for our meeting, and we pore over it, careful to avoid falling drops of tea and cake.

  As always, I try to get them to start at the beginning. Ably assisted by Nobby, Pat has no trouble recalling the details of his first operation, flying as second pilot to an experienced crew on a daylight to Oberhausen. ‘I heard this pilot call out, “Scarecrow, starboard bow,” and saw a huge explosion in the sky.’ For much of the bomber war, the RAF crews believed the Germans employed these so-called ‘scarecrows’ – aerial explosions designed to shake airmen’s nerves by simulating the destruction of a large aircraft. It was perhaps some comfort to the crews, feeling they hadn’t been taken in by the ruse. Only after the war was it revealed that no such weapon existed, and what the men were seeing was in fact exploding aircraft, usually a result of the thinly cased 4000-pound ‘Cookie’ blast bomb being hit by flak. ‘I saw it as plain as anything,’ says Pat. ‘It just disintegrated. My first trip.’

  Nobby’s start to his tour was also a fiery one, a trip to Vohwinkel in the Ruhr Valley. ‘On my first night trip I saw four Lancasters go down,’ he says. In the closing stages of the war, the diminished German night fighter force employed inventive tactics to compensate for its lack of fuel and numbers. ‘We were in the stream, and about half a mile behind I saw them drop their flares,’ he remembers. Slow-descending parachute flares would illuminate the bomber formation, giving the German pilots time to duck underneath and pick the bombers out, silhouetted against the light. ‘Just half a mile to starboard. Four of them went down at a rate of knots. I don’t think any of them would have got out,’ he says. ‘It was quite a popular tactic towards the end of the war.’

  The jollity drops away a little as the men remember darker moments, and I can see in their eyes a slight faraway look, as they recall visions unspoken.

  I ask Pat about the Lancaster from a pilot’s point of view. ‘A four-engined Spitfire,’ he tells me, brightening up. Just to show off its remarkable flying characteristics, he tells me that sometimes they would sidle up alongside the Americans in their B-17s and feather first one, then two and finally three engines in a show of one-upmanship that no doubt had the American crews in their underpowered Fortresses agog.

  ‘What was the conversation among the crew?’ I ask. It’s one of my favourite questions. They both think for a moment, each giving the other the opportunity to answer. Nobby obliges by recreating some of the instructions he gave to his pilot, now beside him again sixty years on. ‘Mid-upper to pilot. Fighter, fighter – thousand yards, port quarter up. Prepare to corkscrew.’ He holds up a hand as if focusing on something in the middle distance and explains to me the illuminated gunsight. ‘I’ve still got the aiming point in my mind. A circular orange ring outside with a point in the centre. You’d get the graticule on the centre of the enemy and open fire when you thought the range was 600 yards.’

  ‘There was no unnecessary chatter, was there, Nobby?’ asks Pat.

  ‘Well, you were concentrating that hard, weren’t you?’ he replies. Returning from a trip, though, with the friendly coast of England in sight, they could relax a little. ‘I remember the rear gunner calling up to me on the intercom when we got close to home, “How you going up there, mid-upper?” It was like meeting a friend again.’

  This jog
s something else in Nobby’s memory. ‘And I’ll tell you another story about this man …’ Awkward at the prospect of adulation, Pat screws up his face and looks away. It was a night raid somewhere – Nobby tries, but cannot remember where. On the run in, the bomb aimer called up to say that he was unable to get a clear sight of the target. ‘Right then,’ said Pat over the intercom, ‘we’ll go round again.’ Turning into the oncoming stream of anything up to several hundred bombers – risking collision as well as giving the anti-aircraft gunners below a second bite at the cherry – was, to say the least, not a popular option among the crews.

  ‘Now me being an abject coward,’ says Nobby, ‘I said, “Look, we’re over Germany, let’s just drop the bloody things and go home!” But Pat was right. We were there to do a job, and so we did it.’ Pat hasn’t forgotten the incident either. ‘I think we were only on three engines for that one, too,’ he says. I ask him how he managed to avoid collision. ‘You just have to use your judgment,’ he says. ‘And hope the others move a bit to let you in.’

  The two men meander in and out of their conversation, feeding each other’s memories. At times I feel like I’m just eavesdropping but know my presence is providing some kind of catalyst. They argue briefly about small details, competing for the sharpness of their recollections. At one point, they can’t decide which particular Lancaster they finished their tour on in March 1945, arguing over the aircraft’s registration numbers

  ‘It was PB 786, wasn’t it? No, 686. 686, was it?’

  ‘No, 796 we finished in, Nobby …’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Then they speak about some crews who didn’t finish at all – faces and personalities briefly known and who one morning were simply absent from the mess at breakfast.

  ‘I always remember another young air gunner. Terrific piano player, he was. I came in one morning and found out he’d got the chop the night before.’ Pat remembers him too. ‘He was in Bill Long’s crew. Yes, C Flight. I think he was a navigator.’

  ‘Oh, perhaps he was. Could have been. Yes.’ What, I ask, was their most dangerous moment. Nobby is first to answer.

  ‘The closest I came was a God almighty “crack” in my turret and piece of shrapnel the size of a walnut that finished up in my ammunition tanks. Frightened the hell out of me,’ he says. ‘They’d get your height and then chuck as much as they could in the hope of getting something.’

  ‘I got one under me seat. Big piece of flak,’ says Pat. ‘They said that when you could see the flame in the explosion, it was close.’

  Both of them, however, admit to feeling cloaked with the seeming invincibility of youth. ‘It was never you that was going to get it, was it, Nobby?’ says Pat. ‘You’re bulletproof when you’re young. It was always that other bloke, way out there on the edge of the stream who was going to be killed. “Bloody idiot, what’s he doing out there?” we’d say.’ Nobby nods quietly. They’re both quiet now.

  Nobby remembers the enormous fire started on a big raid to Munich, one of seventy-one carried out on the big city during the war, which left 6500 people dead and half a million homeless. ‘There were sparks and embers flying around us from the fire below, and we were at 20 000 feet!’ remembers Nobby, with awe.

  Pat and his crew completed thirty operations, including one 48-hour period in which he did three, a sombre way indeed to celebrate his 21st birthday. I look again at his logbook. There it is. One trip on the 5th, then two on the same day, 6 March 1945. ‘We finished at daylight and there was a notice on the board, “All crews go to bed immediately.” We knew something was on for that night.’

  Then one morning after a big raid on Potsdam near Berlin, Pat, Nobby and the rest of the crew were ordered to assemble on parade and told officially that they had finished their tour. ‘An enormous cheer went up,’ says Pat, but then they experienced a strange, empty feeling. ‘It all happened so quickly, and we all thought, “What’s going to happen now?” ’ Soon, the whole crew would disperse and go their separate ways.

  Around us, in the dignified mezzanine lounge of the Victoria, more groups of people meet and settle close by. Country men with ruddy faces and pressed grey trousers sit with their wives and families, and the noise level rises. An old naval officer, already wearing his medals – the Atlantic Star and the distinctive blue and white ribbon of the Distinguished Service Cross – hobbles by on a frame, assisted by a son, who is old himself. It’s getting onto beer time and Nobby and Pat are getting a little restless for their pre-march rendezvous with some others at a nearby pub.

  Tomorrow, they will once again take their place among the ever-thinning ranks of those making the long march up to the Shrine of Remembrance, watched by crowds of enthusiastic onlookers, as if at one of those curious Medieval theatre pieces continually re-enacted on the same spot every year.

  I think back to the Anzac Days of my youth, as that overly-serious fourteen-year-old, clapping solemnly as the thick ranks filed past, vastly outnumbering the scattered patches of onlookers. Not so today.

  As the resonance of the World Wars – and even later ones like Vietnam – fades, an entire generation who has been spared the prospect of war can relax about it, and feel free to enjoy one of its colourful trappings.

  Sentimentalist as I am, I think I would have nonetheless been quite happy to see Anzac Day quietly fade away, dying gracefully along with its original players. Instead, every year it transforms into something else, something a little more forced and hollow, a platform for politicians and flag-wavers and jingoism, of which I never believed it guilty in its more dignified years. I have never really thought Anzac Day to be a glorification of war, but the question was always a worthy one, perhaps even vital. These days, no one even bothers to ask it. I wonder what the men who were there think?

  I turn to the boys – there is something decidedly boyish about them still as they sit together – and ask them. They think carefully. I’m not sure if it’s Pat or Nobby who answers, but I like to think he speaks for a great many. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I don’t think it’s really possible to glorify war. Not when you’ve been in one and seen what it’s like.’

  The characters of these two men, I decide, fit perfectly with the positions they held in their aircraft in the skies over Europe. Pat, the pilot and captain, quieter but with an understated air of authority; and the more independent Nobby, sharp and enthusiastic, the archetypical gunner. I ask Pat whether he has any regrets about not becoming the fighter pilot for which he trained. Not a bit, he says.

  ‘Going through that experience alongside these other men,’ he says indicating his friend, ‘well, it’s worth a hell of a lot to me. That’s one of the reasons I never regretted not staying on fighters. It’s a unique experience – if you’re lucky enough to get through.’

  Unused to articulating emotion, the two nod for a bit in agreement. Little more needs to be said. Besides, the Victoria Hotel is getting busy, and these two have another engagement. ‘We’re going up to the Irish pub to meet some blokes for a Guinness. Come along if you like,’ they offer, but I decline. I figure this one really is a ‘participants only’ affair.

  RALPH PROCTOR

  Pilot, RAAF

  I would have been happy with just a look at Ralph’s logbook, and a couple of flying stories. Instead, I got a whole museum.

  To the east of Melbourne, near the outer suburb of Lilydale, is a charming old pioneering estate named Mont de Lancy, built in the 1880s by a family called the Sebires. Today, it’s a quaint tourist attraction where people eat scones, admire roses and tie the knot. According to the brochure, it boasts many original features including hand-made bricks, twelve-foot high ceilings and ‘a wide verandah taking in panoramic views of the Yarra Valley and surrounding ranges’. And while you’re there, you can inspect the small local museum, lovingly set up in an adjacent room to highlight the district’s history. Here, amid the usual array of bits of old ploughs and sepia photos of grey-whiskered pioneers (who were probably about thirty), you can’t help but notice
the somewhat incongruous 1:72 scale Airfix plastic model of a four-engine Short Stirling bomber. A strange addition to a pioneer museum. Next to it is an open logbook, some bits of what looks like an aircraft instrument panel, an RAAF uniform and sundry other assorted items relating to World War II aviation, all stemming from the personal collection of Ralph Proctor. As I was to discover, Ralph is more than just a former glider tug pilot who operated on D-Day and throughout the Battle of Arnhem, he’s a local treasure: a living, breathing museum piece all on his own.

  No sooner had I arrived at Ralph’s unit on the outskirts of Melbourne than I was bundled into a car with him and his mate Herb and taken up for a private inspection. Here, I was to receive a personal guided tour by the man himself. I felt decidedly honoured.

  Born in Hay in rural New South Wales, Ralph spent ten years before the war on outback cattle stations until coming down to Melbourne to join the RAAF with a bunch of other jackaroos. He trained mainly in Canada, and would have liked to have flown single-engine aircraft but doesn’t seem to have been too fussed when a decree was passed preventing anyone over the age of twenty-five from becoming a fighter pilot. Ralph had just celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday.

  ‘What’s that, Ralph?’ I ask, pointing to an old black aircraft instrument displayed amid his memorabilia on a large display shelf.

  ‘That’s the clock out of a Stirling. You wound it and set your ETA. It still goes,’ he says, his eyes sweeping over the other objects. ‘Those are my goggles. Yep, they’re all mine.’ It was the most I could get out of him on the subject before he was buttonholed by the first of many locals for a ten-minute catch-up. Still, I’m in no hurry – there’s a whole museum to get through, including his original dark blue battle dress tunic which, I note, bears a Saville Row label.

  ‘Vivid’ would be the word to describe the way Ralph talks about his flying. Even the stories from his training are imbued with a kind of first-person breathlessness that belies the fact that more than sixty years have passed since the events took place. When he speaks, I feel like I’m in the cockpit with him. Coming from the wide open spaces of Canada to the crammed landscape and unpredictable weather of England was a shock for all aircrew, and Ralph quickly decided that his instruments were his best friend. ‘When you’re in the air, you just have to stick to your instruments – don’t leave them for a second, because you can go in – in no time!’ he tells me passionately. ‘Sometimes it feels like they’re wrong, especially at night. You feel like the aircraft is standing on one wing, but you look at your instruments and they say, “No, everything’s right.” You have to trust them!’ I nod my head, taking in what he says, as if there’s a chance I might one day be able to take up the advice.