by Cecil Beaton
Midnight. Our charming pilot came to doze by the edge of the weakly flickering fire. His friends continued to chaff him. He’d better fly off tonight, there was nowhere for him to sleep here, the mess was full up, there’d be no welcome for him in their room. ‘Why, I know him — he shouts in his sleep and kicks and snores something awful.’ The Canadian pilot smiled, ‘I don’t like to hear these things you’re saying about me.’
At 1 o’clock in the morning we were given breakfast, a real egg and bacon too, and coffee, but the cold of the dining hut, on the edge of the cliffs, in the coldest night of the year, was even greater than in the Nissen hut mess. A pilot who was travelling with us as passenger said, ‘You’re cold now? You’ll not know yourself when we’ve been flying a bit 20,000 feet up. Oh boy, you’ll be conscious only of your extremities.’ A grey-haired wing commander, deaf and rugged — Aubrey Smith would play his part in films — asked for some more bread. ‘I want to toast it,’ he explained to the numbed but still flirtatious WAAF waitress. ‘I’ll get you some done by electricity.’ ‘No, I’d rather do it here over the stove — it’ll make my fingers warm.’ ‘I wish someone’d toast me,’ said the WAAF. Later she brought some bits of bread, blackened with soot and smoke.
The news went round that Smuts had taken off. Every chance of our leaving now — in a couple more hours. Somehow or other the time passed. Zero hour: we were taken out into the sharp blackness of the night and flare-lighted into a lorry. First stop a farm building where, in flickering lamplight, we were trussed up in boiler suits with zips — one of my zips was missing — Mae Wests and harness. These clothes added bulk without warmth and made one feel claustrophobic. When we got back into the Black Maria for our last journey to the attendant aircraft I noticed we all looked so grim and frightened that I drew up the corners of my mouth into a stylized smile.
Back in the Dakota that was to fly us through the night on our first stop to Gibraltar, I found myself sitting almost at the end of the fuselage, down by the door. As I leant against the seat there was a loud crack and it fell back lopsidedly. The sergeant steward and one of the tyre experts helped by flashing his torch and they both tried to get the seat leg back into its socket. No, no luck. ‘Once we’re airborne the seat will right itself,’ said the steward optimistically. The dim lights were put out and we sat in Stygian blackness. It was the very positive blackness of patent leather without the highlights.
The door was locked; we listened to the roar of the engines; we trundled forward, bouncing along on the uneven icy ground.
The agony of terror that followed, though it lasted only a few minutes, seemed an eternity. Already, at the start of the run, I bowed my head in my hands and prayed very hard because I was so frightened. I prayed that if I survived this ordeal my life might be simplified, that I should resist the distractions of so many unimportant things. We were racing furiously towards the sea, then the aircraft lurched lopsidedly into the air, and banged and rattled its occupants like dice in a box. I heard a man behind me say very quietly, ‘Yes that’s it — now we’re for it.’ My terror became intense. My eyes were shut and I tried not to take cognizance of anything outside my own head. For somehow I felt that these were my last seconds of this life, and I decided that I must spend them contemplating pleasant things.
All sorts of unexpected and forgotten pictures raced through my mind, like slides on a cinematograph sheet. I saw my family when I was a child. I sensed again the excitement of getting a present at Christmas of a picture postcard of Lily Elsie in a headdress she wore in The Waltz Dream. I saw a young preparatory schoolboy, Geoghegan, waiting for me to finish my school tea — as was his custom, under an arcade of chestnut trees outside the playground of my Heath Mount school. He wanted to give me a lift home on the step of his bicycle. I saw and savoured the pleasant tweedy aroma of Peter — chasing the dogs when our friendship was at its most halcyon. I had idyllic memories of the first time I fell in love, and of the soft welcoming look of Ashcombe, my house, in the height of a summer. I remembered the gaiety of certain New York winters and again could smell the hotel rooms I once occupied. I had visions of the silver-grey white trees against the blue skies of the Piero della Francesca frescoes at Arezzo. These appeared particularly Elysian and the sky such a heavenly blue that I tried to make myself visualize uglier things. This was all too pleasant; beauty doesn’t consist only of pleasure. But I couldn’t think of anything that was not ecstatic. My ideas worked up to a crescendo of clear, vivid thought. I was in a delirium of pleasure and terror when crash! Oh how I prayed, Oh God, oh God, oh God! I knew my worst fears had come true, that my nightmares had turned to reality. I found myself lying on a mound of parachute harness — half-way down the fuselage. I opened my eyes. Through the crack of the door leading into the cockpit I saw flashes of light. The engines were still roaring. Then the flames were everywhere. A huge tongue of blue darted down the length of the cabin. The cockpit was now an orange glow. Outside the night was lit by enormous different coloured fires. In the aircraft were patches of flame at odd places, and a bright incandescent fire centred in the extreme rear.
So this was the end. So this was Death. Any second now I should know the unknown. Meanwhile I analysed quite calmly the various stages through which I passed. No use fighting, there was nothing to be done about it. The flames approached. Everyone was very quiet in the aircraft; and even now they behaved with the polite reserve of Englishmen. I looked up to see the whole fuselage illuminated by dense, suffocating, orange smoke through which the silhouetted figures of the aircrew in their cumbersome divers’ suits ran past me, groping in the fog of burning aluminium. Still no one spoke. I lay holding on to my head thinking that as soon as the flames reached us there would be panic and fighting and I should be trampled underfoot. And why not? This was it. I had accepted the worst. Suddenly someone shouted, ‘Open that bloody door.’ I could see various passengers hopefully and pathetically groping for an exit. The tyre expert had the presence of mind to turn his torch on the latch of the door. Its beam seemed very white in the glow of the fires. Then I understood, by some queer reflex, that the door was open. ‘So they are jumping for it,’ I thought, ‘rather than be burnt. How high are we? Well, death is one stage farther away this way ... so here goes!’ I was the last to leave the aircraft. I crawled along the floor backwards and tipped myself out head first into the cold, black night. A short drop and I was astonished to find myself, with a minor bump on the head, upside down in a grassy field covered with hoar frost and patched with snow. The air struck me as bitterly cold. Around and above me were flames.
‘Get up and run,’ someone shouted. ‘The aircraft may explode.’ In spite of a tremendous weakness in the knees, and the weight of my cumbrous harness, I ran, as we all ran, falling and getting up again and running, turning at last to watch the destruction of the plane from the vantage point of safety.
The broken monster lay spurting forth fire. Deep orange and black smoke coiled upwards in a great tower. The cockpit was diamond bright, the burning edges of the wings suggested flare paths on an aerodrome or gala illuminations on a pre-war pier. Our lungs filled with fumes, we coughed as we watched. It surprised us to find how little shocked we were. Someone said the shock would come later. It did. Meanwhile we gazed at the burning dragon as it vomited forth different coloured flames, and spat forth its distress signals of pink, mauve and golden rockets. We discussed our miraculous escape. We had crash-landed; another fifty yards and we would have plunged into the sea. But I couldn’t feel proud of the negative way I had behaved: just to lie and accept death was of little help to the others, whereas the passenger pilot, who had known how to pull up an emergency level and to jettison the locked door, had saved all our lives. The tyre man with the torch had helped too.
‘Are you all right?’ ‘Are we all here?’ The airfield was dotted with theatrically-lit figures. ‘The pilot didn’t get away,’ remarked the navigator. Fumes brought tears to our eyes as we looked at the funeral pyre of the cha
rming young Canadian. The night wind was icy and cut the scalp like a knife. Eventually the ambulance came up. And then, thank God, staggering out of the darkness, his neck and forehead bleeding, his face green, appeared the pilot. ‘Good show,’ the others congratulated him. ‘No, no, it wasn’t a good show,’ he whimpered. He minded only about his responsibility to others. He was taken away in the ambulance suffering, we discovered later, from serious internal injuries: he had a broken arm and ribs; a kidney had to be removed — the stick had gone through his stomach.
Accepting the fact that we were safe, each of us now remembered his particular treasures as they burned before our eyes. ‘There goes all I possess in the world.’ ‘I’ve nothing but what I stand up in,’ the passenger pilot said. ‘Most of all I mind losing the photographs of my child. They can’t ever be replaced, they were taken of him at various stages ever since he was born.’
The tyre man said, ‘All my papers have gone — the result of weeks of meetings.’ Old Walsh, the RAF courier, added, ‘But I’ve saved my bag all right.’ While the others had been fighting to get the door open, he had been throwing baggage about to get at his precious burden. In the lorry, jogging on our way to hospital, someone congratulated him. ‘What I want to know is, will they give us another breakfast. I’d go through that again any time so long as they allow us another egg.’
In the hospital we were given tea. Those with burnt hands were treated, and I saw the pilot lying like a corpse between blankets. Most of us looked grey and drawn: our clothes still smelt of the fumes. The navigator and second pilot (who turned out to be the boy who took me on my first night-flight when I was working on my RAF book) did all they could for our comfort. The atmosphere suddenly became very light, everyone making jokes.
Once more into a black hearse-lorry and, once more, back to the frigidaire of the Nissen mess. Once more a cup of sweet tea. Then bed.
I was lucky enough to be given a room to myself as I was very restless, writing notes and going continuously to the loo. I kept waking to horror pictures of what might have happened if I had fastened my faulty belt and hadn’t been able to get out of it. If — if — After a few hours, we were called. I could either take a midday train back to London to re-equip, or there was a transport plane going in an hour. I knew if I didn’t get into that aircraft I never would fly again.
At another breakfast I sat next to the controller who had watched our crash from his tower. He did not know what happened: maybe icing of one engine. He saw the Dakota give a swerve to the left, but he thought the effect might be caused by an irregularity in the glass window. By the time our aircraft was visible past the wooden strut of his window he could see there would be a crash, and he’d already telephoned to the MO before he had seen the flames. We had left the ground, and the undercarriage had been raised, when the trouble had started and we pancaked. Everyone in the mess took the whole matter excessively lightly, but, at moments, I found myself turning my head away to shake out a tear.
The flight up to London was no pleasure. Again I was terrified of the take-off, but slightly reassured by the sergeant who accompanied us. ‘Oh, you were in that show last night? Well a thing like that doesn’t happen once in a million times.’ ‘But why are we bumping about so much?’ I asked. It helped to put my anxiety into words. The sergeant explained, ‘We’re very likely coming through some cross winds — and in any case it’s pretty bumpy country we’re passing over; on the other hand, it may be just that the pilots are having a friendly argument at the controls.’
When I got home Margaret, the maid, answered the door and raised her hands in horror at the refugee in flying kit who confronted her. My mother looked at me as if I were a ghost. Then I broke down. I blubbed and quivered, snivelled, and behaved in an uncontrollable way until my mother broke down too. This steadied me.
For the next days I was treated like an invalid and lay in bed with hot water-bottles and opiates. The effects of shock asserted themselves in some strange forms: I suffered from acute indigestion, a lassitude that went to the knees, and my temper was foul.
Francis of the Ministry of Information said that as soon as I had re-equipped myself I should set off again. On each buying expedition (for I had lost everything except my camera and films which had gone before me) I discovered that shopping among wartime merchandise was no pleasure. At Selfridge’s I had a row with three officious people in the ‘Men’s Wear’ department, and once, the general tone of regimentation being so rigid, I had a brainstorm on a bus. In my debilitated condition London at this dark time of the year looked greyer and drearier than ever.
When I set off again, in decent flying weather, it was with none of the qualms and anxieties that we had all subconsciously felt before.
Part X: India and Burma, 1943-4
December 25th, Delhi
The bearer, white-turbaned and bare-footed, pulls back the curtains to let in a blaze of sun. Outside, the fountains are playing, the birds are shrieking. Cascades of stocks, carnations and petunias hang over the edges of ornamental pools. Someone is practising on a bugle, and sentries clear their throats with resounding rasps to spit, then stamp their bulbous boots on the gravel. A bearer, in scarlet tunic, comes in, salaams and gives me a parcel tied with ribbon. Another servant, in an enormous cheese-cloth puggaree, brings in a necktie wrapped in coloured paper. It is Christmas Day in Viceroy’s house...
After the black drabness of bomb-damaged South Kensington in the depths of the fifth war winter, the sun, glitter, colour and bhari tamasha (splendour) of imperial Delhi seem to belong altogether to another world.
These first days in Delhi have been spent wandering down the long corridors of the Secretariat. Arrangements are being made for me to go to the Burma front, to the North-West Frontier, to Madras, to Kochin. But each day brings some alteration of plans, some delay or disappointment. ‘But, old boy, you can’t expect anything to be done overnight. It all takes time. You should have warned us before. You see, your trouble is, old man, that you come under so many different headings! You see, there’s HQ India Command (that’s us): there’s the Government of India, the Far Eastern Bureau, the Ministry of Broadcasting and Information — there’s ... but I’ll take you to Brigadier Oldfield of SEAC — he’ll help you.’
It was difficult to hear quite what was happening in this crowded small office. On the telephone Major Arnold was giving someone hell for spelling air marshal with two l’s, while from outside came a fearsome noise as of souls in torment — a dozen natives, hampered in their task by their draperies, were trying to lift a safe. Unperturbed, Brigadier Oldfield planned an itinerary for me on a map. ‘Then you go to Cox’s Bazaar — or Bawli Bazaar — get a plane at Ramu for Chittagong — on to Camilla. Let me explain,’ he pointed, ‘this is the front here — we’re moving towards Maungdaw.’
I was allowed into the War Room of South East Asia Command. The chiefs of all departments, American and English, ‘breezed in’ for what is known as ‘early morning prayers’ (a study of the latest maps, the day’s reports and a short lecture given by half a dozen specialists). The Supreme Commander, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had arrived in this theatre not long before, seemed as yet unaffected by the climate. ‘We mustn’t let it be a damper on effort — we’ve got to galvanize everyone, got to teach ‘em to hustle,’ he said — and he appeared to have impregnated his immediate entourage with his own robust brand of enthusiasm. In spite of all the difficulties he had already encountered, no glaze of disappointment was yet visible in his pale-blue eyes. They twinkled with the delight of a boy who had just been given a Meccano for Christmas — which incidentally, I believe, was just about all he had been given. For was it not decided, at the Tehran conference, that the Eastern theatre could not be a scene of great activity until the European holocaust was over?
In the War Room, sitting among admirals, air marshals and generals, the Supreme Commander interrupts the lecturer to ask pertinent questions. Mountbatten’s ebullient: his toy seems to be workin
g well. It is early morning still; the droning voice of the lecturer, in the otherwise silent room, acts as a soporific, and some of the older men have gone to sleep again.
While awaiting further instructions I have spent many days sightseeing as far away from Headquarters as possible. I have had the excitement of glimpsing my first wild parrot, monkey and elephant, and been stimulated by the brilliant, poisonous colours and ceaseless movement of Old Delhi.
In the Chadni Chowk (the Street of Moonlight), at one time considered the richest street in the world, now an alleyway full of bargains and trash, a begging Sardhou, naked and daubed with dung, an ‘exponent of destitution’, extends a withered arm. Other holy men have whitened faces; and there are boys with heavily kohl-painted eyes, their teeth, tongue and lips scarlet with betel nut. In the thoroughfares, pedestrians, bicycles, carts and sacred animals are wedged together in an almost inextricable confusion. Women resemble human beehives, entirely covered with whitish cloth except for the small letter-box slot through which their painted eyes peer. The shops, no more than window-recesses, offer spangled tassels, glittering phials of perfume, filigree jewels and vivid foodstuffs. A stall of vile-coloured drinks, in bottles stopped with fans of magenta paper, has been built around a sprawling peepul tree; its bark, painted emerald green, adds to the general gaudiness.