Christopher Priest - The Separation

You use the phrase ‘intense interest’ in your letter to me. I can understand that. I too shall be intensely interested if you can fill me in on the rest of this unfinished story.

Finally let me emphasize that irrespective of whether or not you want to interview me again, you’ll always be welcome to visit me here in my tropical paradise. Don’t be put off by recent news of the fighting and terrorism on this large island. We are well aware here how our country sometimes appears from abroad. The government has got the measure of the insurgents and the problem is well in hand. The native Malagasy are largely confined to their area of the island and next year they’ll be given a measure of self-government. That should almost certainly satisfy their demands. In the meantime, life in the big cities is modern, convenient and extremely pleasant. I look forward to your coming here again and seeing for yourself. ‘Masada’ is no longer a state of mind for our people.

Sam Levy

My first impression of Jack (‘JL’) Sawyer was entirely favourable. I’d been posted to 148 Squadron and along with the other people in the same position I was going through the RAF’s rather eccentric and informal method of crew selection. Everyone was sent to the drill hangar and left to sort themselves out into crews. I noticed JL soon after we walked in, partly because he was an officer - at that early stage in the war most of the men who were picked for operational flying were ‘other ranks’ like me, so JL was already unusual - but also because he was a career officer, not from the Reserve. I immediately assumed I’d be far too humble to be in his crew. He’d been chatting with a tall young warrant officer wearing the insignia of a flight engineer but then he came up to me, a friendly expression on his face.

‘You’re a navigator, aren’t you?’ he said.

He spoke with a good voice, in those days the sort of thing people like me called a BBC accent, but he gave it an amused lilt, conveying the impression that he was slightly mocking himself. He was a big chap: he had broad shoulders, a long back and strong arms, an athletic way of walking. I found out later that he had competed in the Olympics, but I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew that day was that he gave off an aura of self-confidence, suggesting a kind of inner strength. I instinctively liked him, I felt I might be safe in his aircraft.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Sam Levy, sir.’

‘We don’t use ranks when we fly together,’ JL said. ‘How did you get on with the training?’

‘All right, I think. I was only lost once.’

‘What did you do about it?’

‘We found an airfield and landed, then phoned back to the base. They gave us the right course to find our way home. It was the first time I’d guided a plane on my own and it hasn’t happened since.’

‘At least you’re honest about it! Where do you come from?’

‘I’m a Londoner,’ I said. ‘Tottenham.’

‘I was born in Gloucestershire. I’m JL Sawyer. Would you like to take a chance in my crew?’

‘Yes, I would!’ I said. ‘They said at nav school that everyone gets lost once. It’s not going to be a habit.’

He laughed at that, slapped an arm around my shoulders and took me to meet the flight engineer, Warrant Officer John Skinner, or ‘Lofty’, as we learned to call him. In the same casual way we soon found the rest of the chaps needed to form a crew:

I’d been chatting earlier with an Aussie bomb aimer called Ted Burrage, so he joined up with us - he already knew a Polish gunner called Kris Galasckja and a young bloke from Canada called Colin Anderson, a wireless operator. With the crew selection complete, the six of us trooped off to the canteen to have a cup of tea and start sizing one another up.

JL struck me as a typical RAF ‘type’: he was handsome, wore his cap at a rakish angle, he was obsessed with flying, used RAF slang with an easy familiarity, moved his hands around to simulate aircraft movements, he was battle-experienced, knowledgeable about targets and bombing methods and full of good advice for us inexperienced recruits. He even told us he’d been to Germany before the war and had seen Hitler in person. Before I went to bed that night I was congratulating myself on having found a first-rate captain.

Four weeks later, after we completed intensive navigation, gunnery and bombing trials, we were feeling as if we were a proper crew. JL’s experience was invaluable. He’d been on daylight ops, for one thing, which earned our respect: we knew how dangerous those trips had been. Then he’d been on several shipping sweeps, again a background that gave him a great deal of experience of flying over the sea, which was handy for us. By RAF wartime standards he was an old hand at the bombing game, already partway through his first tour with eleven completed raids under his belt. He was a natural leader and gained our respect from the outset.

After the trials we were assigned our own Wellington: A-Able. We flew on our first proper mission as a crew in the last week of August 1940, a raid on somewhere in the Ruhr. I don’t mind admitting I was terrified by the experience. Even at the time I’d no idea if we hit the target or not. The next night we were sent to attack an airfield in the Low Countries. More raids followed, and that became the way we lived our lives in the next few weeks and months: a constant round of training, preparedness, stand-bys, raids. It was a hard, cold, frightening and exhausting time, but I think I can speak for all of JL’s crew during those weeks when I say that none of us would have changed a thing.

For several weeks during the winter and spring of 1941, though, I was convinced JL was cracking up under the strain. Strange behaviour went with the job we were doing. They used to say that you had to be crazy to volunteer for active duty, but that was only partly serious, almost an embarrassed excuse. A lot of us were recruits but we were willing recruits, knowing we had to do our bit in the war. We were attracted by the feeling of defiance to Hitler that was such a feature of life in those days. As for volunteering for ops: if truth be known, most of us secretly thought we had the best of it. None of us would swap our lot for what the ground crews had to do, for instance. They weren’t in much danger but they worked long, hard hours, slaving outside in all weathers, a daily round of chores with not much chance of excitement. We wanted a bit of action, a bit of glamour, and although the reality of being aircrew was not in the least glamorous, we were the only ones who knew that. Being aircrew was a sure-fire way of impressing girls, for one thing.

The real problem was the stark contrast between the inactivity of most of the days and the dangers of some of the nights. Many of the men developed a reputation for odd behaviour, verging in some cases on eccentricity or weirdness. After a while you took no notice of the air-gunner who went everywhere in his balaclava helmet, the man who whistled quietly through his teeth through the briefing sessions, the flight engineer who adamantly refused to take off his flying jacket, even when he went to bed. Everyone carried personal good-luck tokens - hours could be spent in frantic searching when one of those little mascots went missing. Some people became withdrawn or aggressive between ops, yet transformed themselves into wild extroverts before we actually took off. On the nights when we were not on operations, most of us would go down to the mess and get smashed: drunken revels were not only tolerated by our senior officers, in the end we came to think they were expected of us.