Christopher Priest - The Separation

JL shouted something, but I was unable to understand him.

The engines throttled back, the nose dipped. I could see the waves through the gaps in the fuselage ahead of us where the nose of the aircraft had been blasted away. I stared ahead, filled with a terrible despair. I could smell the salty sea on the freezing air that was rushing in at us. It reminded me, with shocking clarity, of childhood holidays at the seaside. Windy days, huddling out of the rain in a hut on the edge of the beach at Southend, the wide flat sands damp from the ebbing tide. That cold salt wind. I was certain I was about to die. This turned out to be how it was when you died: you died with your childhood before you. I was immobilized with fear, the sight of the sea, the huge black surface rising up towards us at a crazy angle and at a terrifying speed, believing that the end was upon me and that all my life this finality had been selected by that one moment in childhood.

There the flight ended. I cannot remember the moment of the crash or how I was thrown out of the wreck. I next remember I was in the water, floating face down, surrounded by the appalling, unlimited coldness of the sea. I was rising and falling with a sick sensation. Water was in my face, ears, nose, mouth, eyes. When I tried to draw breath I felt an awful fullness in my lungs, a sensation that I couldn’t open them any more to draw in air. Somewhere, from deep and low inside me, a last bubble of air choked out of my throat and burst briefly around my eyes. I snapped into awareness, thinking that I had lost even that, that last gasp of air. I raised my head backwards out of the water, to a black nightmare of heaving, swelling waves, then down again beneath the surface. But I had been in the air so I struggled and floundered again in the dark, pushing my face out of the water, my mouth out of the water, trying to suck in air, trying to empty my lungs of the sea.

Every attempt to breathe was a struggle against death. I coughed, spurted water, sucked at the air, but too late! I was under the waves and taking in more water. I choked it out somehow, breathed again, sank again. I thrashed my arms, trying to lift myself out of the water long enough to live.

I was surrounded by floating debris from the plane. As I flailed my arms about, struggling for life, they sometimes banged against these small pieces of wreckage. I snatched at whatever they were, trying to interrupt the endless deadly sequence of sinking and resurfacing. Most of the flotsam was too small to hold my weight and anyway slipped from my grasp.

I was tiring rapidly wanted to end the struggle, to give up and let death take me. I choked once more, tasting vomit-flavoured salt water as it jetted out through my nose and mouth. I thought that was it, that I was breathing only water. I let go, slipped backwards, relaxing at last, feeling the weight of my flying gear drag me under. It was a relief to give way to death, to glimpse the darkness that was waiting for me beyond life. The rage to live had gone.

But a wave washed over my face and as it did so I felt air bubbles bursting from my mouth. Somehow I had taken in air.

Once again I struggled to the surface and gasped for breath.

There beside me, dark and silent, was the round shape of the emergency dinghy, self-inflated on impact. I swung an arm up, clasped one of the ratlines, got my elbow through it, then after another long effort, fighting the pain that was erupting from my leg, I managed to hook my other arm through the rope.

I clung there, my head at last safely above the surface of the water, breathing in with a horrible gulping desperation, but breathing. Gradually my panting steadied. Breathing became almost normal and whenever the choppy sea raised itself high enough to splash a wave across my face, I was able to hold my breath for a second or two, shake off the water, then breathe again. I was not going to drown after all.

The next enemies, clamouring to take me, were the cold and the pain.

It became vital that I should somehow manage to pull myself out of the water, flip myself over the inflated wall and fall into the rubber well of the dinghy, where I might lie in comparative dryness until rescue came.

Somehow, in that freezing May night, against the huge swell of the sea, against the pain and weakness in my body, I must have done that, because my next memory is of the breaking dawn, a rubbery smell, a soft and shifting floor beneath me, a curve of bright yellow rubber against a dark blue sky, a sense that the sea was distant, that I was tossing somewhere alone, perhaps in some after-life limbo.

Yet when I hauled myself to the inflated yellow tube that was the wall of the dinghy and raised myself up with both elbows so that I could see over the edge, there was the great endless sea around me, everywhere, heaving and grey. The sun glinted low and yellow from between dark clouds on the horizon.

I felt the touch of wind.

I lay there, probably in great danger of dying but no longer in any condition to know or care, when at last my dinghy was spotted by an aircraft. I heard the engine but I was too weak to wave or set off the flares. The pilot tipped the plane’s wings, swooped down over me, turned at a distance, flew low across me again. Then the aircraft headed away. By that time it no longer mattered to me whether it was British, German or any other nationality, but it turned out that it must have been British. Two hours after the plane flew away an RAF Air-Sea Rescue launch came out and saved my life.

I was alone on that sea, the only survivor from our plane. If there was a miracle that night it was one that saved me. Of the others, Ted, Col, Lofty, Kris, JL, they were killed when the aircraft was shot down, or if they survived that then they must have drowned after the plane hit the sea.

That was the end of JL, the last I knew of him. ‘I think at least one of us will be OK,’ he had said to me in the last moments before he died.

Extract from Chapter 3 of The Practical Conscience- The Red Cross in The German War

by Alan J. Wetherall, published by George Allen & Unwin, London, 1958:

... it was in this way that I first encountered J. L. Sawyer, a remarkable figure of the war years. At the time I was still working as a staff Red Cross official, attached to several offices in the north-west of England. Although I was not personally involved with his exploits, my early encounter with him was memorable and in view of events is worth describing in detail. In anecdotal fashion it may provide insights into his later work.

J. L. Sawyer was at that time an obscure figure, unknown not only to the general public but also to the authorities. He lived in Rainow, a small village on the western edge of the Pennines close to the town of Macclesfield. He was married but at that time childless. His wife was a naturalized Briton who had emigrated from Germany during the 1930s.

Sawyer appeared before the Macclesfield Local Tribunal on Thursday morning, March 28, 1940. It was here that I saw him for the first time. My role at that time was to observe the proceedings on behalf of the Red Cross. Pacifism pure and simple is not a part of Red Cross policy, even though in times of war the Society is often associated with it.

In 1939 the British government had reintroduced conscription, the first call-up going to men in their early twenties, the aim being to raise the strength of the armed services to about three hundred thousand men.

Experience with conscientious objectors during the 1914-18 war forced the government of 1939 to prepare the ground carefully. Under the circumstances the authorities established an enlightened and indeed tolerant approach to the problem. It should not be forgotten that in the months leading up to the outbreak of war in September 1939, Nazi Germany was seen as a major threat to peace and stability throughout Europe. If war broke out, devastating air raids on British cities were expected. All through 1940 there were realistic fears of an invasion from across the English Channel. The fact that by March 1940 none of these had taken place was seen by most people (correctly, as events turned out) as only the calm before the storm. In this climate it took political sophistication and firmly liberal instincts to implement an official policy that gave a humane hearing to would-be objectors.