Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

‘Rosie, every one of us has been through their own Hell for years, you at Netley, where you must have seen the most terrible things day in and day out, and me in France. I’ve listened to people burning to death and screaming for God in wrecks that I shot down myself. I’ve come back from patrol and found two, three, four empty chairs in the mess, over and over again, month after month. I could go on. You know perfectly well how long one’s list is. Yours is probably longer than mine. Your mother’s list has one entry.’

‘But we’re not all the same! We expected to see what we saw. She wasn’t expecting it.’

‘In the end we have no choice, do we? We put it behind us, clench our teeth and battle on until the distance becomes sufficiently great. You’ve been indulging her. The whole family indulges her. No one challenges her, so she just gets worse and worse, until one day she’ll be so eccentric and so damned rude that even you won’t be able to live with her and you’ll have to put her in a loony bin.’

Rosie looked at him desperately, unable to concede.

‘Anyway,’ continued Daniel, ‘there are two ways out. Either you and Esther move with me into married quarters as soon as the squadron gets settled, or I leave the RAF and get a job somewhere quite a long way away, and you and Esther come and join me there.’

‘But I can’t leave my mother! How will my father cope with her?’

‘You have Millicent and Mary. And Ottilie hasn’t left home.’

‘But one day she’ll want to move away and get married! What then? Who’ll look after her? What about Daddy?’

‘Rosie, you’re married.’

Rosie looked at the floor dumbly. She sat on one of the hall chairs and put her face into her hands.

‘I’ve been such a disappointment,’ she said. ‘I’ve done everything wrong. I’ve been a terrible wife, I know it. I’m so sorry. I expect you hardly love me any more, do you?’

‘You gave me Esther,’ said Daniel. ‘That was the best gift anyone could have given me. Whatever happens, I’ll always love you for that.’

He went to fetch his Sidcot suit and shuffled it on. He sat on the other hall chair and pulled on his boots, then he stood. ‘I’d better be going,’ he said. He hesitated, holding his flying gloves in one hand and his helmet and goggles in the other.

Rosie looked up at him, her eyes bloodshot from weeping. ‘Don’t go, Daniel, please don’t go. We’ve got to keep trying. Please stay.’

THE ROYAL FLYING Corps had been amalgamated with the Royal Naval Air Service a year before, and Daniel had talked it over a great deal with Fluke, in the cricket pavilion of their temporary airfield, and in their local tavern. For old soldiers of the RFC there was far too much navy tommyrot in the RAF these days, and peacetime service was a full-scale bore. The brass hats and chair-warmers were clamping down on all that made aviation joyous. No flying under bridges. No contour-chasing and tree-hopping in case it upset the farmers, the cows and the horses, or made people spill their tea with the shock, or startled drivers into ditches. No more cloud-vaulting, no more split-arsing over the villages. No more binge nights when you smashed up everything in the mess, because now you couldn’t send out a vehicle to fetch in the abandoned chairs and tables from the ruins of French houses. Worst of all had been the introduction of endless hours of guards-style square-bashing, the surest sign that the force had lost sight of its purpose and was seeking only to enforce uniformity and keep the men occupied. ‘You might as well get us to dig holes and fill them in again,’ said Daniel. ‘I’m not wasting my mornings stamping around, and I don’t see why the men should either. I want my fitter working on my machine, not being yelled at by some numbskull with a head full of drill book.’

‘I hate this bloody uniform,’ said Fluke. ‘The old maternity dress was bad enough, but at least nobody made us wear it. What was wrong with your regimental duds with a pair of wings and your ribbons sewn on? And I’m damned if I like being a squadron leader. I’m a major, damn it. I’m a soldier, not a bloody air sailor.’

‘Remember the first uniform they came up with?’ said Daniel, and they both laughed. It had been a hideous and ridiculous outfit in vulgar blue, covered with gold. The policy had been that, owing to the shortage of uniforms, only the new boys would have to wear the new outfit. As the old guard were killed off, the replacement of the old by the new had taken place naturally by a process of attrition, but there were plenty of surviving stalwarts who still felt as if they really belonged to their regiments. You don’t alter your allegiance by putting on something blue.

‘No more WRAFs,’ said Fluke gloomily. ‘I loved WRAFs. Almost as much as WAACs and dusky maidens. I got driven for miles by one in a combination, getting back to the squadron after a smash. Stout girl, lovely smile, wonder what happened to her.’

‘Think of all those empty Wraferies,’ said Daniel.

‘It’s a horrible thought,’ agreed Fluke.

‘No more airship service either.’

‘I don’t mind that too much,’ said Fluke. ‘There aren’t any Boche ones to shoot down any more, and you can’t pip the ones on your own side anyway. Might as well get rid of them.’

‘Good for submarine spotting,’ said Daniel.

‘No more submarines to spot,’ said Fluke. ‘I suppose you could sell them off to whalers. And why haven’t they issued us with parachutes yet? Don’t they give a damn? The Huns had them ages ago.’

‘Parachutes are for sissies,’ said Daniel. ‘True heroes bounce or burn.’ They both thought for a while of all those who might have been saved by parachutes.

‘Those RNAS types were damn good flyers, and they were all on land anyway, just like us. I feel sorry for them that they didn’t get much credit. But I’m damned if I can take all this navy mullarkey they’ve brought in with them. Why couldn’t they just be Royal Flying Corps?’

‘They wrote off my Tripe and let me have it,’ said Fluke. ‘Here’s to the naval types and their lovely old Tripes. And here’s a curse on all their naval mullarkey. And here’s to General Smuts. We forgive him.’ He tipped back a neat slug of whisky, and said, ‘Do you remember when we got so plastered that we couldn’t tell whisky and soda from champagne? Never been so sick in my life.’

‘Talking of credit,’ said Daniel, continuing on his own line of thought, ‘what about the poor bastards in two-seaters? Imagine being in a Harry Tate and getting set on by six Fokkers.’

‘And the night-flyers,’ said Fluke. ‘Got no credit at all.’

‘We were the Glory Boys,’ said Daniel.

‘Actually we can’t be, because the Glory Boys are the Norfolk Regiment, and we can’t be “Death or Glory” either, because that’s the Gloucesters.’

‘The Norfolk Regiment are the Holy Boys. You’ve got in a muddle.’

‘Quite right. As you were. Can we be the Glory Boys after all?’

‘How about the “Glamour Boys”?’

‘That’ll do me,’ replied Fluke. ‘You know we’re down from 188 squadrons to thirty-three? From now on it’s a tuppenny-ha’penny air force. And God help the navy. We’re done for. We are muchly confounded. What’s next?’

‘Just Empire stuff,’ said Daniel. ‘There’s a squadron of Snipes waiting to pounce on the Huns at Bickendorf if they get frisky, but apart from that it’s India or Egypt or Malta or Mesopotamia or Somaliland, for God’s sake. Everyone’s being sent to Egypt as far as I can see. It’s packed full of bombers. God knows why.’