Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

From there I was sent back even farther north to Lincolnshire, where my training group practiced flying Tiger Moths. Did I think of that story Glynnis Goldring had told of her ancestor who had centuries earlier seen an imp carved in stone in some Anglican church in this very Lincolnshire where I was now to be stationed? Was a certain compassion not evoked in me, a sense that the hope for love I’d left to the south might outweigh what was ahead of me here in the north? If such clarity of emotion was available to you when you were twenty-one years old, I can only convey to you my most sincere, ardent jealousy. No matter the upheavals of my most recent years, I was still a young man bent on moving forward. When I returned to London after my service, perhaps I would fulfill the suggestion that Glynnis and I could marry. I would write her letters.

For now my mind drew northward.

As for my arrival there, I can say only that these Tiger Moths we were soon to train on were quite familiar from my time flying in Czechoslovakia. This was an updated model, but it was very similar to my father’s. I felt I knew what I was doing. Soon enough I was faced only with the formality of recording two hundred hours in the little blue logbook.

In a matter of months, I wasn’t far from taking to the air for battle.

In the classrooms and briefing rooms where we were to study the visual differences between Messerschmitt 109’s and Junker Ju 88’s and Dorniers and Focke-Wulfs, I looked up when our training officers would place long pieces of yarn on large maps of Western Europe to show us routes we might take in flying over the Channel and into the Ruhr Valley. What I would see there were flight paths traversing the airspace over much of England; over the North Sea; directly over Rotterdam and over German soil. I was ready to take flight.

2.

Near the end of my training, my time to strike against the Nazis would be delayed. I had nearly logged my two hundred hours on that Tiger Moth to take the Pilot Navigator Test. There had been much talk of who would pilot bombers and who fighters, who would go up with half a dozen of their fellow fliers to drop bombs on those German cities from four-engine Lancasters and Manchesters — and those who would engage the Luftwaffe in Spitfires. But this decision so important to my fate wasn’t mine to make. My experience flying solo was noted in my blue logbook by my superiors. I was to fly a Spitfire.

At that aerodrome in Lincolnshire, I took one of those sleek machines skyward, just twenty hours short of fulfilling my training. Below me were fields, one of which might still provide feed for the very cattle that Glynnis had once fed when she was a girl, pushing her along her own path to medicine. An early fog fought the high sun all morning. The low clouds we’d been taught to fear hadn’t abated by late afternoon. Training in these fighters was limited to night flying, as we would be escorting bombers to their targets over Germany. At 2100 hours I readied for takeoff, through darkness and clouds. As the flight progressed and I began to run low on petrol and prepared to return, clouds near what I thought was our aerodrome were so thick they wholly obscured the ground. Even as I sank below ten thousand feet, I passed through opaque clouds, and soon found myself hopelessly lost. The coordinates I was meant to follow had me nowhere near the aerodrome, but deeper and deeper into the dark sky above western England. I would have to guess my way back to base.

I got on the radio, calling, “Hello, darky,” “Hello, darky,” seeking an operator.

The night was a blank, unyielding future. I had come to see my destiny as line stitched in a glove: bending and bobbing above and below leather — but always by design. The night’s darkness and the clouds’ opacity seemed, if anything, a benefit. On occasion a light would brighten a section of cloud below, but a single flash of light is not enough to sustain a life.

Soon I was down to my last ten minutes of petrol. Faltering on the wind, with only my ailerons and the growing certainty of my hand to reach my destination, the aqueous, impermanent world washed away from me and then back. There was a particular switch that always gave me trouble, and I found it easier to remove my right glove to flip it. In the cold of that cockpit, I bared skin to metal. Off in the distance, to match the flashing lights behind my eyelids, I espied two spotlights: A runway, and at its end a red flare not unlike the markers the Pathfinders would use later in the war to mark my bombing targets in the Ruhr Valley.

I was out of petrol and forced to land with only the wind to propel me. So I landed heavy. My underbelly scraped hard, calling sparks up from the pavement below. The control column drove into my ribs. My entire chest was imploding, and before me every dream and desire I’d harbored for now months and even years was growing diffuse, distant. Before I was even debriefed I was taken to a hospital, where after a number of days I was diagnosed with pleurisy, which I was now suffering from as a result of an infection that developed from my injuries.

During the months following this landing, I had a great deal of time for thinking, and I thought often of how different the experience of physical pain as an adult was than it had been when I was a boy. When I was eight and broke my wrist, physical pain still contained that singular didactic ability to transform action. So much of life is defined by the acceptance of pain. When I was four I put my hand on a teapot and burned my fingers. The raised red imprints are still seared onto my pinkie and ring fingers, and at the heel of my left palm. I was still learning from pain, conditioned to understand what to touch, what not, how to proceed as a human.

Pain had a single lesson: Some things must be avoided. One kind of pain was the pain you received when you burned your hand; another kind of pain was the pain of bad decisions rued for years to follow. What pain do I feel now, decades later, when I think of that day I left Rotterdam? What pain did I feel when I lay in that hospital bed, trying to imagine Françoise now in life or in death? It was Glynnis I should have been thinking of, but something in the indeterminacy of what I’d left in Rotterdam kept my mind returning to it much as my mind returned to that day I’d gripped the teapot.

This inauguration into the experience of human-being had not yet ended when I was thirteen and traversing Prague with my mother, when the sometimes unbearable sexual desire I’d coupled with my experiences then arose in me. I wonder even now at what point in our development pain becomes something one endures, at times something one comes even to learn to enjoy — if only to test one’s stamina, if only to remember once more that the routine of one’s days has brought about in one the forgetfulness of death. Forgetfulness at the mind meeting each coming moment. Being itself becomes an attempt to skirt pain at all costs — when from the start that experience has been the siren informing us we are interacting with the world in the first place. And isn’t that the experience of new love: knowing that once again it may end in just the pain it ended in the last time? No matter what I’d felt in leaving Françoise, when I saw Glynnis, some part of me was prepared to believe it would end better. Or that I would see Françoise again. Who could predict the line one’s life would follow? Was I the child fearing the reprisal he had experienced when blisters formed on his fingers, or a masochist drawn into the web whose creator awaits with numbing, fatal venom? Surely it was this that tracked me in the moments when I strapped on my safety belt in that plane, tracked me that first night I saw Glynnis Goldring’s pale, beautiful face in the half-light of a tube station, tracked me when I met Françoise and even when I left her. Surely.