Graham Swift - Out of This World

We clamber into the cockpit. Jenny passes up the cameras. Gives me a brief, knowing look. Peter has a last-minute word with Michael. He is feeling good today about 880390 and 960370. The engine roars and Jenny steps back and throws a quick and generalized kiss, trying to make the gesture more casual than she means. We taxi down to the runway, turn, and Michael opens the throttle. We speed back in the direction we have come and as we ascend over the apron and the tower, we see her wave, in that stubborn, clumsy way in which people wave when they cannot see if their wave is acknowledged. She is still holding a hand aloft as we bank to head south. And I could almost believe it, could almost be guilty of believing it: the rest of the world doesn’t matter. The world revolves round that tinier and tinier figure, as it revolves round a cottage in a tiny village in Wiltshire, where she has taken up residence. That I am home, home.

‘It’s the wrong name, isn’t it? “Harry”. “Harry” sounds like the reliable sort. An uncle, a best man, a loyal old flame.’

‘And he’s never written you in ten years?’

‘No.’

‘If you wrote him, would he write you? Is that how it is?’

‘Don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?’

‘I wish I could, Sophie. I wish he were right here now, so we could both ask him some questions. Do you wish that?’

‘You’ve got nice hands. Neat. Has anyone ever told you that?’

‘Supposing he were right here. Right now.’

‘For fuck’s sake.’

‘You never miss him?’

‘I miss Grandad.’

‘But your grandfather’s dead, and Harry’s alive.’

‘Spot on. You really have a way of cutting through the crap.’

‘And Harry wasn’t to blame for your grandfather’s death.’

‘No. Not to blame, no.’

‘What do you mean, “not to blame”?’

‘I mean it wasn’t a case of blame.’

‘What then?’

‘Like I say, ask him.’

‘You think it should have been your father who died somehow, not your grandfather?’

‘Fuck.’

‘Do you say “fuck” a lot at home, with Joe and the boys? Supposing I did ask him, what would he say?’

‘He’d say, What is this, a fucking inquisition?’

‘Okay, relax, Sophie. Relax. Touché. Truce. Let’s take our time.’

‘At eighty dollars an hour?’

‘You want my economy deal? It’s cheap, but there aren’t any guarantees.’

‘No, it’s okay. I’ll stick with deluxe. Joe pays.’

‘What does Joe think of Harry?’

‘I don’t know if Joe thinks of Harry at all. Joe is good at forgetting.’

‘He doesn’t forget to pay.’

‘Good.’

‘Shall we have some coffee? Coffee time is free. So is the coffee.’

‘Do you know, when you talk sometimes, you tug your ear?’

‘It’s a defence reflex, Sophie. According to the books, tugging your ear, scratching the back of your head, is a disguised defence reflex. You lift your arm to strike your enemy. What do you say?’

‘I like it when you smile like that.’

‘If he wrote you, would you write him?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘But you’ve never written him?’

‘No. I mean, yes. No.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I write him letters sometimes. In my head. I mean I don’t put them on paper. I don’t send them.’

‘What sort of letters?’

‘Just letters. Thoughts. You know.’

‘Do you think he misses you?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘But do you think he ever writes letters in his head, too — to you?’

‘Don’t know.’

I still believe he fixed it. Some cunning string-pulling with his contacts in the Air Ministry. Though he never confessed it (so many unconfessed confessions! So many things buried away!). I still believe it was his doing that had me assigned, a fit, young, would-be flier, to a desk in Intelligence.

And yet he could have acted more ruthlessly, and with less trouble, if he’d wished. Could have foreclosed on my future. Insisted, since, undoubtedly, there was a busy time ahead, that I was needed at his side, and, since armaments were the reserved occupation par excellence , had me exempted from military service.

Though it’s easy to see now that, in his position, he could hardly have put the duties of a son before those of a citizen. Amongst those heaps of papers he (involuntarily) left me (I never thought he would be the one for such careful documentation, for preserving the evidence) were the typescripts — annotated and underlined with red ink — of the speeches he made when he stood for Parliament in the Thirties. Now, when I read them, fifty years later, those heavy-handed phrases, those chastising and belligerent slogans prick at my eyes: ‘manning the defences’, ‘the sleeping lion’, ‘moral re-armament’ — by which he meant, precisely, material re-armament. That was ’35. The timing was just out. But the stance, the rhetoric (my God, I never went to hear him on the hustings) would be remembered later. Not least in those panegyrics after his death.

Right-hand man! My right-hand man, he would say. A dubious and all too blatant joke from a man with only one arm. I’ll never know what the real motive was. Some absurd, implausible, residual dream? That it might all come right and good — Beech and Son, the two of us in tandem, the greater glory of B M C. For which he was prepared to wait and pay and bribe. My expensive and lengthy upbringing (Winchester, Oxford): a long-term investment in my filial conscience.

Or just a punishment? Just a kind of revenge?

‘… You appear, Beech, to be a highly educated young man. It seems what we could most use from you are your brains …’

‘… And we understand, Beech, that you are interested in photography …’

He laughed when I told him I had opted for the R.A.F. The rough, gravelly laugh of the former infantry officer. He laughed even more scoffingly (triumphantly?) when he learnt the result of my Board — that I was made of too precious stuff, so it seemed, to be flung into the skies. He never ceased to remind me that if, after all, mine was to be a non-combatant’s role, I might as well have chosen to come in with him. That though, no doubt, I would have been worked off my feet, I would have been better off and better rewarded than in some ‘wretched hut’ in Lincolnshire. Perhaps — I can’t recall it now — there was the tiniest, barely detectable flaw in this mockery, the tiniest, stubborn note of gratitude. I don’t think I wanted to be a hero, a charioteer of the skies. My father was a hero. I didn’t worship my father. But I had wanted to fly.

And yet I saw the war from the air. Since the officers of the Commissioning Board, in their obtuse or ironic wisdom, took literally my professed interest in photography. And the ‘hut’ in Lincolnshire — in reality a small country house not unreminiscent of Hyfield — was given over to the analysis of aerial photographs.

I looked down with a privilege no pilot ever had on target after target. Before and after. I became routinely familiar with the geography of western Europe. At first a motley geography of steel works, dockyards, power stations, refineries, railways, then a geography (rapidly altering, diminishing) of cities. Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf, Berlin … I learnt to distinguish the marks of destruction — the massive ruptures of 4,000-pounders from the blisters of 1,000-pounders and the mere pock-marks of 250-pound clusters — and to translate these two-dimensional images, which were the records of three-dimensional facts, into one-dimensional formulae — tonnage dropped as against acreage devastated, acreage destroyed as against acreage attacked (the tallies never included ‘people’, ‘homes’) — while someone in the hierarchical clouds above me refined these figures into the ethereal concept known as ‘the progress of operations’.