Ian R. Macleod - The Chop Girl.pdf - Ian R. Macleod - margozap

Ian R. MacLeod

THE CHOP GIRL

Me, I was the chop girl-not that I suppose that anyone knows what that means now. So much blood and water under

the bridge, I heard the lassies in the post office debating how many world wars there had been last week when I

climbed up the hill to collect my pension, and who exactly it was that had won them.

Volunteered for service, I did, because I thought it would get me away from the stink of the frying pans at home in

our Manchester tea room's back kitchen. And then the Air Force of all things, and me thinking, lucky, lucky, lucky,

because of the glamour and the lads, the lovely lads, the best lads of all, who spoke with BBC voices as I imagined them,

and had played rugger and footie for their posh schools and for their posh southern counties. And a lot of it was true,

even if I ended up typing in the annex to the cookhouse, ordering mustard and HP Sauce on account of my, quote,

considerable experience in the catering industry.

So there I was-just eighteen and WAAF and lucky, lucky, lucky. And I still didn't know what a chop girl was, which had

nothing to do with lamb or bacon or the huge blocks of lard I ordered for the chip pans. They were big and empty places,

those bomber airfields, and they had the wild and open and windy names of the Fens that surrounded them. Wisbeach

and Finneston and Witchford. And there were drinks and there were dances and the money was never short because

there was never any point in not spending it. Because you never knew, did you? You never knew. One day your bunk's

still warm and the next someone else is complaining about not changing the sheets and the smell of you on it. Those big

machines like ugly insects lumbering out in the dying hour to face the salt wind off the marshes and the lights and blue

smoke of the paraffin lanterns drifting across the runways. Struggling up into the deepening sky in a mighty roaring, and the

rest of us standing earthbound and watching. Word slipping out that tonight it would be Hamburg or Dortmund or

Essen-some half-remembered place from a faded schoolroom map glowing out under no moon and through heavy

cloud, the heavier the better, as the bombers droned over, and death fell from them in those long steel canisters onto

people who were much like us when you got down to it, but for the chances of history. Then back, back, a looser run in

twos and threes and searching for the seaflash of the coast after so many miles of darkness. Black specks at dawn on the

big horizon that could have been clouds or crows or just your eyes' plain weariness. Noise and smoke and flame. Engines

misfiring. An unsettled quiet would be lying over everything by the time the sun was properly up and the skylarks were

singing. The tinny taste of fatigue. Then word on the wires of MG 3138, which had limped in at Brightlingsea. And of CZ

709, which had ploughed up a field down at Theddlethorpe. Word, too, of LK 452, which was last seen as a flaming cross

over Brussels, and of Flight Sergeant Shanklin, who, hoisted bloody from his gun turret by the medics, had faded on the

way to hospital. Word of the dead. Word of the lost. Word of the living.

Death was hanging all around you, behind the beer and the laughs and the bowls and the endless games of cards and

darts and cricket. Knowing as they set out on a big mission that some planes would probably never get back. Knowing for

sure that half the crews wouldn't make it through their twenty-mission tour. So, of course, we were all madly

superstitious. It just happened-you didn't need anyone to make it up for you. Who bought the first round. Who climbed

into the plane last. Not shaving or shaving only half your face. Kissing the ground, kissing the air, singing, not singing, pissing

against the undercarriage, spitting. I saw a Flight Officer have a blue fit because the girl in the canteen gave him only two

sausages on his lunchtime plate. That night, on a big raid over Dortmund, his Lancaster vanished in heavy flak, and I

remember the sleepless nights because it was me who'd forgotten to requisition from the wholesale butcher. But

everything was sharp and bright then. The feel of your feet in your shoes and your tongue in your mouth and your eyes in

their sockets. That, and the sick-and-petrol smell of the bombers. So everything mattered. Every incident was marked

and solid in the only time that counted, which was the time that lay between now and the next mission. So it was odd

socks and counting sausages, spitting and not spitting, old hats and new hats worn backward and forward. It was pissing on

the undercarriage, and whistling. And it was the girls you'd kissed.

Me, I was the chop girl, and word of it tangled and whispered around me like the sour morning news of a botched

raid. I don't know how it began, because I'd been with enough lads at dances, and then outside afterward fumbling and

giggling in the darkness. And sometimes, and because you loved them all and felt sorry for them, you'd let them go

nearly all the way before pulling back with the starlight shivering between us. Going nearly all the way was a skill you had

to learn then, like who wore what kind of brass buttons and marching in line. And I was lucky. I sang lucky, lucky, lucky to

myself in the morning as I brushed my teeth, and I laughingly told the lads so in the evening NAAFI when they always

beat me at cards.

It could have started with Flight Sergeant Martin Beezly, who just came into our smoky kitchen annex one hot

summer afternoon and sat down on the edge of my desk with his blond hair sticking up and told me he had a fancy to go

picnicking and had got hold of two bikes. Me, I just unrollered my carbons and stood up and the other girls watched with

the jaws of their typewriters dropped in astonishment as I walked out into the sunlight. Nothing much happened that

afternoon, other than what Flight Sergeant Beezly said would happen. We cycled along the little dikes and bumped

across the wooden bridges, and I sat on a rug eating custard creams as he told me about his home up in the northeast

and the business he was planning to set up after the war delivering lunchtime sandwiches to the factories. But all of that

seemed as distant as the open blue sky-as distant, given these clear and unsuitable weather conditions, as the possibility

of a raid taking place that evening. We were just two young people enjoying the solid certainty of that moment-which the

taste of custard creams still always brings back to me-and Flight Sergeant Beezly did no more than brush my cheek with

his fingers before we climbed back onto the bikes, and then glance anxiously east toward the heavy clouds that were

suddenly piling. It was fully overcast by the time we got back to the base, driven fast on our bikes by the cool and

Ian R. MacLeod

unsummery wind that was rustling the ditches. Already, orders had been posted and briefings were being staged and the

groundcrews were working, their arclights flaring in the hangers. Another five minutes, a little less of that wind as we

cycled, and there'd have been all hell to pay for me and for Flight Sergeant Beezly, who, as a navigator and vital to the

task of getting one of those big machines across the dark sky, would have been shifted to standby and then probably

court-martialled.

But as it was, he just made it into the briefing room as the map was being unfolded and sat down, as I imagine him,

on the schoolroom desk nearest the door, still a little breathless, and with the same smears of bike oil on his fingers that

I later found on my cheek. That night, it was Amsterdam-a quick raid to make the most of this quick and filthy cloud that

the weather boffins said wouldn't last. Amsterdam. One of those raids that somehow never sounded right even though it

was enemy-occupied territory. That night, GZ 3401, with Flight Sergeant Beezly navigating, was last seen laboring over the

North Sea enemy coastal barrages with a full load of bombs, a slow and ugly butterfly pinioned on the needles of half a

dozen searchlights.

So maybe that was the first whisper-me walking out of the annex before I should have done with Flight Sergeant

Beezly, although God knows it had happened to enough of the other girls. That, and worse. Broken engagements.

Cancelled marriages. Visits to the burns unit, and up the stick for going all the way instead of just most of it. Wrecked,

unmendable lives that you can still see drifting at every branch Post Office if you know how and when to look.

But then, a week after, there was Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson, who had a reputation as one of the lads, one for the

lassies. All we did was dance and kiss at the Friday hall down in the village, although I suppose that particular night was

the first time I was really drawn to him because something had changed about his eyes. That, and the fact that he'd

shaved off the Clark Gable moustache that I'd always thought made him look vain and ridiculous. So we ended up kissing

as we danced, and then sharing beers and laughs with the rest of his crew in their special corner. And after the band had

gone and the village outside the hall stood stony dark, I let him lean me against the old oak that slipped its roots into the

river and let him nuzzle my throat and touch my breasts and mutter words against my skin that were lost in the hissing of

the water. I put my hand down between us then, touched him in the place I thought he wanted. But Pilot Officer Charlie

Dyson was soft as smoke down there, as cool and empty as the night. So I just held him and rocked him as he began to

weep, feeling faintly relieved that there wouldn't be the usual pressures for me to go the whole way. Looking up through

the oak leaves as the river whispered, I saw that the bright moon of the week before was thinning, and I knew from the

chill air on my flesh that tomorrow the planes would be thundering out again. You didn't need to be a spy or a boffin. And

not Amsterdam, but a long run. Hamburg. Dortmund. Essen. In fact, it turned out to be the longest of them all, Berlin. And

somewhere on that journey Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson and his whole crew and his Lancaster simply fell out of the sky.

Vanished into the darkness.

After that, the idea of my being bad luck seemed to settle around me, clinging like the smoke of the cookhouse.

Although I was young, although I'd never really gone steady with anyone and had still never ventured every last inch of

the way, and although no one dared to keep any proper score of these things, I was already well on my way to becoming

the chop girl. I learned afterward that most bases had one; that-in the same way that Kitty from stores was like a mum to

a lot of the crews, and Sally Morrison was the camp bicycle-it was a kind of necessity.

And I believed. With each day so blazingly bright and with the nights so dark and the crews wild-eyed and us few

women grieving and sleepless, with good luck and bad luck teeming in the clouds and in the turning of the moon, we

loved and lived in a world that had shifted beyond the realms of normality. So of course I believed.

I can't give you lists and statistics. I can't say when I first heard the word, or caught the first really odd look. But being

the chop girl became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Empty wells of silence opened out when I entered the canteen. Chairs

were weirdly re-arranged in the NAAFI. I was the chop, and the chop was Flight Sergeant Ronnie Fitfield and Flight

Officer Jackie White and Pilot Officer Tim Reid, all of them in one bad late summer month, men I can barely

remember now except for their names and ranks and the look of loss in their eyes and the warm bristle touch of their

faces. Nights out at a pub; beating the locals at cribbage; a trip to the cinema at Lincoln, and the tight, cobbled streets

afterward shining with rain. But I couldn't settle on these men because already I could feel the darkness edging in

between us, and I knew even as I touched their shoulders and watched them turn away that they could feel it, too. At

the dances and the endless booze-ups and the card schools, I became more than a wallflower: I was the petaled heart

of death, its living embodiment. I was quivering with it like electricity. One touch, one kiss, one dance. Groundcrew

messages were hard to deliver when they saw who it was coming across the tarmac. It got to the point when I stopped

seeing out the planes, or watching them through the pane of my bunk window. And the other girls in the annex and the

spinster WAAF officers and even the red-faced women from the village who came in to empty the bins-all of them

knew I was the chop, all of them believed. The men who came up to me now were white-faced, already teetering. They

barely needed my touch. Once you'd lost it, the luck, the edge, the nerve, it was gone anyway, and the black bomber's

sky crunched you in its fists.

I can't tell you that it was terrible. I knew it wasn't just, but then, justice was something we'd long given up even

missing. Put within that picture, and of the falling bombs and the falling bombers, I understood that the chop girl was a

little thing, and I learned to step back into the cold and empty space that it provided. After all, I hadn't loved any of the

men-or only in a sweet, generalized and heady way that faded on the walk from the fence against which we'd been

leaning. And I reasoned-and this was probably the thing that kept me sane-that it wasn't me that was the chop. I

reasoned that death lay somewhere else and was already waiting, that I was just a signpost that some crewmen had

happened to pass on their way.

Me, I was the chop girl.

And I believed.

Such were the terrors and the pains of the life we were leading.

With the harvest came the thunderflies, evicted from the fields in sooty clouds that speckled the windows and came

out like black dandruff when you combed your hair. And the moths and the craneflies were drawn for miles by the

sparks and lights flaring from the hangers. Spiders prowled the communal baths, filled with their woodland reek of bleach

and wet towels. The sun rippled small and gold like a dropped coin on the horizon, winking as if through fathoms of

ocean.

With harvest came Walt Williams. Chuttering up to the Strictly Reserved parking space outside the Squadron

Leader's office in a once-red MG and climbing out with a swing of his legs and a heave of his battered carpetbag. Smiling

with cold blue eyes as he looked around him at the expanse of hangars, as if he would never be surprised again. Walt had

done training. Walt had done Pathfinders. Walt had done three full tours, and most of another that had only ended when

his plane had been shot from under him and he'd been hauled out of the Channel by a passing MTB. We'd all heard of

Walt, or thought we had, or had certainly heard of people like him. Walt was one of the old-style pilots who'd been

flying before the War for sheer pleasure. Walt was an old man of thirty, with age creases on his sun-browned face to go

with those blue eyes. Walt had done it all and had finally exhausted every possibility of death that a bemused RAF could

throw at him. Walt was the living embodiment of lucky.

We gathered around, we sought to touch and admire and gain advice about how one achieved this impossible

feat-the we at the base that generally excluded me did, anyway. The other crew members who'd been selected to fly

with him wandered about with the bemused air of pools winners. Walt Williams stories suddenly abounded. Stuff about

taking a dead cow up in a Lancaster and dropping it bang into the middle of a particularly disliked Squadron Leader's

prized garden. Stuff about half a dozen top brass wives. Stuff about crash landing upside down on lakes. Stuff about flying

for hundreds of miles on two engines or just the one or no engines at all. Stuff about plucking women's washing on his

undercarriage and picking apples from passing trees. Amid all this excitement that fizzed around the airfield like the rain

on the concrete and the corrugated hangars as the autumn weather heaved in, we seemed to forget that we had told

each other many of these stories before, and that they had only gained this new urgency because we could now settle

them onto the gaunt face of a particular man who sat smiling and surrounded, yet often seeming alone, at the

smoke-filled center of the NAAFI bar.

Being older, being who he was, Walt needed to do little to enhance his reputation other than to climb up into this

Lancaster and fly it. That, and parking that rattling sports car the way he did that first day, his loose cuffs and his other

minor disregards for all the stupidities of uniform, his chilly gaze, his longer-than-regulation hair, the fact that he was

almost ten years older than most of the rest of us and had passed up the chance to be promoted to the positions of the

men who were supposedly in charge of him, was more than enough. The fact that, in the flesh, he was surprisingly quiet,

and that his long brown hands trembled as he chain-smoked his Dunhill cigarettes, the fact that his smile barely ever

wavered yet never reached his eyes, and that it was said, whispered, that the Pilot Officer in the billet next to his had

asked to be moved out on account of the sound of screaming, was as insignificant as Alan Ladd having to stand on a box

before he kissed his leading ladies. We all had our own inner version of Walt Williams in those soaringly bright days.

For me, the shadow in bars and dancehall corners, potent in my own opposite way, yet now mostly pitied and

ignored, Walt Williams had an especial fascination. With little proper company, immersed often enough between work

shifts in doleful boredom, I had plenty of time to watch and brood. The base and surrounding countryside made a

strange world that winter. I walked the dikes. I saw blood on the frost where the farmers set traps to catch the foxes,

and felt my own blood turn and change with the ebb and flow of the bomber's moon. Ice on the runways, ice hanging like

fairy socks on the radio spars as the messages came in each morning. The smell of the sea blown in over the land. In my

dreams, I saw the figures of crewmen entering the NAAFI, charcoaled and blistered, riddled with bleeding wormholes

or greyly bloated from the ocean and seeping brine. Only Walt Williams, laughing for once, his diamond eyes blazing,

stood whole and immune.

Walt was already halfway through his tour by the time Christmas came, and the consensus amongst those who knew

was that he was a unfussy pilot, unshowy. Rather like the best kind of footballer, he drifted in, found the right place, the

right time, then drifted out again. I stood and watched him from my own quiet corners in the barroom, nursing my quiet

drinks. I even got to feel that I knew Walt Williams better than any of the others, because I actually made it my

business to study him, the man and not the legend. He always seemed to be ahead of everything that was happening, but

I saw that there was a wariness in the way he watched people, and a mirrored grace in how he responded, as if he'd

learned the delicate dance of being human, of making all the right moves, but, offstage and in the darkness of his hut

where that pilot who was dead now had said he'd heard screaming, he was something else entirely. And there were

things-apart from never having to buy drinks-that Walt Williams never did. Games, bets, cards. He always slipped back

then, so smoothly and easily you'd have to be watching from as far away as I was to actually notice. It was as if he was

frightened to use his luck up on anything so trivial, whereas most of the other crewmen, fired up and raw through these

times of waiting, were always chasing a ball, a winning hand, thunking in the darts and throwing dice and making stupid

bets on anything that moved, including us girls.

Watching Walt as I did, I suppose he must have noticed me. And he must have heard about me, too, just as

everyone else here at the base had. Sometimes, on the second or third port and lemon, I'd just stare at him from my

empty corner and will him, dare him, to stare back at me. But he never did. Those sapphire eyes, quick as they were,

never quite touched on me. He must, I thought. He must look now. But never, never. Except when I stood up and left,

and I felt his presence behind me like the touch of cool fingers on my neck. So strong and sharp was that feeling one night

as I stepped down the wooden steps outside the NAAFI that I almost turned and went straight back in to confront him

through those admiring crowds. But loneliness had become a habit by now, and I almost clung to my reputation. I

wandered off, away from the billets and into the empty darkness of the airfield. There was no moon, but a seemingly

endless field of stars. Not a bomber's night, but the kind of night you see on Christmas cards. After a week's rain, and

then this sudden frost, I could feel the ground crackling and sliding beneath me. The NAAFI door swung open again, and

bodies tumbled out. As they turned from the steps made to sway arm-in-arm off bed, I heard the crash of fresh ice and

the slosh of water as they broke into a huge puddle. They squelched off, laughing and cursing. Standing there in the

darkness, I watched the same scene play itself out over and over again. The splash of cold, filthy water. One man even

fell into it. Freezing though I was, I took an odd satisfaction in watching this little scene repeat itself. Now, I thought, if

they could see me as well as I can see them, standing in the darkness watching the starlight shining on that filthy puddle,

they really would know I'm strange. Chop girl. Witch. Death incarnate. They'd burn me at the stake. . . .

I'd almost forgotten about Walt Williams when he finally came out, although I knew it was him. Instantly. He paused

on the steps and looked up at the sky as I'd seen other aircrew do, judging what the next night would bring. As he did so,

his shadow seemed to quiver. But he still walked like Walt Williams when he stepped down onto the frozen turf, and his

breath plumed like anyone else's, and I knew somehow, knew in a way that I had never had before, that this time he

really didn't know that I was there, and that he was off-guard in a way I'd never seen him. The next event was stupid,

really. A non-event. Walt Williams just walked off with that loose walk of his, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He was

nearly gone from sight into his Nissen hut when I realized the one thing that hadn't happened. Even though he'd taken the

same route as everyone else, he hadn't splashed into that wide, deep puddle. I walked over to it, disbelieving, and tried

to recall whether I'd even heard the crackle of his footsteps on the ice. And the puddle was even darker, wider, and

filthier than I'd imagined. The kind of puddle you only get at places military. I was stooping at the edge of it, and my own

ankles and boots were already filthy, when the NAAFI door swung open again, and a whole group of people suddenly

came out. Somebody was holding the door, and the light flooded right toward me.

Even though I was sure they must all have seen me and knew who I was, I got up and scurried away.

All in all, it was a strange winter. We were getting used to Allied victories, and there'd even been talk of a summer

invasion of France that had never happened. But we knew it would come next summer now that the Yanks had thrown

their weight into it, and that the Russians wouldn't give up advancing, that it was really a matter of time until the War

ended. But for us, that wasn't reassuring, because we knew that peace was still so far away, and we knew that the risks

and the fatalities would grow even greater on the journey to it. Aircrew were scared in any case of thinking further than

the next drink, the next girl, the next mission. Peace for them was a strange white god they could worship only at the risk

of incurring the wrath of the darker deity who still reigned over them. So there was an extra wildness to the jollification

when that year's end drew near, and a dawning realization that, whether we lived or died, whether we came out of it all

maimed and ruined or whole and happy, no one else would ever understand.

There was a big pre-Christmas bash in a barn of the great house of the family that had once owned most of the land

you could see from the top of our windsock tower. Of course, the house itself had been requisitioned, although the

windows were boarded or shattered and the place was empty as we drove past it, and I heard later that it was never

re-occupied after the War and ended up being slowly vandalized until it finally burnt down in the fifties. The barn was

next to the stables and faced into a wide cobbled yard, and, for once, out here in the country darkness and a million

miles from peace or war, no one gave a bugger about the blackout, and there were smoking lanterns hanging by the pens

where fine white horses would once have nosed their heads. It was freezing, but you couldn't feel cold, not in that sweet

orange light, not once the music had started, and the Squadron Leader himself, looking ridiculous in a pinny, began ladling

out the steaming jamjars of mulled wine. And I was happy to be there, too, happy to be part of this scene with the band

striking up on a stage made of bales. When Walt arrived, alone as usual in his rusty MG, he parked in the best spot

between the trucks and climbed out with that fragile grace of his. Walt Williams standing there in the flamelight, a

modern prince with the tumbling chimneys of that empty old house looming behind him. A perfect, perfect scene.

I did dance, once or twice, with some of the other girls and a few of the older men who worked in the safety of

accounts and stores and took pity on me. I even had a five-minute word-just like everyone else, kindly man that he was,

and spectrally thin though the War had made him-with our Squadron Leader. As far away from everything as we were,

people thought it was safe here to get in that bit closer to me. But it was hard for me to keep up my sense of jollity,

mostly standing and sitting alone over such a long evening, and no chance of going back to base until far after midnight. So

I did my usual trick of backing off, which was easier here than it was in the NAAFI. I could just drift out of the barn and

across the cobbles, falling through layers of smoke and kicked-up dust until I became part of the night. I studied them all

for a while, remembering a picture from Peter Pan that had showed the Indians and the Lost Boys dancing around a

campfire.

Couples were drifting out now into the quiet behind the vans. I tried to remember what it was like, the way you

could conjure up that urgency between flesh and flesh. But all I could think of was some man's male thing popping out

like a dog's, and I walked further off into the dark, disgusted. I wandered around the walls of the big and empty house

with its smell of damp and nettles, half-feeling my way down steps and along balustrades, moving at this late and early

hour amid the pale shadows of huge statuary. It wasn't fully quiet here, this far away from the throb of the barn. Even in

midwinter, there were things shuffling and creaking and breaking. Tiny sounds, and the bigger ones that came upon you

just when you'd given up waiting. The hoot of an owl. The squeak of a mouse. The sound of a fox screaming. . . .

Perhaps I'd fallen asleep, for I didn't hear him coming, or at least didn't separate out the sound of his footsteps from

my thoughts, which had grown as half-unreal as those dim statues, changing and drifting. So I simply waited in the darkness

as one of the statues began to move, and knew without understanding that it was Walt Williams. He sat beside me on

whatever kind of cold stone bench I was sitting, and he still had the smell of the barn on him, the heat and the drink and

the smoke and the firelight. The only thing he didn't carry with him was the perfume of a woman. I honestly hadn't

realized until that moment that this was another item I should have added to my long list of the things Walt Williams

avoided. But somehow that fact had been so obvious that even I hadn't noticed it. It wouldn't have seemed right,

anyway. Walt and just one woman. Not with the whole base depending on him.

I watched the flare of the match, and saw the peaked outline of his face as he stooped to catch it with two

cigarettes. Then I felt his touch as he passed one to me. One of those long, posh fags of his, which tasted fine and sweet,

although it was odd to hold compared with the stubby NAAFI ones because the glow of it came from so far away. No

one else, I thought, would ever do this for me-sit and smoke a fag like this. Only Walt.

He finally ground his cigarette out in a little shower of sparks beneath his shoe. I did the same, more by touch than

anything.

"So you're the girl we're all supposed to avoid?"

Pointless though it was in this darkness, I nodded.

It was the first time I'd heard him laugh. Like his voice, the sound was fine and light. "The things people believe!"

"It's true, though, isn't it? It is, although I don't understand why. It may be that it's only because . . ." I trailed off. I'd

never spoken about being the chop girl to anyone before. What I'd wanted to say was that it was our believing that had

made it happen.

I heard the rustle of his packet as he took out another cigarette. "Another?"

I shook my head. "You of all people. You shouldn't be here with me."

The match flared. I felt smoke on my face, warm and invisible. "That's where you're wrong. You and me, we'd make

the ideal couple. Don't bother to say otherwise. I've seen you night after night in the NAAFI. . . ."

"Not every night."

"But enough of them."

"And I saw you, that night. I saw you walk over that puddle."

"What night was that?"

So I explained-and in the process I gave up any pretense that I hadn't been watching him.

"I really don't remember," he said when I'd finished, although he didn't sound that surprised. This time, before he

ground out his cigarette, he used it to light another. "But why should I? It was just a puddle. Lord knows, there are plenty

around the base."

"But it was there. I was watching. You just walked over it."

He made a sound that wasn't quite a cough. "Hasn't everyone told you who I am? I'm Walt Williams. I'm lucky."

"But it's more than that, isn't it?"

Walt said nothing for a long while, and I watched the nervous arc of his cigarette rising and falling. And when he did

begin to speak, it wasn't about the War, but about his childhood. Walt told me he'd come from a well-to-do family in

the Home Counties, a place that always made me think of the BBC and pretty lanes with tall flowering hedges. He was

the only child, but a big investment, as was always made clear to him, of his mother's time, his father's money. At first,

to hear Walt talk, he really was the image of those lads I'd imagined I'd meet when I joined the RAF. He'd gone to the

right schools. He really had played cricket-if only just the once when the usual wicket keeper was ill-for his county. His

parents had him lined up to become an accountant. But Walt would have none of that, and my image of his kind of

childhood, which was in all the variegated golds and greens of striped lawns and fine sunsets, changed as he talked, like a

film fading. His mother, he said, had a routine that she stuck to rigidly. Every afternoon, when she'd come back from

whatever it was that she was always did on that particular day, she'd sit in the drawing room with her glass and her sherry

decanter beside her. She'd sit there, and she'd wait for the clock to chime five, and then she'd ring for the maid to come

and pour her drink for her. Every afternoon, the same.

Walt Williams talked on in the darkness. And at some point, I began to hear the ticking rattle of something which I

thought at first was his keys or his coins, the kind of nervous habit that most pilots end up getting. It didn't sound quite

right, but by then I was too absorbed in what he was saying. Flying, once Walt had discovered it, had been his escape,

although, because of the danger to their precious investment of time and good schools and money, his parents

disapproved of it even as a hobby. They cut off his money, and what there was of their affection. Walt worked in garages

and then on the airfields, and flew whenever he could. He even toured with a circus. The rattling sound continued as he

spoke, and I sensed a repeated sweeping movement of his hand that he was making across the stone on which we were

sitting, as if he was gently trying to scrub out some part of these memories.

Then the War came, and even though the RAF's discipline, and the regularity, were the same things that he detested

in his parents, Walt was quick to volunteer. But he liked the people, or many of them, and he came to admire the big

and often graceless military planes. The kind of flying he'd done, often tricks and aerobatics, Walt was used to risk; he

opted for bombers rather than fighters because, like anyone who's in a fundamentally dangerous profession, he looked

for ways in which he thought, wrongly as it turned out, the risk could be minimized. And up in the skies and down on the

ground, he sailed through his War. He dropped his bombs, and he wasn't touched by the world below him. Part of him

knew that he was being even more heartless than the machines he was flying, but the rest of him knew that if he was to

survive it was necessary to fly through cold, clear and untroubled skies of his own making.

The faint sound of the band in the barn had long faded, and I could see the sweep and movement of Walt's hand

more clearly now, and the clouds of our breath and his cigarette smoke hanging like the shapes of the statues around us. I

had little difficulty in picturing Walt as he described the kind of pilot he'd once been; the kind who imagined, despite all

the evidence, that nothing would ever happen to him. Not that Walt believed in luck back then-he said he only went

along with the rituals so as not to unsettle his crew-but at a deeper and unadmitted level, and just like all the rest of us,

luck had become fundamental to him.

Ian R. Macleod - The Chop Girl.pdf

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