Staring at the Sun (5 page)

“It sounds wonderful.” Jean wasn’t sure if she was allowed to ask questions. It was a bit like being down at the Old Green Heaven with Uncle Leslie. “What … what else do you miss?”

“Oh, I don’t miss
that
,” he replied, quite rudely. “I don’t
miss
that. There’s no future in seeing
that
again. It’s a miracle, isn’t it? You don’t want to go back and see miracles again, do you. I’m just glad I saw it when I did. ‘I’ve seen the sun rise twice,’ I’d say to them. ‘Oh, yes, have the other half.’ They used to call me Sun-Up Prosser. Some of them did. Until we got posted.”

He stood up and wolfed the piece of sandwich on her plate without asking. “What I
miss,”
he said emphatically, “since you want to know, is killing Germans. I used to enjoy that. Chasing them down until they were too low to bail out and then letting them have it. That gave me a lot of satisfaction.” Prosser seemed determined to sound brutal. “I got in an argument once with a 109 over the Channel. He could turn a bit tighter, but we were pretty well matched. We scrapped around but neither of us could really get in close enough to press the tit. So after a while he broke off, waggled his wings and headed back to base. If he hadn’t waggled his wings I wouldn’t have minded so much. Who d’you think you are? Bloody knight in armour? All good friends and jolly good company?

“I grabbed a bit of height. There wasn’t any sun I could use,
but I think he didn’t expect me to be chasing him. Expected me to go home like a good chap, have a slap-up meal and play a round of golf, I expect. I gradually began to gain on him—maybe he was nursing his fuel or something. Mind you, I was bumping along like a goods train by the time I lined him up. Gave him about eight seconds, I should think. Saw bits fly off his wing. Didn’t knock him down, more’s the pity, but I think he knew what I thought of him.”

Sun-Up Prosser turned and stomped out of the room. Jean fished a piece of dandelion from between her teeth and chewed it. She had been right. It did taste sour.

After this, Prosser took to coming down and talking to her. Usually, she carried on with her tasks while he stood propped against the door. This seemed to make it easier for both of them.

“I was at Eastleigh,” he began once, as she crouched by the grate rolling the
Express
into firelighters, “watching this little Skua take off. Bit gusty, not enough to stop flying or anything. The Skua, as I shouldn’t think you’re aware, takes off with a funny sort of tail-down technique, and I thought I’d watch it go, cheer myself up or something. Well, it scuttled along the runway, and was getting up to flying speed, when it hopped into the air, suddenly, then flipped over on its back. It didn’t look too bad—just upside down. A few of us ran across the tarmac thinking we might be able to pull the chaps out. When we got halfway there we saw something on the runway. It was the pilot’s head.” Prosser looked across at Jean but she kept her back to him and went on folding newspaper. “Then we got a bit nearer and there was another. It must have happened as the Skua flipped over. You wouldn’t believe how neat it was. One of the chaps I was with couldn’t get over it. Welsh fellow, always going on about it. ‘Just like dandelions, Sun-Up, wasn’t it?’ he said to me. ‘Walking along, and you take a swing at a line of dandelion clocks with a stick or something, and you think, if I’m really clever I can knock them off and have them float down without disturbing the feathers.’ That’s what he thought.

“The ones that haunt you … they aren’t really the ones you
expect. I’ve had mates shot down only a few yards away. I’ve seen them get into a spin, I’ve shouted at them over the R/T, I’ve known they couldn’t bail out and followed them down and seen them go, and thought, I hope someone sees me off like this when it’s my turn. It shakes you at the time, and for a bit afterwards, but it doesn’t haunt you. The ones that haunt you are where there’s no fucking dignity. Sorry. I’m going to get it, you think, and sometimes you almost get used to the idea; but you still want it on your own terms. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It really does.

“I heard about some poor blighter at Castle Bromwich. He was testing a Spitfire. Took off, pointed the nose up, and started climbing as hard as he could. Got up to about fifteen thou, something went wrong. Came right back down again: from fifteen thou straight into the tarmac he’d taken off from. They had to dig down quite a way. Then they had to have what was left of him looked at in case it was carbon monoxide in the oxygen supply or something, so they collected what they could find and sent it off for analysis. They sent it off
in a sweet jar.
” He paused. “That’s what matters.”

Jean couldn’t really follow his horror. Dandelion clocks, sweet jars—of course it sounded undignified. Perhaps because it sounded homely, not grand enough. But there wasn’t anything very pretty or dignified about getting shot down or diving into a hillside or being burnt alive in your cockpit. Perhaps she was too young to understand about death and its superstitions.

“So what’s the best way to … get it?”

“I used to think about that all the time. All the time. When the whole thing started I used to see myself somewhere near Dover. Sunshine, sea gulls, the old white cliffs gleaming away—real Vera Lynn stuff. Anyway, there I’d be, no ammo, not much juice left, and suddenly a whole squadron of Heinkels comes along. Like a great swarm of flies. I’d intercept, get right in among them, fuselage like a colander, then I’d pick out the leader of the battle group, fly straight at him and smash into his tail. We’d both go down together. Very romantic.”

“It sounds very brave.”

“No, it’s not brave. It’s pretty stupid, and anyway it’s wasteful. One of theirs for one of ours isn’t a good enough ratio.”

“So what about now?” Jean half surprised herself with her question.

“Oh, now. It’s a bit more realistic. And a bit more wasteful. Now I’d like to get it the way quite a few pilots—the young ones, especially—used to get it back in ’39, ’40.

“That’s one of the funny things you notice. You can’t get better without experience, but it’s while you’re getting the experience that you’re most likely to get knocked down. It’s always the youngest chaps that you might not see again at the end of an op. So as the war goes on, what happens in a squadron is that the old get older and the young get younger. Then some of the old ones get pulled out because they’re too valuable to lose, and you end up less experienced than you started off.

“Anyway. Imagine you’re up there, really high. When you get over twenty-five thousand it’s like a different world. Very cold for a start; and the aeroplane handles differently. It climbs slower and it skids around the sky because the air’s so thin and the props don’t have enough to bite on, and everything slips a bit as you try to control it. Then your Perspex starts misting over and you can’t see too well.

“You haven’t been on many ops and you’ve had a bit of a scare and you’re climbing. You’re climbing straight into the sun because you think that’s safe. It’s all much brighter than usual up there. You hold your hand up in front of your face and you open your fingers very slightly and squint through them. You carry on climbing. You stare through your fingers at the sun, and you notice that the nearer you get to it, the colder you feel. You ought to worry about this but you don’t. You don’t because you’re happy.

“The reason you’re happy is you’ve got a small oxygen leak. You don’t suspect anything’s wrong; your reactions are slower, but you think they’re normal. Then you get a bit feebler; you don’t move your head around as much as you should. You aren’t in pain—you don’t even feel the cold now. You don’t want to kill anyone
anymore—all that feeling has been leaking away with the oxygen. You feel
happy.

“And then one of two things happens. Either a 109 drops on you with a quick burst and a whouf of flame and then it’s all over, nice and clean. Or else, nothing at all happens, and you carry on climbing through the thin blue air, staring at the sun through your fingers, frost on your Perspex but all warm inside, all happy and not a thought in your head, until your hand drops in front of you, and then your head drops and you don’t even notice it’s curtains …”

What possible answer could you make to that, Jean thought. You couldn’t shout “Don’t do it!” as if Prosser were a suicide on a parapet. You couldn’t very well say it all sounded brave and beautiful to you, even if that was exactly what it did sound like. You just had to wait for him to say the next thing.

“Sometimes I think they oughtn’t to let me back to flying. I can see myself doing that one day. When I’ve had enough. Have to do it over the sea, of course, otherwise you might land in someone’s allotment. Might stop them Digging for Victory.”

“That wouldn’t do.”

“No, that wouldn’t do at all.”

“And … and you haven’t had enough.” Jean intended this as a gentle question, but she seemed to panic halfway through and it came out bossy and certain. Prosser’s tone hardened in reply.

“Well, you’re a good listener, little missie, aren’t you, but you don’t know the first thing. You don’t know the first thing.”

“At least I know that I don’t,” Jean said, rather to her surprise; and to his, for the sting went out of his tone at once. He carried on, in a sort of reverie.

“It really is quite different up there, you see. I mean, when you’ve flown as much as I have, you find you can suddenly get completely browned off, just in a minute or so. Something to do with nerves, I suppose—you’ve been tense for so long, and then if you relax a bit, it feels like forever. You should talk to some of those flying-boat chappies if you want to hear funny stories.”

Did she want to hear funny stories? Not if they were about sweet jars and dandelion clocks; but Prosser didn’t give her the chance to say no.

“Chum of mine, he was on Catalinas. They can be on duty twenty, twenty-two hours at a stretch. Up at midnight, breakfast, take off two in the morning, not back till eight or nine at night. Flying over the same bit of sea for hours on end: that’s what it feels like. Not even steering—they’ve handed over to George most of the time. Just staring at the sea, looking for subs and waiting for the next brew-up. That’s when your eyes start playing tricks. This chum of mine said he was once out in the Atlantic, nothing much happening, when suddenly he pulled the stick right back. Thought there was a mountain ahead.”

“Perhaps it was one of those clouds that looks like a mountain.”

“No. After he’d flattened out and they’d all effed him for spilling their brew-up, he had a good look round. Nothing, not a cloud in the sky, absolutely clear … And then another bloke I talked to, he had it even odder. Guess what? He was four hundred and fifty miles off the west coast of Ireland, tooling along, he looks down, and what does he see? He sees a fellow on a motorbike, riding along like it was Sunday afternoon.”

“In the air?”

“Course not. Don’t be daft. You can’t ride along in the air. No, he was obeying the traffic regulations and going along in a straight line on the top of the waves. Goggles, leather gauntlets, exhaust smoke coming out the back. Looking as happy as Larry.”

Jean giggled. “Riding on the water. Like Jesus.”

“None of that, if you please,” said Prosser disapprovingly. “I’m not that way inclined, but don’t blaspheme in front of those who are going to get it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Granted.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a policeman.”

“Are you really?”

“Yes.”

“Really really? You don’t look like a policeman.”

“We have to be masters of disguise, miss.”

“But if you disguise yourself too well no one will know that you’re a policeman.”

“You can always tell.”

“How?”

“Come a bit closer and I’ll show you.”

He was standing by the creosoted front gate with the sunrise motif cut into its top half; she was in the middle of the concrete path, on her way to feel the washing. He was a tall man, with a fleshy head and a schoolboy’s neck; he stood awkwardly, his brown herringbone overcoat reaching almost to his ankles.

“The feet,” he said, pointing downwards. She looked. No, they weren’t enormous great flat feet; they were quite small, actually. But there was something a bit funny about them … Were they the wrong way round? Yes, that was it—both his feet were pointing outwards.

“Did you put your shoes on the wrong way round?” she asked, a bit obviously.

“Certainly not, miss. That’s the way every policeman’s feet are. It’s in the regulations.” She still almost believed him. “Some of the recruits,” he added, in a voice that spoke of wet dungeons, “have to have
operations.
” Now she didn’t believe him. She laughed, and then again as he stagily uncrossed his legs beneath the engulfing overcoat and set them down the right way round.

“Have you come to arrest me?”

“I’ve come about the blackout.”

Looking back, she thought it was an odd way to meet a husband. But no odder than some, she supposed. And compared to others, almost quite promising.

He called again about the blackout. The third time he just happened to be passing.

“Would you like to come to the pub a hop the tea shop out for a walk out for a drive out to meet my parents?”

She laughed. “I expect one of them will be all right with Mother.”

One of them was, and they took to meeting. She found that his eyes were dark brown, that he was tall and a bit unpredictable; but mostly tall. He found her tentative, trusting and guileless to the point of rebuke.

“Can’t you put sugar in it?” she asked after tasting her first half of mild and bitter.

“I’m sorry,” he replied, “I completely forgot. I’ll get you something else instead.” The next time, he ordered her another half of mild and bitter, then passed her a screw of paper. She tipped the sugar in and screamed as the beer fizzed out of the glass; it poured towards her, making her jump off her stool.

“Never fails to amuse, does it, sir?” said the publican as he swabbed down the bar. Michael laughed. Jean felt embarrassed. He thought she was stupid, didn’t he? The man who ran the pub certainly thought she was stupid.