Authors: Christopher Priest
‘Sir, if you would.’ He stammered out a rush of words: please ask
her to phone me, no, write to me, get to this airfield somehow, it’s important, urgent, I must hear from her soon.
The man listened quietly, then took out a notebook. He asked Torrance for his full name and rank, and his service number, who the NCO in charge of his unit was, and the name of the senior officer. He wrote all that down. He told Torrance his own name: he was First Officer Dennis Fielden, and gave Torrance an address where he could be contacted – the airfield at White Waltham – and even the address of the ATA headquarters in London, which he suggested, ‘if all else fails’, might be the best way of locating Krystyna. He reminded Torrance that because of wartime security concerns it could be difficult to obtain exact information about personnel.
‘Aircraftman First Class Michael Torrance,’ he said, reading out what he had written down. ‘Will she know your name and rank?’
‘Yes.’
‘Leave it with me,’ he said. ‘Sometimes these things can be found out. I joined the ATA at the beginning of the war, so I know my way around.’
When Torrance returned to work he felt more cheerful than he had for weeks, but for the rest of the base it was still a time heavy with sadness.
Three days passed, but because of Fielden’s confident manner Torrance felt certain everything was going to be all right. On the afternoon of the fourth day he was summoned without warning to the Adjutant’s office in the main block. He borrowed a bike and pedalled across there quickly – he had never been anywhere near the Adjutant’s office before and when he reached the main building he had to ask the way.
Two men were standing in the corridor where he had been directed – one was Dennis Fielden, the other was an RAF officer he did not recognize, but he assumed it must be the Adjutant. As soon as he was noticed walking towards them, the officer nodded to Mr Fielden, then walked briskly away. Mr Fielden greeted him in the corridor, then ushered him into the office. Torrance noticed he was not wearing his cap, so he removed his own. Fielden closed the door. They remained standing.
He said without delay, ‘Aircraftman Torrance, I have managed to trace Second Officer Roszca for you, but I’m afraid I bring sad news. Krystyna Roszca has been posted as missing and is believed to be dead. She was delivering a plane as a regular part of her job, when she appears to have diverted from her planned course. She
did not arrive at her destination. No wreckage was found, so it is thought that she might have made an emergency landing in water somewhere. Part of the route she filed would have taken her close to the Thames Estuary, and the diversion she took from that course almost certainly led her out over the sea. It seems possible that she somehow lost her bearings, became unable to find her way back to the right course and was forced down when she ran out of fuel.’
Torrance had taken in only the first few words, the giddy sensation of bad news rushing through him.
They were both silent for a while, then Torrance said, ‘Sir, when did this happen?’
‘It was last year, towards the end of August. She was rota’d for the delivery on the twenty-seventh of that month.’
‘Is it absolutely certain she is dead?’
Torrance had somehow sat down – he did not remember doing it. He was on a hard wooden chair placed behind the door of the office. The ATA pilot was standing beside him, leaning over with an expression of sympathy. He was calm, steady, tall. He placed a hand on Torrance’s shoulder.
First Officer Fielden said, ‘Michael, I am really so very sorry.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
After Fielden had left, Torrance was unable to face going back to work straight away. He left the Adjutant’s office, walked along the corridor and found an empty room at the end. Inside, with the door closed, he hid there alone.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1944 MIKE TORRANCE WAS TRANSFERRED
to an RAF base in southern Italy, where he serviced P-51 Mustangs and P-38 Lightnings operated by units of the USAAF. He remained attached to this section until the end of the European war, when he returned to England. He was demobilized at the beginning of 1946.
In 1948 he met his wife, Glenys, and they set up home together in the south-east London suburbs, on the Kent side. They had three children, two boys and a girl. Torrance worked in a number of jobs after the war, but in 1954 began working for a medium-sized advertising agency in Bayswater Road, not far from Notting Hill. He was trained as a copy-writer, which was work he found stimulating and creative. He worked well in advertising for a few years and
enjoyed what he was doing, but in the end he found copy-writing something of a blind alley. He was developing a taste for different kinds of writing. He transferred to the subsidiary of an American chemical company with an office in Bromley, closer to his home, and there he was appointed senior journalist. He was responsible for writing and producing all manner of printed material, from straightforward descriptions of products, to publicity handouts and the house journal, published every month.
Some years later, emboldened by both his enjoyment of the work and the belief that he was doing it well, he gave up paid employment altogether and started a new career as a biographer, working for himself as a freelance. He began modestly, producing short biographies of service personnel who had performed acts of exceptional bravery or gallantry in the Second World War, and these were commissioned and printed by a specialist military history publisher. Later he branched out into political and social biographies for the general market, where he was soon established as an authority in his field.
He rarely thought about Krystyna Roszca in these years – his professional life was full and he was absorbed in the experience of seeing his young family growing up. Eventually the age of retirement approached.
For Torrance this felt like a mere technicality of the calendar, because as a freelance the prospect of ceasing work was arbitrary and unnecessary. He was in good health, had active commissions for the work he was engaged in, and was planning more books as far ahead as ever. Even so, he was conscious of a general slowing down and he became more introspective than he had been before. He continued with his usual work as normal, but with increasing frequency his thoughts returned to the summer of 1943 and his brief romantic interlude with Krystyna, the flier from Poland, the girl, the young woman, who had cried and held his hand. He had not thought for many years of the secret she had imparted to him, her mother’s love-name for her. Malina – it came back to him immediately. He said it quietly to himself, using Krystyna’s own Polish pronunciation, with the emphasis on the long middle ‘i’.
He thought about her with increasing interest and attention, quietly remembering himself at that time, at the age he had been: so shy, young, callow, inexperienced, unprepared for a worldly woman like her. He began to wonder – how had he seemed to her? He realized, belatedly, what she had achieved: that fierce independence
and brave initiative that had given her a role in the defence of her country, the hours of dangerous flying while the Luftwaffe dive-bombers hit the towns and the fighter planes searched for any target they could find, the escape from the invasions, the nightmare overland journey to safety across Europe as war was erupting everywhere around. When he met her he had been not much more than a boy, uprooted from home, thrown into the hurly-burly of a wartime RAF station, just about getting by. Looking back, Torrance felt abashed by his memories of himself: his insular background, his unawareness of the wider world, his lack of experience with girls. At first Krystyna had seen in him, he knew, a reminder of someone else, her real lover, but somehow by the end of their day that was no longer so important. He believed she had been responding to him, not to her memory of someone else.
When the Second World War ended, Torrance, like many of the people who had been caught up in it, deliberately pushed it to the back of his mind. He had had enough of war, of life in the RAF. He almost never spoke of his experiences. Even when he met Glenys, six months passed before he mentioned he had been in the RAF, and even then he minimized his role and barely spoke of it again to her. With his work on the early biographies, corresponding with veterans and sometimes interviewing them, Torrance realized that what had happened when he met Krystyna was not at all unusual. So many of the war’s participants were young, even the ones who had distinguished themselves in action. Nearly everyone was away from their families for the first time, thrown into the controlled chaos of service life. For many, the prospect of action and the fear of death heightened the need for friendships, for love, and the consequent separations, weeping, regretting, reunions, hopes, fearing not just their own deaths but those of the people they knew or loved or simply worked with. All those bereavements, families broken for so many reasons, so many liaisons and relationships and new starts and false hopes and tragic outcomes.
His meeting with Krystyna was the one wartime experience that had left a real mark on him. He recalled the account of her life in Poland, which he had written up from memory in 1953 while he was still working in unsatisfying jobs. At the time it felt like a way of making what happened coherent, something he could complete and finish. In this sense he had succeeded. He had not read his account or even thought about it for years. He searched his room, his desk, his cupboards, his old and inefficient filing – finally he found it,
stuffed into a box file of papers which his wife had put to one side for possible recycling. He rescued it, read it.
It was full of memories, and it made him think about how he had heard of Krystyna’s death.
There was something unexplained about the way she died, and it still nagged at him. While he accepted as true what the gentle ATA officer, Dennis Fielden, had told him, he felt from the first moments that it could not be the whole story. In the larger process of consciously leaving behind everything that happened to him in the war, Torrance had let this small mystery drift into the past. Millions of people had died, many of them in unexplained circumstances – it was in the nature of war, with its violent events, sudden deaths, guilty acts, secrecy.
But it still seemed unlikely to him that Krystyna would allow herself to get lost, or would divert from her planned route. It was of course possible she had crashed, through a mechanical failure of the aircraft, or by enemy action, or because of bad weather, but it was against everything that he knew about her that she would simply lose her way. No wreckage had been discovered, which he presumed meant that nothing had been found along her known route. He had seen her flying, admired her skill, her natural way of piloting – also her determination, the inner strength and individuality, all her hopes and wishes. If she had diverted from her route there would have been a reason.
Torrance decided he would try to find out what it might have been. He had learned a few skills of his own since becoming a writer. Notable among them was an ability to search and research, to explore boxes of dusty papers, to ransack newspaper libraries, to elicit half-concealed information from official bodies. He had many contacts, friends, ways and means. He knew it would help to be able to speak Polish, an ambition he had nurtured for many years, so he sent away for an audio course, then later took privately tutored lessons.
The facts were easier to find than he had at first expected, because in the post-war years many official papers and documents were released into the public domain, with many more becoming accessible after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This made the prospect of going to Poland much less of a concern. For researchers it became a matter not of trying to find out if the information existed, but of locating exactly where it was. In Britain, the aircraft manufacturers had released a huge amount of information about the serial numbers and marques of the aircraft they had built,
when the planes were completed and where they were delivered. Among many other authorities the ATA had made their archives public and their pilots’ logs and delivery schedules were available to be consulted. In a few cases, where the pilots had died in service or gone missing, personal effects were still on file, including some letters. Krystyna’s file had several personal effects. Among the letters were two of the ones he had written to her himself, the ones that she had never answered. He started reading the first, but when he noticed the date, two days after she went missing, he was unable to go on to the end. In the same file Torrance found the little purse, the one that had started everything. It was now empty. The bright colours, which had so entranced him in that monochrome wartime world, had faded, and the red piping was coming unstitched. He held it for a while, consumed by memories, then sadly replaced it.
The first thing Torrance discovered about Krystyna was her full name: Krystyna Agnieszka Roszca. Foreign Office records revealed that she had been admitted to Britain firstly as a refugee, then accredited as a serving member of the Polish Air Force attached to the Polish government in exile. All this confirmed what she had told him about herself. He could find no information about her birth family. The rest of her story was corroborated in broad outline: certain elements of the Polish Air Force had escaped to Romania, their equipment was confiscated, and they were told to leave the country in the early part of 1940.
From the Polish Embassy in London he discovered facts about her he had not known. She had been given a rank in the Air Force, presumably by the general she had named: a temporary commission as Porucznik, or Lieutenant, Roszca. After living in Britain for some time she had eventually been given some back pay by the Poles, and a small stipend every week, but this was discontinued when she joined the ATA.
More interesting still was the fact that Sikorski’s government had awarded her a medal for her flying duties during the invasion: the Cross of Merit for Bravery, or in Polish,
Krzyż Zasługi za Dzielność
. The citation read: ‘Porucznik (Temporary) K.A. Roszca – for selfless bravery in the defence of national borders, and the life and property of citizens in especially difficult circumstances.’