The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday

Author:Daniel Torday
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466871816
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

ACT THREE

1.

My first few weeks after enlisting in the RAF were taken up with logistics. I was given an examination in math, which I passed with ease. I was issued a respirator and identity disks, eating utensils, and a whole new set of vaccinations should I be shot down over North Africa. An officer in his RAF blues gave me and three other recruits a lecture about how short we should keep our hair, how it was imperative that a pilot shower after each run, and bathe himself every other day on any account.

“If you meet some young thing in the NAAFI, you’re to use protection,” this officer said. The idea of meeting any “young thing” was far from my mind at that moment. This officer was tall, and broader across the chest than the Elbe near Brüder Weisberg, and of a British type who, frankly, scared me. “We don’t need any more of our crew walking around with balls swollen with disease, if you see what I’m bloody saying.”

We saw.

The walls grew brighter and my palms began to sweat, thinking what diseases I myself might have acquired, having spent more than a year sleeping with Françoise and now Glynnis. It was as if the world before me was succumbing to splashes of color, and a kind of spasm shook my eyeballs so that I could not focus. I could think now of what diseases I might have, but had I thought before of what the experience was to them? I didn’t even know what Françoise’s fate was, let alone what she might be thinking now.

In a room with dun-colored floors, which smelled antiseptic and vaguely of man sweat, an officer shouted that I was to take off my clothing. Soon he hit me with a painful spray from a hose to assure I was rid of any bugs. From there I was whisked off to a Nissen hut where I was to spend the night, before moving along to begin my training.

Next day I rode by train down to the southern coast, where I was plied further with a trainee’s gear at the Initial Training Wing to which I was assigned. It was the same train Glynnis and I had ridden to visit Mrs. Goldring not three months earlier. Water still lay in the fields, and now the fields, which only rarely had been scarred by bombs, were torn up, as if plagued by some infernal vermin. I pulled down my rucksack to inventory my new possessions. Everything seemed to come in threes: three navy blue sweaters, three pairs of heavy socks (“You’ll need those up there, it’s cold as hell at thirty thousand feet”), three service collars, and three service shirts, stiff and itchy on those first days I donned them. I’d received fork and knife, and today a heavy navy blue wool sweater with a cable-knit collar, which I would later learn was named after the British isle of Guernsey. Again hygiene was a major concern, and

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