Sky Writing

It was called the Dive during the war and it drew servicemen and women from across Yorkshire and the north who enjoyed the hubbub, the smoke and beer, and the temporary sense of freedom and escape that the bar provided. It was said that if you wanted to know where the RAF’s next raid would be, Bettys Bar – the Dive – was the place to be. Now Bettys is anything but a dive: elegant, timeless and comforting. Its waitresses are similarly fragrant, their white blouses and broderie anglaise aprons ironed with military precision. Bettys’ ground-floor restaurant is bright with mirrors, reflecting the line of delicate teapots on a high shelf, the silver of cake-stands and the narrow streets of York.

Downstairs you can see an altogether more poignant mirror displayed in the windowless corridor at the foot of the curved oak-banistered staircase. It is a fragment of a larger wartime original. Looking at it, you tend to ignore the reflection of yourself and concentrate on the names scratched on the glass, 569 of them in all, many of them from airmen and troops – British, Canadian, American – passing through York at the whim of wartime logistics. The accepted wisdom is that the first name on the mirror was scratched using a waitress’s ring; at all events, the custom of cutting one’s name on the glass developed, prompted no doubt by the way it seemed briefly to confer a sense of permanence in an uncertain world. I have often wondered how many of the signatories survived the war. As well as the mirror, with its forlorn and shaky names, there are two visitors’ books, the first of which dates from 1989 and is slightly water-damaged following a leak on one of the floors above the restaurant. Increasingly over the years these books have been signed by veterans from the Second World War revisiting the past, or by their descendants, intent on commemoration; my ex-Bomber Command father-in-law has signed twice. My favourite entry is by a Dennis Webb who ‘last came here when stationed at Pocklington. Was sitting here when police came in to round up crews for a raid when [the German battleships] Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen escaped up Channel.’ Reflect upon the moment and you can see through the haze of cigarette smoke and the press of blue uniforms to the misty night outside the windows; hear the police dogs barking and the redcaps chivvying the boozed-up pilots towards the door. I read the visitors’ books one morning in a small subterranean office opposite the mirror. It was very moving, this succession of fleeting stories contained in them: a former airman recorded the celebratory tea taken fifty years after the event with the woman from the Normandy Escaping Organization who had facilitated his escape when he was forced to bale out over France; an airman’s niece marked her uncle’s last mission when he had been shot down over Germany – he had taken off from RAF Leeming and had remained defiantly at the controls of the aircraft to the end, thereby enabling the rest of the crew to bale out. He had died with his Halifax. Later, I discovered that in the previous year, he had been the sole survivor when his aircraft was attacked by a night fighter. On that occasion he had successfully found his way back to England. Sometimes the visitors’ books and the mirror were linked: ‘My crew names are on the mirror,’ wrote one American airman on a visit to this old haunt half a century after the war ended. Looking through the list of signatures I was jolted by a name I recognized: the Australian writer Don Charlwood, author of No Moon Tonight, had signed the visitors’ book in 1989. He flew in Halifaxes with 103 Squadron based in Lincolnshire. I had read his book before I had begun to write anything about flying. I had started to cycle round the disused airfields in Yorkshire, stirred by the echoes of the past that such places retain but not sure what kind of book I wanted to write. The end of Charlwood’s is particularly evocative and thought-provoking: he had returned to the airfield at Elsham Wolds in 1958. What had been a place of intense and emotional activity had become desolate farmland: ‘I stood very still,’ Charlwood wrote. ‘Somewhere hens were clucking and rain gurgled off the roof. There were no other sounds at all. Something in the room eluded me . . . I walked quickly into the rain, groping for understanding of our silenced activity, the purpose of all the courage and devotion I had once seen.’ It was that sense of past times too easily forgotten that took me to the first sentence of my own book on Bomber Command. I owe Charlwood a debt. And not just Charlwood. Without a solid squadron of other writersbefore me, my own picture of life in aeroplanes would be hazy, ill-defined. Above all I owe a debt to the memoirists rather than the historians. Guy Gibson’s Enemy Coast Ahead, for example, I read for the first time in my early teens when bomb sites in my native Bristol were still weed-strewn and widespread. The book immediately conjures up an image of a leather-helmeted pilot in a night-bound cockpit, a glimmer of instruments in the darkness, a hint of white on the surface of the North Sea far below, and flak arcing up from the Dutch coast ahead. I also read Miles Tripp’s The Eighth Passenger. Lancasters had a crew of seven: the extra passenger was Fear but might just as well have been Death. Air Vice-Marshal Don Bennett’s Pathfinder is another account that I still consult: he flew Empire flying-boats before the war and was a pivotal figure in Bomber Command. I warmed to his Aussie directness and confidence, just what an Imperial Airways pilot needed to succeed. Early in the war, he was commissioned to take a flying-boat to Biscarrosse in France to rescue senior Polish army officers. Accompanying him was the Polish leader, General Sikorski. Evidently Bennett was grumpy, perturbed by late arrivals and worrying about missing the tide, and he made no secret of his disapproval. ‘I take my orders from the Air Ministry, not some bloody foreign general!’ His account of the rescue in Pathfinder is wonderfully stiff-upper-lip in style: ‘The only thing that shot at us was a British cruiser. . . Fortunately their shooting was more or less of the usual standard, and we were not hit.’ Typically, Bennett brought the flying-boat back to England more or less at the expected minute. My favourite ‘book of flight’ however is unlikely ever to be reprinted. Brackles – subtitled Memoirs of a Pioneer of Civil Aviation – was ‘compiled’ by Air Commodore Brackley’s widow and published privately in 1952, four years after Brackley died. It is clearly a labour of love and runs to 695 pages. Brackley served in both world wars and was a fervent advocate of flying-boat travel. The book defies a systematic, conscientious read-through, but its mix of terse, phlegmatic diary entries (28 November 1938: ‘Calpurnia crashed at Habbanyeh’), and long, loving letters home to his wife from far-flung places where he was exploring flying-boat routes or trouble-shooting, are often absorbing and always observant and evocative. I warmed to Brackley and visited his grave in a churchyard on the Norfolk coast, regretting the terseness of the epigraph on his gravestone. His house, over the road from the church, was surrounded by a crumbling stone wall, with a driveway shadowed by undisciplined, tall trees. I imagined him setting out in his roadster, bound for prewar London and meetings to discuss the intricacies of Imperial Airways policy, driving on empty roads as the sun rose over the sea. His book sat on my desk for years while I wrote of flying-boats and empire and by the end I felt I knew him well. I still treasure his book. Though bulky and lacking a hard-headed editor, it is reassuringly thorough, heartfelt and substantial. Brackley had two passions – swimming and flying-boats. He was drowned, aged 54, on a beach in Rio de Janeiro. The night before he had written in a letter to his son, David: ‘The harbour is splendid for flying-boats.’ Reading those names on the mirror in Bettys tea-rooms and scanning the brief messages in the visitors’ books – all those stories largely lost – I am conscious of the debt we owe to the men who wrote of their wartime flying experiences. Their voices speak for all who passed through the warm fug of York’s ‘Dive’, cycled anonymously back to base through blacked-out lanes, and scratched their name and rank on a smoke-dulled mirror with a waitress’s ring.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 32 © Richard Knott 2011