Free The Complete Flying Officer X Stories by H.E. Bates

summer he managed to increase this by ten or twelve shillings by gardening in the evenings and his mother put in a weekly average of about sixteen hours at sixpence an hour at the rectory. As a boy, Lawson went harvesting and haymaking for about sixpence a day and doing odd jobs on Saturdays in the rectory kitchen. And somehow, out of this, they bought him an education.
    I don’t know who was at the back of this idea of education. It may have been the rector. Most likely it was the rector and the mother. Lawson’s father, I gathered, was a solid, unimaginative man who was rather content to let things remain as they were. He worked hard for three hundred and sixty-two days of the year — he tended hisown garden on Sundays — and then got roaring tight on Christmas Eve, Flower Show Saturday, and the local Easter Monday races. It obviously wasn’t he who had the idea of education, yet once the idea had been conceived he was behind it wholly and with all the solidity of his nature. For two years he and the mother saved up every extra penny they earned; every pea picked, every potato picked up, every forkful of hay turned over was something extra to the account. The house where they lived was old and damp, with unplastered walls and a brick floor and cracks in the window-frames that were stuffed with paper. The only light they had was a little oil lamp which they carried from room to room if they wanted a light in another place. They bought fifty pounds of coal each week and on Friday afternoons the mother wetted the last shovelful of coal and banked up the fire so that it would last till evening.
    When Lawson was fourteen they were able to send him to the local grammar school. Or at least they were going to send him. Everything was arranged for him to start in September when one of those little accidents happened that often greatly affect the course of people’s lives. Lawson fell off a bridge and broke his left arm. By the time it was better the vacancies in the first school were filled and he was sent instead to a school about fifteen miles away. He travelled there every day by train.
    It was at this school that he heard the remark that was to affect, and crystallise, his whole life. The third term he was there, within a week or so of his fifteenth birthday,he heard a lecture in the school hall on the work of the R.A.F. When the lecture began, he told me, he really wasn’t very interested. When he came out he could not get out of his mind something the lecturer had said about those who fly. “I often think,” the lecturer said, “that they are the greatest people in the world.”
    When I knew Lawson the war was two years old. He had graduated rather uneventfully in the usual way, up through Moths and Ansons and so to light bombers, until now he was captain of a Stirling. There was even then a kind of premature immobility about him, especially about his eyes, so that the pupils sometimes looked seared, cauterised, burnt out. His first trouble was to have been made a bomber pilot at all. He had been through the usual Spitfire complex: all roaring glory and victory rolls. The thought of long flights of endurance, at night, with nothing to be seen except the flak coming up at you in slow sinister curls, the earth in the light of a flare, and then the flare-path at base if you were lucky and the fog hadn’t come down, shook him quite a lot. It may have been this that accounted for what happened afterwards.
    He had stayed at school until he was eighteen, and had virtually walked straight out of school into the Air Force. What struck me most was that there was no disruption, no disloyalty, between himself and his parents. There might well have been. Their life, simple, bound to earth, lighted by that cheap oil lamp which they carried from room to room, compressed into the simple measure of hard work, saving, and devotion, was like the life of anotherage compared with the life they had