Beaky's Blather

I attended a formal RAF dinner in the Officers’ Mess; a function familiar to us and known then as a ‘dining-in night’. Dinner was for around 100 officers drawn largely from my Unit. There was a level of formality that as officers, we understood but I recognise now, would have seemed peculiarly arcane to an observer not drawn from the military; a social function and duty of formality and a quality that few will ever experience today. 

    In a uniform designed for the type of function, mess dress, we assembled In the bar as an informal throng. I found my group of friends assembled and we were, in our own estimation, brilliant and amusing. Jibes and joshing were exchanged, glasses raised, emptied and rapidly replenished. 

    I checked the seating plan, identified where I must sit for dinner and returned to my crowd in the bar for a final sip. 

     An announcement called us to the dining room and, with the 100 others, I walked through and secured my allocated place at a table. As the seats around me filled I was I admit, mildly disappointed to discover that seated to my left, arriving shakily, my companion for the evening was to be an elderly, dinner-suited gentleman. I had hoped for the continued entertaining ribaldry of my familiars of the informal period just concluded in the bar. 

    I accepted that good manners directed that I engage him in conversation; that I prompt him into some level of disclosure of his world and that I listened. Venerable age deserves no less. 

    Opposite and to my left and right, across the table sat guests that I knew fairly well, amongst them were colleagues that I was confident would have provided diversion and some stimulating exchanges. 

   I turned to the elderly gentleman,

     ‘What brings you to an RAF dining-in night?’ I enquired, anticipating that I would learn of some connection as CEO or chairman of a civilian supplier company, I waited.

He turned to look at me through damp eyes that suggested vulnerability. 

‘Well, he paused, once I was in the mob,’ he responded quietly with a sad smile. ‘Long ago.’ 

   ‘Really’ I replied seeking to suggest interest.  ‘What did you do?’

   He paused, ‘oh, I was the rear gunner on a Lancaster bomber during the War.’ This rocked me – figuratively – onto my heels. Those who know, understand that the  most vulnerable, least enviable place to occupy in a slow bomber is alone in a glass bubble stuck out the back of the fuselage, directly in line with the very place every enemy fighter seeks to latch onto in his aim as it seeks to destroy your aircraft ahead. 

   My focus altered in a moment. The room and its hundred or so occupants melted away. I spoke with no one else during that dinner. In fact, I was oblivious to everything but this quiet, gentle, frail man. 

   ‘What was it like… over Europe,’  I enquired tenderly. I felt that my time in the Service was trivial beside his. He lent towards me, glanced around as if checking that no enemy was listening, and intimated, 

 ‘fucking cold…and noisy.  I don’t recommend it.’

    In his quiet way, that never at any point suggested derring do, he related his world of long ago to me, No drama, just his extraordinary experience, years in the past. 

   ‘Were you scared?’ I enquired. 

   He paused in thought, ‘terrified,’ he eventually offered. 

    I felt that I might be his last opportunity to share and record his story.

One anecdote I recall so vividly, even today, forty-five years later, was an experience he described that took place post War; in 1949. He had returned to Berlin as a delegate of some rebuild-Germany committee. The aircraft taxied to a position near an assembled group of dignitaries, opposite the ravaged terminal building. He descended the front steps from the airliner that had brought them.

 ‘I sat near the front,’ he explained, ‘not the back,’ which made me smile. Each delegate was greeted by a pair of breathless, attractive young ladies. who were to be their escorts for the visit.

    Faced with a challenge similar to the one that had faced me as we had first sat down at the table earlier in the evening, one of the young escorts (if I dare call them such) enquired,

‘have you been to Berlin before?’ He paused and turned in his seat to address me directly,

    ‘Without thinking,’ he explained, I replied, ‘yes, a few times…. we didn’t land.’