Out of This World Read Online Free PDF

citizen. Amongst those heaps of papers he (involuntarily) left me (I never thought he would be the one for such careful documentation, for preserving the evidence) were the typescripts – annotated and underlined with red ink – of the speeches he made when he stood for Parliament in the Thirties. Now, when I read them, fifty years later, those heavy-handed phrases, those chastising and belligerent slogans prick at my eyes: ‘manning the defences’, ‘the sleeping lion’, ‘moral re-armament’– by which he meant, precisely, material re-armament. That was ’35. The timing was just out. But the stance, the rhetoric (my God, I never went to hear him on the hustings) would be remembered later. Not least in those panegyrics after his death.
    Right-hand man! My right-hand man, he would say. A dubious and all too blatant joke from a man with only one arm. I’ll never know what the real motive was. Some absurd, implausible, residual dream? That it might all come right and good – Beech and Son, the two of us in tandem, the greater glory of B M C. For which he was prepared to wait and pay and bribe. My expensive and lengthy upbringing (Winchester, Oxford): a long-term investment in my filial conscience.
    Or just a punishment? Just a kind of revenge?
    ‘… You appear, Beech, to be a highly educated young man. It seems what we could most use from you are your brains …’
    ‘… And we understand, Beech, that you are interested in photography …’
    He laughed when I told him I had opted for the R.A.F. The rough, gravelly laugh of the former infantry officer. He laughed even more scoffingly (triumphantly?) when he learnt the result of my Board – that I was made of too precious stuff, so it seemed, to be flung into the skies. He never ceased to remind me that if, after all, mine was to be a non-combatant’s role, I might as well have chosen to come in with him. That though, no doubt, I would have been worked off my feet, I would have been better off and better rewarded than in some ‘wretched hut’ in Lincolnshire. Perhaps – I can’t recall it now – there was the tiniest, barely detectable flaw in this mockery, the tiniest, stubborn note of gratitude. I don’t think I wanted to be a hero, a charioteer of the skies. My father was a hero. I didn’t worship my father. But I had wanted to fly.
    And yet I saw the war from the air. Since the officers of the Commissioning Board, in their obtuse or ironic wisdom, took literally my professed interest in photography. And the ‘hut’ inLincolnshire – in reality a small country house not unreminiscent of Hyfield – was given over to the analysis of aerial photographs.
    I looked down with a privilege no pilot ever had on target after target. Before and after. I became routinely familiar with the geography of western Europe. At first a motley geography of steel works, dockyards, power stations, refineries, railways, then a geography (rapidly altering, diminishing) of cities. Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf, Berlin … I learnt to distinguish the marks of destruction – the massive ruptures of 4,000-pounders from the blisters of 1,000-pounders and the mere pock-marks of 250-pound clusters – and to translate these two-dimensional images, which were the records of three-dimensional facts, into one-dimensional formulae – tonnage dropped as against acreage devastated, acreage destroyed as against acreage attacked (the tallies never included ‘people’, ‘homes’) – while someone in the hierarchical clouds above me refined these figures into the ethereal concept known as ‘the progress of operations’.
    And as operations progressed, the statistics grew larger, the images more other-worldly, more crater-ridden, more lunar.
    Frank Irving came to ‘the Manor’, as we called it, in the summer of ’44. I was delegated to show him the ropes. He and I were two of the youngest on a staff dominated by men over forty. When I think of Frank, even now, I