Out of This World Read Online Free PDF Page B

still think of Lincolnshire in the war. Of the broad, grassy Lincolnshire countryside, of draughty Lincolnshire pubs, and the strange stigma and exclusion of being junior Intelligence officers in a region littered with airfields and serving airmen. I think of the saloon bar of the Crown Hotel in Grantham, where there is a dearth of female company, let alone unattached female company, and where Frank, on his fifth pint and in fluent voice, is announcing the voluptuous procession that is shortly to enter through the amazed hotel portals: Hayworth, Lake, Grable, Lamour …
    He arrived with a limp in his left leg (two fractures and a damaged tendon), the result of a motor-cycle accident that occurred before he had even begun his pilot’s training. The story he told the Ladies of Lincolnshire (for we had our moments) was that he was shot down in his Spit back in ’42 – hence the wretched desk job. While the story he conferred on me was a legendary and invisible head wound. Marvellous what these surgeons can do now. My friend Harry here – you won’t believe it: totally blind in one eye.
    False pretences. Of more than one kind? Did I intend it from the very beginning?
    That summer, during fine weather, as the bombings intensified, we would sometimes be attached to the airfields themselves, working at all hours to monitor the raids and keep the crews effectively briefed. One hot July afternoon we were watching the tenders lumbering out to fill the bellies of the Lancs, and I said to him: ‘Do you know who makes those bombs?’
    He looked puzzled.
    I said, ‘My father.’
    He looked puzzled still.
    ‘You’ve heard of Beech Munitions? Robert Beech? BMC? Cannon balls by appointment …’
    I think what he said then, and what he’d say still, though in a hundred subtle ways, was: ‘Somebody has to make them.’ But his eyes lost their puzzled look and after that day they acquired an ever-alert expression. Some weeks later when we both had three-day passes I asked him if he’d like to visit Hyfield. And I might have guessed that his eyes would become even more alert as we drove through the gates. As I might have known (had I wished it?) that Dad, tired and irascible as he was looking, would take a shine to him, would be the soul of affability, would take advantage of the situation to knock volleys into the air I had no way of returning.
    ‘Now Harry will tell you … Now when Harry takes over …’
    I pretended to be nonplussed.
    That must have been in the early autumn of ’44, after the liberation of Paris and before they sent me on that sudden photography course. They had decided by then that the war would be over before long and it was thus a historical phenomenon worthy of documentation. And my gauche enthusiasm back in ’39 must have stuck on my file. I was sent to London where I was taught the parts and use of a camera in much the same manner as rifle drill. Then I was sent back to Lincolnshire, with equipment, a special pass and papers that would oblige senior and fellow officers to give me assistance, and told to get some pictures.
    As if they might have said: You know, atmosphere, action, human drama stuff. Editor’s desk by midnight.
    So I went round the bases. And up (oh, just a few hellish times) at night with the crews. I flew. Saw. The whole works. Flak and tracer and vomit and kerosene and rear-gunners turned to meat. The photos on the desks, under the lamps and magnifiers, came alive and polychrome (so I could turn them into photos again), and I watched the light-show of Dresden burning, far below, in the dark.
    Half my pictures, of course, they buried. You aren’t supposed to see, let alone put on visual record,
those
things.
    A photographer is neither there nor not there, neither in nor out of the thing. If you’re in the thing it’s terrible, but there aren’t any questions, you do what you have to do and you don’t even have time to look. But what I’d say is that someone has to look. Someone