The old man was twenty-four: not an unusual age for a squadron commander in the Royal Flying Corps.
Major Milne had been christened Rufus because his infant hair was bright red. Within a year it faded to a mild sandy colour, and this was the first of many disappointments for his father, a commander in the Royal Navy.
Ever since Trafalgar, all the Milne sons had gone into the Navy. When Rufus was five, his father took him dinghy-sailing on a sheltered lake. There was a soft, steady breeze, not enough to make a chop, and Rufus was sick throughout the trip. The next time they went out he began to throw up before the boat left the landing-stage. The third and fourth attempts were no better. “Nil desperandum,” his father said. “The great Horatio Nelson was seasick in Portsmouth harbour, so they say.” The fifth time they went to the lake, Rufus was standing on the shore, putting on his little lifejacket, when he started to vomit. His father wanted to persist, and Rufus was ready to do as he was told, but the boy had lost eight pounds in a week and his mother was alarmed by his gauntness.
“Sorry, old chap,” his father said. “I’m afraid it’s shore duty for you until that rumblegut of yours changes its tune.” Rufus, chomping his way through a second helping of scrambled eggs on toast, nodded bravely.
The tune never changed. Rufus went from short to long trousers, his voice broke, he turned sixteen and started shaving, but whenever he stepped into a boat his stomach emptied itself with an energy his father had never seen matched, not even during storms in the China Seas. The risk was too great. Milne senior wasn’t going to disgrace the family name with a naval cadet who might well throw up at the mention of the word “dreadnought”. In due course he pulled strings and got his son a commission in a decent regiment, the Green Howards. That was in 1910.
In 1912 Rufus took private flying lessons from a Frenchman at Brooklands aerodrome. His father felt cheated when he learned that flying did not make Rufus sick, and his mother felt relieved when he got his certificate. She thought it was all over then. But he kept on flying and in 1914, six weeks after the war began, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. Rear-admiral Milne (now retired) gave up. The Green Howards weren’t the real thing, they weren’t the Navy, but at least they were a proper lot, a decent outfit, a regiment. What was the RFC? A bag of tricks, a joke, and not even a funny joke that you could tell your neighbours. So be it. The admiral had nephews in the Navy and he had a younger, non-vomiting son who would follow them soon. He tried not to think about Rufus.
Rufus Milne had long since stopped thinking about his father, who existed in his memory as a gruff and discontented figure pruning roses very hard, as if he suspected mutiny below. Rufus enjoyed flying, he was proud of his rank, and he liked commanding a squadron; but he had grown up in such an atmosphere of suppressed disapproval and disappointment that even now, after six years in the army and two years in France, he hid his feelings behind a wall of disarming habits and mannerisms. He spoke in a drawl that suggested nothing was as important as it seemed; he rarely looked people in the eye, preferring to let his gaze wander past the left ear while he nodded and blinked at what they said; he slouched as he walked; and he had several chunky, short-stemmed pipes that demanded a lot of attention. He often seemed vague, and vaguely elsewhere. Sometimes, when people met him for the first time, they wondered how on earth he got to be a major, let alone a squadron commander. That was what Paxton wondered as he sat opposite him. Fellow looks half-asleep, he thought.
“Weren’t we expecting you….urn…. rather earlier than this?” Milne asked, so softly that Paxton leaned forward.
“Yes, sir. Five days ago, sir:”
“Five days, eh? As much as that…”
“I’m afraid we ran into a spot of bother on the way. Several spots, in fact.”
“Ah…” Milne slumped in his chair and squinted at the sunlight. “Spots of bother, you say.” He seemed to be trying, not very hard, to remember what bother was like. Far away, thunder rumbled. The sound rolled like a slow avalanche until it made a window shiver. Milne glanced at his wrist-watch. Paxton waited, upright and alert. The door was slightly open. A fly wandered in, as if looking for a friend, and Milne watched it until it wandered out again. “Suppose you tell me,” he suggested.
“Yes, sir. The first thing that happened, sir, was the weather turned rather nasty soon after we took off from Shoreham. You see I’d planned to fly due east, that is, straight across the Channel, and reach the French coast at Boulogne but some pretty stormy squalls hit us, and what with the cloud and the wind and the rain the other chaps simply couldn’t keep formation on me. I was leading, you see. So it looked too dangerous to fly straight to Boulogne – not that we could fly straight if we wanted to, the wind was chucking us about so much – but anyway I knew it was at least sixty miles to Boulogne, mostly out of sight of land, and I decided we ought to follow the coast to Dover instead and then make the short crossing to Cap Griz Nez.”
Paxton paused. The CO smiled encouragingly at the empty air beside his left ear, so he went on.
“Well, as I said, it was dreadfully stormy when I changed course, sir, and although three of the other chaps saw what I was up to, unfortunately the fourth man didn’t. I remember a very large black cloud. We went one side of it and he went the other, and I’m afraid I never saw him again. Lieutenant Kellaway, sir… Anyway, the rest of us managed to stagger along to Dover, getting thoroughly soaked in the process, and I could see that a couple of our engines weren’t too jolly – you know, coughing and spluttering – so down we all went and landed at the ‘drome there. I mean that was the idea, sir. We all did our best but one chap’s engine simply conked out before he could reach the ‘drome and he went slap into a tree. Awfully bad luck. Chap called Wilkins.”
“Then there were three.” Milne took a pipe from his desk and began scratching his head with the stem.
“That was on Friday. Wilkins broke lots of legs and things, sir, and his BE2c was smashed-up altogether. Well, on Saturday our engines were okay and I led the chaps across the water, aiming for the depot at St. Omer via Boulogne. By then I think the wind must have changed or something, sir, because what I thought was Boulogne turned out to be Calais, only I didn’t know that at the time. So of course St. Omer wasn’t where we thought it would be, although we flew around for hours and hours looking for it. In the end we had to land any-old-where before we ran out of fuel. And that’s how we came to spend the night at a Royal Naval Air Service place called St. Rambert.”
Milne nodded, or perhaps he was now scratching his head against the stem.
“The naval types were jolly friendly, sir, and they asked us to a party. Frankly, I don’t think Ross-Kennedy was used to strong drink, sir. He was frightfully ill next morning. That was Sunday. I made him take a cold bath and drink lots of black coffee, which I must say didn’t seem to do him a lot of good, but by the afternoon I really couldn’t wait any longer. We all took off and I wanted to get to St. Omer so I could send a message here, sir, in case you were worrying. Then Ross-Kennedy started flying round and round in circles. I could see him being sick over the side of the cockpit. I made all sorts of signals to him to buck up, but I don’t think he saw me. In the end he went round and round and down and down until he tried to land his machine in a field and he overturned. Did a sort of cartwheel. Dexter and I flew on to St. Omer. We spent the rest of Sunday and all Monday morning driving around the country in a tender, but we never found the BE or Ross-Kennedy. Dexter thought it might have caught fire.”