‘Global-Photo-Watch. It’s an American magazine.’
I was in the adjutant’s office of RAF Cawston in Norfolk. A flight sergeant was checking the appointment diary and collating the entry with my identity papers and letters of introduction. All seemed well.
‘I’ll drive you out there, Miss,’ he said. ‘Can I give you a hand with the cameras?’
‘No, no. I’m fine thanks.’
We stepped outside and he showed me into an olive-green staff car and we sped off through the base, past low hangars, with grass growing on their roofs, and anti-aircraft gun emplacements dotted here and there, towards distant aeroplanes parked by a long thin runway.
‘Thought you’d be more interested in the Yanks next door,’ the flight sergeant said.
‘I’m going there tomorrow.’
‘You’ll eat well, that’s for sure. Oh, yes sirree.’ He went on in the same envious culinary vein comparing what was available in the sergeants’ mess in RAF Cawston with the gourmet feast of ‘amazing grub’ served up at USAF Gressenhall. ‘It’s a different world, Miss, I tell you.’
I let him chat on, not telling him of my familiarity with American ‘grub’, preoccupied with the prospect of seeing Xan after all this time. I felt I’d missed a whole chapter of his life. Two chapters. The diffident schoolboy and guinea-pig breeder I knew best had gone to Oxford, published a book of poetry and was now a fighter pilot. How did these drastic changes happen in life? Then a moment’s thought told me that it happens all the time. Time is a racehorse, eating up the furlongs as it gallops towards the finish line. Look away for a moment, be preoccupied for a moment, and then imagine what has passed you by.
We pulled up at a parked Typhoon fighter plane, surrounded by a thick six-foot semicircular glacis of sandbags. The Typhoon was big and bulky for a single-seater aircraft, canted steeply back on its solid-looking undercarriage, and it had a gaping intake — like a mouth — under the three-bladed propeller. Xan stood beside it, one hand in a pocket, watching us arrive, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing his sheepskin jacket and his flying suit, as requested. He seemed taller and thinner since the last time we’d seen each other at Beckburrow. We embraced. I stepped back and looked him up and down.
‘Well, well, Marjorie — who would’ve thought.’
He laughed and just for a second I saw the little boy in him again.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, wagging his finger at me. ‘When I saw the request, “Miss A. Clay of Global-Photo-something-or-other” wanting to take my photograph, I did smell a rat.’
‘I just wanted to see you,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to take pictures of all these American airmen and their bombers tomorrow so I thought I’d sneak in a visit to my little brother.’
I made him stand by his Typhoon, leaning on the wing by his open cockpit, as if he were about to climb into it and take off on a mission, and pretended to take photos of him — there was no film in my camera — for the benefit of the flight sergeant from the adjutant’s office who was standing looking on, approvingly.
I wandered round the aeroplane. A big solid machine — like a tank with wings, it had remarkable heft, not like the other fighters, the Spitfires or the Hurricanes. This was a beast.
‘What kind of plane is this?’ I asked.
‘A Typhoon.’
‘I know that, silly. What kind of Typhoon?’
‘A Hawker Typhoon Mark Ib. It can fire rockets.’
‘Why is it painted with these black and white stripes?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell.’
‘Something to do with the invasion?’
‘Shall we go to the mess? I’ve got a present for you.’
We were driven to the officers’ mess, an old rectory outside the base perimeter. The drawing room looked on to a wild garden with an unmown tennis court. Outside I could hear a cuckoo calling in the woods beyond the pink-brick boundary wall.
Xan brought me a gin and orange and he had a half-pint of beer. We lit our cigarettes and talked dutifully about the family: Father’s health (good, stable), Mother, Dido’s fame, cousins, aunts and uncles. Then he handed me a slim book in a brown paper bag.
I took the book out and stared at it in some wonder. A purple cover with dull gold lettering. Vertical Poems by Xan Clay, V. L. Lindon and Herbert Percy. I felt tears of absurd pride brim at my eyelids. I hastily flipped through a few pages to distract myself from my emotion. I understood the title immediately — all the poems were thin like ladders, one or two words per line.
‘Why like this, vertically?’
‘Read the afterword — not now, obviously, but when you have a moment.’ He smiled, leaning back, searching for an ashtray. ‘It’s a little poetic movement we’ve started — me and two friends from Oxford — trying to do something different with poetry, out of the ordinary, shake things up a bit, if we can. Maybe you could write about us in your Global-Photo-Thingamajig.’
‘You have to sign it for me.’
‘Oh, but I have.’
I looked at the title page: ‘For Amory with love from Marjorie Clay.’
I blew my nose, had a small coughing fit, all to cover up the tears that had now begun to flow.
‘You’re meant to be happy, not tearful,’ Xan said.
‘These are tears of happiness, Marjorie,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea how proud I am of you.’
I grabbed his head with both hands, pulled him towards me and covered him with kisses. He had to beat me off.
Half an hour later he had the mess steward telephone for a taxi to take me to my hotel in Fakenham. As we stood waiting under the rectory’s porch he introduced me to his fellow pilots, fellow officers, as they came and went. They all looked as if they were playing truant from school. This was the curious effect my siblings had on me. I felt like Xan’s great-aunt — decades older than him — while Dido made me feel like a child.
He kissed me on the cheek and opened the door of the taxi for me.
‘It’s absolutely appalling,’ he said. ‘I haven’t asked you a single question about yourself. It’s all been me, me, me.’
‘That’s precisely why I came to see you,’ I said. ‘Now I’m completely au courant.’
‘Are you happy, Amory? You seem happy.’
‘Happy to see you, darling,’ I said, ducking the question.
We drove off down the lane to Fakenham and I looked back through the rear window and saw him wave at me. Then someone asked him for a light and he turned, fishing in his pocket for his lighter.
I wiped away residual tears. Why was he making me so lachrymose? The transformation in him, I suspected — while I wasn’t looking he had become someone entirely different. A competent Xan, a young man who could take his strapping plane, armed with its rockets, power it into the air and go into battle. It shook you up, that kind of realisation.
‘So, Miss,’ the taxi driver said, over his shoulder, ‘what’s your bet for the invasion? July or August?’
The Vertical Poets, Oxford, 1942. Left to right, Herbert Percy, V. L. Lindon and Xan Clay.
‘Premonitions’ by Xan Clay
Stars
foretell
the fall
of
czars.
Strummed
guitars
lead to
hidden
bars.
Huzzahs
greet
news
of life
on
Mars.
Time
stands
still
in
Shangri-las.
2. HIGH HOLBORN