“Flak ahead,” Navigator Smith called out. “Or … something.”
Gallsworthy came on the interphone next:
“Not flak,” he said. “Lightning.”
Before us was the largest cloud ever amassed in the air above Nazi Germany. As we passed over the German coast south of Cuxhaven, the great mass undulated. All through the cloud, branches of white fire spread and retreated like the passing of axons to synapses in the great black brain of the Reich.
Gallsworthy came over the interphone again:
“Perhaps we might consider turning back, Captain West.”
No sooner had the words escaped his mouth than Navigator Smith followed: “I’m not going out with an LMF”—lacking in moral fiber, the worst kind of discharge from the service. “You’re certain to get one, too, Captain West. How will that look for a citizen of a Nazi protectorate?”
We stayed in formation.
The bombers ahead pushed headlong into the cloud. Silence saturated our bomber. The only sound was the low, anxious rumble of nearby thunder. For once something wrought by the Lord had quieted Navigator Smith’s constant chatter. At last the sky grew angry as I was at the loss of my parents, of Françoise, of Glynnis. Like a tumid-eyed pup seeking his mother’s teat, we edged around the crevasses comprising the outer realm of that great black cur, which lit up so frequently it was difficult to know just what we were seeing.
We would fly directly into the cloud.
First came the winds. A current of cold air swept S-Sugar’s wings, rocking us until we banked right and then left. Soon we were alone amid dense cloud. No other bombers from our wing were visible.
Nothing was visible.
We pushed on, and then a flash — for a second I was blind. When I regained my sight, a deep blue glow enshrouded the cockpit. The de-icing tube on the other side of the perspex bore a halo of blue flame. Blue tendrils shot back and forth between Browning guns of the front turret Gallsworthy manned. All around the propellers to our left and right, blue auras outlined the blur of blades.
“I can see a kind of blue light between my guns,” Gallsworthy said over the interphone.
Navigator Smith said, “All over the instruments back here as well.”
Five seconds passed. The world again flashed so bright I was blind. This time when I regained my sight, the world was wholly suffused with corporeal blue. It was so cold I could not tell if I was experiencing electricity or air. Again the dark world flashed white so bright my sight was gone as if for good. A kind of mania gripped us in those moments as we looked in the eye of the lightning from a cloud in which we were sitting.
A pounding began on the fuselage. Gallsworthy came again over the interphone:
“We’re hit! We’re hit!”
Then navigator Smith: “I don’t see Jerry — does anyone see Jerry? — where’s Jerry?” No sooner had they spoken than we all saw it. The propellers were throwing off ice in chunks the size of shingles. Navigator Smith said he could see the ailerons icing over. In a matter of seconds we would freeze into a block and plummet like a bomb into the sea. I had my hand on the throttle, which pushed hard back against me. My grip slipped, then slipped again.
I took off my right glove.
I was in need of traction.
Now I pushed the column in hard. We dropped a couple hundred feet. The ailerons were icing worse. I knew if I were to try to fly higher, we’d never make it. I pulled back horizontal and desynchronized the engines. We shook like we were inside a paint mixer until I synchronized the engines again. No sound came over the interphone.
We were free of the ice. In the brief moment we seemed free I began to feel spider legs of trepidation slide over my hands. Then another flash stole my sight, then a third. When I regained sight we were bathed in blue flame so thin I could see where on my hand minute blue effluvia sank canines into skin. I could feel it all around my molars, blue maws of flame stabbing their fangs into enamel. I tried to put my hand to my lap for my glove but my muscles all tensed. They wouldn’t untense. My jaw clenched tight and a jolt stole through me and atop my head I felt a burst of hot pain.
A great blue flash.
Eyes failed.
Then: nothing.
10.
The world returned in electric blue flames. No sooner had I regained consciousness than my brain made me believe I heard the voice of my cousin Niny saying in her native Czech, “Oh, I think he might be waking,” and “Keep your eyes closed, Poxl.”
I didn’t understand what Niny was doing in the cockpit of a Lancaster over Lübeck. Some large part of me felt as if from the time I’d first entered that cockpit I had been living some other, borrowed, life. One I knew well enough, but one that wasn’t mine. Soon enough my hand came to my face to feel the soft cloth covering my eyes.
Niny said again, “It’s all right, Poxl. You’ve survived and they’ve just got you here in Grimsby at the hospital and you’re all right.”
A doctor admonished her to speak to me in English so he and his nurses could understand her, and for her to tell me by some miracle I’d survived a lightning strike on S-Sugar. My only thought then was to tell her how I’d wanted her to meet John Gallsworthy, the best chap I’d yet come to know in my squadron.
But I wasn’t able to say anything at all.
Following the moment I was struck by lightning, Rowlandson had Gallsworthy drop his bombload, turned S-Sugar around and brought her back to base. Somehow amid the orange spiraling bullets of Me110’s they encountered on their return, the men of the Lancaster S-Sugar survived yet another run, only to lose the commission of their pilot to an electrical storm.
There were losses and there were losses, and my loss was of a particular variety: the loss of my commission to many months’ more rehabilitation in hospital. I’d suffered a rupture of my tympanic membrane as blue fires surged through my body. I could just make out the words Niny spoke at my bedside. My doctors came through and observed spreading ferns of Lichtenberg figures across my left arm. These red patterns across my skin were evidence of the lightning that had entered my body, bursting veins and capillaries along its path.
Only when I’d just regained my sight was I able to witness the ferns’ remnants. The eruption at the top of my head, where the electricity had singed my scalp, burrowed its path and exited back into the cloud over Lübeck, had mostly healed by the time I’d regained my hearing and had been weaned off the morphine that got me through those initial weeks, almost exactly as it had after my bout of pleurisy. I was left with a small patch of scalp atop my head where no hair would ever grow again.
But I was alive.
It would be a month before I was able to see. In those words of Goethe’s, “Alles Nähe werde fern”: “Everything near becomes distant.” Even when my hearing returned, the physical world stayed far from me until I could again see. I lay in bed for days, relegated to a chamber in a cave. The world around me grew to the likeness of those caverns where Mrs. Wilma Goldring, who felt me a suitable partner for her daughter Glynnis, who sparked in me a lifelong love of Shakespeare, had lived out the Blitz so as not to succumb to the bombs that took her daughter. Only in my cave, there were no other humans to join in my isolation. Around the shadows and in the corners of those visions I had in the weeks I lay alone convalescing I would see faces: at times Glynnis’s or Suse’s or my cousins’ or my mother’s, but as time progressed, only one face came to me: Françoise’s.