In the car he again studied Angela Chipperton’s covering letter. There was no possibility of mistake: her address was printed on the notepaper in an unambiguous typeface.
He drove home, feeling irritated rather than intrigued. The attraction of the Sawyer story was the puzzle it presented: Mrs Chipperton merely added another layer of enigma that seemed designed only to waste his time.
That evening, putting aside his irritation, he re-read the Sawyer notebooks, then looked again at the material Sam Levy had at last sent to him.
4
Mr Stuart Gratton, Cliffe End, Rainow, Cheshire, UK
August 3, 1999
Dear Mr Gratton,
I hope you will quickly understand why I’ve taken such a long time to answer your letter of enquiry about Flight Lieutenant Sawyer. I apologize for that, also for not even responding with an acknowledging postcard. I can explain the delay by asking you to look through the enclosed, which I’ve been working on ever since I received your letter. You will understand where most of the time has gone, perhaps. However, I can read between the lines of your letter so I’ll assure you I’m still in pretty good health, in spite of being eighty-one next year. The wounds I received during the war, after being latent for many years, have come back to haunt me. Walking is difficult, as is getting in and out of bed, sitting down or standing up, etc., but once I’m in place somewhere I don’t feel inconvenienced. My wife Ursula died last year, so I have had to leave the house you mentioned. I’m now living in some style with my niece and her family. I have a room to myself, my library is intact, I have online access, my brain still feels sharp enough and overall I have a pleasant life. I hope to be good for a few more years yet!
Turning to the subject of your letter.
I’d already come across that remark about Sawyer by Churchill. In fact, the memorandum is part of the dossier I was compiling at the time you wrote to me, so we are clearly thinking alike. (I’ve included it in its approximate chronological place.) Yes, the Sawyer he mentions is almost certainly the Sawyer I flew with for a time. I can only say ‘almost certainly’, though, because you are correct in thinking that there’s a mystery about the man.
It was Sawyer’s strange behaviour during the war that personally involved me. At first it was a mild irritation, then it became a potential threat to the safety of the whole crew, then, after the war, it became the small mystery it still is. I don’t pretend to have solved it, but I do think that what I’ve found may help lead you to an answer. However, not everything is as clear as even that might seem to make it. Churchill had it both wrong and right, as he often did.
The first-person account attached to this letter is my own short description of how I met JL (Flight Lieutenant Jack Sawyer), what happened while we flew together in the RAF and how it ended in tragedy. The rest of the pages make up the dossier I’ve compiled: the various photocopies, internet downloads, tear-sheets, newspaper cuttings and so on, that I’ve been collecting for some time. Some of them were fairly hard to locate, but if you have access to the internet and as much spare time as me, it’s amazing what you can turn up with a little perseverance. I imagine you’re an old hand at this kind of thing, but for me it has been an interesting journey through the past. Perhaps I should warn you that my dossier raises more questions than it answers.
And I should also warn you that you’ll probably not enjoy everything you learn from the papers, but I know that as an historian you can take that sort of rub.
You use the phrase ‘intense interest’ in your letter to me. I can understand that. I too shall be intensely interested if you can fill me in on the rest of this unfinished story.
Finally let me emphasize that irrespective of whether or not you want to interview me again, you’ll always be welcome to visit me here in my tropical paradise. Don’t be put off by recent news of the fighting and terrorism on this large island. We are well aware here how our country sometimes appears from abroad. The government has got the measure of the insurgents and the problem is well in hand. The native Malagasy are largely confined to their area of the island and next year they’ll be given a measure of self-government. That should almost certainly satisfy their demands. In the meantime, life in the big cities is modern, convenient and extremely pleasant. I look forward to your coming here again and seeing for yourself. ‘Masada’ is no longer a state of mind for our people.
Sam Levy
Part Four: 1940-1941
Statement of Samuel D. Levy to Stuart Gratton, July 1999.
Subject: Flight Lieutenant J. L. Sawyer, 148 Squadron, RAF.
1
My first impression of Jack (‘JL’) Sawyer was entirely favourable. I’d been posted to 148 Squadron and along with the other people in the same position I was going through the RAF’s rather eccentric and informal method of crew selection. Everyone was sent to the drill hangar and left to sort themselves out into crews. I noticed JL soon after we walked in, partly because he was an officer - at that early stage in the war most of the men who were picked for operational flying were ‘other ranks’ like me, so JL was already unusual - but also because he was a career officer, not from the Reserve. I immediately assumed I’d be far too humble to be in his crew. He’d been chatting with a tall young warrant officer wearing the insignia of a flight engineer but then he came up to me, a friendly expression on his face.
‘You’re a navigator, aren’t you?’ he said.
He spoke with a good voice, in those days the sort of thing people like me called a BBC accent, but he gave it an amused lilt, conveying the impression that he was slightly mocking himself. He was a big chap: he had broad shoulders, a long back and strong arms, an athletic way of walking. I found out later that he had competed in the Olympics, but I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew that day was that he gave off an aura of self-confidence, suggesting a kind of inner strength. I instinctively liked him, I felt I might be safe in his aircraft.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sergeant Sam Levy, sir.’
‘We don’t use ranks when we fly together,’ JL said. ‘How did you get on with the training?’
‘All right, I think. I was only lost once.’
‘What did you do about it?’
‘We found an airfield and landed, then phoned back to the base. They gave us the right course to find our way home. It was the first time I’d guided a plane on my own and it hasn’t happened since.’
‘At least you’re honest about it! Where do you come from?’
‘I’m a Londoner,’ I said. ‘Tottenham.’
‘I was born in Gloucestershire. I’m JL Sawyer. Would you like to take a chance in my crew?’
‘Yes, I would!’ I said. ‘They said at nav school that everyone gets lost once. It’s not going to be a habit.’
He laughed at that, slapped an arm around my shoulders and took me to meet the flight engineer, Warrant Officer John Skinner, or ‘Lofty’, as we learned to call him. In the same casual way we soon found the rest of the chaps needed to form a crew:
I’d been chatting earlier with an Aussie bomb aimer called Ted Burrage, so he joined up with us - he already knew a Polish gunner called Kris Galasckja and a young bloke from Canada called Colin Anderson, a wireless operator. With the crew selection complete, the six of us trooped off to the canteen to have a cup of tea and start sizing one another up.