We heard later that while the aeroplane had been standing on the field at Eastleigh a large bumble bee had flown in through the cockpit window to escape the heat and had remained dozing behind the instrument panel until we had passed the Isle of Wight, whereupon it had flown out in alarm—perhaps realising belatedly that it was bound for a new life in the Channel Islands—and stung the pilot on the bridge of his nose. He was one of those people who have an allergy to bee stings, and within a few minutes the poor man had become woozy while his face had swollen up to a degree where he could barely see out of his eyes. In the end though, assisted by our flying carborundum-wheel man, he recovered sufficiently for us to make a safe if bumpy landing at St Helier, where fire engines and ambulances were standing by to receive us. As we descended the steps—myself following Edith, who was being carried out unconscious on a stretcher—the air hostess stood at the foot of the steps, a model of well-groomed composure once more. As the passengers filed past she bade them a smiling farewell, making the expected apology for “the unfortunate incident” and hoping that they had otherwise had a pleasant flight. And the passengers for their part—who not twenty minutes before had expected to be entering the Eternal Kingdom—assured her as the English will that yes, it had been a pleasant flight and that it was no bother to them at all to have narrowly missed nose-diving into the sea. My turn came, last in the queue. But for me there were no comforting words: only a suddenly frozen smile and the reproachful stare reserved for someone who cannot really be expected to behave well, but who has still contrived to act in a base and cowardly manner—letting the side down even though he could never have aspired to belong to the side.
“I’m afraid,” she said, “that your behaviour back there was simply disgraceful—there are no other words for it—and you must never, never, do you hear me? never do that sort of thing again. If you can’t restrain yourself from upsetting the other passengers with your silly jakes then you really shouldn’t fly at all. I’m afraid that in this country we just don’t behave like that.”
I have often had cause to wonder, both then and since, at that effortless tone of authority which seems to come so naturally to the English upper-middle-class female, whether the genuine article or (as I suspect in this case) one promoted from the ranks. I spent over half my life as a career officer at sea, on land and in the air; leading men under fire aboard ships, in the control rooms of submarines and on a dozen battlefields from the hills of north China to the Paraguayan chaco. Yet I could never hope to equal the faultless self-confidence of that young woman’s voice: as if only a moral degenerate or a person utterly devoid of decency could possibly fail to do as they were told. I suppose it was the result of three centuries of being able to lay down the law to the natives wherever the guns of the Royal Navy could reach. What a pity, I think now, that she should have been born into an age when the natives were fast acquiring bigger and better guns of their own.
When we arrived at my sister-in-law’s house we discovered that Edith’s mother had already been dead several hours, so we might just as well not have bothered. Not surprisingly, Edith insisted on returning by sea, saying that she would far rather remain on Jersey for the rest of her life, sleeping under hedges if necessary, than ever fly again.
A silly incident really, and I must apologise for having rambled on so and bored you with it. But I was reminded of it by that silly film on television. And it made me cast my mind back even further to events forty years earlier stilclass="underline" to my brief but hectic career in the summer and autumn of 1916 as a flier for the Noble House of Austria: not quite four months with the Austro-Hungarian Army Flying Service, followed by a period of nine weeks with the Imperial and Royal Navy’s air arm. After Sister Assumpta had helped me up to my room that evening (I can still manage the stairs on my own but they prefer someone to be with me), I took out my old photograph album and began leafing through the pages.
The Sisters brought me down here in May, after I had suffered so badly from bronchial asthma in Ealing the previous summer. It was to have been only a short seaside holiday, but they have shown no disposition to move me back and anyway, a lengthy military career has taught me that nothing lasts quite so long as a temporary posting. No, I suppose that I might as well die here as there, almost on the shore of the great ocean which is now the only fatherland to which I feel any attachment whatever. And anyway, we have to be practical about these things. I understand that the Sisters have a cheaper-by-the-dozen concession with the Swansea and West Glamorgan Co-op and receive no less than ten books of stamps for each funeral, which makes no small contribution to the Order of the Perpetual Veneration’s finances over the course of a year. They are not allowed to do it back in Ealing because the Order’s chaplain, a ferocious old bigot called Father Czogala, holds the Co-operative retail movement to be a part of the worldwide Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy. But down here they are far enough away from his rantings to have some discretion about their trading arrangements. I have enquired of Mother Superior whether she could get the Co-op to bury me at sea—no nonsense about a coffin; just a seaman-like shroud of canvas and a couple of bricks tied to my feet—but she is dead set against the notion, I fear. Being a landlocked people the Poles like to have a grave to mourn beside (though no one at all is left to mourn beside mine), and anyway, she tells me that the local Co-op are reluctant to do sea burials after a distressing incident a few months ago, when hake fishermen trawled up a coffin off Tenby. So I suppose that I shall just have to be content with being devoured by worms like the rest.
But there, I am wandering again. Yes, what about the photograph album? Well, the photograph album covers the years 1915 to 1918, kept with the Imperial and Royal War Ministry’s permission as the basis for a post-war book about the career of an Austro-Hungarian submarine. It was restored to me back in May by a quite extraordinary stroke of luck after it had turned up among the possessions of a dead Ukrainian emigre in a west London bed-sitter. Most of the surviving photographs detail my career as a k.u.k. U-Boat captain: Linienschiffsleutnant Ottokar, Ritter von Prohaska, submarine ace of the Mediterranean theatre and holder of Old Austria’s highest military honour the Knight’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa. It was these faded pictures that provided the background for my reminiscences when Kevin and Sister Elabieta prevailed upon me to tape-record them some weeks ago. But one photograph—and one only— remains from those months in late 1916 when I was taking an enforced break from submarining and instead doing my best to get myself killed in the air. I gazed at it that evening by the light of the bedside lamp.
Faded and sepia-grey with the passage of seventy years, it shows a group of men standing in front of an aeroplane on a sunlit, stone-littered field fringed by a few wooden huts and canvas hangars. By the foliage on the trees in the background, it looks like early September or thereabouts, and in the distance one can see a low range of eroded, bare mountains. The two men are wearing leather flying overalls with helmets and goggles, and are accompanied by four mechanics in the baggy grey uniforms and high- fronted peaked caps of Austrian soldiers. The taller of the two airmen is clearly me as I was then: erect, confident, with binoculars slung around my neck and a map case under my arm, every centimetre the Habsburg career officer. The creature standing beside me however is barely recognisable as a human being at alclass="underline" at least a head and a half shorter, hunch-shouldered, bandy-legged, with a prognathous beetle-browed face scowling out from under the brim of his flying helmet like something from a zoo cage or a fairground side-show. This is—or was—my personal chauffeur, Feldpilot- Zugsfuhrer Zoltan Toth—or Toth Zoltan as he would have styled himself back in his native Hungary.