Warmer Than He Thought

A blast of cold winter air howled its way between the grey aircraft hangars as Wing Commander Ian Mackey left the Station Commander’s office and headed for the warmth of the squadron crew room. The interview had been brief and to the point. Ian’s birthday was just three weeks away and his application to stay on in Her Majesty’s Royal Air Force had finally been turned down. No more flying. Not even a cosy desk job. His worst fears had just been confirmed: after a lifetime in uniform, it was retirement time.

Ian pulled his cap down onto his forehead and hunched his shoulders against the bitter wind. He was passionate about flying but, on a day like this, he really wished that it could happen in warmer climates. A long history of wars with European neighbours had left the RAF with a string of airfields up and down the east coast and mostly in good old, flat Lincolnshire. As he struggled against the noise of the wind, Ian could hear himself trotting out the hackneyed line at morning briefings.

“No more high ground between us and Russia. It’s no wonder that the wind blows all day, every day, across this green and pleasant land.”

He thought about how often his world had been punctuated by the temperature metaphor: heated discussions, icy looks, hot passion, cold war. For him, today had just become very cold.

A flurry of snow wrapped itself around his ankles as he walked across the tarmac and he sank his gloved hands deeper into his greatcoat pockets.

“Not the done thing, having one’s hands in one’s pockets, but then I am about to become surplus to requirements. Do I care any more?”

Nothing moved on the airfield which lay silently beneath a white coat of newly fallen snow. On another day it would have been stunningly beautiful, pristine clean and shiny bright under the cold, watery winter sunshine. Today, all that Ian saw was a blank canvas on which to write the rest of his life. He looked up at the grey sky above him and he knew, because he was a flyer, that he was looking at a thin layer of cloud, dirty grey on the bottom and brilliant white on the top. The only true joy on a day like this was to get above the clouds into the crystal clear air and escape this miserable, damp, bone-numbing chill of an English winter’s day.

Ian saw dull, yellow lights beckoning through the frosted windows of the crew room ahead of him and it seemed as though he could already smell the coffee. He knew that when he pushed open the door, some young Pilot Officer would jump up and offer to make coffee.

“No sugar, Sir?” the young sprog would ask. They always did. They all knew where he had been, and why. They would all want to know the answer, but no one would ask him directly. They would pretend to talk about the weather, football, the new gyro system, anything but:
“Well, boss, do you stay, or do you go?

The subject had been crew room gossip for weeks. It was only natural that they were all curious. Wing Commander Ian Mackey DFC, had been their Squadron Commander for two years and these men were more than just his friends. He wondered how best to tell them. He was not ready to tell them just yet.

Flying had been his life, his whole life. He was not ready to end it all yet. As he walked the remaining few metres towards the crew room he recalled his first trip in an Anson where the wind blew into the fuselage through gaping holes in its flimsy panels. He thought about his early training days, getting lost over the North Sea on his first navigation exercise, his first solo landing that nearly wrote off the undercarriage. He took one hand from his pocket to brush the place beneath his greatcoat where the ribbon of his Distinguished Flying Cross was sewn onto the breast of his uniform jacket. He did not often talk about the incident. To him, getting his crew and his damaged aircraft back safely after being shot up by rebel hordes was just part of the job. He had not been the least bit scared: at the time it was just a great big adventure. His life had been a series of exciting adventures. These things did not happen in Civvy Street. Again, he wondered how best to break the news when he had not even hoisted the idea of retirement on board himself.

The Squadron had been Ian’s family for the last two years. Ian had never married, there was never time in his life for domestic matters. He had always lived in the Officer’s Mess, cosseted by the Mess Staff, untroubled by domestic things. There had been girlfriends over the years but no one who could compete with flying. The Squadron was his wife and the crews were his children; there was no one else. This sudden separation would be like a divorce. Worse still, he was the one being rejected. His family no longer wanted him. He was the one getting the push. It was a concept that Ian’s mind refused to grasp.

He turned away to walk around the hangar in the snow rather than face them now. He was wearing his regulation uniform and his polished black leather-soled shoes felt damp already. His feet were beginning to feel numb, but they were competing with deeper thoughts now. Ian pushed the chill out of his mind; he had been colder than this before.

He once spent a February night in an inflatable dinghy on the inky black waters of Llyn Brenig, a grim, forbidding lake in North Wales. It was part of a survival exercise which should have just been a couple of hours but had all gone wrong when the engine packed up on the controller’s dinghy. God, that was cold!

Once, he had been flying across the Atlantic when the heating system failed in his aircraft at 30,000 feet and it took a full hour to get it sorted out. God, that was cold too! He remembered not being sure that his feet were still on the rudder pedals; there was no feeling from his knees downwards.

He tried to summon up happier memories. He remembered skiing in Canada. The temperature was close to fifty below zero, but the air was bone dry and skiing among the pine trees was huge fun. Skating had been fun too. As a young Flying Officer he had learned to skate on a backwoods lake in Canada. During the winter months, the north of Canada is in permafrost and the ice was a great place to get away from the high tech world of aeroplanes. There was never much time-off in those days but what there was, he chose to spend skating.

His mind filled with wonderful images of playing schoolboy hockey with his crew, using broken pine branches and round flat stones to smack across the ice. It was nonsense, but it was fun. He remembered the exciting, crunching, whooshing sounds as his blades cut though the surface of the ice. His life had always been filled with periods of intense action, always with that added touch of danger to drive up his adrenaline level. In a little over three weeks that would all come to an end. What would he do then?

Ian turned the corner at the back of the hangar and the icy wind hit him in the face again. He pulled his cap down tighter on his head. The snow was getting heavier and the sensible thing would have been to get inside, but Ian was not feeling sensible and he was certainly not ready to face the crew room yet. Instead, on a whim, he headed back to his room in the Officer’s Mess. This was not his usual way to deal with a crisis, he knew that this was totally the wrong thing to do, but he seemed to have no option. A voice in his head called out to him;

“Your Squadron are waiting for you, your fellow Officers, your friends . . . soon to become your past life.”

Ian’s mind responded: “I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

In the comparative warmth of his room, Ian searched the dusty depths of his wardrobe for his skating boots. He had not worn them for years but they still fitted. One of the guards was missing from the blades, but that didn’t matter now. He dropped them into a sports bag and headed for the car park and the highly tuned vintage MG that was the envy of many of the younger officers. He knew of a small lake in the woods not fifteen minutes from the airfield.

“If it’s frozen, I will skate again. I know that I can still do it. I am not a spent force. I am not ready to retire yet.”

“So, I am absent without leave for a while. So what? My boss has just told me he does not need me any more. This one’s for me.”

Ian knew that the end of his flying career was always on the cards. Why did it suddenly seem so drastic, so final? Somehow, he had not expected to be asked to leave altogether. Why did he feel so empty, so cold inside?

The lake was frozen, its edges covered in crisp fresh snow, undisturbed by man or beast. Ian brushed the snow from a tree stump and sat on it while he swapped his sodden uniform shoes for the skating boots. The dusty old leather was cracked and unyielding but drier than his shoes. He struggled with the laces and settled for a half knot, it didn’t matter now; he desperately needed to get out onto the ice.

He was still wearing his uniform, not ideal, but the greatcoat was warm enough and he pulled the collar up around his ears. He toyed with the idea of doing up that silly little button that holds the collar up but it was too difficult for his numb fingers; too much trouble. Ian needed to skate.

There was a light dusting of snow on the ice and he brushed some of it away with a fallen branch. The ice looked good. It looked like the ice in Canada. In the Canadian permafrost, the ice could be as much as a foot thick or more. Ian knew that the ice was nowhere near that thick here in Lincolnshire. On another day he might just have considered if it were safe but now he did not care.

With a sudden, characteristic burst of energy Ian launched himself out onto the ice towards the middle of the lake where the wind had blown the snow away. The clean, newly swept ice out there in the middle looked good, beckoning him towards it. Ian hooked the toe of a skate and stumbled once, twice, then his old skills came back and he began to pick up speed. There was no one to play hockey with but he played anyway with an invisible crew. Short sprints, snap turns and quick toe-lock stops. Ian carved up the ice like an old pro, why had he not done this before?

Too old to fly, but not too old to skate up a storm. Ian began to feel good again. Confidence flooded back into his skates as he turned and raced across the ice. He began to feel the indefinable exhilaration that comes from maximum speed with minimum effort, the exercise pumping warmth back into his chilled blood. Maybe there was life after flying. Skates slicing their way through the ice turned a cold winter’s morning into a scene of pure delight. Ian turned again and headed straight down the length of the ice, his arms outstretched like a child, Ian was flying.

The sound of the ice breaking under his blades was like a rifle shot, echoing in the heavy cold air. The bank was several metres away and the nearest road even further away. The world around him had been eerily silent, until now.

Now, was an inferno of noises: ice snapping, water rushing, but most of all the terrifying sound of his own blood coursing through his veins and pounding on the inner membranes of his eardrums. In an instant he was beneath the ice and looking up through the murky water, with distorted vision, at a dirty grey sky above. Suddenly, crazily, he knew that this would be the last time that he would see the sky. Ian loved the sky, it’s where he lived.

It was warmer than he thought it would be. In the back of his mind, school-boy physics told him that the water must be less cold than ice, but that was no comfort now.

He knew that he should be panicking or crying out, but his body would not let him spare the last breath of air in his lungs. His arms flailed about trying to reach something, anything that would lever him back to the surface, but there was nothing but the cold, cold water. His greatcoat was waterlogged and heavy, dragging him downwards. Perhaps it didn’t matter any more? It was warmer than he thought. He began to feel comfortable, to realise that he would not have to face the crew room after all.

Ian looked up again at the grey sheet of ice above him and his mind filled in the blurred picture with long-forgotten detail. Suddenly, he was a young Flying Officer again, in the familiar cockpit of a Vulcan bomber, flying at three thousand feet over a snow-covered Lincolnshire countryside. In less than thirty seconds, these tons of heaving metal would cross the coast line out over the North Sea. He was waiting for the distant, tinny voice of the local controller in his headset: Golf Alpha Bravo Echo Lima, You are cleared to climb to 25,000 feet.

He would pull back hard on the stick with his left hand, while pushing forward with his right on the four black levers in a single, well-practiced movement that would transform the huge Rolls Royce engines into growling monsters, thrusting him skywards, away from this dull and frozen landscape. His eyes searched the ice, left and right, for any conflicting traffic in that final moment before the transition. He settled his body firmly into the familiar worn leather seat, waiting for the G-forces to press down on his rib cage when the power surge hit him. The action would have to be exactly right, there would only be one chance to pull and push in a single synchronised movement before the pain came. He could feel it starting in his chest now. From the corner of his eye he saw the coastline pass under his wingtip. The nose came up and, in a split second, the refuelling probe in front of the radar cone punctured the dirty grey cloud layer and he was in the sun again.

Wing Commander Ian Hamilton Mackey DFC was flying one last time.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 09.07.2010

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