Moral Fibre

After several minutes of silence and immobility, Adrian stirred. He ran his hands threw his long, blond hair and then dropped them again. With his elbows still propped on his knees, he turned to look at Kit with large, miserable eyes. “You don’t understand what this will do to me. Your parents are in Africa, but I’ll have to face mine immediately. They’ve always considered me weak, even effeminate, because I like to draw and paint. My mother, because of her American background, always worried that I’d turn into a pansy. My father just thinks I’m not up to the mark at anything, that I fall short at everything I do. If — if I’m posted LMF, I’ll never be able to face either of them again.”

Kit could hear Colonel Selkirk shouting “lily-livered” and “yellow” at him.

“They’ll throw me out of the house, Kit. Disinherit me altogether.”

Damn it! From what he’d seen of Adrian’s parents, he could all too readily imagine the barrister’s indignation and his complete disdain for his own son.

“And it’s not just my parents who will disown me. All my friends from school will too,” Adrian continued. “The entire old boys’ network will turn on me. I’ll be ostracised and persona non grata everywhere! I’ll never be admitted to any club, never invited to another wedding, never be able to get a proper job.”

“I can’t believe that —”

“Then you don’t know England!” Adrian snapped angrily. “Old school ties and reputation are everything!” He continued in a tone of hopelessness, “When word gets out that I’m LMF, I’ll be professionally and socially ruined. No decent girl will ever have anything to do with me.” Adrian again dropped his head in his hands and shook it from side to side. “I’ll be ruined.”

Kit didn’t know what to do or say. He thought back to the other men he’d encountered at the DYDN centre. Most of them had been far more terrified of operations than of being labelled LMF. Several of them had been visibly and vocally relieved to be away from it all. Others had agonised more, but with the emphasis on “bad as this is, flying is worse.” Then he realised all the men he had encountered at the DYDN centre had initiated the process, as had he, by refusing to fly. They hadn’t been posted LMF against their will, as he was threatening to do to Adrian.

“Adrian, I don’t want to ruin your life. You must know that. But we all depend on one another up there. If you break down at a critical moment, you’ll have six lives on your conscience. Do you want that?”

“Of course not!” He sat up sharply and confronted Kit. “I’m fully aware of my responsibility to all of you, but I recover rapidly, Kit — at least when I’m flying with you. Yesterday, I was only frozen for ten— maybe fifteen — minutes. After I snap out of it, I can do the navigation. How many aircraft get home with wounded or dead navigators on board? Why does a short black-out have to be treated like a capital offense?” Adrian pleaded his case.

Kit thought he’d been frozen closer to twenty minutes, but that wasn’t the point. He tried to explain, “Because countless aircraft and crews have been lost because a navigator— for whatever reason — failed to provide the correct course at a critical moment. Do you want us to risk that every time we go up? Aren’t the hazards bad enough as it is?”

“But I don’t always freeze, Kit!” Adrian pointed out emphatically. “I didn’t freeze on any of the pathfinder ops or on the Dortmund-Ems raid either. It only happens on daylight raids.”

That was true, Kit registered, and it explained why Adrian had performed well on five of the seven sorties he’d flown but cracked on the other two. Yet it didn’t help Kit out of his dilemma. “I can’t go to the CO and tell him we’re only available for night ops, Adrian. That’s not the way the RAF works.”

“I know,” Adrian answered deflated. He sat hunched over, staring at the cracks in the concrete floor.

Kit asked himself what Don would have done and was startled to realise that Don would have sympathised with Adrian. Don’s father, too, would have made his son’s life hell if he ‘funked,’. Don, too, understood the pressures of public schools and their networks in England. Yet none of that altered the fact that a skipper bore the responsibility for the lives of the entire crew.

Kit knew that some of the other skippers consciously avoided befriending their crews to prevent themselves from being swayed by sentiment when they had to make hard choices. One of the veterans of some sixty ops had told him outright, “You may have to sacrifice a crewman’s life to the target, pressing ahead even while a man bleeds to death. It’s easier to do that if you don’t care too much about anyone.”

By the time he heard these words of wisdom — if that was what they were — it had been too late. Kit had already worked hard to make his crew a surrogate family for all of them. He did not believe he could sacrifice one of his men to the target. There had to be another way.

Adrian looked up at him, his hair falling in his eyes, and his lips starting to tremble. “Please, Kit. Don’t do this to me. Let me stay on your crew. I can beat this. We can beat it together. We’re a team. Never in my whole life have I felt so strongly that I belong somewhere the way I feel I belong with Zebra and her crew. And, up to now, you’ve been the best friend I’ve ever had. Please don’t discard me, Kit. Please.”

Kit drew a deep breath, hesitated momentarily, and then nodded. His crew was a unit. It couldn’t be broken up and remain strong. If Adrian was weak, then he as skipper— and the others — were simply going to have to take up more of the burden. They would all be weaker, not stronger, if he tossed Adrian aside. “You’re right, Adrian. You’re one of us. We’ll see this through together.” He held out his hand to help Adrian to his feet.