The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (3 page)

Wednesday 9 June 1943

I regard my death in the RAF as very possible. I am aware in vague bursts that entering the RAF is a great and dangerous venture. When I think of the technical knowledge necessary before I can fly and the number of things I will have to think of and do it fills me with foreboding, but I suppose that all can be done if I work hard at my training. That is only the learning side; it is the problem of judging the exact moment for flattening out and worse still the problem of whether I can keep my nerve in a spin or when the flak is at me. I am filled with depression and then I cheer up and say, ‘Well, what if I do get killed? I shall be a hero and I won’t have to plan my life which I realise will be an almost impossible task.’ I think my new and most earnest wish is that Mike should survive the war unhurt.

Why am I fighting? In short it is because I think there is something worth fighting for. If I think that it is worth fighting for – it is presumably worth making any sacrifices possible?

I shall be terrified most of the time but the conquest of cowardice is a personal struggle and I can say that it will never be my policy to be a coward. I can’t guarantee that in a panic I shan’t give way – God preserve me from doing so – but I can’t do anything now about it except prepare myself and train myself.

Friday 14 January 1944 –SS Cameronia

I woke up occasionally but it was not until about 6.15 that I began getting up. A quarter of an hour later we stopped at Glasgow.

We moved off again at about 1430 and about half an hour later came aboard the SS
Cameronia
. I went down to our mess and attempted to settle in. We were situated on D4 Mess Deck where in an area not more than eighty feet square and not higher than six foot five, 296 of us were accommodated. There we ate, sat and wrote. At night the space above the floor and tables was crowded with the hammocks slung from bars on the ceiling. Our kit was stored on wooden racks above these bars and the crush was incredible. Many had to sleep on mattresses on the tables. The first few hours were desperate – you could not be certain what was yours and where were your possessions. However, after the evening meal it was more tolerable and I went on deck. Four enormous cranes were at work loading the ship, two powerful lights shining on each crane, illuminating the decks like the streets of London before the war.

I slung my hammock at 8.30 and slept soundly.

Friday 21 January

I didn’t get out of bed till ten to seven. I felt weak with the stink of 300 bodies in so confined a space. We have nothing but artificial light twenty-four hours
each day on our mess deck and the fresh air comes through air conditioning vents.

Tuesday 25 January

I went along to a lecture on aircraft recognition which later turned into a discussion of the colour bar, and instructions on how to behave towards negroes and half-whites. We had a few phrases of kaffir language. I went downstairs and started an argument with Stan, Ken and Johnny on the colour bar and whether the Christian church could sanctify marriage based on the love of a black woman by a white man.

Wednesday 2 February

A tanker came alongside of us and while it was filling us up the mechanics on board the tanker sold us handbags, wallets and bracelets, which they sent by rope to the ship on previous receipt of money sent down in a tin.

We are more cramped now. There are twenty-eight on a table designed for eighteen as two tables have been given over to the army and there are a number of stories about women coming on board – WRNS, WACS, ATS and so on. I must say that I hope that they are true.

The Tannoy played music by Victor Sylvester and I lay watching the moon and stars and the lights of Suez.

Wednesday 16 February

A ground staff RAF fellow died this morning in sick quarters of heat stroke. He was evidently working in the bakery where there is a constant temperature of 115 degrees. The flag is at half mast and he is being given a military burial tonight. We were also told that a sailor has gone blind from the sun.

After pay I got dinner and read, showered and talked. Then I attended the funeral of the airman. It was quite impressive though, despite the fact that it was the first funeral, I didn’t feel at all spiritually or emotionally moved. It was rather cheap and everyday in a way. In the first place I think his life could have been saved and then the funeral arrangements weren’t quite perfect and it went off rather like a parade not quite up to scratch, with all the shabbiness that that involved.

I slept on deck again.

Thursday 24 February

Johannesburg 10.50 – great mines and piles of slag. We passed on today through more of the bush country. The gradient was sometimes as steep as 1:4 and the train went on so slowly that some people jumped off it and ran beside, stopping to pick wild peaches and jumping on again. At one station some kind ladies distributed tea and grapes etc. free. At Mafeking (where I relieved myself!) there were a lot of natives though no town to speak of. Periodically we would pass through native settlements or villages and very rough they were. Mud huts made of lumps of clay hewn in brick form, with hay rather than properly thatched roofs, and very often no windows but a wide space for a door. The natives were sitting around quite lazily outside watching, although I fancy their men were railway workers, leaving only their old, infirm, children and womenfolk at home in the daytime.

Friday 25 February

In the afternoon we passed from Bechuanaland to Southern Rhodesia and by 7 o’clock we were at Bulawayo where we disentrained and were marched to Hillside Camp. There we were issued with bedding, given huts and a meal, and left. The camp had been a dairy farm and the buildings were originally cattle sheds.

Saturday 4 March

It is very amusing to hear the natives in the compound in the morning. A native comes in about 0615 and shouts in Bantu, interspersed with the emphatic imperative ‘
WAKEY, WAKEY
’. There is more shouting and laughing followed by silence when the ‘waker’ departs as sleep regains its prey. This continues until the man returns and reawakens us, which he may have to do two or three times.

Monday 10 April

Today I was very depressed indeed. I think that the boil on my face, the sore on my behind, and the blister on my toe tended – if anything – to worsen things. This depression squashes life itself and any interest in it. Anyway this evening I saw Rita Hayworth in
Strawberry Blonde
and this cheered me quite a lot.

Wednesday 26 April

We were woken this morning at 03.30 hrs but as I had gone to bed early I
didn’t feel too bad. We were issued spats, maps and compasses and we boarded the lorry just as the dawn was lifting. The lorry moved off and the flight began to sing as we drove through Bulawayo, the old sentimental soldier songs which in these surroundings were very pleasant. The sky in the east was yellow and orange and above a bank of black cloud shone Venus, the morning star. We were dropped at a gate with a course of 168 degrees and fifteen miles of rough bundu ahead. I pushed on and gradually as the heat increased and the country grew more difficult I stumbled more often, and began to swear under my breath.

We had lunch at a hotel and the lorry came back at 2.30.1 had a deadly headache and I felt pretty ghastly but some Anadin soon put that right and despite my sore feet, I went into town to see Gloria. She was there and I noticed a definite difference. She was dressed very much more attractively and when she came over to the table she was much sweeter and her earlier chilliness had completely vanished. I went to bed tired but happy with feet that hurt like the devil.

Thursday 4 May

In the evening Noel Coward came to the camp to give his one-man show. John, Les, Ken and I queued up between 6 and 6.30. The doors opened at 7.30 and from then until 8 the ‘Hillside Scamps’ played. Then the great moment arrived and Coward came on with his pianist Norman Hackforth. He was very smartly dressed in a khaki shirt and tie, light brown soled suede shoes. His programme which lasted a little over an hour long was absolutely first rate. I admire Noel Coward for being so low despite the ladies present. He used the words ‘bloody, bitch, Christ, bastard, short arm inspection, sexy’ and so on despite them.

Sunday 21 May

In the evening I went to the Services Club and Gloria was there. She was very sweet and charming to begin with – in fact extremely so. All the signs were OK and Les Boughey came over to my table and said that she had been miserable until I came in and then she had cheered up like billyo. This optimistic statement I should have taken with a pinch of salt, but anyway she did appear to be favouring me so I determined to say something tonight. Unfortunately I found that my heart was throbbing so fast and I felt so hot I was blushing a deep red.

Stubborn in my determination to get somewhere I asked her to ‘come and sit at my table and make the last evening of my leave gay’, but she turned scornfully away and said, with a sting in her voice, ‘I think I’ll get you a glass of water to recover.’ That finished me. I got up and left at once, muttering to myself and fuming with rage and almost self-pity at this sudden humiliation which had fallen so swiftly after my seeming victory.

Tuesday 6 June 1944 – Liberation Day for Europe and the World

I went up for over an hour and a half during which time I finished spins and started on my final and crucial task – finding out whether I will ever be able to land an aircraft. It was not until breakfast time that I heard the great news. The story was consistent and persistent, then during the airmanship period F/O Freeman told me the real ‘gen’. He had heard General Eisenhower’s broadcast announcement to the world of an Allied invasion of the French coast and containing the gist of issued orders to the underground movement The strain of having old Mike in the front at a time like this must be very great for Ma, for the burden is probably more heavy on those near and dear to the fighting men who are left behind than on the men themselves. I am still depressed.

Thursday 8 June

The WingCo’s inspection was strict and searching. We were all in best blue and the sun came down blazingly on the ranks. One man halfway down our rank suddenly fell forward limp on to his face with a soft thud; he was carried off.

The WingCo began by saying that he was sure that we all agreed that the occasion of the King’s birthday was significant at this time and that our minds were probably not only turned to the King personally or to all that the Crown stood for but also to the men engaged in the second front. I for one certainly failed to see why the King’s birthday mattered at such a time since everyone was solely preoccupied with the European onslaught.

Then swinging to the right after an order to remove headgear and give three cheers for the King which was certainly not rousing, the WingCo walked over to the native Rhodesian Air Askari Corps and addressed them through an interpreter in this manner. ‘Everything here, the land, the hangars, the aircraft are all the King’s and it is all your duty to guard them. Do your duty well.’ I felt sick at the failure to thank them or refer to Matabeleland as their country, used by us. It was a dictatorial speech that Goering might make to the conscripts of an occupied country about Hitler.

Wednesday 14 June

At six this morning Crownshaw told me to get into 322 straightaway, a PT-26A Cornell trainer. I apologised to him for boobing the check yesterday and he remarked that they were really only nominal things and that they didn’t really matter. However we took off, did a circuit or maybe two, and then as we taxied up to the take-off point, he said to me: ‘Well, how do you feel about your landings?’ I replied: ‘Well, that’s really for you to say, sir.’ He chuckled. ‘I think you can manage one solo,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get out now and I’ll wait here for you,’ he went on.