'The Pilot Who Kept a Diary'
A young fighter pilot's private record of a single summer of air fighting — written each night, never intended to be read.
The diary that forms the subject of this week's feature was found after the war in a kitbag, written in pencil in a schoolboy's exercise book. Its author flew fighters through one long summer of the war, and set down each night, in a few unguarded lines, what the day had actually been like.
"Scrambled twice before lunch," runs one entry. "Saw nothing the first time. The second time saw far too much. B. did not come back. His mother writes to him on Tuesdays and I do not know what happens to the letters now."
It is the smallness of the detail that gives the diary its force — the eggs at breakfast, the deckchairs at dispersal, the mounting arithmetic of faces missing from the mess. There is almost no hatred in it, and no rhetoric at all; only tiredness, and a kind of astonishment that the summer weather could stay so beautiful.
The final entry is three words long, and the reader turns the page to find the rest of the book blank. It is one of the most quietly devastating documents of the air war we have encountered.