Friend of My Youth

paper would run some lugubrious story about the war.
    “ NOBODY WINS IN A WAR ” was the headline of one such story. Jack threw the paper on the floor.
    “Holy Christ! Do they think it’d be all the same if
Hitler
had won?”
    He was angry, too, when he saw the Peace Marchers on television, though he usually didn’t say anything, just hissed at the screen in a controlled, fed-up way. As far as Hazel could see, what he thought was that a lot of people—women, of course, but, as time went on, more and more men, too—were determined to spoil the image of the best part of his life. They were spoiling it with pious regrets and reproofs and a certain amount of out-and-out lying. None of them would admit that any of the war was fun. Even at the Legion you were supposed to put on a long face about it; you weren’t supposed to say anymore that you wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
    When they were first married, Jack and Hazel used to go to dances, or to the Legion, or just to other couples’ houses, and sooner or later the men would begin telling their stories about the war. Jack did not tell the most stories, or the longest, and his were never thick with heroics and death staring you in the face. Usually he talked about things that were funny. But he was on top then, because he had been a bomber pilot, which was one of the most admired things for a man to have been. He had flown two full tours of operations (“ops”—even the women referred to “ops”). That is, he had flown on fifty bombing raids.
    Hazel used to sit with the other young wives and listen, meek and proud and—in her case, at least—distracted by desire. These husbands came to them taut with proved courage. Hazel pitied women who had given themselves to lesser men.
    Ten or fifteen years later the same women sat with strained faces or caught one another’s eyes or even absented themselves (Hazel did, sometimes) when the stories were being told. The band of men who told these stories had shrunk, and it shrank further. But Jack was still at the center of it. He grew more descriptive, thoughtful, some might say long-winded. He recalled now the noise of the planes at the American airfield close by, the mighty sound of them warming up in the earlydawn and then taking off, three by three, flying out over the North Sea in their great formations. The Flying Fortresses. The Americans bombed by day, and their planes never flew alone. Why not?
    “They didn’t know how to navigate,” Jack said. “Well, they did, but not the way we navigated.” He was proud of an extra skill, or foolhardiness, that he would not bother to explain. He told how the R.A.F. planes lost sight of one another almost at once and flew for six or seven hours alone. Sometimes the voice that directed them, over the radio, was a German voice with a perfect English accent, providing deadly false information. He told about planes appearing out of nowhere, gliding above or beneath you, and of the death of planes in dreamlike flashes of light. It was nothing like the movies, nothing so concentrated or organized—nothing made sense. Sometimes he had thought he could hear a lot of voices, or instrumental music, weird but familiar, just beyond or inside the noises of the plane.
    Then he seemed to come back to earth—in more ways than one—and he told his stories about leaves and drunks, fights in the blackout outside pubs, practical jokes in the barracks.
    On the third night Hazel thought that she had better speak to Dudley about the trip to see Miss Dobie. The week was passing, and the idea of the visit didn’t alarm her so much, now that she’d got a little used to being here.
    “I’ll ring up in the morning,” Dudley said. He seemed glad to have been reminded. “I’ll see if it would suit her. There’s a chance of the weather’s clearing, too. Tomorrow or the next day we’ll go.”
    Antoinette was watching a television show in which couples selected each other, by a complicated ritual, for a blind date, and then came back the next week to tell how everything went. She laughed outright at disastrous confessions.
    Antoinette used to run out to meet Jack with nothing buther nightie on under her coat. Her daddy would have tanned her, Jack used to say. Tanned us both.
    “I’ll drive you out, then, to see Miss Dobie,” Antoinette said to Hazel at breakfast. “Dudley’s got too much on.”
    Hazel said, “No, no, it’s all right, if Dudley is too busy.”
    “It’s