Officer of the Court

Icarus "Bloody asinine," declared Flight Lieutenant Lucian "Paddy" Donlay. "Eh? What's that? Blathering to yerself? First sign yer round the bend, mate, blathering to yerself." The diagnosis, delivered in a curt, unsympathetic Scots burr, was courtesy of Flight Lieutenant Alec "Taffy" Macnee. Paddy Donlay peeped out the gap in the upturned collar of his fleece-lined Irvine flight jacket. "I said," and it emerged in his wry Dubliner's brogue, "bloody asinine!" Unsaid was whether he meant asinine Taffy Macnee, or the asinine venture upon which Macnee had currently propelled them. The pair were shivering in a canvas-topped jeep that Macnee was wrestling through the ruts of the frozen mud track that curled out of the Bay of Firth and along the shoreline of Orkney Mainland. Burrowed inside leather and fleece, Donlay could still hear what passed in Macnee for a laugh: a brief, gruff barking. "Har! What's bloody asinine was me thinking some soft Irish lass " and here Macnee pinched Donlay's wind-reddened cheek " had the stomach for exploration. The guts, if you will. Ya see, this is an expedition! An adventure! And all history knows there's no great explorers wi' an Irish name on 'em, Christian or otherwise. Remember; it was a gentleman carried the name Scott who trekked to the South Pole." "Scott was an Englishman," Donlay told him. "Aye, but his name was Scott!" shot back Taffy. "Must be a clansman's blood in 'im somewhere." "Yer right, there was no Irishman nonsensical enough to freeze his arse off with yer Mr. Scott," retorted Paddy. "'Cause even some Sligo sot on his worst night'd have enough sense to find his way home. Unlike yer Mr. Scott." At first glance, they seemed an odd coupling: Taffy Macnee, the scion of an Uplands Scots laird who could trace the family title back fourteen generations, and Paddy Donlay, whose sole knowledge of his lineage was that his Da and his Da's Da both died coughing up coal dust before they turned fifty. Yet in August of 1940 they were serving side by side in a Hurricane squadron flying out of Manston, the Kingdom's most forward spear point during the Battle of Britain. The skies over that part of Kent grew so heavily combated by the two vying air armies that the Luftwaffe would come to call it "Hell's Corner." Macnee had come to the war out of patriotic fervor, Donlay for nothing more noble than an appetite for a good punch-up. It took only a short time for their respective views to deteriorate to something more primal: they fought simply to stay alive. After ten weeks of flying against the German bombers and fighters of Luftflotte 2, not only were both the only survivors of their squadron's original twelve-man roster: they were fair on their way to being the sole survivors of the squadron's second generation. They had begun as strangers; they ended the Blitz as brothers. They had fought together and survived together; short of a blood tie, nothing brings two men closer. And, having shared the strain of vaulting into the sky six or seven times a day against an enemy regularly outnumbering them several to one, living on coffee and Benzedrine in lieu of rest, they also crumbled together. Macnee snapped suddenly one October day, so battle-fatigued he tried to land his Hurricane without remembering to lower his landing gear. As his riggers attempted to pry him from the wreckage, he apologized for crashing the aeroplane, then fell into uncMesce, Bill, Jr. is the author of 'Officer of the Court' with ISBN 9780553581980 and ISBN 0553581988.