“They’ll never let you.” Benno said.
“No, but I can do it if you help me. We might not be able to fly again for another three or four years.”
“You’ll be suspended if you fly without permission.”
“What difference does it make, if I can’t fly anymore anyway? Come on, Benno. Just once.”
Benno looked around nervously. The governors were sitting in the wooden clubhouse drinking coffee and discussing the future. The sun was behind them and it was very unlikely that anyone would be able to see, with all that light in their eyes, what was going on farther down the airstrip. When they heard the winch starting up, they might come running. But by then it would be too late.
The boys ran to the hangar and rolled out the last plane that had been brought in. It was the chairman’s plane, and it had been standing on the airstrip that morning, ready for takeoff, when the news came in about the invasion. As they lifted the slender wings and began pushing the plane out the door, Benno looked at my father over the top of the fuselage. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. My father, who didn’t even know himself what he was doing, said nothing. “I’m going to be in trouble with the whole club and your whole family. This is Hendriks’s plane, and he’s the town clerk. What’s he going to say when he sees you taking off…” The plane was now at the start of the airstrip. Benno ran to the winch to get the tow cable. My father lifted up the canopy and inspected the cockpit. When Benno came back and hooked him up to the cable, my father, who was beginning to understand what his friend had meant, said: “Why don’t you come with me, Benno? Anything is better than staying.” The other boy shook his head. “Somebody’s got to work the winch. I don’t want to run out on my family.” They both stared down at the dry grass. Then Benno turned and started running back to the winch. My father crawled into the cockpit and shut the canopy.
Even before he felt the first tug of the cable, he began to have second thoughts. Leave his family…His father was right. He was responsible for the people who worked for him. The airplane slid across the grass and righted itself. He had to stay. He was responsible, too. He had to help his father. They can save themselves…How could he have…The plane cleared the ground. Benno, who was standing in the distance next to the winch, zoomed in closer. My father felt the explosion of pleasure in his stomach that he always felt when he was airborne. He was pressed back in his seat. He adjusted the trim, the airstrip disappeared under the nose of the plane, and he began climbing.
When he was free of the cable and looked back over his right wing he saw, far down below, over his shoulder, a tiny group of people standing between the clubhouse and the winch. Suddenly his doubts vanished. The field went shooting under him as he steered a course for the dunes, which were a distant yellow strip in the green countryside. Once he was flying over the sand he would use the updraft to gain height. It was a sunny day and there would undoubtedly be a thermal to give him the lift he needed for a good point of departure.
He reached England, though just barely. He had no map, navigated by means of the sun and his watch, but at the end of the day, flying dangerously low, the coast appeared and he managed, hungry, exhausted, dying of thirst, to set the glider down just outside a village. A month later he was taken in as a boarder by a Dutch family living in London and two years after that he began his training as a fighter pilot.
It was this training that enabled him to earn a living after the war: first flying a mail plane, later in the little planes that sprayed the endless fields of grain on the new land of the Zuider Zee Polders. Later still, when the country was prosperous again, he and his fellow pilots also flew over the smaller fields of farmers on old land where they’d dive down behind one row of trees, let the mist billow behind their wings, and then shoot back up, just before the next wooded bank. Those were the days when, as my father had told me, they’d land at noon in a meadow behind a village pub, climb out of the cockpit, and go inside for a plate of ham and fried eggs.
Different people will give different periods in their lives as a clear point in time, the moment when life itself suddenly seems simple and obvious, and when things and events seem to fit together with such ease that one will later wonder how on earth life could have been so obvious, what the secret was. There probably is no secret, it’s the kind of memory, a memory that plays up more strongly than all the rest, a recollection tinged with melancholy and regret that makes one yearn for those days of freedom, the seeming wealth of possibilities, the first nudge in the back that later becomes the rhythm of life itself, grown-up life. For my father, that clear point in time was back in the days when he flew a spray plane. He never spoke about the war. He had fought in it, he had survived, he had known friendship and disappointment. For some strange reason those days, for him, were not colored by romantic notions. The few instances in which he spoke about his life as a fighter pilot, his mouth grew thin and tight and he invariably said that war was a filthy business. But in that spray plane, he felt better than ever before. He could do anything,
