A walk in the woods, 1943
I’ve pieced together fragments of a story about a walk that might – or might not – have happened one dark November night.
I don’t know for sure that my grandpa once wandered, dazed and disoriented, through a woodland near Düsseldorf, but I do know how he got there.
“So this is what death is like,” his crewmate heard him say on the intercom. They were trapped in a burning Halifax bomber – shot by a German nightfighter – and spiralling uncontrollably towards the ground. My grandpa passed out. The next thing he knew, he was outside the plane, floating through the air.
“I tried to pull the rip cord. It wasn’t there.”
“I do not know whether I was sucked out or blown out,” he wrote many years later to a relative of a crew member researching his family history. “I came to falling through the air.” The letter ends abruptly here, but we have another source.
“I tried to pull the rip cord. It wasn’t there.” The voice on the tape is steady. We found the cassette among my grandpa’s papers after he died. It was the first time we’d heard him speak about what happened that night. He explained how, as he grasped in vain for the rip cord, he remembered his training.