The Flying Shadow Read online

  The Flying Shadow

  Other Handheld Classics

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  D K Broster, From the Abyss. Weird Fiction, 1907–1940

  John Buchan, The Runagates Club (1928)

  John Buchan, The Gap in the Curtain (1932)

  Melissa Edmundson (ed.), Women’s Weird. Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940

  Melissa Edmundson (ed.), Women’s Weird 2. More Strange Stories by Women, 1891–1937

  Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me The Waltz (1932)

  Marjorie Grant, Latchkey Ladies (1921)

  Inez Holden, Blitz Writing. Night Shift & It Was Different At The Time (1941 & 1943)

  Inez Holden, There’s No Story There. Wartime Writing, 1944–1945

  Margaret Kennedy, Where Stands A Wingèd Sentry (1941)

  Rose Macaulay, Non-Combatants and Others. Writings Against War, 1916–1945

  Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures. Essays on Enjoying Life (1935)

  Rose Macaulay, Potterism. A Tragi-Farcical Tract (1920)

  Rose Macaulay, What Not. A Prophetic Comedy (1918)

  James Machin (ed.) British Weird. Selected Short Fiction, 1893–1937

  Vonda N McIntyre, The Exile Waiting (1975)

  Elinor Mordaunt, The Villa and The Vortex. Supernatural Stories, 1916–1924

  John Llewelyn Rhys, England Is My Village, and The World Owes Me A Living (1939 & 1941)

  Malcolm Saville, Jane’s Country Year (1946)

  Helen de Guerry Simpson, The Outcast and The Rite. Stories of Landscape and Fear, 1925–1938

  Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, Business as Usual (1933)

  J Slauerhoff, Adrift in the Middle Kingdom, translated by David McKay (1934)

  Amara Thornton and Katy Soar (eds), Strange Relics. Stories of Archaeology and the Supernatural, 1895–1954

  Elizabeth von Arnim, The Caravaners (1909)

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin (1977)

  Sylvia Townsend Warner, Of Cats and Elfins. Short Tales and Fantasies (1927–1976)

  The Flying Shadow was first published in 1936.

  This edition published in 2022 by Handheld Press

  72 Warminster Road, Bath BA2 6RU, United Kingdom.

  www.handheldpress.co.uk

  Introduction © Daniel Kilburn and Luke Seaber 2022

  Notes © Kate Macdonald and Daniel Kilburn 2022.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  ISBN 978-1-912766-65-9

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

  Series design by Nadja Guggi and typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro and Open Sans.

  eBook Conversion by Bluewave Publishing

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction, by Daniel Kilburn and Luke Seaber

  The Flying Shadow

  The First Chapter

  The Second Chapter

  The Third Chapter

  The Fourth Chapter

  The Fifth Chapter

  The Seventh Chapter

  The Eighth Chapter

  The Ninth Chapter

  The Tenth Chapter

  The Eleventh Chapter

  The Twelfth Chapter

  The Thirteenth Chapter

  The Fourteenth Chapter

  The Fifteenth Chapter

  The Sixteenth Chapter

  The Seventeenth Chapter

  The Last Chapter

  Notes on the text, by Kate Macdonald

  Acknowledgements

  David Murdoch, the nephew and literary executor of Jane Oliver, the widow of John Llewelyn Rees, has been a generous and enthusiastic supporter of the project to republish John Llewelyn Rees’s works, and was kind enough to supply information from his own researches into his aunt’s life, and his memories of her conversations about her husband. Rees family members James Anderson and Jill Alexander MBE were supportive of the project to bring these novels back into print.

  Daniel Kilburn is a Lecturer in Geography and the Built Environment at University College London, where his teaching and research spans urbanism, global mobilities and social research methodologies. He is a licenced private pilot with some experience with a range of aircraft types.

  Luke Seaber is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Modern European Culture at University College London. He is the author and editor of various works on British literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including (with Michael McCluskey) Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (2020).

  Introduction

  BY DANIEL KILBURN AND LUKE SEABER

  ‘Be Air-Minded!’ This exhortation from the Observer on 26 July 1932 was repeatedly given to the British public in the interwar years, although rarely quite so directly as in this article headline. To be air-minded was to know about the world of aviation, of flights for pleasure, for war, for business; it was to interest oneself in technology, in celebrity aviators and aviatrices. It was to fly, to learn to pilot an aeroplane with an ‘A’ (private) or ‘B’ (commercial) licence; to travel for business or pleasure; to take ‘joyrides’ in aeroplanes at a fairground; to take flight vicariously in films, stories, poetry, posters and paintings. This hugely popular technology was operated, experienced and understood by comparatively few people, yet it had a disproportionate cultural importance. It is rare for a work of fiction to capture such a paradigm shift in its moment of ascendency, ushering the reader inside its technological, social and cultural world so deftly and compellingly as The Flying Shadow.

  Despite the apparent ubiquity of aviation in the culture of the 1930s, there is a lack of a corresponding literary canon. English literature did not seem to have an author like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in whom personal experience as a pilot was transmuted into novels and other works, such as Vol de nuit (1931; published as Night Flight in English in 1932) or Terre des hommes (1939; published in English as Wind, Sand and Stars in the same year). The representation of aviation in English literature of the period was largely about the experience of being a passenger or an onlooker. The experience of flying was relayed through the perspectives of non-experts, for whom the aeroplane was a mysterious machine and to whom flight meant surrendering to the expert, to the pilot. Descriptions of the mechanical, the importance of engineering and the role of the human-machine nexus are rare, as was a narrative of aviation written by someone in the pilot’s seat.

  This is the importance of The Flying Shadow, because the author John Llewelyn Rhys was above all a pilot. This is not to say that no other pilots in Britain in the interwar years wrote fiction or wrote about aviation. Two examples show how exceptional Rhys was. The first is the pilot C St John Sprigg, who is now better known by the pen-name he used to write Marxist literary criticism before he was killed in the Spanish Civil War, Christopher Caudwell. He held a pilot’s licence, worked in aviation publishing and was author of ‘Let’s Learn to Fly!’ (1937) as well as co-author of Fly with Me: An Elementary Textbook on the Art of Piloting (1932). He also wrote detective novels; in Death of an Airman (1934) the Bishop of Cootamundra solves a murder at the flying school at which he has enrolled. This is an entertaining whodunit, and full of much valuable and accurate information on what it was like to fly and learn to fly in those years, but it is not much more than a piece of entertainment to which flying is a backdrop, however unusually expertly drawn. In contrast is T H White, best known as the author of the classic fantasy novel The Sword in the Stone (1938). His England Have My Bones (1936) is a diary of his experiences huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ – and flyin’. A significant part of England Have My Bones is taken up with White’s reasonably successful attempt to learn to fly, and it contains some of the best literary depictions of flight from the period. But for all White’s expertise in literature, he was an amateur flyer at best. The Flying Shadow in turn makes it clear the extent to which flying in the 1930s was in many ways considered a type of country sport – with the hunt at one point appearing below the aeroplane as ‘a crowd of riders swirling down a lane as water down a gutter’ (60) – a curious detail that reminds today’s reader just how much we should be careful to remember that what is being described is partially a world of alien leisure pursuits to an early twentieth-century audience.

  The Flying Shadow combines true expertise in aviation with being a fine novel. Rhys’s first novel, out of print for over eighty years, is arguably the great (unknown) work in British literature to provide unrivalled descriptions of flight, and piloting, in the moment of its greatest cultural importance. This work is rare in its content and presentation by its counter to the cultural tendency, identified by social scientists, of confining activities that rely on technologically complex, confounding or concealed processes to a metaphorical ‘black box’ in our individual and collective understandings, inside which exist and operate things (and people) that we otherwise cannot fully know (see Latour 2007). Such a black box is symbolized, literally, in flow charts of complex systems, as a convenient black square into which run necessary inputs and from which flow useful outputs (but inside of which occur activities that need not be known). The more familiar use of ‘black box’ as the secure and indestructible repository of flight data and voice recordings found after aircraft crashes, to be deciphered
by investigators who need to shed light on an accident, is coincidental. Yet in a way this alternative meaning is a symbolic reminder of how little can be known of the routines of flight, or how few routine lines of social or cultural enquiry seek out the unknowns of the cockpit (or the aerodrome, the hanger or club house). Researchers in science and technology have sought to open ‘black boxes’ and understand how human and technological elements combine in activities ranging from particle physics experiments, to power distribution grids or the manufacture of electric cars. However, the processes of piloting aeroplanes or of becoming and being a pilot remain, to varying extents, stubbornly ‘black boxed’ (despite the fact that there are likely many more pilots than particle physicists and that – for now – many more of us travel in aircraft than electric cars). The acts of piloting and crewing aeroplanes are fundamental in modern life (for leisure, politics, business and maintaining supply chains). Unlike other examples of black-box activities (whether the abattoir or the nuclear reactor) which we might prefer to stay hidden, society has instead maintained a voracious appetite for ‘airmindedness’. It is in this context that insights gleaned from flying are all the more valuable, especially those richly contextualized in time and place, written with the assurance of an insider’s perspective and inflected with subtle human observation, as Rhys does so effortlessly in The Flying Shadow.

  From the perspective of anyone lucky enough to have taken practical instruction in flight, whether a single ‘joyride’ or en route to a private pilot’s licence (or ‘A’ licence as it was then), Rhys’s ability to illuminate the ‘black box’ of learning to fly reveals moments of recognition, however fleeting, that attest to there being something truly unique about this experience and the human relationships that flying produces. The Flying Shadow may leave you asking why no other novels of this kind exist, why there are so few studies of this nebulous area of flight operations. A few classic memoirs of this era have their place as required reading for aspiring aviators. While many memoirs by celebrated pilots of the period are concerned with their destinations and flight dramas, Nevil Shute’s autobiography Slide Rule (1954) is an important technical memoir of working in British aviation design and engineering in the 1920s and 1930s. David Garnett’s The Grasshoppers Come (1931) and A Rabbit In The Air (1932) record his experience of learning to fly. Ernest Gann’s Fate Is the Hunter (1961) is a notable example, as a contemporary of Rhys, although in his compelling account the ‘learning’ stretches across an entire, rip-roaring, career spanning World War Two. It is harder to put one’s finger on any account, whether fictional or factual, that offers such nuanced and sustained focus on the world that encompasses learning to fly; from the school (or in this case club) with its characters and conventions; to the instructors and their necessarily fluid, fleeting and yet complex relationships with each other, their ground crew and their pupils; and of course the aeroplanes and their cockpits, at once a classroom in the sky, an individual escape from earthly binds and a communion with corporeal risk (all under the ‘shadow’ of risking life-changing injury or death). The immediate and lasting allure of the window into this environment as it was in the 1930s may be felt more widely than by pilots or airminded types alone. For this world, so astutely studied and richly recreated by Rhys, includes all the ingredients required to bring the black box of inter-war flying training to life in all its guts and glory. This world appears fuelled as much by alcohol as by high-octane leaded gasoline, almost as novel to those who inhabited it as to the surrounding communities who sought its airmindedness second-hand, and with a cast of characters whose lives play out, often directly and painfully, under the recent legacy and prescient threat of (aerial) conflict, danger and societal upheaval. In this respect, The Flying Shadow is cast with such vivid definition as much from the light shone by Rhys, as by the distinctive fuselages of the de Havilland biplanes, across the landscape of inter-war Britain below.

  Just as Rhys’s book has long been unjustly forgotten, so too has Rhys himself. He was born John Llewelyn Rees (using the more ‘Welsh’ spelling for his publications) in Abergavenny on 7 May 1911. The son of a Church of England vicar, he left Hereford Cathedral School in 1929, and in 1934 he took his pilot’s licence, signing up as a Sergeant Pilot in the RAF Reserve the following year. In 1936 he published his first and best novel, The Flying Shadow, with Faber and Faber. This brought him little in the way of fame, but did bring him something more important: among the novel’s first readers was the author Jane Oliver (the pseudonym of Helen Evans). She was not only a fellow author, but also a fellow pilot. She wrote to Rhys in praise of how he had ‘caught so exactly the terror and loveliness of flight’ (Oliver 1941, 9). They corresponded, met, fell in love, and married in March 1939, the same year in which Rhys’s second novel, The World Owes Me A Living, was published, once more with Faber and Faber. Happiness, as The Flying Shadow often suggests, did not last. The long-expected war came, and Rhys was ever more involved in RAF work. On 5 August 1940, by now a Flight Lieutenant, he was on a training flight at Harwell with Pilot Officers Arup and Lester. Something went wrong: the Wellington bomber he was commanding stalled and dived to the ground, killing all three men (Chorley 1992, 24). Rhys had become part of the shadow that his first novel so eloquently and tragically suggests.

  The Flying Shadow is the story of Robert Owen (RO to the Club members), who has much in common with his creator. Like Rhys, he is a clergyman’s son from Wales; he is also, above all, a pilot, living ‘for flying and flying alone’ (3). After some time in the RAF – this also mirrored Rhys’s life – he takes a job at a flying school, and the depiction of the world of this flying school and its people and places is the novel’s triumph. We meet Hawkings, the chief instructor, a veteran pilot flying since the days before the Great War; Metcalf, who works as a test pilot for the aircraft manufacturer adjoining the flying school and who later leaves on a long-distance publicity flight; Martin, the local schoolmaster with a fondness for self-aggrandizing bragging about his (non-existent) prowess in flying; Janet Moreton, the hard-drinking trainee professional pilot; Perkins, the cynical and expert chief ground engineer; these and many others become Robert’s world and the reader’s close companions. As much time seems to be spent in the flying club’s bar (where, as Hawkings sardonically comments, wonderful flying goes on as in the air (11), but flight remains the focus of these men and women’s lives. For the instructors the mundane work of taking up those who think they may wish to learn to fly is their bread-and-butter, but always in the background is the allure of the freedom that solo flight gives, and the ever-present risk of violent and fiery death. The mundanity is buried in casual asides that work as the textual equivalent of a film scene in which a calendar’s pages are shown changing at a blurringly fast rate, or posts on the Club noticeboard or the notices in the aviation periodicals devoured by the members. The very off-handedness of a report of a flight accident emphasizes how quotidian is the mortal danger the characters face: ‘One of the Air Liners that used the aerodrome flew into a hill in a mist and three passengers and the pilot were burned to death’ (107). It is there when the waiting Robert, Perkins and Hawkings imagine in frightening and frightened detail what will happen if a delayed cross-country flight misjudges its landing in the falling dusk and fog. It is there in the deaths of characters both major and minor.

  The Flying Shadow is not only a novel of the camaraderie of flying, set against the warm lights of the saloon bar or in the harsh glare of the flames of a burning ’plane: it is also a love story. Robert gradually falls in love with Judy Hateling, a pupil of his who is married to a rich man many years her senior, a bullying figure whose off-stage presence is one of several shadows darkening the action. Another shadow is that of war – both the Great War that Robert is too young to have flown in and the vaguer shadow of a coming war that here as in so much 1930s writing is an uneasy half-felt presence. Shadows and doubts are everywhere in this novel, held only at bay, perhaps, in and by the losing of oneself in the courage and technical complexities of flight. Yet it is to flight that Robert turns to for an image as doubts gather around him even in his moments of greatest happiness: