Spitfire Pilot and Squadron Leader Brian Lane: Missing in Action, 13 December 1942, Age 25.

 

Sometimes all that’s left is a photo. All else has gone to dust, or worst. The man, his uniform, his log book, even the imperishable machine he once flew. The aircraft that time has rendered invincible.

 

I must have looked at a thousand photos from that summer; many stand out, a few are truly remarkable. Like the one of Brian Lane staring straight into the camera (where is that camera now?), hands on hips, a cigarette in one hand. He is wearing a pale yellow uninflated life jacket, a puny defence against the claims of an angry sea, and there is a look in his eyes that says he hasn’t slept, at least not properly, in a long time. Not perhaps since the start of the war. Whatever trace of youth he once possessed is long gone.

 

I have the sense that he is not long down from the sky, that somewhere off camera his Spitfire is still cooling down, the exhaust stubs still hot, friction generated vapours – the very essence of the sky – still emanating from the wing tips. Fitters and riggers and armourers are working on the much used machine, streaked in places with oil and here and there punctured by the violent passage of cannon shells through the stressed metal skin. Just in case he needs to go back up in a hurry, as seems likely. For it is that summer, the summer of 1940. And it will be his last.

 

There are no genetic ingredients, no DNA bearing fragment of uniform, from which he might be resurrected. No way to cheat death by conjuring a copy of the original organic template, perhaps from a stray thread of hair still attached to his RAF cap, or a sample taken from the blood soaked seat of his fighter plane.

 

What I need, but don’t have, is the technology to enter the picture and have a look around, the way Deckard did with that photo of the mysterious silver scaled replicant in Blade Runner. To zoom in on the frame and enter his world, to see that, yes, his battered Spitfire is indeed waiting nearby along with several others, all being serviced by the diligent ground crews. And there is the dispersal hut where he used to sit in his small office writing letters to the families of the pilots who never came back. Parked to one side of the hut is the open-topped two-seater Bentley that he uses to get to and from the airfield, almost as sleek as his kite, built to chase the wind. It’s a good day for flying, clear skies with little cloud and barely a trace of wind. The visibility much prized by the German aces reveals southern England to be a collection of grass airfields, all under siege like beleaguered castles, verdant runways leading up into the sky.     

 

If I'd been a novice fighter pilot back then, sick with fear and apprehension, with a nearly empty log book (at least as far as flying Spits was concerned) I’d want Brian Lane as my squadron leader. It’s the only thing that would have steadied my nerves. Fear may be contagious but so is confidence and good humour. Grace under fire. Those famous lines from Kipling seem so apt: If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs…It’s inconceivable that Brian ever lost his composure...at least not in front of the men. He would have known the importance of holding the line, of flying in a steady formation, on the ground as well as in the air.

 

And if there’s nothing left of the man, then the myth will have to do.

 

“How much time have you got in Spits?”

“Ten hours, sir.”

“It’s a good start but we can do better than that. When we get up, stick to me like glue. Come on then.”

 

And that’s just the point. I’d have followed Brian Lane anywhere. Even into a sky full of German planes.

 

*          *          *

 

Who wrote the letter to his own parents when he died? Did he get an obituary in The Times? I doubt it. They, Dowding’s fighter boys, were dying too fast by then. And there was always that element of uncertainty. No body. No plane. Nothing to mourn over. No object for the heart to grieve over. Except that photo.

 

There is as far as I know no grave, for like a mariner he was lost at sea, shot down while chasing the enemy back across the ocean. Lost to the sea just like Amy Johnson. Fame and misfortune have rooted Amy in time but Brian’s ghost is less easy to pin down, more reluctant to stay in place like the man himself. All pilots are itinerant wanderers, unable to keep their feet on the ground. 

 

His plane or what's left of it lies at the bottom of the English Channel, a wreck that will never be found, like the last Hurricane (P2923 VY- R) once flown by Dickie Lee. Artefacts that will never be raised from the sea bed for they too have gone to dust; or rather have become sediment, the loam that lies beneath the deep fathoms like a layer of soil from which nothing will ever grow.   

 

Lost at sea has a greater ring of finality to it than missing in action. The latter implies that the missing person might come back, that they might one day walk through the front door of the family home and sit down at the kitchen able with an apologetic look on their face, as if to say sorry I’m a bit late for tea. But lost at sea means just that. Lost never to return, body dissolved by salty currents, atoms scatted by far reaching tides. It's no way for an airman to perish.

 

In the end, maybe the photo is all we need, with or without a way to peer into its hidden reaches. Maybe it’s better than just a grave and a cross, one amongst so many. It gives us a way to look into those steadfast eyes, to return that committed stare. We will never be as brave but our own measure of courage, whatever that might be, demands that we don’t look away. And perhaps as we look into the past he can return our gaze and glimpse the future – Churchill's brightly lit meadows – that Brian Lane did so much to help create.

 

*          *          *

 

"He was completely unflappable, no matter what the odds, his voice always calm and reassuring..."

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Unflappable perhaps because he knew he wasn't alone in the fight. As he wrote in his own account of what it was like to take part in the Battle of Britain, behind every pilot were "the fitters and riggers, the engineer officers, the flight-sergeants (the backbone of the service), the Controllers in the Operations Room, and all the other ground personnel..."  The book ends with the telephone ringing as Lane's airfield is threatened once again: "Hello...Operations?...Yes...Yes, speaking. Thirty plus over the Channel? Good show...O.K., boys, we're off. Somebody tell the flight." He puts down his pen, never to take it up again, his life like so many others cut short.  

 

The perfect English gentleman, it is easy to see traces of Brian in David Niven’s performance as a Spitfire test pilot in "The First of the Few."

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"What I want isn't as easy as all that. It's got to go 400 miles per hour, turn on a six pence, climb 10,000 feet in a few minutes, dive at 500 without the wings coming off. Carry eight machine guns."

Leslie Howard as R.J. Mitchell

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