Hurricane Pilot Richard "Dickie" Lee, missing in action 18 August 1940, age 23.

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Away from their wings they looked so vulnerable, especially in the bright sunlight of that long ago summer, standing or sitting or lying beneath skies that would never seem quite so blue again. They lived with the imminence of death, which is why they embraced life to the full. And they were young, young enough to believe themselves immortal. And who wouldn’t, shielded by such armour, by the fortress walls of a Hawker Hurricane, its wide wings like banners, emblems of faith and duty, flying above a field of honour. When the Hurricanes flew in formation, in the mind’s eye there must have been as many pennants flying as there had been at Agincourt and Crecy.

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Despite its lineage (or perhaps because of it), the Hurricane represented the decisive break with the era of the bi-plane. Two wings instead of four, an enclosed rather than an open cockpit, and at last, at long last, engines that could deliver the speed required of a modern fighter plane, that could compete with the inspired array of designs produced by Wilhelm Messerschmitt. It wasn’t just the engines that produced the speed; it was the way they formed an integral part of the entire design package. The Hurricane, with its aerodynamic muscular prow and low wings, looked like a fighter plane, rather than an elongated box held together with wires and struts. Like a racing car it was a machine built for the primary purpose of unleashing kinetic energy.    

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I can’t say whether Dickie owned an open-topped old-style Jaguar or MG, with its wonderful ratcheted hand brake so like the brake lever of a locomotive. Or if he used the lanes of Surrey and Sussex as his personal race track, inspired perhaps by the nearby circuit at Brooklands with its famous banked walls. The same high hedged country lanes whose abrupt twists and turns would help end the life of T.E. Lawrence. Legend would suggest that he did own such a vehicle and that the roadster was either bottle green or navy blue. And maybe there was a Labrador with black liquid eyes that waited for him to come back from each sortie, its attentive gaze somehow capable of recognising the plane its master flew.

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I do know that he pushed his Hurricane (or more probably a succession of Hurris) to its limits, using the aircraft just as its designer Sydney Camm must have intended. Hurling the fighter through the sky to the point of blacking out under the G-forces such manoeuvring would have imposed.  

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He probably pranged a few as well, to the likely annoyance of the fitters and riggers whose job it was to look after the planes. No matter. The ground crews would have forgiven him such misdemeanours and much else besides.  For Dickie, like so many other young men, was one of those pilots who took off in his Hurricane from a grass airfield never to return. Leaving behind a name written in chalk on the dispersal blackboard (a name which time would shortly erase like the man himself) and an unanswered call sign:

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“Blue Two, Blue Two, are you there Blue Two? Over.”   

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“He could only have been what he was: a Second World War fighter pilot, flying a Hurricane, a plane made more of wood than metal, with a fuselage like the inverted hull of a Viking long boat. The Hurri with its canvas skin and sturdy wings. An aircraft not easily knocked from the skies. A Spitfire? No, thanks, sir, I’ll stick with my Hurricane.”

 

 

"Dickie" from the short story collection "The Painted Sky." 

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