ONE MAN’S WAR IN THE AIR

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31030, 9 April 1966, Page 4

ONE MAN’S WAR IN THE AIR

The Sky Suspended. By Jim Bailey. Hodder and Stoughton, IM pp.

This is an autobiographical account of one man’s war in the air, 1940-1945. It is an unusual story told by an unusual man. He survived the war after flying operationally through almost the whole of it. This in itself makes him one of the very few. His survival must have been largely a matter of skill, partly luck and partly because he was employed almost solely on night-fighters. His own assessment is that nightflghting was safer though more demanding than any other role in the Royal Air Force. Naturally enough he comes from a most unusual family. His father had got a fortune, a title and an English country seat from mining in South Africa. His mother was a pioneer aviatrix, who at odd times got lost in the Sahara Desert, Russia and Spain. He comments that even by the end of the war his mother still had more flying hours to her credit than he had. The family lived in England though the father commuted between there and his mining interests. With such mobile parents, the boy was largely brought up by the gamekeeper. The family also had at least a nodding acquaintance with the great England and this allows the author to go in for a bit of namedropping now and then. However, this is not obtrusive. The war came to Jim Bailey when he was almost twenty years old, an Oxford undergraduate. Before the war he played polo, joined the University Air Squadron, asked Gilbert Ryle “What is Philosophy?” (getting the answer “That’s an interesting question”) and debated very seriously the Meaning of Life with other undergraduates, as is usual. It is unfortuate for the book that his formal education stopped there. The dull patches in this book, and there are quite a few, consist of the sort of thing one gets in undergraduate bull sessions. While it can be great fun to participate in such sessions, it is deadly dull to read them. The Meaning of Life, the Meaning of War, the Meaning of Sin—all these can be hotly debated at two o’clock in the morning and still read like pretentious

nonsense when set down in sober print. ■ When he writes of flying and fighting Mr Bailey writes well. He had a certain innocent, adolescent enthusiasm for flying which he kept to the end. It is the sort of enthusiasm that usually goes away with maturity and experience, perhaps unfortunately so. Some of the vignettes of life outside the world of flying are well done too and help to salvage the book. Inevitably, many of the people he flew with were killed, and this too he handies well: there is no excessive sentimentality. It is also a book in

which social intercourse n not mentioned. Either the author had no intimate personal relationships with anyone, male or female, in those five years or he did tut does not care to discuss the matter. As the book is autobiographical and not all concerned with flying, this lack leaves it curiously incomplete. Perhaps the omission is deliberate, perhaps there was nothing to omit. One is left with the impression that while the author wants us to feel that we are sharing his every experience there is a lot that he is in fact unwilling to share.