“The Story of Michael and Mary” a radio script
by John Leslie Fitzmaurice Creighton,
first broadcast in Sydney, June 20, 1935.
At about 5 o’clock on a certain evening in December, 1917, a fog hung heavily round a lovely old Georgian home in Norfolk on the East Coast of England. It swirled in ghostly eddies across neatly kept tennis courts and croquet lawns and it wreathed silvery shapes across the bare branches of elm trees. Moisture dripped incessantly from ivy covered walls and condensed upon window panes.
Cold. Dark. Dreary was that particular night, but from inside this Georgian home came sounds of revelry. The windows, in spite of the fog, threw out a blaze of soft golden light. Yes, a party was most certainly in progress. Screams of delight came from the big dining room. On its hands and knees was a curious object covered by a polar bear skin. The animal’s head, with half open mouth forming a most lifelike imitation of the real thing. On its back sat a little girl. Surrounding it were children of every age from three to ten and behind, and just beyond the flickering candlelight stood a group of grown ups. inntermingled with proud mamas (there were not many fathers there that night for they were away at the War) were a fair sprinkling of young Flying Corps officers of a Home Defence Night Flying Squadron. Flying was washed out for the night for the weather was too thick even for the Zeppelins – and besides it was Christmas Eve.
Suddenly the curious beast gave a heave. Off came the little girl, off came the polar bear skin and there emerged a young man of maybe nineteen, with laughing brown eyes and very ruffled, very black hair. He was wearing the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps and the wings on his tunic were very new indeed.
A few hours later a scene was enacted in the Great Hall of this old Georgian home – by chance it happened almost under the mistletoe. The players were this lad of nineteen and a girl called Mary. Mary was 18 and very beautiful. “Michael” she said “ here is your Christmas present from me. Will you promise to wear it always and whenever you look at it, think of me?” “Always, Mary” said Michael. "Always" The present was a gold wristwatch.
That one short night is the end of Scene One.
Scene Two is a few weeks later. The aerodrome of a night flying squadron in France. A group of pilots are standing in a hangar. Three twin engine bombers are ticking over in the darkness outside: the squadroin clock is also ticking over, its big hand approaching the hour of 8.30. “Is that clock right, Michael?” asked a certain chap who had witnessed the little scene in the Geoirgian home that foggy Christmas Eve.
“Well. Here’s the right time anyway.” said Michael, looking at his gold wrist watch and thinking of Mary.
A few moments later the first machine roared out into the darkness, followed by the second and the third. Circling round the aerodrome, they found each other and manouvred into flying formation then gaining height they flew eastward toward the Rhine valley. Patches of countryside beneath them showed almost white in the fitful moonlight. Here and there a dark splash told of a field or the gleam of a railway told that their course was right. Not many lights showed beneath. It did not do for a town to advertise itself in that way in those dark days.
On they went, flying at 8000 feet now, each with sixteen 112 pound bombs. The further they entered enemy territory the more careless did townspeople on the earth below seem to be in the matter of screening their lights, till finally away on the horizon appeared almost a blaze of light. As the three machines approached, warning must have been given ahead for, like brilliants dropping off the thread on which they hung, the illuminations of this city went out by whole streets and districts at a time. In the north east corner of the town the glow from factory chimneys could not be damped in time. Towards this glow Michael led his little party. Suddenly a dozen searchlights stabbed the sky, sweeping to and fro, hesiating a moment on a fragment of cloud, but always searching, searching, searching. One picked the little formation up and instantly others focused on their target. Came gunfire, came puffs of smoke. From the ground it seemed as if those lhree little silverfish must surely be hit. But slipping sliding, two dodged the searchlights. The third dropped a parachute flair and while the searchlights followed it down, made good his escape – driving lower and lower all the time.
The two machines first out of the searchlights glare dropped their bombs, which fell wide of the target and then beat it for home.
Michael in the third machine noticed this and dived lower still, the engines throttled back. Citizens of the town congratulated themselves that the hostile aircraft had been driven off: congratulated themselves until with a roar of engines Michael opened up only a few hundred feet above their rooftops. There was a shattering roar as his observer dropped a salvo of bombs into doomed factory in the northeast corner. Twice did Michael return and at his third coming, the city’s railway station was wrecked.
Back on their aerodrome, the crew of the other two machines waited anxiously for the well known throb of a twin engined machine returning to roost. And return it did, riddled bullets and scarcly able to fly. Out jumped Michael, pulled off his flying helmet and his brown eyes were laughing and his hair was ruffled just like the night he had played Polar Bears. He looked at gold watch. “”11.30. Anyone care for a drink, chaps?”, Mike said and then his face grew suddenly serious. Perhaps he was thinking of Mary.
For his actions on that night Michael Coombs was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the first of many awards he would receive during this War.
Here is the third scene of this little story. Two years have passed. Once more a group of men are talking, talking in hushed tones although the sun is shining bright and they are out in the open air. They are standing on the field of the Heliopolis Aerodrome. Just audible above their voices is the hum of an aeroplane in the distance, flying high above the Pyramids and the Sphinx. “What a mess.” Said one. “Did you know him?” asked another. “No, not well. Did well in the War I believe”
The mess referred to was a broken thing, flattened into the ground: the engines sunk two two feet into the hard Egyptian earth. Underneath one engine, had been a pilot, crushed by the very machine bore him aloft. Some weeks back in London I spoke to one of those who been there the day that Mike’s plane had fallen one thousand feet from the sky, for I was not there when my friend died. He told me that all they found was his left hand and part of an arm. On the wrist of that arm was a gold watch.
Back in England there is to this day a girl grown prematurely to middle-aged womanhood. On her wrist is a gold watch stopped at 11.15 stopped at the moment of Michael’s death. That was on 20th June 1920. She doesn’t realize it has stopped, because for her too, time stopped at that moment. Michael’s Mary has never married.
Some years later on my way to India, I returned to Egypt. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for in the Military Cemetery at Heliopolis. They had mounted the propeller shaft that crushed him above the simple white cross that marked his grave and it stood glinting in the early morning desert sun. On the cross was a simple inscription “Flight Lieutenant Herbert Millhouse Coombs DFC. RFC. RAF. Greater love hath no man”
“Herbert?”, do I hear you ask. Yes my friend’s real name was Herbert, but to those of us who knew him well he was Michael or Mike and in our most private times together I would call him Kael, old Gaelic, so I am told, for “mighty warrior”. My Kael.
I remember standing there for a while. Then in the glaring sunlight I shrugged my shouldsers, turned and walked away. I paused just once to look back and if there were a few tears in my eyes – what of it? Perhaps it was the memory of a lad with laughing brown eyes and ruffled black hair, perhaps the memory of a Polar Bear skin, perhaps of searchlights and night flights and gunfire over Germany; or of cocktails and laughter and dancing in Paris, in Athens, Cairo, Constantinople, the Riviera and in Italy. Or perhaps it was the horror of what Mike and I had seen in South Russia; perhaps memories too of a small white dog, who died tired I think of waiting for his Master who never came home, and of the words on his grave - “He flies alone now in Shadowland, a shadow also, chasing shadows”. Or was it the memories of a woman to whom I had returned a gold wrist watch on the back of which was inscribed “Always”
But those days are over now. It is all just water under the bridge.
