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Flying Ace by Jim Eldridge
Mar. 11th, 2024 06:00 pmHaven't read a book in weeks now so I'm easing back into it with this: a My Story series book about an RFC pilot.
If you haven't encountered the My Story series before, it is essentially a series of edutaining children's books in a diary format. As a young teen I was traumatised by the potato famine one, and while in primary school I read one about a mill girl which... also traumatised me. They tend to start out with an innocent statement about how great life is and then by the end someone's lost an arm and everyone's parents are dead.
I picked this one up in my school's KS2 library this afternoon and - this is the real benefit of these books - finished it in less than an hour of total reading. It's 120 pages of pure edutainment. I read so many statistics and got so much terminology explained to me in parenthesis. The descriptions of flying are deeply rudimentary and to be honest the actual flying seemed to fall by the wayside in favour of a lengthy side-trip to visit the protagonist's older brother after he has been invalided home with shellshock.
There were several moments where I was taken out of the narrative due to my knowledge (mostly from Biggles, I'm not claiming academic status) but it was certainly informative on the broad strokes of the RFC. I will say that the protag and his best friend being sent for five-ish months of training in 1915 seemed like quite a long time but I admit I have a bit of a Flashheart understanding of how quickly pilots were being churned through at that point in the war.
Here is a representative example of the prose:
We were instructed that the primary task of the Royal Flying Corps was to act as aerial observers. To report enemy positions and troop movements in order that the Top Brass could take proper decisions about battle strategy and the movements of our own troops. To that effect, we were shown how to take photographs from the air using large wooden box-cameras fixed to the side of the plane. We were also taught how to locate and identify positions on maps from the air, and how to identify enemy weapons. It's all very given.
A brief summary of the major plot events of the book (warning for suicide (yes really)):
Oh and here's a short scene set about 1.5 pages after the end of the books.
DECEMBER 1918
It was a quiet Christmas this year. As Lord Fairfax I have a great many responsibilities, but I found that all I really wanted was to sit with Nanna and Mother in the drawing room. The church bells ringing sent a shiver down my spine; it will be some time before I'm used to them again, I expect.
At midday Meadows knocked gently at the door. I beckoned him in, awkward, still unused to my newfound authority.
"Sorry to interrupt, your lordship," he murmured. He nodded politely to Mother and Nanna. "There's a visitor to see you." At the time I could not detect anything unusual in his tone, but in retrospect I think he may have been trying quite hard not to cry.
I stood from my chair, feeling the customary pins-and-needles in my still healing arm and leg. The casts came off last week but I could swear that some weakness remains. Meadows led me to the foyer, where the visitor sat waiting on a chaise which was probably older than Nanna. A sturdy walking stick rested against the chaise beside the visitor, and - I noted this with some sympathy - his left leg had been amputated below the knee. There had been some risk of the same happening to me as my leg had been a compound fracture, but thankfully infection had failed to take hold.
Then I took a moment to look at the visitor's face.
"Hullo, Jack," said Alan Dixon, a man who I knew had been dead for over two years. He smiled at me, wobbly in the way it had sometimes been after a thrashing at school. "Long time, no see."
Maybe now I can read a proper book again... fingers crossed!
If you haven't encountered the My Story series before, it is essentially a series of edutaining children's books in a diary format. As a young teen I was traumatised by the potato famine one, and while in primary school I read one about a mill girl which... also traumatised me. They tend to start out with an innocent statement about how great life is and then by the end someone's lost an arm and everyone's parents are dead.
I picked this one up in my school's KS2 library this afternoon and - this is the real benefit of these books - finished it in less than an hour of total reading. It's 120 pages of pure edutainment. I read so many statistics and got so much terminology explained to me in parenthesis. The descriptions of flying are deeply rudimentary and to be honest the actual flying seemed to fall by the wayside in favour of a lengthy side-trip to visit the protagonist's older brother after he has been invalided home with shellshock.
There were several moments where I was taken out of the narrative due to my knowledge (mostly from Biggles, I'm not claiming academic status) but it was certainly informative on the broad strokes of the RFC. I will say that the protag and his best friend being sent for five-ish months of training in 1915 seemed like quite a long time but I admit I have a bit of a Flashheart understanding of how quickly pilots were being churned through at that point in the war.
Here is a representative example of the prose:
We were instructed that the primary task of the Royal Flying Corps was to act as aerial observers. To report enemy positions and troop movements in order that the Top Brass could take proper decisions about battle strategy and the movements of our own troops. To that effect, we were shown how to take photographs from the air using large wooden box-cameras fixed to the side of the plane. We were also taught how to locate and identify positions on maps from the air, and how to identify enemy weapons.
A brief summary of the major plot events of the book (warning for suicide (yes really)):
- Our protagonist (The Right Honourable Jack Fairfax) and his best friend (Alan Dixon) climb onto the roof of their boarding school to hang a pair of their house master's trousers on the steeple. When inevitably caught for this, they get six and ten of the best respectively but since it's their last day of school ever neither of them care very much. Alan tries to take the first beating in a fit of chivalry but their teacher is having none of it. As far as I can tell this has no thematic resonance besides reminding us that the characters are very young.
- It did REALLY remind me of the beginning of The Rescue Flight but obviously more negative about public school, while W.E. Johns (even with his general ambivalence towards it) seemed to have some empathy for the staff.
- Jack goes home to his parents (Lord and Lady Fairfax) and informs them that instead of joining the family's old venerable cavalry regiment he will be learning to fly and joining the RFC. His father is predictably not thrilled at all about this and goes on a diatribe about how Jack's brother Oswald is way cooler and better than him and will certainly be a major before long.
- Alan informs Jack that the RFC is currently full up but they're fine with that because it gives them time to take private flying lessons to gain their wings. This costs One Hundred Pounds Each, which seems like a lot of money although I suppose to the second son of a lord it's pocket money.
- Within about five pages they have both earned said wings and been accepted into the RFC which is now open for applications again. Then they have the aforementioned five months of training and are sent over to France in their very own DeHavillands! This is on about page 60 of 120.
- Jack shoots down two German planes in his first two dogfights. Meanwhile one of his flight is shot down and he is a bit sad but not very much, then it happens again and he is once again a bit sad. Honestly I was shocked by how little emotion Jack was allowed to show in this versus the standard Biggles short story from this era where everyone is on the edge of their nerves. I don't think it can be a content thing because (spoiler alert) his brother fucking kills himself at the end and that is apparently fine. But God Forbid our protagonist cries over anything less than his best friend since he was six dying.
- His engine gets shot out and Jack has to make a forced landing in No Man's Land. He sprains his ankle and pisses off a doctor at an aid post, but gets back to his squadron where he's given a 48 hour pass. He uses this to go home where he discovers Oswald is in hospital for shell shock. When he visits him Oswald has a harrowing monologue about how awful it is to be in the cavalry in World War One which is very moving but also feels somewhat out of place for a book which is called 'Flying Ace'.
- THEN Jack returns to his squadron and finds out that Alan got shot down while he was gone and is missing presumed. Now the book clearly wants me to accept Alan is dead. But I won't be doing that. Jack gets dressed down by his CO for asking what happened to Alan and then goes off crying because Alan was shot down by the same man who shot his engine out - a pilot in a yellow Albatros who is the most transparent Baron von Richtofen reference I've ever seen.
- So obviously the next time Jack is called for a mission it turns out to be the opening day of the Somme. So Jack flies out on guard duty for the bombers and ends up locked in combat with the Yellow Baron until his guns jam, he's been shot, and he decides his only chance to avenge his best friend is to ram the Albatros with his own plane. Which he does!
- Then there is, no joke, a three page epilogue in which we find out that all his other friends got shot down, his brother probably killed himself, his dad died of a shame induced heart attack, and he is now Lord Fairfax having been shot down and received the "minor injuries" of a broken arm and leg.
Oh and here's a short scene set about 1.5 pages after the end of the books.
DECEMBER 1918
It was a quiet Christmas this year. As Lord Fairfax I have a great many responsibilities, but I found that all I really wanted was to sit with Nanna and Mother in the drawing room. The church bells ringing sent a shiver down my spine; it will be some time before I'm used to them again, I expect.
At midday Meadows knocked gently at the door. I beckoned him in, awkward, still unused to my newfound authority.
"Sorry to interrupt, your lordship," he murmured. He nodded politely to Mother and Nanna. "There's a visitor to see you." At the time I could not detect anything unusual in his tone, but in retrospect I think he may have been trying quite hard not to cry.
I stood from my chair, feeling the customary pins-and-needles in my still healing arm and leg. The casts came off last week but I could swear that some weakness remains. Meadows led me to the foyer, where the visitor sat waiting on a chaise which was probably older than Nanna. A sturdy walking stick rested against the chaise beside the visitor, and - I noted this with some sympathy - his left leg had been amputated below the knee. There had been some risk of the same happening to me as my leg had been a compound fracture, but thankfully infection had failed to take hold.
Then I took a moment to look at the visitor's face.
"Hullo, Jack," said Alan Dixon, a man who I knew had been dead for over two years. He smiled at me, wobbly in the way it had sometimes been after a thrashing at school. "Long time, no see."
