Additionally, his demise occurred in the summer holidays when Briggs had not been exposed neither directly nor indirectly to me for some time, and so to support their theory the conspiracy theorists would have to accept the rather tenuous idea that a heart attack induced by stress could come as a delayed reaction—a haunting, as it were, by the ghosts of stresses past. Few medical speculators would be inclined to accept this possibility.
    Moreover, it must be added that throughout the preceding scholastic year, actual contact between Briggs and myself was minimal, to the point where it barely existed at all.
    Nevertheless, Briggs did die and everyone did seem to agree that I was to blame.

 

After the noise, everything was suddenly quiet and still. The cockpit was tilted. That was odd: it leaned him sideways. He must have crashed; but it was only a hazy idea and not very interesting because pain was stabbing at his back. Slowly it ebbed, leaving a passive torpor, and sitting in the straps, hands on his lap, he was placidly aware of the cockpit: beyond that, nothing.
Gently as his mind came into focus he was aware that his knees were buzzing as though he had hit his funnybone. His eyes wandered down and absorbed with curiosity that his legs were in peculiar positions. At least his right leg was. He could not see his left leg and forgot about it. (It had buckled under the collapsed seat so that he was sitting on it.) His right foot was tucked over in the far, right-hand corner and the clean white overalls were torn at the knee and staining in blood that was pumping in slow little squirts and spreading in filmy waves. There was his knee through the blood and something sticking through it. It looked a bit like the rudder bar. Very odd. He regarded it in an abstract way, and for a while it made no impact until an ugly thought crystallised: “Damn! I won’t be able to play rugger on Saturday.”
    Douglas Bader, the legless Spitfire pilot, greatest hero of the Battle of Britain, collides with destiny in Paul Brickhill’s Reach for the Sky. No greater hero was possible at the time, but you could only admire him from afar—you certainly never wanted to be him. Unless, of course, you were already a cripple. Flights of fancy have their limitations.
    Bader was truly amazing, a highly successful fighter pilot who got shot down more than once, was captured and put in a German prison hospital where the commandent was good enough to arrange for a new leg to be sent over from England, the old one being trapped in the doomed plane when he bailed out. Once he had two legs under him, Bader prompty escaped by the time-honoured method of tying the sheets together to get out a second floor window. Recaptured, he soon escaped again, this time successfully. Somehow it didn’t occur to the dumb Germans to take his legs off him.