The Lost Flying Boat by Alan Silltoe

later told me that he left the hospital after eighteen months because kindness was turning him clockwise into a lunatic. He hiked the by-ways for a year to get back health, and the only item of value in his rucksack was a bubble sextant which he would not relinquish. He did not know why, but while children ran from him he relished the extra weight. Sisyphus, he said, had nothing on me. At which Bull confessed that he’d had a dose of that, as well. Rose got a job, and went to live again with his mother, and stayed until receiving Bennett’s telegram which called him, he said, back to duty.
    As I stood across the road from the enormously enlarged picture of Rose’s hideous blemish high up the wall, I wondered how long it would be before we took our departure. The livid vision made me active where I had been apathetic. I walked away as quickly as I could, unable to look a moment more than I had to. When I passed in the evening the whole building was level with the ground.
    14
    The seven of us waited in the hotel lounge, which was closed off for our use. A chart of the ocean, and a large-scale map of the islands, were pinned to the wall. As if to accustom us gradually to the scarred side of his face, the navigator kept it turned whenever possible. Because his name was Rose, I thought of him as ‘Compass’, though when none of the others took the sobriquet as in any way witty I let the name go. Smoke from his pipe drifted over a fleshy landscape of red and purple, to screen the distortion from anyone tempted to gaze at it. The pipe angled jauntily out of the disfigured side of his mouth, so that a languid puff slid up the lunar scars. If anything this made the effect worse, which may have been his idea, though I think he no longer cared for anyone’s opinion. The glint in his eyes suggested that he was used to bearing the scar, and his nonchalant expression turned humorous when he considered what the world could do as far as he was concerned. But the lasting effect of the scar was to curb outright laughter from him. People in any case expected so little merriment because of his affliction that he eventually employed less than he had grown up with. The truth was that he had accustomed himself to his disfigurement, and it was up to us to get used to it.
    He looked around. ‘What a bloody shower!’
    The others laughed, having known him well, but only in the wartime pre-scar days, so that to some extent he was also new to them. Perhaps we did look a shower, with our open-necked shirts and various kinds of jackets. I had a tie in my luggage, and supposed the others had.
    â€˜You may well turn out to be right,’ Nash said.
    â€˜I sincerely hope not. You know how the skipper likes us to dress for dinner in mid-flight.’
    I laughed with the others.
    â€˜We don’t want any crisis during the trip.’ In spite of twitting us, he had a gentle voice. He’d grown up in a small farming town on the northern edge of Salisbury Plain, and the pleasant burr to his speech remained. His father, a solicitor, had sent him to the local grammar school to which he had gone as a boy, and a distinction in mathematics for his Higher School Certificate had naturally led Rose to become a navigator on volunteering for aircrew.
    He sat with the knick-knacks of his trade: a Dalton Computer, plotting instruments, star-finder, and a Bubble Sextant Mark IX. Maps and charts were spilling from a black bag by his polished shoes. Even Bennett hadn’t such knife-edged creases in his trousers. He irons his laces at night, we used to say about such a type. Butter wouldn’t melt in his turnups. You could smell his haircream a mile off. How wrong we were.
    When the skipper came in, Rose, Nash and the others stood as at a pukka briefing, so I joined them. He looked at us one by one, then nodded. We sat down, and he talked for some time about the allocation of duties. We were informed that Rose, being the navigator