Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

Then quite abruptly came his decision to get into the Royal Flying Corps.

Neither Oswald nor Joan ventured any comment on this, because both of them had a feeling that Peter had, in a sense, climbed down by this decision to go up....

In the Royal Flying Corps Peter’s rather hastily conceived theories of moral fibre came into an uncongenial atmosphere. The Royal Flying Corps was amazingly young, swift, and confident, and “moral fibre” based on abstinence and cold self-control was not at all what it was after. The Royal Flying Corps was much more inclined to scrap with soda-water syphons and rag to the tunes of a gramophone. It was a body that had had to improvise a tradition of conduct in three or four swift years, and its tradition was still unstable. Mainly it was the tradition of the games and sports side of a public school, roughly adapted to the new needs of the service; it was an essentially boyish tradition, even men old enough to have gone through the universities were in a minority in it, and Peter at one-and-twenty was one of the more elderly class of recruits. And necessarily the tradition of the corps still varied widely with the dominant personalities and favourite heroes of each aerodrome and mess and squadron. It was a crowd of plastic boys, left amazingly to chance leads. Their seniors had no light for them, and they picked up such hints as they could from Kipling and the music-halls, from overheard conversations, and one another.

Is it not an incredible world in which old men make wars and untutored young men have to find out how to fight them; in which tradition and the past are mere entanglements about the feet of the young? The flying services took the very flower of the youth of the belligerent nations; they took the young men who were most manifestly fitted to be politicians, statesmen, leaders of men, masters in industry, and makers of the new age; the boys of nerve, pluck, imagination, invention, and decision. And there is not a sign of any realization on the part of any one of the belligerent states of the fact that a large proportion of this most select and valuable mass of youth was destined to go on living after the war and was going to matter tremendously and be the backbone of the race after the war. They let all these boys specialize as jockeys specialize. The old men and rulers wanted these youngsters to fight and die for them; that any future lay beyond the war was too much for these scared and unteachable ancients to apprehend. The short way to immediate efficiency was to back the tradition of recklessness and gallantry, and so the short way was taken; if the brave lads were kept bold and reckless by women, wine and song, then by all means, said their elders, let them have these helps. “A short life and a merry one,” said the British Empire to these lads of eighteen and nineteen encouragingly. “A short life and a merry one,” said the Empire to its future.

If the story of the air forces is a glorious and not a shameful thing it is because of the enduring hope of the world—the incessant gallantry of youth. These boys took up their great and cardinal task with the unquenchable hopefulness of boyhood and with the impudence and humour of their race. They brought in the irreverence and the Spartanism of their years. They made a language for themselves, an atrocious slang of facetious misnomers; everything one did was a “stunt”; everything one used was a “gadget”; the machines were “’buses” and “camels” and “pups”; the older men were perpetually pleading in vain for more dignity in the official reports. And these youngsters worked out their moral problems according to their own generous and yet puerile ideas. They argued the question of drink. Could a man fly better or worse if he was “squiffy”? Does funk come to the thoughtful? And was ever a man gallant without gallantries? After the death of Lord Kitchener there survived no man in Britain of the quality to speak plainly and authoritatively and honestly about chastity and drink to the young soldier. The State had no mind in these matters. In most matters indeed the State had no mind; it was a little old silly State. And the light side of the feminine temperament flamed up into shameless acquiescences in the heroic presence of the flying man. Youth instinctively sets towards romantic adventures, and the scales of chance for a considerable number of the flying men swung between mésalliance and Messalina.

The code and the atmosphere varied from mess to mess and from squadron to squadron; young men are by nature and necessity hero-worshippers and imitative. Peter’s lines fell among pleasant men of the “irresponsible” school. The two best flyers he knew, including him of the hard blue eyes who had first instructed him, were men of a physique that defied drink and dissipation. Vigours could smoke, drink, and dance in London, catch the last train back with three seconds to spare, and be flying with an unshaken nerve by half-past six in the morning; Vincent would only perform stunts when he was “tight,” and then he seemed capable of taking any risk with impunity. He could be funny with an aeroplane then a thousand feet up in the air. He could make it behave as though it was drunk, as though it was artful; he could make it mope or wag its tail. Men went out to watch him. The mess was decorated with pictures from La Vie Parisienne, and the art and literature of the group was Revue. Now seeing that Peter’s sole reason for his puritanism was the preservation of efficiency, this combination of a fast life and a fine record in the air was very disconcerting to him.

If he had been naturally and easily a first-class flying man he might have stuck to his line of high austerity, but he was not. He flew well, but he had to fly with care; like many other airmen, he always felt a shadow of funk before going up, on two or three bad mornings it was on his conscience that he had delayed for ten minutes or so, and he was more and more inclined to think that he would fly better if he flew with a less acute sense of possibilities. It was the start and the uneventful flying that irked him most; hitherto every crisis had found him cool and able. But the slap-dash style, combined with the exquisite accuracy of these rakes, Vigours and Vincent, filled him with envious admiration.

In the mess Peter met chiefly youths of his own age or a year or so younger; he soon became a master of slang; his style of wit won its way among them. He ceased to write of “getting down to elementals” to Joan, and he ceased to think of all other girls and women as inventions of the devil. Only they must be kept in their places. As Vigours and Vincent kept them. Just as one kept drink in its place. One must not, for example, lose trains on account of them....

Through these months Joan maintained a strained watch upon the development and fluctuations of Peter. He wrote—variously; sometimes offhand duty notes and sometimes long and brotherly letters—incurably brotherly. Every now and then she had glimpses of him when he came to London on leave. Manifestly he liked her company and trusted her—as though she was a man. It was exasperating. She dressed for Peter as she had never dressed for any one, and he would take her out to dine at the Rendezvous or the Petit Riche and sit beside her and glance at common scraps of feminine humanity, at dirty little ogling bare-throated girls in patched-up raiment and with harsh and screaming voices, as though they were the most delicious of forbidden fruits. And he seemed to dislike being alone with her. If she dropped her hand to touch his on the table, he would draw his away.

Was the invisible barrier between them invincible?