RAF 39: Hiding in Plain Sight
To hide in plain sight, to carry false guilt, to know what will happen because texts written thousands of years ago are regarded as at the behest of some Deity… THAT is a glimpse of Hell on Earth
In 2013, I published my third anthology, a collection of Verse and Prose that the more conservative, entrenched, and phobic had, in varying ways, not only suggested but, nay, demanded I remove from any future editions of my two previous anthologies.
Liverpool had schooled me well. Along with my family's military history and double payment on society's behalf. So, rather than remove it, those people gave me my third anthology's raison d'être. Had they said nothing, then I would have not been spurred into action.
And I gave the third anthology its double-decker bus title! You know, the line that catches you as the bus passes by on your way to work, and you can't get it out of your mind till you go to bed that night.
I have long learned that the best form of defence is attack.
This is just one of my designs that I'm playing around with for when I publish the second edition of Being Gay Being Bi Whatever and more risqué and blunter than ever, but a lifeline to those for whom that lifeline is crucial.
CONSIDER
A four-engine bomber (Royal Air Force Bomber Command) flies on a very dangerous mission. The pilot and skipper and his flight engineer sitting alongside him would not return. Both were 21. Both would never meet their nephews, less than a decade later. The nephews often wonder what their ancestors would have said about their nephews' sexuality.
CONSIDER FURTHER
A Royal Air Force Wing Commander and a Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant, different crews, different heavy bombers, both on very dangerous missions over Nazi Germany, also in their very early twenties.
The wing commander and his crew did not return. The flight lieutenant survived.
In his eighties, he recounted, for the first time, their forbidden love.
“You’d never suspect. I shall never forget his eyes and his smile, the way he lit up the room, and lit up my life, and I shall never forget the night his aircraft did not return. But I couldn’t dwell. I had an operation that night to fly, and I was responsible for leading my crew. Every night we all lived the same experience as if it was the first time. Every bomber pilot knew it, felt it, and those who survived the war, still know of it, ‘Can I get my crew back safely?’ But, you know, I’ll never forget him.
His name?
No. No. That’s only for me. I’ll just say this, A lovely boy. A lovely, lovely boy.”
I suspect that those first two guys would have looked beyond society's phobia and noted instead two highly successful lives and careers, where each upheld all the principles of freedom and democracy, and somehow kept quiet, hiding in plain sight.
Of course, none of us will ever know.
And of the second two? Well, I’m just thankful that the flight lieutenant (I believe he, too, eventually served as a wing commander on a wartime commission) was able to tell his very private story before it was too late. This recollection reaches back some twelve years or more when I lived in Liverpool and where, spiritually- in my heart- I still am, even though I love being back home in my county, Gloucestershire.
In this very, very dangerous 21st Century, it is well to consider outcomes as well as the blight that every religion, unless handled correctly, does to every society, every community, and every individual the world over, and since the dawn of time.
As the great Sir Anthony Hopkins reminds us in this horrid January 2024, there is something wrong with us, the human mind. ‘We’re stuck’. We’re unable to see the need to compromise. And so the killing and the genocide goes on. The human beast.
Kenneth .T. Webb
Flight Lieutenant (RTD)
6 January 2024
LIVERPOOL
© 2024 Eyes to the Skies
© 2024 Kenneth Thomas Webb
Digital Artwork by Kenneth Thomas Webb
Author Note
In light of the subject, I have included my formal title granted to me
by the Secretary of State for Defence in 1991
for exemplary service as a junior commissioned officer in the RAF VR (1974-1991)
Ken Webb 1985
