A Train of Powder (32 page)

It seemed odd that a person so strong in dissent should have lived the ordinary existence of which we had been told. He had been an RAF officer who had done well in the war, having won a decoration in the Battle of Britain, and had been invalided out of the service. Since then he had made a living in various ways, some of which were quite ordinary jobs of electrical engineering, and others of which, such as dealing in planes for the Near East, were more unusual and probably dovetailed with more dubious ones. He had had bad luck; he had started a factory in Wales to make plastic switches and it had been destroyed by two fires. He had his gay side and was seen about in night clubs, often with notably good-looking girls. But he was making a good living by acting as a commercial pilot. It was a very ordinary story. What made it extraordinary was that, though everybody who knew him, including his wife, to whom he was a devoted husband, believed it, not one word of it was true.

There had been some strange circumstance connected with his birth. His mother was a schoolmistress and called herself his aunt, and when he was three he was sent to some sort of institution which he always described as an orphanage, at which he stayed until he was ten. He interpreted this to mean that he was illegitimate and that he had been sent to this institution because his mother hated him and wished to cast him off. But there are reasons for disbelieving that the story was as simple or as sinister. His mother, an intelligent woman, sister of a well-known scientist, was married at the time of his birth, and it is possible that she may have concealed her relationship to him in order that both of them should escape the shadow of some curious calamity; and certainly many women have sent their young children away to boarding school not because they wanted to but because their circumstances prevented them from looking after them at home. In the village where she lived at the time of the trial she was liked and respected, and as in his childhood she took Hume back from his boarding school to make his home with her, and as she makes a later appearance in his story as conferring with somebody who wanted to be his benefactor, it seems unlikely that she behaved badly to him. Apparently the psychoanalysts are right, and the mind of a child cannot stand any prolonged separation from its mother during the first five years. In any case he continually spoke with rage of his mother, and went on and on through the years about her cruelty in leaving him in the orphanage. He once had a long conversation on the subject with Mrs. Stride, the daily help who gave evidence at his trial, and she gravely told him not to wear himself out by making a fuss over it, and said that she had a right to tell him that, because her father had died young and her mother had had to let her go away for a time, and she knew what it was to have that happen to you when you were a child. But you just had to forget it and get on with life.

He was a clever boy. He won a scholarship that might have taken him through a secondary school and given him a good chance of going to the university; but in a frenzy he rushed out into the world and earned his living as a kitchen boy in various hotels. It is strange that wherever this boy went, who was bitter because he believed his mother had failed to love him, the earth opened and there appeared people who were willing to give him deep and disinterested affection. One winter’s day in 1934, when he was fourteen, he was seen by a motorist walking across a common in the suburbs of London, dragging a heavy suitcase and weeping. The motorist stopped and gave him a lift and asked him what his trouble was. Hume told him that he was running away from a job as a houseboy in a hotel where they had ill-treated him, and was going to the docks to find a ship that would take him. The motorist, who was a builder, offered him a job in his own business, bought him a suit of clothes, and got one of his own foremen to take the boy in as a lodger. This was amazing good luck, for the foreman’s wife, an elderly woman named Mary Clare, immediately became his loving and beloved mother.

There began what should have been a happy life for him. By day he learned with some aptitude the craft of electrician; and in the evening he sat with his new mother in the kitchen and enchanted her and was enchanted by her. For a time he became a Communist and had a contented time planning revolution, but politics had hardly any chance with him because of his obsession with planes. When he was working on the wiring of a new house they could always tell where he had been, because he had scribbled drawings of planes on the plastered walls. It was this passion for planes which made him leave that business and take a job in an aircraft factory, and later another one in a Metal Engraving Company which had some connection with aeronautics. At the same time he joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve, and when war came he enlisted in the Royal Air Force.

Very soon he had a serious accident when flying. Probably he cared too much about it. Shortly afterwards he had an attack of cerebro-spinal meningitis, and he was declared unfit for flying duty and put on the ground staff. Eighteen months after he had volunteered he was declared unfit for any sort of duty in the RAF and was invalided out. Then he took a job as one of the spotters who sat on the roofs of factories and offices and gave warning when a German plane was actually in the neighbourhood, so that the workers need not break off and go down to the shelter when the sirens sounded, which might announce the arrival of a plane anywhere within a hundred miles. At the same time he was trying to get back into the RAF through other avenues, and once got a call to an Aviation Selection Board, but was turned down. It happened about this time that Mary Clare, who had again given him a home, took in her own daughter and her husband, who were homeless owing to the war, and the girl had a baby. Hume became bitterly jealous and complained that Mrs. Clare gave the baby too much of her attention and that it cried so much that he got pains in his head. He became such a plague that she was forced to ask him to leave the house.

Shortly afterwards he revisited his benefactor, who had picked him up on the common six years before. He was in sergeant-pilot’s uniform and told a story of having played a gallant part in the Battle of Britain. He gave his benefactor and some of the workmen souvenirs, parts of planes he had shot down and a German machine gun. Later he turned up again in officer’s uniform, wearing the ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Medal; and in this rig-out he went to the Metal Engraving Company works, where the firm gave him a substantial cheque in appreciation of what he had done for the country. Then his benefactor received a visit from the police, who told him that Hume had been using his name in the town to recommend himself to people on whom he played the confidence trick; and shortly afterwards he was arrested for masquerading as an RAF officer. He had for some time been carrying on a peculiar fraud, which required great talent and resourcefulness. After Mrs. Clare had asked him to go he had lodged with an ex-officer of the RAF, and had bought his uniform from him and had borrowed an RAF identity card. Thereafter he had travelled from one airfield to another all over the country, living in the messes, getting pilots to take him up for flights, and finally cashing worthless cheques and going on his way to another airfield. He even consulted an RAF medical officer and got him to certify him as unfit for duty, so that he had a certificate to convince any military policeman or anybody else who questioned him that he was on sick leave.

So ingenious was this plan of campaign that the police at first thought that Hume must be a spy. But they found out that the story was a simple one of imposture, and he was bound over to come up for judgment after being kept in prison for some time under medical treatment. While he was jailed he wrote to Mrs. Clare, who sent him sweets and food. But when he came out he did not go to see her. He cut himself off from his second chance of a contented home life because it was more important to him that he should be able to go on pretending to be a pilot. His marriage was a supreme episode in that impersonation; and there are glimpses of other delights. One summer he appeared at Torquay, the best of the south coast seaside resorts, with an American accent and a large American automobile, saying that he was a Pan-American Airways pilot. He became very popular, and when there was a town carnival he was asked to drive the carnival queen in the procession, which he did, bringing out a scarlet and gold uniform for the occasion. He gave the right impression of being very good-humoured about doing something which he could not, of course, really like doing.

It is an obvious enough story. He suffered from the neurotic’s incapacity for love and could not compensate for that lack by exercising power, so pretended to be powerful. But it was much more than that. The idea of flight had had some treatment in his mind which made it tremendous. When Mr. Humphreys, listing his lies, asked him whether it were not true that he had pretended to be a pilot though he had failed his tests, he was convulsed with grief and fury as he shouted back that he had not failed his tests, he had never taken them, he was not allowed to take them, because he had concussion. “You have no right to say I failed,” he cried, as if Mr. Humphreys were in some magic way killing him by using those words. He too had his religion, he could not bear to have it violated, he was a fervent worshipper. That was to be seen in his apartment, which was a temple of flight. The upper parts of all the walls were obsessionally covered with photographs of planes, of aviators, of air battles, with parts of planes, with cartoons about flyers. Many boys and girls are infatuated with flying, but their rooms are not quite like these, though the fetishes are the same. In his apartment there was a wall on the staircase to the upper floor which took the light. On this wall there were arranged such pictures and such plane parts, and a medal. They were arranged in a pattern like the outline of a great bird with wings. This was not planned; it was an achievement of the daemon within Hume, who had ideas about flight beyond the sphere of aeronautics, who allowed, indeed, some pictures on his walls which were neither of planes nor aviators, which were of birds with strong wings, wild swans, wild geese, creatures of dazzling plumage, cleaving air so high and pure that it is not air at all. Hume had mistaken the nature of his spirit. This was not denial, it was affirmation.

Purity is the justification of flight here. You rise and leave your abhorred mother and the orphanage far below. Above the pictures and the plane parts on the walls was a cartoon representing a pilot as a knight in armour, saving the world from evil. There was no indication anywhere in the apartment that Hume was attracted by the idea of murder. There were on his shelves no detective stories, only books, mostly of a high standard, about flying and adventure. But there were in these pictures hints that added up to a broad statement that a man had lived here who would find it ecstasy, the perfect realization of a fantasy which had absorbed him from childhood, to take a corpse, reeking emblem of our human corruption, defy its nastiness by exposing it to the purification of flight, and cast it down through the clean air into the clean sea, which would keep it and cover it and annul it forever. It was extraordinary that somewhere an unknown man had found it pleasing to his soul to kill and cut up an enemy, thus giving Hume an opportunity to do the equally strange thing that pleased his soul; but not more extraordinary than that the corpse should ultimately have been picked up by Mr. Tiffen, who was as strange as these others in his great goodness, and therefore was able to pity Mr. Setty in a way that performed the miracle Hume had thought the air and sea would do, and took the horror from the crime.

It must not be thought that Hume got his ecstasy for nothing. He had had to win it by great courage. He had either been connected with the RAF or posing as a flyer for about twelve years, but not till the last year had he taken flying instruction sufficient to get a licence. Then he only got a civilian “C” licence, which enabled him to fly solo but included only one hour’s instruction in navigation and none at all in night flying. It was the opinion of the airfield staff that he had no gift for flying, and in any case he must have lacked practice. In his work as an electrician he showed a curious mixture of flashes of unusual aptitude combined with an unusual unhandiness and failure to grasp essentials. It is to be noted that the times of his two flights with Setty’s body over the sea, running into the evening, are fantastically long; he should have been able to do the job well before dusk fell. He landed in the most odd places, twice coming down south of the river when he wanted to be north. He owned to the police that he blundered about, losing his bearings, misjudging his height so that once he nearly flew into the water. It was bad weather. It was sheer accident that he did not die for his ideal.

Surviving that phase of danger, he tried again for martyrdom. When he was telling the story of how the three men had given him the parcels his life depended on whether he was believed; but his desire to alienate his hearers grew here to a perverse climax, and he told the story so that nobody would wish to believe it. When he was describing how he had handled the third parcel, how, as he lifted it, it made a gurgling noise and he saw a pool of blood under it, he said, “It put the fear of Christ up me,” and leered. There was nothing spontaneous in the brutality of his speech. He was using the name of Christ in the hope that some believers would consider it blasphemy, he was speaking of the dead flesh with planned callousness so that he should affront the pitiful, and he was feeling a sensual pleasure at the thought that he was disgusting people so much that presently they would turn round and hurt him, perhaps to the ultimate degree. He worked still further to that end by altering the time when this incident had occurred to an hour different from the one he had given in his original statement, thus making it less easy to believe. At such moments his plump face lost masculinity and youth; he might have been a smiling middle-aged woman dressed as a man. He was invoking chaos, and it came. But he did not appear a murderer. It was impossible to imagine him leaving the world of fantasy long enough really to kill a man. But the three men he described as leaving the corpse with him, they too seemed to belong to the world of fantasy.