“He’s A Very Nasty Piece Of Work – You’re Lucky To Have Him”

I’ve just finished reading Piece of Cake, Derek Robinson’s controversial novel about the RAF in 1939 and 1940. Controversial because this is a bleak, cynical, and blackly comic look at flying in wartime. As such, it’s rather like Hornet’s Sting, the same author’s take on First World War flyers. Something about the setting makes this a much punchier effort, though.

The concept of “The Few” in the Battle of Britain is a core part of the British national myth, with the young fighter pilots of the RAF held to be examples of everything good about Britain and the British. Robinson’s view of “The Few” is that it consisted mainly of morally blank undergraduates, with a smattering of swaggering crypto-fascists and cold-eyed psychopaths for good measure. At the heart of the novel is Pilot Officer “Moggy” Cattermole, a sort of Flashman for the Twentieth Century – except that Flashman was always intended to be a loveable rogue, and there’s nothing loveable about Cattermole.

The author’s skill is that even though these pilots are painted in pretty dark colours, they still do things which you’d have to admit are heroic – like getting into an aircraft five times a day in order to take on odds of five-to-one. Does this make up for their deficiencies? Perhaps. As Robinson points out, the fact that the men who won the Second World War were so flawed doesn’t diminish their achievements, it makes them far more impressive.