Excerpts

From 1940

THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT: 3:58 AM. on the WATERTANK GUARD

Plod, plod go my feet, a hundred paces round my beat.
Nod, nod goes my head: how I wish I was in bed!
Rifle's heavy on my shoulder, hands are blue and getting colder.
Must keep moving round this tank, guard it like a blooming bank!
How I curse this graveyard shift: the hours drag and the minutes drift.
I'm asleep, my feet are cold: good story that the sergeant told!
Gee, I sure would like to shout "Ho Sergeant - there:
Hey Guard - TURNOUT!"
Wonder what's behind that light?
Black-out's not so good tonight...
Thing seems senseless anyway - Gerry never comes this way.
What's that?? - Oh, just another plane: shucks, it's starting to rain.
Water's running down my neck, curses on this bloomin' wreck!
I ask, do I deserve this grief? - "Halt, who's there?" -
Ahhhhhh, my relief!!!!

From 1940

But to get back to the peculiar incident. It happened about 5 AM. I was making my way wearily down Fleet Street for I had been chasing incendiaries all night and was very tired. I crossed Ludgate Circus and started up Ludgate Hill. The great dome of St. Paul's was gilded with the rays of the rising sun and seemed to share an air of hope and peace upon the ruins which nestled all around its feet. My ears were still roaring with the noise of fires and bombs and planes and guns.
Suddenly, as I stepped into the open space in front of St. Paul's, a beautiful sound of singing burst upon my ear. Heavenly music it was! Thousands upon thousands of whistles and cries. It was the sparrows and the pigeons - which flock about St. Paul's all the year, singing as though their throats would burst! I stood there absolutely unable to budge. After all the horror and terror of the past night to hear such a beautiful thing as that...it completely restored my faith in God which had begun to waver under the impact of such a horror as I had seen. How I wished that all of London could have heard it. Instead there was I - completely alone, listening to that wonderful choir. It is a sound that I will never forget as long as I live.

From 1941

And now for the most important news of all.
I have saved it for the last because suspense doubles enjoyment!
Last week, Lady Astor introduced me to George Bernard Shaw and he and I had a quiet little chat (all by ourselves) lasting quite five minutes....it was the most dramatic and vivid five minutes I have spent in my life so far! Even when I was in the midst of the Blitz last fall I was not so thrilled - for all that seemed so garish and unreal, so very impersonal, just as though I said to myself, 'All this cannot be happening to me!' But this meeting was real! I felt the grip of his hand, heard his voice and saw him in person! He is a wonderful man, a living, walking example of the proverb 'A man is as old as he feels' for although he is an old man in years, his posture is one that a young man well might envy! His conversation kept my mind racing trying to keep up with him as he nimbly skipped from topic to topic. He is very tall - over six foot I think, with flowing snow-white hair and beard, bushy fierce-looking eyebrows and his surprisingly-keen eyes peering out from behind them. Reminds you rather of a fierce 'old lion looking through his mane'! I could not discover the color of his eyes but I think they are a bright blue. But the most surprising thing about him, is his facial expression and the fact that his boastings (which are quite real by the way) do not upset you at all. You merely accept them as being the just-right of a great man. His face is startling in its childlike simplicity and its extreme placidity. No picture of him that I've seen really does him justice for they all seem to make him out as a petty, boastful, arrogant old man and he certainly never struck me that way. His wit is of that scintillating variety that is as keen as a knife-blade and refreshing as dew and yet at the same time, is innocent of any maliciousness. His voice is pleasing and resonant with a wonderful Irish-lilt that is truly charming. Altogether, I think I was more impressed by him than by any other man I have ever met: and there are some very famous ones among them! I see one of them - Lord Willingdon, died last week. Love t'all, JIM

From 1941

I am immensely proud too that the 'Toronto Star' should print my letter. Wonder how they got it...hope you kept a copy: I never do. I have a notion that all these things I am writing now are going to valuable to me some day. A definite book is gradually taking form in my mind and these letters together with my diary are going to be of immense help to me. Even now my diary is an immense help and comfort. Was reading it over the other day and was so surprised to find out how interesting it was!

From 1942

I don't know what it is but a feeling of confidence has come into me ever since I managed to transfer to the RCAF that was never there before. I am convinced of my own ability to do things whereas before, I doubted my own initiative and powers...as though I no longer feared something. Anyway, my Army life has taught me one thing: if you would do a thing to the best of your abiiliity and the utmost limit of your power, never fight against your natural inclination. I did that for three years and the result was misery and futility. Everything I turned my hand to, too quickly flourished and as quickly died because my heart was not there though my head and hands were. All the time my heart was in the sky with the planes I saw day after day skimming so lightly across the sky or diving in and out of clouds like otters playing in a pool. There is something fascinatingly beautiful about a Spitfire winging its way homeward through the dusk as darkness falls, passing as it does a slow lumbering bomber outward-bound for Germany or France. One somehow doesn't think that this Spitfire has probably just returned from shooting up a goods-train or attacking a convoy and the Whitley is probably loaded to the gunwales with bombs to be dropped on our enemies. We even forget the human agency inside each plane: forget that that is a fellow human being piloting that Spitfire, he becomes transferred in our imagination into a supernatural being - a demi-god, sitting secure on his seat like a king on his throne: master of all he surveys. And who can say he's not? He rules himself and his machine. He has a definite job to do today, tomorrow and many tomorrows until it is done. His path is clear before him. And he knows what living and life really are. No man can taste the sweetness of life until he is ready to lose it. What is the use of a sacrifice unless it contains the elements of blood and tears, toil and sweat. Therefore, I am not going to take any steps to evade danger if it should come my way. But facing up to it does not mean - as you seem to have interpreted one of my former letters, taking unnecessary risks. You should have more faith in your own teachings than that Mother! You - above all people, should realize that I am not foolhardy and a daredevil. Whenever I do anything, my mind and eyes are open: I know what I am going to do, how I am going to do it and why it is being done.
Yes Mother, I am but 21 years of age, but those years have taught me far more than they teach most men and I know a more vast range of experiences and emotions than many men know in a lifetime. The things I have seen, I have seen in my heart and they have become part of me. And they have helped me decide what I know is worth living for - yes, and worth dying for too. The world in which I was born and in which I lived was a chaos of shattered ideals and false hopes, of lies, bitterness, ambition, greed and lust directed to the end of self-advancement. Men grovelled or trampled or wheedled or bribed their way to victory or power or position, thus truth and honor and self-sacrifice were forgotten - or even worse, derided as evidence of weakness.
But those derided virtues have now come into their own again: honour again strides triumphantly over a re-awakened world, truth is struggling upward from the realms of darkness where she had been banished. And it is to help her upward into the light again that I am where I am today. We must learn to trust the men beside us, the man - our neighbor whose strivings and ambitions are identical with our own, whose goal is our goal and whose hopes and fears are our hopes and fears. We must pull together, band ourselves into a unity that will tear down this rotten, tottering structure that has held us suppressed for so long. We must answer our own questions, solve our own riddles, face our own fears and have faith in ourselves. Too long we have trusted others to do what we should have done, and the result has been that we have been muzzled and duped and encompassed with lies and scandals and black iniquities upon which we have looked and from which we have turned away because we loathed dirtying our hands. Someone else's hands could be dirtied, but not ours! Now our eyes are opened and we understand what we must do. We must set up a new order of living which again goes back to the basic teachings of Christ and the laws of God. That is what I am fighting for, that is what all the Free people of the world are hoping for and that is what I am firmly convinced God meant for us. That is our ministry, that is our mission!

From 1944

THESE THINGS HE LOVED

The blue wood smoke from winter fires curling upward through the frosty air
As - pail in hand, he trudged through crunching snow down to the barn in that half-light before
The winter's dawn. The rythmic jingling of harness chains when the unhitching's done
And tired horses - aching to be gone to pasture where they cool their sweaty sides
By rolling in the fragrant grass, stamped their feet and nuzzled in the green-grown water
trough.
The first faint tinkle of ol' Bessie's bell as home she led the herd in summer's dusk
Along the winding path from out the dingle where grass grew greener, sweeter than elsewhere:
For that was where the brawly brook ran through.
The hurrying, bustling days of harvest time when golden wheat stretched first in swinging waves
As far as the eye could see and then, the fields were dotted o'er with stooks and then - e're long,
The busy hum of threshers filled the air.
All those long harvest days: up e're the sun had thrown it's light upon the sleeping world
To work right through the blazing heat of noon, on through the dusk and if the moon were full,
Into the night: for threshing must be done
Before the sky turned grey and sent slow down the first faint fluttering flakes of fairy snow.
These things and hundreds more he loved. They were his world and he - content to live
And let others live as they saw fit, was happy.
Where is he now? This happy boy who yet was not a boy?
He fast grew up and almost overnight became a man: for when one harvest came,
A blacker cloud o'ercast the autumn sky and then a spectre - grimly purposeful.
Began to reap a harvest yet unripe.
A swath of men (brave men in pride of youth) fell thick and fast before that flashing scythe,
And his was one of those whose life was reaped.
Down from the white-traced sky he fluttered
Like the blue wood-grouse he had so often shot at home among the beech woods on the hill.
"Killed in Action" thus the cable read, but letters later came and told the tale:
How his Squadron - out upon a fighter sweep o'er war-torn France had found a flock of Huns
And - though out-numbered, had dived straight in.
How - in the melee, he - to save another had sacrificed his life and fell in flames.
He gave his all that we at home might live to keep the things that he so deeply loved.
But we (in blindness) see not the things he saw: we take them for our natural heritage
And rarely think of those who fought to keep them safe for us. Let us remember them:
That one and all the thousands more like him who day by day gave more to us by far
than we could ever hope to give to them.
We cannot give our lives perhaps, but we at least can give our bodies and our minds
to tasks the nation now demands of us.
Let's give ourselves as freely as they gave -Let
not the thought of 'self' besmirch the soul: they did not think of self,
Why then should we?

JAMES BAKER Spring 1944

From 1945

However, everything will work out if only I have the patience to let it, and sufficient trust in God. That is one thing that I have learned here in Ops. One has to trust one's soul to God's keeping in order to achieve anything. That I learned - really, before I came here but I never practiced it because I never really knew what it meant. But when one flies as we do into the 'face of death' and repeatedly goes back again and again, one learns what faith and trust in God really means and one sees (probably for the first time) how small and trivial are our trials and petty tribulations compared to the great reality that is the 'Fountain of Life': God's love for us.