Young Bradman

139 The ‘stream of average men’ on Charlwood’s squadron flowed on – a dozen or more crews would fly from his airfield at night on a mission and usually one or more never returned - and those left became dulled to the deaths, including, probably, their own. The public seldom heard of these missing thousands; rather they heard of those whose luck lasted sufficiently long for their courage to be revealed. Probably no one realised this more clearly than did the Himalayan men themselves and yet, knowing the odds, men like Edwards strained their luck to the uttermost – and seldom did they win. Cricket or any sport was never like a war; as the fighters knew better than any. However, we can well imagine Bradman applying himself to the months-long training to become a navigator, radio operator or pilot, for he had many of the talents needed. He had the physical strength to do the work for eight or nine hours, and the concentration (although whereas as a batsman you could rest between balls, over the Continent you had to be alert in case of night-fighter attack at any moment); the will-power to become good at a job with practice (staying alive would give all the motivation anyone needed) and team-work (because a mistake by one crewman could be the death of a crew). Despite all that, Charlwood came to see a disturbing truth. Guy Chapman, the survivor of the 1914-18 war, saw the same in civilian life: ‘excellence is not rewarded as naturally as the sun ripens a fig’. In a competitive but civilised society, men could assume they did well or not on merit. Life was rational. In war, there was no such deal. Bad weather, a defective aircraft, the unavoidable German ‘flak’, an error in the dark – so many ‘discrete events’ could kill a crew, no matter how heroic or careful. Even the ‘Himalayan men’ proved it – Guy Gibson and Percy Pickard died in combat in 1944. Charlwood’s memoir, though not, as I learned in conversation with him, completely autobiographical, can stand beside great works of war literature, like Ernst Juenger’s Storm of Steel and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front – from another war, and another side – because all those authors felt and expressed the numbing shock of losing so many around them; in Charlwood’s case, the ‘Twenty’ that he trained with, in Canada like Walker. Statistically remarkable as he was, Charlwood knew his place. He was like the outstanding club bowler who understands he is a ‘yard slower’ than a professional player, who is likewise measurably below the international; and even the international knows there is a difference between him and the very greatest. Again, the air force does not compare to a sport. Besides the physical desk between Charlwood and Edwards when they met, the responsibility that came with Edwards’ higher rank placed a psychological distance between the two. Charlwood’s metaphor was so clever because it hinted at their duty to fly, the Royal Air Force’s hierarchy, and – once you climbed high enough – how hard it was simply to keep breathing. If we respect the men of Bomber Command for the risks they ran, how humbling it is that veterans looked up to others among them. So it is with the most exceptional players in Bradman’s old age. ‘Even today,’ Steve Waugh wrote in 2013, ‘a decade after his death, we [all in Australian The Himalayan Men