A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

My internet rabbit hole on pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe and the Guinea Pig Club (WWII aviators who were burned and got reconstructive surgery) produced a remarkable amount of !!! from Wikipedia alone. A number of them had distinctly "you can't make this shit up" lives. (There's also one who possibly did make some shit up.)

For your interest, I present some of my favorite bits.

I had a row with a German.

Tom Gleave

"Gleave was shot down on his first sortie after restoration of his command, on 31 August 1940, and badly burned. Initially treated at Orpington Hospital, he regained consciousness underneath a bed during an air raid. His wife was called to his bedside and asked the heavily bandaged Gleave "what on earth have you been doing with yourself?" "I had a row with a German" was his characteristically laconic reply."



If you click through to just one article, make it this one.

Alois Šiška

This guy's story is incredible from beginning to end. Here's ONE section:

"Šiska was a member of an illegal cell through which he helped Jews and others escape to Poland and later to Hungary. He remained in the republic until the outbreak of war. At that time, fear grew that the Germans would discover a hidden prototype of the Z-XIII aircraft. In order not to fall into their hands, it was decided within the illegal group that the prototype must fly to the Balkans. However, this plan failed.

Together with Alois Bača, they fled across the frozen river Morava to Slovakia, then with the help of a Hungarian pastor, they crossed the Slovak-Hungarian border and continued by train to the border with Yugoslavia. There they were arrested by a Hungarian border guard and imprisoned in Hodmezövasárhely prison for several weeks. After a failed escape attempt, they were deported to the Citadella in Budapest.

Here they were held in harsh conditions together with another hundred and twenty Czechs and a similar number of Poles. An opportunity to escape did not come until 30 March 1940, when Šiška reported to the doctor suffering from scabies. He managed to escape his guards and took a taxi to the French consulate."

Now imagine that sequence of getting captured and imprisoned, then escaping repeating several more times, interspersed with a shipwreck, a lengthy life raft survival situation, and only escaping getting his feet amputated because he seemingly dropped dead.

This line in his Wikipedia entry caused me some confusion when I attempted to search for his memoir: Šiška authored the book No Response KX-B.



The OTHER pilot who flew in combat with two prosthetic legs.

Colin Hodgkinson

This guy had both his legs amputated, then returned to being a fighter pilot! There were at least two men who did this during WWII.

"On 24 November 1943, during a high-altitude weather reconnaissance mission from 11.50, in Amiens area his oxygen supply failed 6 m E. of Hardelot, causing him to crash land in a field. He was dragged from his burning Spitfire by two farm workers, losing an artificial leg in the process. For the next 10 months he was held in Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp, before being repatriated and deemed "no further use to his country". He was again treated by McIndoe and he continued to fly until his release from service in 1946."



On the bright side, a shell severed the control lever and the throttle got stuck on open.

Eric Lock

"On 8 November 1940 his Spitfire was badly damaged during a skirmish with several Bf 109s over Beachy Head in East Sussex. The Spitfire was so badly damaged that Lock crash-landed in a ploughed field, but was able to walk away. On 17 November 1940 No. 41 Squadron attacked a formation of 70 Bf 109s that were top cover for a bomber raid on London. After shooting down one Bf 109, and setting another on fire, Lock's Spitfire was hit by a volley of cannon shells, which severely injured Lock's right arm and both legs.

The rounds also knocked the throttle permanently open by severing the control lever. The open throttle enabled the Spitfire to accelerate swiftly to 400 mph, leaving the Bf 109s in his wake, without Lock having to attempt to operate it with his injured right arm.

At 20,000 feet (6,100 m) he began to descend and with little control and no means of slowing the fighter down, he could not execute a safe landing; being too badly injured to parachute to safety, Lock was in a perilous situation. After losing height to 2,000 feet (610 m), Lock switched the engine off and found a suitable crash site near RAF Martlesham Heath, Suffolk, into which he glided the stricken fighter for a "wheels down" landing.

Lying in the aircraft for some two hours, he was found by two patrolling British Army soldiers and carried two miles (3 km) on an improvised stretcher made of their Enfield rifles and Army issue winter coats—made after instruction from Lock. By this point, Lock had lost so much blood that he was unconscious, and so unable to feel the additional pain of being dropped three times, once into a dyke of water."

Like the war wasn't bad enough.

Jackie Mann.

"Jackie Mann, CBE, DFM was a Royal Air Force fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, who in later life was kidnapped by Islamists in Lebanon in May 1989 and held hostage for more than two years."

A single swipe of a spade.

Richard Pape

"He became a sergeant navigator in a Short Stirling bomber. On a 1941 mission he was shot down close to the German/Dutch border, was twice captured and twice escaped. Following his second capture he was tortured by the Gestapo. He was repatriated by the Germans on health grounds in 1944.

In November of that year he was on a retraining course when he was burnt in a drunken motorcycle accident on the Isle of Man, which led to his being hospitalised at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, for pioneer plastic surgery under Archibald McIndoe: he thus became a member of the Guinea Pig Club."

Also, he was mad at the Beatles.

An Amazon review of his book: Time and time again I thought that what I was reading did not have a ring of truth about it, and in some cases the account was simply unbelievable. A good example of the latter is a story of a fight between two prisoners where one cuts off the other's head with a single swipe of a spade.



Wait for the last line.

Mollie Lentaigne was not a member of the club herself, but a nurse and artist on the medical staff.

"Lentaigne worked as a Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, West Sussex, where her duties included drawing the experimental operations of Archibald McIndoe and his fellow surgeons. She needed to work quickly in the operating theatre and so used pencil but subsequently added ink and colour to some of her work.

Around 300 of Lentaigne's drawings have been preserved at the East Grinstead Museum, as the Mollie Lentaigne Collection. After the surviving Guinea Pig Club members used social media to search for Lentaigne and found her living in Zimbabwe, she returned to East Grinstead in 2013 to be reunited with her work."

She was 93 at the time, and is still alive at the age of 103.

An absolutely superb history of aviation in WWI, in the words of the people who lived it. (Mostly British, with some exceptions.) I love first-person accounts, and this one is exceptionally good: vivid, startling, detailed, exciting, enlightening, often surprisingly funny, and as often unsurprisingly heartbreaking. You don't have to be interested in the subject matter for this to be well worth reading - I'd recommend it to anyone who likes history at all, ever.

It's full of useful details if you write in this period. It confirms that RFC/RAF pilots did get treated at Craiglockhart, along with a lot of other harrowing accounts of PTSD. It's got lots about daily life, like that pilots got pretty good food, put on plays which sometimes involved cross-dressing, and in one case wrote to their parents to ask for fast-growing seeds so they could grow a garden - fast-growing because many of them only survived for a few weeks. It has tons of details about how to fly a Sopwith Camel and other planes of the period, and informs us that the official plural of the German fighter plane, the Albatros, is Albatri.

Levine mostly keeps in the background, though he occasionally indulges in a bit of dubious speculation. For instance, he mentions that W. E. Johns was treated for STDs during his service and dubiously speculates that that was the REAL reason why Biggles stayed single.

I listened to this in audio first, then bought the book in hard copy. The audio version is excellent and includes some music of the period, which was great, but if you want to use it for reference you'll need the physical book.

I was hoping the book would have cites for every source, but unfortunately Levine got the majority of his material from museum and library archives and the originals aren't otherwise available. He only cites six published books in his bibliography, though he definitely uses material from more than that - for instance, he doesn't include Manfred von Richthofen's autobiography in the bibliography, though it's quoted and attributed in the book itself. But he does include the names of everyone he quotes (or says they're anonymous) so it's possible to start from there.

Here's some excerpts, which will give a sense of what the whole book is like. (You all benefit from me FINALLY getting Dragon Dictate to work again on my phone).

These are all accounts by different people. All are British unless marked otherwise.

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By the author of National Velvet, which if you’ve never read it is a quite unusual book with a distinctive prose style and atmosphere that I find quite lovely, especially at the beginning. It doesn’t read at all like your typical girls-and-horses book, though it is that as well.

A Diary Without Dates is Bagnold’s memoir of nursing soldiers during WWI. It’s also written in an unusual, distinctive style, with an unusual, distinctive atmosphere, both gritty and impressionistic. She captures fleeting moments of beauty or horror or unexpected humor, and the sense of how fleeting those moments are, in a way that reminds me a bit of Banana Yoshimoto, of all the unlikely comparisons. I’ve read a number of memoirs by WWI nurses, and this is by far the most interesting on the level of literature. It’s not so much a diary as a record of memorable moments, thoughts, and feelings.

Though it’s not about therapy, it’s one of the books that comes closest to capturing what doing therapy feels like for me. Bagnold delicately and precisely observes the odd mixture of intimacy and distance between nurse and patient, in an institutional setting with inhuman rules against which intensely human dramas are played out, and how you can share a person’s greatest agony one hour, and then walk outside and be moved by the beauty of a flower or annoyed by the next nurse over, and have all those moments be equally real and deeply felt, though some seem trivial and some profound. But to Bagnold, they're all profound because they're all real moments of life, and life itself is profound. A few other works that have that feeling to me are the Tove Janssen's The Summer Book and Anita Desai's The Peacock Garden, and the WWII movie Hope and Glory.

Though it’s not particularly an expose, Bagnold writes rather unflatteringly about some of her bosses and some of the rules at the hospital where she worked. As a result, she was fired when the book came out. So she went to London and became an ambulance driver. I think she must have been quite an interesting person, and reading her diary, I wished that I could have known her. I think we might have had a lot in common and a lot to talk about.

Note: Contains some of-the-period racism and other isms. Not a lot and it’s typical of books written in that period by white people (as opposed to being more racist than usual), but there’s at least one instance though I have now forgotten the details.

While flying to Asheville, I read these two westerns, which I happened to have on my Kindle.

I adore Louis L'Amour. This novel was a great demonstration of how good he is at pulling you into a story. Matt, the hero of this one, isn't the usual good guy who doesn't go looking for trouble, but is found by it. The first three pages of the book go basically like this:

Matt, a young gunslinger, swaggers into town and heads straight for the saloon. There he spots two tough-looking men glaring at each other.

Matt (to tough guy # 1): "I can kick your ass." (To tough guy # 2): "Yours too."

Tough guys: "Want a job?"

Matt: "No... I want a FIGHT."

Tough guys: "Suit yourself."

A beautiful girl, Moira, passes by.

Matt: "Hi, I'm Matt and I'm going to marry you. I can see our strong, handsome sons already!"

Moira: "W. T. F."

Helpful deliverer of exposition: "Hey, gunslinger! As you are probably not aware, those two tough guys are in the middle of a huge, bloody feud with each other. They both want the water from a river on property owned by a third party, Ball, who is no fighter and is going to get murdered any second now."

Matt goes to Ball's ranch.

Matt: "I'm a rough, tough gunslinger, but now I've fallen in love and mean to settle down and raise my future brood of sons. Give me a half share in your ranch and I'll fight two separate gangs of ruthless gunslingers for you!"

Enter Morgan Park, a giant ruthless gunslinger with tiny feet (this is a plot point) and a crush on Moira.

Morgan: "Make that three separate gangs of ruthless gunslingers."

Okay, this isn't actually the first three pages. Morgan doesn't appear until about page ten. But you get my drift.

I'd call this middle-grade L'Amour. The characterization and setting are pretty standard (both are much better in some of his other novels, which also goes for female characters), but it's quite engaging. I'm a bit sorry that Matt stops being such a cocky jackass early on, because he then becomes just a generic guy.

Silver Canyon



I've never read Zane Grey before, and this was not what I was expecting.

New Yorker Carey's fiance Glenn returns from WWI, shell-shocked and seriously ill from being gassed, and takes off for Arizona, to Carey's confusion. (He didn't tell her what bad shape he was in.) She finally goes out meet him. Cue lavish descriptions of scenery and life in the west. She learns that he nearly died, but has now recovered. Mostly. I was hoping for more shell-shock. What I got was this:

Carey: "Wow, life seems really rough out here. I'm not sure I like it. But I will do my best to keep up, because I love you, Glenn!"

Glenn: "City women like you are failures of the modern world and have abandoned your true female natures. You need to move here, do real work, and have babies. Also, stop wearing slutty dresses. I am shocked and horrified."

Carey: "But Glenn, I wore this white dress because you said you love me in white. Um, and also it's hot, and I love you, and you love me, right?"

Glenn: "I guess? But it's so slutty! It has NO SLEEVES! The skirts are at the knee! This is the sign of the decline of western civilization!"

Rachel [checks book to make sure that I am really reading Zane Grey, the famous writer of westerns, because I just summarized a three-page rant on the sluttiness of modern women's wear. Yep. Zane Grey.]

Rough sheep-dipper: "Hey, sexy city-slicker! Let me rape you!"

Carey [faints]

Rough sheep-dipper: "Never mind the rape. Let me lecture you on your slutty attire and how awful modern city women are, then leave in disgust."

Rachel: "Excuse me! Where are the gunslingers? The shoot-outs? The ranch wars? Or, failing that, can we have some more shell-shock? I'm always up for shell-shock!"

Characters of book: "Ha ha ha ha! No. But we've got lots more condescending lectures on the moral failures of modern women."

The Call of the Canyon

Sponsored by lnhammer.

I’ve re-read this at least once before, but not for years. I was always more of an Emily girl. So I had totally forgotten that the first three chapters are titled, “Mrs. Rachel Lynde Is Surprised,” “Marilla Cuthbert Is Surprised,” and “Matthew Cuthbert Is Surprised.” (Later, there is a chapter called “Mrs. Rachel Lynde Is Properly Horrified.”) I had also forgotten how funny it is – not only in incident, like the “getting Diana drunk” chapter or the “jumping on Aunt Josephine” bit, but in the prose itself. Montgomery has a great, wry sense of humor which especially shines in her descriptions of personalities and of village life, and the contrast of Anne’s romantic imagination with the relentlessly down-to-earth people around her is never not funny.

I had not, however, forgotten the classic meet cute in which Anne’s beau-to-be, Gilbert Blythe, calls her hair “carrots” and she breaks a slate over his head. Still a classic scene! But I did forget the equally classic scene in which Anne is punished by being made to – horrors! – sit next to Gilbert in class. He slips her a candy heart. She heartlessly crushes it underfoot.

For those of you who don’t know the story, it was written in 1908, and is set on the lavishly described, rural Prince Edward Island. Aging siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert decide to adopt a ten-year-old boy so they can have someone to help Matthew with the chores. (I was horrified while reading this at how nobody seems to find the slightest thing wrong with that. But then again, the way we treat non-adopted orphans in contemporary America isn’t much better. Or, in many cases, better at all.) But a miscommunication means that they get sent red-headed Anne Shirley instead, a chatterbox who lives largely in an imagination shaped by romantic novels. With some reluctance, they decide to keep her. She proceeds to make Avonlea a far, far more interesting place. Hijinks galore!

Anne was my introduction to L. M. Montgomery, and I read all the books, though I didn’t care for the last couple. (Bored by the later generation, except for Walter, who I adored. Uh-oh.) I also liked Ilse much, much better than Diana, whom I thought a bit dull. Honestly, don’t you think Anne deserved a friend with a bit more spark to her? I also lost interest in Gilbert once their relationship went from sizzling love-hate to dull love. Emily had so many more shipping possibilities than Anne, and I think I sensed that in my little proto-fangirl’s heart. (For the record: Emily/Ilse.)

Still, there’s a bit in which Marilla finds Anne sobbing hysterically for no apparent reason. It turns out that Anne had been imagining Diana’s future wedding (remember, everyone is still ten at this point), and herself as the bridesmaid, “with a breaking heart hid beneath my smiling face. And then bidding Diana good-bye-e-e.” Here Anne again bursts into tears.

The scene made me laugh, and yet… I remember, when I was about eight, suddenly bursting into hysterical sobs in the middle of a playdate. Why? Because at the end of the playdate, Angela would have to go back home and leave me! (Until the next playdate.)

Anne of Green Gables is very, very funny, and the characters are vividly sketched. But maybe one reason it’s so enduring is that Montgomery remembered the intensity of friendship between girls of a certain age.

Anne of Green Gables

A sequel to Regeneration, the historical novel about shellshocked WWI soldiers being treated at a psychiatric hospital.

This was harder for me to get into at first than Regeneration, because the early section concentrates on Billy Prior, the bisexual soldier with class issues, now reassigned to domestic intelligence due to asthma. Prior is interesting but chilly, hard to like. He’s maintaining a girlfriend and having discreet encounters with men on the side; he’s working for an agency devoted to persecuting and jailing pacifists, deserters, and gay and lesbian people, when he’s bisexual himself and has pacifist friends. The first section, which is about Prior’s inner conflicts as embodied in various figures from his low-class past who are now unjustly jailed or on the run from the war he’s trying to return to, is well-done but, for me, more intellectually than emotionally engaging.

To my relief, the novel then returns to Rivers, the psychiatrist, who is once again treating both Prior and Siegfried Sassoon, who has been sent back to England after being wounded again. It’s amazing from there out – suspenseful, and satisfying on every level. All the therapy scenes, and the way that people’s psychological secrets were unraveled, were beautifully done – clever but not reductionist.

There were a number of plot surprises, which I will put under a cut.

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I highly recommend this novel. All else aside, it’s one of the best uses of a repeated motif – the eye – I’ve ever encountered. Warning for horrific wartime violence, and the aftermath of that violence.