H.E. Bates Companion

A story much in the mold of Bates's "Flying Officer X" stories, but neither appearing in those collections nor with that pseudonym. The narrator relates a visit to the aristocratic mother and sister of a dead pilot, during which conflicting memories of pilot emerge. At story's end, the narrator tries to put aside all the differing images and think of the boy "when alone, flying by night, when no one could see his face or guess his thoughts;" the mother admits that "I sometimes think...I never knew him at all." In Printer's Pie -- A Miscellany by Leading Writers (London: Hutchinson, 1943, ed. Leonard Russell, pp. 41-46.)