A Piece of Cake
The most memorable metaphor of the book, arguably of course, is also the title of one of the stories. In this sense, it is inarguably the most significant metaphor in the book. The story “A Piece of Cake” not only uses this common metaphor describing anything that is every easy to do but also repeats the phrase several times throughout.
“Katina”
One might put up the argument that the most memorable metaphorical imagery in the book is that which describes the title character of this story. Katina is a little girl who has been orphaned as the result of Germans bombing her Greek village. She is effectively adopted by the flight squadron in a horrific story that leads to a nightmarish ending. The description of the little girl is hard to get out of your mind:
“The hatred which was on the face of the child was the fierce burning hatred of an old woman who has hatred in her heart; it was an old woman’s hatred and it was strange to see it.”
Death by Snakebite
“An African Story” is also horrific, but in a way as different from “Katina” as it seems possible within a collection with a narrowly focused unifying theme. It is the story which veers farthest from that theme as the collective agent of being about RAF pilots during World War II is tangential at best. In this story-within-a-story-within-a-story the climax is the death of a character from the venomous bite of a black mamba. Metaphor provides a chilling image of that gruesome quality of that demise:
“It was all very quiet, as though a man of great strength was wrestling with noise. It was all very quiet, as though a man of great strength was wrestling with a giant whom one could not see, and it was as though the giant was twisting him and not letting him get up, stretching his arms through the fork of his legs and pushing his knees up under his chin.”
Fear Itself
“Death of an Old Old Man” begins in the first-person with a stream-of-consciousness penetration into the mind of an RAF pilot who is considered a great pilot equipped with all the necessary stoicism that makes it possible to climb back into the cockpit again and again ever knowing if this is the flight where luck finally catches up. In a frenzied half-crazy narrative style not far removed from the paranoid protagonist of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” the pilot drops all pretense and reveals the naked truth about the fear that grips him each time he heads back to the cockpit:
“At first it begins to grow upon you slowly, coming upon you slowly, creeping up on you from behind, making no noise, so that you do not turn round and see it coming. If you saw it coming, perhaps you could stop it, but there is no warning. It creeps closer and closer, like a cat creeps closer stalking a sparrow, and then when it is right behind you, it doesn’t spring like the cat would spring; it just leans forward and whispers in your ear.”
“Mad as a hatter”
This familiar simile is used exclusively in the story “Someone Like You” to exclusively describe a pilot known as Stinker who was forced to leave his dog behind in Malta when he got orders to leave for Egypt and spent the rest of his short life acting as though the dog was right there with him every moment of the day. The phrase refers to someone who has gone completely bonkers, of course, but within that general meeting is the embedded connotation of having succumbed to insanity directly as a result of the job you are doing. Although the phrase is only directly attached to Stinker, it is a metaphor that could equally well apply to any number of characters in this collection.
