We have ways of making you talk presents One Man's Window, an illustrated account of

10 weeks of war, multiple April 13th to June 21st, 1942 by Dennis Barner.

Chapter 2 Operational Tour

The last time I was in an aircraft carrier I was 8 years old. My mother had taken me

to a Navy week at Port Smith. It was the scale of the aircraft carrier that assaulted by

child's eye. With its flight deck so horizontally flat and its vertical surfaces, its superstructure

and masks rising up into the sky like Jack's Beanstalk. I was excited by the secret

caverns to explore in such a ship, but the last many of them were forbidden to the public.

I'm still that child on just such a carrier now. I'm rather disappointed that the Burle

American seamen called me buddy instead of sir, although I am able to explore. But I

am astonished to find myself here, just 22 years old, a married man, an officer in charge

of a flight of 12 Spitfires and their pilots on a carrier that is steaming into action

in war. I expected to be an artist, a painter. On my 17th birthday, my mother gave me a

present of a studio, once a chauffeur's quarters above the garages at home. In its

eye painted pictures, listened to music and read avidly. I had begun that hunt for truth

that so many other ad lessons must have begun just before the war. In my case, it was particularly

my love of music and paintings that nourished my inward life. Furthermore, as I became aware

of the beauty and structure in the music of Bach and Beethoven, and in the paintings

of De La Francesca and Blake, I linked them with what I was reading about the universe.

In paintings, I knew it was quite impossible to be aware of the design of a picture if

my eyes were too near the canvas. Thus I felt that man was too much implicated with the

universe to be aware of its order. But I sensed an insignificant and perhaps an intuitive

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