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Wilbur comments about
EAGLE IN THE SKY:
In 1946, when I was twelve years
old, I went with my father to buy cattle for the ranch, and I met a young man who had been
a Hurricane pilot during the Battle Of Britain. He had been shot down in flames over the
Channel, and my childish horror still remains with me when I remembered how he looked.
He was living alone on a remote ranch
for reasons which were clear once I thought about it, which I often did.
I wondered how such a man might find
happiness and the solution occurred to me. When I became interested in writing I thought
about it as a short story - the mutilated airman and the lovely blind girl. Now I know
that the story was not ripe at that time, and I am glad that I waited so long to tell it.
When at last I started on the necessary
research for the book, my wife and I visited Israel, and the deeper we went into Judaism,
the more intrigued I became. We spent months exploring that incredible land, but always we
were drawn back to the golden city of Jerusalem, sitting on its many hills, wrapped in the
folds of history. Within days of our going it was plunged into the holocaust of Yom Kippur
war and I wonder how many of those cheerful youngsters, who crowded happily into the rear
seat of the Volkswagen when we picked them up beside the road, now lie in some lonely
desert grave...
Although I have flown light aircraft
since I first took instruction at the age of sixteen, I had to research modern jet
interceptors and this was not an easy task. An almost neurotic veil of security hangs over
most air force bases - but at last I found amongst the closed ranks people who had read and
enjoyed my previous books. Even they were reluctant to allow me actually to fly one of
their beloved Mirage fighters, and I saw the reason later when I was seated in the
earthbound flight simulator faced by the bewildering array of instruments and performing
what I believed were a few masterly evaluations. I remember the voice of the flight
controller in my earphones. "Mr Smith, you are now approaching Mach 2. You are in a
vertical dive and you are three hundred feet above the ground. What are you going to
do?" I solved the problem by raising the canopy of the controller with the terse
command, "Take over, Major!"
There is much else in the story that has
very personal associations. I remember my eighteen-month-old son tottering into the circle
of bare earth commanded by a fully grown chained baboon. I reached the child one hundredth
of a second before the animal, but his shirt was torn from him and the baboon's claws
raised long red scratches across his chest as I snatched him away. The baboon had not been
chained by me. The captivity of any wild animal I find completely repellant.
My wife and I try to make a safari into
the bush every year, but there are no guns on our safaris. When I was fourteen, I shot my
first lion - but I have not aimed my rifle at a living thing since I turned twenty-one.
The abhorrence that I have for poachers dates also from about that age when I saw
the work they had done on a cherished herd of the rare and lovely Roan Antelope that had
the run of my father's ranch.
EAGLE IN THE SKY, then, is a very
special book for both my wife and myself. Much of it was actually lived and all of it was
deeply felt.
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