'No Circus could rival this'

Men were training for the Second Front. Huge, fat bodied aeroplanes hurtled across the sky above what looked like a violent battle, with guns rocking and stabbing the air, smoke screens drifting, and tanks and lorries and self-propelled guns darting about below. From the aeroplanes scores and hundreds of black dots spattered like pepper from a collection of pepper-pots; then the dots blossomed into canopies and became paratroops.

High ranking officers watching from below made sudden exclamations - pointed upwards. One of the dots had failed to detach itself from one of the aircraft that was tearing across the sky at four miles a minute. That twisting, writhing black dot was a man whose parachute had failed to open, and he was hanging outside the aircraft far below and behind it. The paratroopers name was Trevor. He said later that he abandoned all hope, spreadeagled there by the terrific force of the wind, turned over by it so that he could catch fleeting glimpses of men peering horror-struck from above in the machine's belly and then swiftly blown round again.

It could not be imagined that the line could hold more than a minute or so. When it broke, Trevor would fall like a stone. Above, in the aircraft Sergeant Instructor Alfred Cook, a Yorkshireman from Goole, was struggling to pull Trevor back into the machine.

There was only one thing to do and Cook swiftly started to do it, while the faces of tough paratroops waiting to jump turned white. For Alfred Cook was fastening his parachute tight against his body, while preparing to climb down that slender line as the aircraft roared along inmid-air. The line could hardly be expected to hold one man- it must almost certainly break under the weight of two.

But - the aeroplane could not land without killing Trevor; to delay meant that the line would snap anyway; Cook took the millionth chance. He clambered out into the air that whistled and poured past the streamlined underbelly of the machine. He had to cling with hands, feet, legs and eyebrows. Then he began to go down the line hand over hand, hand over hand.

Below, the guns thudded and the tanks rattled and roared. All around in the sky other aircraft were dropping their paratroops. The sun shone brilliantly. The line did not snap. Cook took one hand off and swiftly clutched at Trevor. He almost fell, recovered and made another snatch. He grabbed a foot and in holding it almost dislodged his own one handed grip from the line. Hooking his elbow round Trevor's foot, he released that hand, and with it tried to release Trevor's parachute. The men peering down from above could see the two of them swinging and twisting, sailing along at the end of the outstretched line that twanged in the wind like a violin string about to crack through being keyed too tight. They could see Cook's teeth set deep in his lower lip and Trevor's eyes blinking with fatigue. Then the slipstream from the powerful motors above suddenly took a hand in the drama - like a live thing it clutched at Cook's parachute and began to force out the rigging lines from the bag.

The two bodies swung round and round in the slipstream, their equipment reflecting the sun in dull patches of light. As they twisted, the lines of the two parachutes entangled hopelessly, then entangled again as the twist began the other way, then twisted afresh.

A few minutes more of that and Cook would have cut out Trevor's last tiny chance of life, for once they were properly tangled, neither could survive; they would just hang there in a twist of death until the line above them snapped.

"I'm going to jump!" Cook yelled at the top of his voice. The roaring motors just above them drowned his words; the slipstream tore them away with a yell of savage triumph. Trevor turned his head, was twisted aside, but his eyes rolled round at Cook to show he had heard words. "I'm going to jump. Hold on - to me. Pull you free! Hold on! Can you hear?" Trevor nodded sharply twice, and gripped Cook's harness with hands and feet.

Cook jumped free, as the line untwisted. . . His body went hurtling away down into the abyss; but Trevor, defeated by a sudden blast of air, was unhitched from his grip and left swinging on the end of the line as before. No! Not as before! For Alfred Cook as he hung there, had performed the impossible. He had freed the line from its kinks and twists, and now there was a chance - a slender chance still, but ten thousand times more than before - to pull Trevor into the aircraft. Cook went sailing head-over-heels, jerked into an upright position as his own chute finally opened - and the men in the aircraft saw the white blob of his face instantly turn upwards and stare at Trevor.

The men crouched round the open doors in its belly began, with infinite caution, to try and haul the line in. They sweated so that they constantly had to wipe a slippery hand on chest or trouser; they leaned over the great gulf in which Trevor hung till it looked as if they would hurtle out to join him. He came slowly twisting upwards, like a salmon in a slow motion film. A big fellow with arms like a gorilla reached right down into the windy gulf, while three others gripped his legs. "Farther - bit bit farther, mates . . ." And then the man who was coming back from the dead felt a human grip on his shoulder; clutching up a handful of his tunic - felt a hand go beneath his other armpit. And so they dragged him in.

And, far below, beyond the edge of the battle area, Alfred Cook was expertly disengaging his parachute harness. As he did so, he noticed something. Five of the parachute rigging lines were broken. Whoever made that parachute put honest work into it; otherwise Alfred Cook would have hit the earth like a falling thunderbolt and died. But he was not thinking of that. He was wondering about Trevor, had they managed to pull him in, after all? Had the line snapped?

Goole and England - can be proud of this man. They gave him the George Medal. Few would have dared to attempt what he did; not, perhaps, one man in a million could have succeeded as he did hanging there in mid-air, with Death screaming at his shoulder.