"The Greatest People in the World."

The title story for the first "Flying Officer X" collection is a tale of a boy whose poor farming parents sacrifice to fund his education, during which he hears a lecture where pilots are described as "the greatest people in the world."

Bad weather and technical difficulties sabotage his first three assignments in the R.A.F., and he is plagued by nightmares of disaster, a loss of confidence, and then finally the news that his parents have been killed in a raid. Returning from a successful flight, he looks down on a couple working in the fields: he remembered his own people...as they lived, simple and sacrificing, living only for him, and he saw them alive again in the arrested figures of the two people in the field below: as if they were the same people, the same simple people, the same humble, faithful, eternal people, giving always and giving everything: the greatest people in the world."

There are similarities between the pilots in this story and another "Flying Officer X" story, "The Bell."

Published in:

• The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942)
• There's Something in the Air (1943)
• Argosy (July 1944)
• Something in the Air (1944)
• The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952)
• Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989, with title incorrectly given as "The Greatest People on Earth" on the contents page)
• Great Flying Stories (1991)
• The Complete Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (Bloomsbury ebook, 2018)