In the Wet (17 page)

Jet temperatures on the port inner engine were a little high at altitude, and they spent some time next morning adjusting the fuel pumps and doing engine runs. They took off for Ottawa after an early lunch and landed four hours later in the dark. Next day was a Saturday and they displayed the aircraft to a large number of Canadian members of the Senate and the House of Commons, now seeing the aeroplane that they had given to the Queen for the first time.

It was a disappointment to David that the Governor-General did not come to see the aircraft. Sir Thomas Forrest was a legendary figure at that time to every man who had served in the Russian war, the Field-Marshal who had come up from the bottom, who had risen from corporal to brigadier in the second war, from major to lieutenant-general in the third. At that time he had been Governor-General of Canada for about two years. David had never met him and he wanted very much to do so, but Tom Forrest was away in Winnipeg.

Mr. Delamain, the Prime Minister, entertained the officers to lunch at his residence. He was a small, vivacious French Canadian from Quebec who had worked his way up from the bottom to a commanding position in the lumber industry by the time he was forty five, and had then turned to politics. Auguste Delamain had a fat wife called Marie and eleven children, only two of whom appeared at the lunch table, and he had a fund of amusing anecdotes for the officers.

“Mr. Iorwerth Jones, he is well?” he asked. “Last time I was in England I thought he looks very poorly, and I thought perhaps he is not well. But then I hear that he has tried to nationalise your retail clothing shops and the Trades Union Congress did not approve, and so he was not allowed to do that. I think he was not very unwell, but only angry.”

“The T.U.C. stood out against that one,” said Group Captain Cox. “I expect they were afraid of what their wives would say.”

“I asked him that,” said Mr. Delamain. “I asked how English women would like to wear standard clothes all to one of six or eight designs, and he told me that it was necessary to the economic situation that they should do that. Marie was with me, and she was very rude to him, but she was very rude in French, which he does not understand, and fortunately nobody who was with us offered to translate what she had said. So we are still good friends.”

Within the meaning of the act, thought David.

A little later the Prime Minister said, “Mr. McKinnon has told me that the Queen has had a heavy cold, and that she was looking tired when he saw her last week. I hope when she comes she will take a long rest. I have talked to the Governor-General, and we have discouraged all suggestions for engagements for her. She is to open the hydro-electric scheme at the Clearwater River, and the new Hospital in
Vancouver, but after that there is nothing arranged, and I hope that she will take a long rest at Gatineau. It is very beautiful up the Gatineau in the late fall, and the colours of the maples will be wonderful this year, because we have had frost.” He paused. “But she is so energetic—she is always making engagements for herself. But this time she should rest.”

“I wish she would rest, sir,” said Cox. “She’s had a very difficult time recently.”

The French Canadian shot a quick glance at him. “I know that,” he said. “Perhaps one day she will be able to come here and spend a long, long time with us.”

The Ceres crews escaped from hospitality in the middle of the afternoon and went back to the aerodrome to prepare Sugar for the flight home. Refuelling and inspection took an hour and a half; they locked up the machine and went to the R.C.A.F. station for an early meal and bed. They were up at three in the morning and took off at four o’clock in the dark night and climbed to operating height. The sun rose an hour and a half later as they passed above the Straits of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador and started on the Atlantic crossing; flying against the sun they took five hours on the trip from Ottawa to White Waltham, and put down at the home aerodrome at two o’clock in the afternoon.

David had brought home with him from Ottawa twenty pounds of steak and a dozen bottles of claret, at that time practically unobtainable in England. He drove back to his flat at Maidenhead and put the meat in the deep freeze, and pondered for a time whether he dared call up Rosemary to suggest that she should get on the electric train to Maidenhead to come and share his meal. He resisted the temptation and cooked his
steak au vin
alone, and spent the evening thinking of all the things that he would
have to tell her when he met her next at Itchenor.

The Royal inspection of the aircraft took place at White Waltham a few days later. Frank Cox had had the two machines drawn up outside the hangar and the crews paraded in front of each aircraft; it was a bright, sunny afternoon. The Royal party arrived in a big Daimler, the Queen and the Prince Consort and the Prince of Wales. Frank Cox went forward and saluted as they got out of the car, and then walked with the Queen as she inspected the parade.

At the end of the inspection she said, “Will you fall the parade out, Group Captain, and introduce the officers to me. Then let each member of the crews go to his own position in his own machine, so that I can see what they have to do.”

David was introduced after Dewar, and the Queen shook his hand. She was not tall and she was definitely plump, but she was still beautiful, and clearly interested in the new machines, even excited. She asked how he was enjoying life in England, and he said, very much indeed, and she smiled, and said that she expected to see a great deal more of him. Then she passed on to the next officer and he met the Consort, a grey haired, handsome, humorous man, who asked him what he got the Air Force Cross for.

“Test flying, at Laverton, sir,” said David.

“In general, or anything in particular?”

David hesitated. “I got a thing down after it got broken up a bit,” he said.

The Prince of Wales beside the Consort spoke up. He was a man of about thirty five, fair haired and pleasant, in the uniform of an Air Vice-Marshal. “Was that the Boomerang?”

David said, “Yes, sir.”

“I remember that, Father,” said the Prince. “The
rudder came off in a dive. He landed it without a rudder.”

The Consort said, “It must have been a great temptation to bale out.”

“Couldn’t do that, sir,” said David. “It cost about a million pounds.”

The Consort laughed. “They didn’t give you any of it?”

“No, sir. Not even the grateful thanks of the taxpayer.”

“Ah well, you got the best decoration of the lot.”

He passed on to the other officers, and the Prince stayed and chatted for a moment with David. “We met somewhere in the war,” he said. “I remember your face.”

“At Lingayen, sir. I had No. 147 Squadron of the R.A.A.F. there.”

“I remember.” They chatted for a time about the war. Then the Prince said, “Is everything working out all right here, in this job?”

“Quite all right, sir.”

“Getting all the stores and material you want?”

“Yes, sir. There were a few minor difficulties just at first, but Major Macmahon got those ironed out for us. Everything seems to be going very smoothly now.”

The Prince said, “When the Queen goes to Canada next month with my father, Group Captain Cox is going too. You’ll be left in charge here, I suppose.”

David said, “Yes, sir.”

“If anything should crop up that you don’t feel you can handle, while the Group Captain is away,” the Prince said, “you’d better give me a ring, or come and see me.”

The pilot blinked a little in surprise. “Very good, sir,” he said. “Thank you.”

The Royal party went to the Canadian machine, and David got his own crew into Tare in their places. He stood by the
fuselage door himself waiting; it was over half an hour before the Queen emerged from Sugar. He came to attention and saluted as she crossed to the Australian machine. “I’m afraid this one is exactly the same as the other, Your Majesty,” he said.

She smiled. “Never mind. I want to meet your crew. It will make it so much easier to get to Tharwa, now that we have this beautiful aeroplane to go in. How long will it take us, Wing Commander?”

“About nineteen hours flying time, madam,” he said. “Colombo is almost exactly half-way, and we should have to put down there to refuel. That would take about an hour.”

She asked, “Could we go by night?”

“Going Eastwards the time difference makes the night short,” he said. “If your time is at your own choice, it would be best to start after dinner, say at about nine o’clock at night. You could go to bed then, and have eight hours sleep before we reach Colombo at about noon, local time. You could lunch upon the ground then if you want to, and going on we should reach Canberra nine hours later, but that would be before dawn of the next day.”

She said, “It sounds as if I shall be spending most of the journey in bed in my cabin.”

“I should say that that’s the best way to take it,” he said. “The cabin is very quiet in this aircraft, and I think you would be comfortable.”

“I’m sure of it,” she said. She turned to the Consort. “Twenty four hours in bed with no possibility of a box reaching you, and Tharwa at the end of it. It sounds too good to be true!”

They passed into the machine laughing together, and David followed with Prince Charles. The aircraft was, in fact, a replica of the one that they had seen before, but they spent twenty minutes in it, talking to the crew. The Queen
spent several minutes in her cabin talking to the stewardess, a girl called Gillian Foster from Shepparton; coming out, David heard her say to the girl, “I can hardly wait to spend a night in here.”

“We’ll do our very best to make you comfortable, madam,” the stewardess said.

The inspection over, the party left the machine, but they seemed to be in no hurry to get back to Windsor. The Queen stood with the Consort for a time upon the tarmac, chatting to the officers. To David she said once, “It makes our lovely home at Tharwa seem so close, to get into this magnificent thing and to be there in about twenty hours.”

He asked her curiously, “You like Tharwa so much as that, madam? We have no autumn colours like Canada, and no high mountains.”

“I know,” she said. “That corner of Australia is beautiful in its own way. I am always sorry when it’s time to come away from Tharwa.”

At last they got into the Daimler and drove off, and even then it seemed to the officers that they were reluctant to go. Dewar turned to Cox, “Well, that went off all right,” he said. “They seemed to like these aircraft.”

The Group Captain nodded. “I thought at one time they were going to ask if they could have a ride in one of them. I thought they’d only be here for about ten minutes.”

“They could have gone up if they’d wanted to,” said David. “Tare’s had her daily. We could have flown Tare.” He paused. “I didn’t expect them to be so enthusiastic,” he said. “It must be just another aeroplane to them.”

“They’re only human,” said Frank Cox. “Things aren’t so complicated for them in Australia and Canada. Now they can get there just whenever they want to, without bothering Lord Coles of Northfield.”

David drove back to his flat that evening happier in his job than he had been since he started. It had made a difference to him that the Queen had said that she liked Tharwa. He knew the Royal residence in the Federal Territory by motoring past it and looking at it from the hills upon the west side of the Murrumbidgee, two miles away. He had even studied it with field glasses, for curiosity. It was a long, white house in pastoral surroundings, set in a bowl of wooded hills and with lawns running to the Murrumbidgee river from the house. With the inferiority complex of an Australian he could see no reason why anyone should want to come to Tharwa. He had been quite deeply moved by the Queen’s statement that she found it beautiful in its own way, because it was his country, and he himself would rather have lived there than anywhere else though he could not have said why.

That evening he rang up Rosemary in her flat. She said, “Hullo, Wing Commander. How did your party go off today?”

“It went off very well,” he said. “I think they were pleased with everything.”

“I thought they would be.”

“They’re bonza people,” he said. “I was really impressed.”

“Had you never met them before?”

“No,” he said. “I’d read about them in the papers, of course. But you can’t believe all that stuff.”

“You can now,” she said.

“That’s right. Are you going down to Itchenor this week end?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m going down on Friday night and staying at the club. Will you be coming over?”

“I thought I would,” he said. “I’ll probably get into Wootton and lie there for Friday night, and come on to
Chichester Harbour on Saturday morning early. It’s high water about midday, isn’t it?”

“I think so. I’m racing in the afternoon,” she said. “Would you like to crew for me?”

“I’d like to,” he replied.

“I’ll be looking for you in the morning, then,” she said. “You should be able to pick up a mooring at this time of year.”

“I’ll get in somewhere.” He paused. “I brought some steaks back from Ottawa, and some red wine. Will you have dinner with me on Saturday?”

“I might have known you’d do something like that if you went off to Canada. Of course, I’d love to dine with you. How did the flight go?”

“All right,” he said. “We got back in one piece. I’ve got a lot I want to talk to you about.”

“We’ll talk on Saturday,” she said.

He arrived in Chichester Harbour at about ten o’clock that Saturday morning, having sailed from the Isle of Wight at dawn. He dropped sailed just inside the entrance to the wide stretch of inland water and motored up the long channel to Itchenor, three miles from the entrance. He saw Rosemary put off in a dinghy from the shore as he drew near the village and scull out into the middle of the stream; he put the clutch out and she came on board and streamed her dinghy astern. “There’s a yellow mooring a few hundred yards upstream,” she said. “You can take that one.”

She was wearing her yachting clothes, thin shirt, shorts, and blue sandshoes; she brushed his arm as they were pulling in the mooring chain together, and he found her proximity disturbing. She helped him to make up the mainsail on the boom and get the vessel into harbour trim. Then she rowed him ashore in her dinghy, and so began a very happy day.