The Lonely Sea and the Sky (11 page)

  That flight round Europe started on 25 October, and it was a sporting adventure from beginning to end. Joe King came with me to Paris. 'Let's go,' said Joe, and pushed the throttle wide open. I assumed that he wanted to take off himself, so I let go the controls. We were a long time leaving the ground, and then only just cleared the trees on St. George's Hill by a foot or two.

  'What on earth are you doing?' shouted Joe through the speaking tube.

  'Nothing,' I said indignantly. 'I never even touched the controls.'

  'Nor did I,' said he.

  I don't think that manoeuvre can be repeated.

  At first Joe kept on asking me if I knew where I was, and where I was going. Crossing the Channel was my first flight over water, and I climbed up to 6,000 feet. Joe complained bitterly of the cold, so I landed at Abbeville in France, where we had some cognac. After this his worry diminished enough for him to sleep in the front cockpit until we reached Paris. Here he dropped off, and left me to continue on my own. I refuelled at Nice, where I landed on a deserted strip on the beach, thumbed a lift from a passing car into Nice, and returned with tins of petrol in a taxi. I went on to Milan.

Next day I was late in getting away from Venice for my hop to Ljubljana in Yugoslavia. As I flew over Trieste it was already twilight, and I could see that I would not reach Ljubljana before dark. However, I decided to risk that. But as soon as I climbed over the hilly country inland I ran into mist. If that persisted, I should be unable to see Ljubljana at all. I suddenly realised that I must land immediately, while I could still vaguely see the ground below. I was over a narrow valley, which was divided into hundreds of thin cultivated strips. I chose the best looking strip, came round in a steep turn, and landed on it. Unfortunately, it was too dark for me to realise that it was freshly ploughed land, and as the plane slowed I could sense the wheels sinking. Up came the tail, and the Moth went on to her nose. Once again I found myself dangling from my safety belt ten feet from the ground. It was too dark to assess the damage, but next morning it turned out to be only a broken propeller. I spent an interesting ten days in Novi Vas pri Rakeku until a new propeller arrived.

  The village mayor wanted to be taken for a flight, and as they had been so good to me I could not bear to refuse. I looked over all the flat land in the valley, and the best strip was only 15 yards wide and 200 yards long with a deep ditch on each side. Although the
Gipsy Moth
had no brakes, I took off from this strip with the mayor and landed him on it again. I moved on to Belgrade, which I left in bad weather. For 60 miles I flew down the Danube with the hills on each side in thick cloud and mist. I was disappointed that the Danube was a dirty brown instead of the blue, which Strauss had led me to expect. By the time I reached the Iron Gates I was flying in a huge tunnel with a cloud ceiling. After entering Rumania the cloud gradually lowered until I was dodging telephone poles in the mist. Finally, I had to land in a field where I was immediately surrounded by a running, shouting crowd of barefooted peasants. The difficulty was to explain in my bad German how fragile the aeroplane was, and that the people should keep their hands off it. In the end four soldiers, also barefooted, were produced, who mounted guard until the mist cleared sufficiently for me to take off again. I bypassed Bucharest, and skirted the Transylvanian Alps, flying over clusters of oil derricks. I was headed for Iasi in the wide valley of the River Prut. Just before dark I crossed a wide range of hills to find the Prut Valley a dense sea of white fog with Iasi somewhere at the bottom.

  An ice cold wave of fear passed through me, but it left me cool and clear-headed. I turned in a vertical bank, opened the throttle wide and set off to retrace my route at full speed. I had been flying over forest­covered hills where there was not enough flat ground to build a house on, but I remembered having seen a valley with some flat pasture 30 miles back. Night was falling when I arrived. I could still see the ground directly below me as I flew low. I chose a piece which seemed clear of obstructions, but I then had to turn twice, and find it blind, because it was too dark to see anything ahead. I flattened out, and landed nicely, then held my breath, waiting to hit a fence or run into a ditch. My luck was in; it was a perfect landing. This is one of the few occasions when I landed without anyone seeing the plane. I walked across pasture until I found a road, and waited there until a car came along loaded with fierce-looking peasants in sheepskin rig-outs. There was a tremendous babble of talk and argument, none of which I could understand, and then another car arrived with someone who spoke French. He explained that they had thought I was a Russian spy, and should be shot. I said, 'Tell them I have had nothing to eat all day, and would they please defer such frivolous debates until they had found me some dinner?' This changed the whole atmosphere; I was rushed to the village, and set before a mountain of goulash while for hours relays of noses were flattened against the window looking on to the one street of the village. I was offered a tiny, stuffy, dirty room, with a vast covering twelve inches thick stuffed with feathers to sleep under. Next morning I flew to Iasi with the mayor, Advocate Popovitch.

  From Iasi I flew north to Czernowitz, later Czernauti and now Chernovtsky on the boundary of Moldavia and the Ukraine. Here I stayed the night as a guest of the Aerodrome Commandant, who had been one of the country's chief fighter pilot aces in the First World War. I let him fly the
Gipsy Moth
by himself, which delighted him. He was the most hospitable host imaginable, and detailed his charming Russian girlfriend to entertain me. She was a lovely creature. We only had a few words in German in common, but I think we were better off without being able to talk.

  From Czernowitz I flew over hundreds of miles of dense forest, interlaced with streams and rivers and with few signs of people. I refuelled at Warsaw, and again at Poznan. I was making for Leipzig, but I ran into fog near the River Oder and landed in a huge stubble field at a place called Reppen. Here I was most grateful to be the guest of the Rittergutsbesitzer. Again I had had nothing to eat all day, and was most grateful for the meal with my host, who was the local squire.

  This flying trip may sound simple, but in fact the negotiations and formalities at every landing I made were long and exhausting. Police, Customs, military, air force and civil aviation officials had to be satisfied after long questioning. Every time I landed, my passport and permits, carnet, aircraft log books and journey log book, all had to be examined, interpreted, explained and stamped. In East Europe no one seemed to eat anything in the morning, and I was too anxious to get away to spend time hunting for food at any stopping place during the day. On top of this I nearly always had difficulty in obtaining suitable petrol and oil when I landed. Once I had to wait sixteen hours for petrol. Later, when I had grown wiser, I always carried a loaf of bread with me.

  After Reppen I landed in a field in the Black Forest, and although I did take on some petrol there, I really did it for fun. A crowd of Germans surrounded me, and when I asked them not to handle the aeroplane because it was so easily damaged, they took offence. They thought that I was afraid of their damaging it purposely because of still hating the British as they had done in the war, whereas, they said, they now felt exceedingly friendly towards us. In due course I soothed them down, and we parted friends. I landed at Leipzig and from there flew on to the Junkers Works at Dessau, where I had a flight in a small all-metal Junkers monoplane. I thought it was heavy on the controls, and glided like a brick compared with the
Gipsy
Moth
.

  On leaving Leipzig I had an adventurous day. I landed in a field when I could not penetrate the fog near Munster. I waited an hour on the ground, and then tried again. I still could not get through to Munster, so I made for Osnabrück. Here, the area round the field was completely enveloped in fog. I cruised round for some time, and then landed in a field at Jeggen. I got someone to pinpoint the exact position of the airfield on my map and tried again. I flew low up a shallow valley, only to find it closed off by fog on the ground. I turned round to retrace my track down the valley, to find that meanwhile the fog had dropped on to the ground at the other end, and I was completely trapped. I was attacked by panic. There was no time; the fog was dropping everywhere to the ground; already I had not enough height to turn properly banked but had to slither round in horrible skidding flat turns. However, I saw a field, which I thought suitable, and successfully found it again, after sliding round in a horrible semicircle. I pulled off a good landing. That night I slept in the house of a small farmer who had fought against the New Zealanders at Dixmude. He was most hospitable, and I spent the night under the same roof as his father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, his children, my
Gipsy Moth
and five cows. The
Gipsy Moth
and the cows occupied the hall. Next morning I found Osnabrück. The airfield officials knew I was coming and shot up red Very pistol lights in the mist as I approached.

  After that I had no more adventures before returning to England. I re-crossed the English Channel fifty feet above the water, grateful for no hazards. I was sorry Joe King could not have seen it.

I got back to England on 20 November to start a month of worry, work, suspense and fear. Now, this seems inevitable to me before the start of any big adventure, and it boils down to 'Can I start, or can't I?'

  Geoffrey, my partner, had sent me £400, but I had already spent half of it. With it came a telegram, 'Advise selling plane. Expensive salvage Malay aerodromes. No more money possible.' The failure of any permit for the following countries could kill the flight – Egypt, Iraq, Persia, India, Straits Settlements, Timor, Dutch East Indies, etc. The Shell Company had agreed to lay down petrol supplies for me at 2s. 6d. a gallon throughout, but they could not do this until I knew where I could land. There was difficulty in finding out which airfields in the East Indies would be unusable. Eventually some of the petrol went into Northern Territory, Australia, by camel. I got my maps together, and cut them into long strips that I could handle easily by myself. These strips totalled over seventy feet.

  I had difficulty in getting permission to fly along the north coast of Africa from Benghazi to Tobruk because the Arab rebellion against the Italians made it dangerous for any white man. The total inventory of difficulties was immense, but had this advantage, that it took my mind off the chief worry which was whether I had the flying skill to make the flight. I wanted to beat Hinkler's record. He had achieved the flight from London to Darwin, Australia, in fifteen and a half days. It was 12,000 miles by the route flown, so that he averaged 750 miles a day. It was not much use trying to beat his time by only a few hours, so I divided the distance as nearly as possible into 500-mile stages, and decided to attempt two stages a day. This would require twelve and a half hours' flying every day, with a halt for refuelling, probably in a fresh, strange country, in the middle of the day. In order to make the final landing of the day in daylight, I should have to start in the dark in the morning at about 2 o'clock. So I had to enlist the help of the Air Ministry to obtain permission from the various countries to fly over them at night without navigation lights, for to fit a Moth with the only navigation lights then available would be like fitting out a 5-ton yacht with a steamer's anchor.

  On 19 December I worked hard all day. I flew over to De Havilland's at Stag Lane to have a cover fitted to the front cockpit, which was both streamlined and easy to open, so that I could get out my rubber boat in a hurry. Also, I had a hole cut in the back of the front cockpit seat, so that I could extract food from where I sat at the controls. I collected and stowed all my food and gear. I made telephone calls about last minute permits. Not until after dark did I take off from Brooklands to fly to Croydon Aerodrome, where I had to clear Customs etc., before leaving the country. At Croydon an Air Ministry official immediately pounced on me to know why I was flying without navigation lights.