The Lost Flying Boat (6 page)

He laughed, and became more likeable. ‘Wasn't much, was it? Like a kitten with mittens playing dobbie! I might have done the same in your place, only the poor sod I did it to wouldn't have got up in a hurry. Still, as long as you make up for your tap at me by finding some nice grub.'

‘You won't get pork pies and pints.'

‘Ah well!' He held my arm, as if he might lose me again.

‘Wine gets you drunk quicker.'

‘That's what I'll have, then, if you recommend it.'

I asked how many gunners we were taking on. There seemed no end to them.

‘Two, besides me and Nash. I came down with my old oppoes Armatage and Appleyard. You'll be as safe as houses with us. We've shot coffins out of the sky many a time!'

All we needed was a navigator. As things stood, Bennett would fly the plane, Nash and the gunners guard it, Wilcox maintain it, and I would be all ears cocked against the world. But without a navigator on a long flight over the ocean we would not reach our destination. Though Bennett had a First Class Navigator's Licence, he couldn't fly the crate and do that job properly, because while the navigator took star-sights in the astro dome a good pilot had to keep the plane level and steady.

We faced each other, as well as chips and chops and chunks of bread and bottles of red plonk in between. It suited him fine. He poured a tumbler and drank it like cold tea. He was thirty years old but seemed middle-aged. Civvy life had been so dull he had joined the Merchant Navy, doing any work he was put to: ‘As well as being a gunner, I'm a rigger and a steward – a jack-knife of all trades, you might say. I happened to be at home to see my parents, because I'd just jumped ship. I thought I might settle down on shore for a while, but then Bennett's telegram came and I knew I couldn't let the skipper down. Well, could I? You know how it is. He's got us all now, every manjack of the old crew except the wireless-op, and you're standing in for him.'

He was open and friendly, and the more we drank the more I wondered whether he had in fact been following me. No matter what he said, mistrust came and went. At the third bottle he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. I glanced at his decorated skin. ‘That's how it is if you're a sailor,' he said. ‘You aren't much of a man if you haven't got a bit of this stuff over your arms and tits.'

From the bulge of white muscles down to the backs of his wrists were red and blue daggers, hearts, reptiles, union jacks, buxom women and, on his chest, he said, a portrait of King George. My sight was glazed from too much wine, but I was sure that, even though I hadn't yet met Appleyard and Armatage, Bennett had gathered a very fine crew indeed – and, whatever I thought, I was certainly one of them.

‘Oh yes,' Bull said, ‘and another thing I forgot to tell you. The navigator came in as well. You're in for a treat when you see him.'

13

The water chopped itself about, objecting to the wind, but the flying boat was well-moored. When Bennett wasn't on board overlooking stowage, or in his room cooking up hypothetical navigation schemes, he was pacing the quay in strides too big for his frame, cigar going like a haystack, hands behind his back and glancing up every few yards, as if to a time mechanism, at the lift and fall of the
Aldebaran.

His skin was the colour of milk from the tension of waiting. The bottle of whisky on his table was always half full, and of a different brand. For the captain of a flying boat his hands shook too much, but we all had aches and twitches of some sort that would not go away till flesh and blood felt relief at the great flying boat with stores and men on board lifting into the air, the rate of climb indicator, the rev counter and the altimeter doing their jobs, as lessening bumps under the hull told us we were almost airborne.

All we could do was play cards, walk the town, fall asleep in the local picture house, and get drunk. Six months will pass before we depart, I thought when I woke up the morning after my encounter with Bull, so that we'll have winter as one more enemy. None of the others seemed over-anxious, however, and Wilcox was positively glad of all the sleep he could get.

After a shower and breakfast I went out for my usual walk. I watched cranes at their demolition work with the fascination of the idle at the spectacle of the energetically employed. I did not know whether to go left and walk by the harbour, or stroll right and up the hill behind the town.

As I stood, work ceased for some kind of break. Blacks went to their dinner cans, and whites to a wooden hut, and I saw the wall that was left naked. Floors had been scraped away, and a purple mark remained as if it had been burned there. A groove was revealed, and with it a continuation that made a scar as if across a chin, and the blue wash of a wall crested an eye enclosed in tissues that gave the glazed, beacon-like stare of some prehistoric creature.

Illuminated by the sun, the composition was like an enlarged reproduction of the side of our navigator's face, turned from us when I met him in the breakfast room before coming out. The wound had been caused by a Very signal-rocket pistol. The stubby cartridge of brutal calibre had gored his cheek and burned there, a stray or accidental shot from the control tower window when he happened to have been strolling by. Plastic surgery had bettered the grisly enhancement, but not much. He later told me that he left the hospital after eighteen months because kindness was turning him clockwise into a lunatic. He hiked the by-ways for a year to get back health, and the only item of value in his rucksack was a bubble sextant which he would not relinquish. He did not know why, but while children ran from him he relished the extra weight. Sisyphus, he said, had nothing on me. At which Bull confessed that he'd had a dose of that, as well. Rose got a job, and went to live again with his mother, and stayed until receiving Bennett's telegram which called him, he said, back to duty.

As I stood across the road from the enormously enlarged picture of Rose's hideous blemish high up the wall, I wondered how long it would be before we took our departure. The livid vision made me active where I had been apathetic. I walked away as quickly as I could, unable to look a moment more than I had to. When I passed in the evening the whole building was level with the ground.

14

The seven of us waited in the hotel lounge, which was closed off for our use. A chart of the ocean, and a large-scale map of the islands, were pinned to the wall. As if to accustom us gradually to the scarred side of his face, the navigator kept it turned whenever possible. Because his name was Rose, I thought of him as ‘Compass', though when none of the others took the sobriquet as in any way witty I let the name go. Smoke from his pipe drifted over a fleshy landscape of red and purple, to screen the distortion from anyone tempted to gaze at it. The pipe angled jauntily out of the disfigured side of his mouth, so that a languid puff slid up the lunar scars. If anything this made the effect worse, which may have been his idea, though I think he no longer cared for anyone's opinion. The glint in his eyes suggested that he was used to bearing the scar, and his nonchalant expression turned humorous when he considered what the world could do as far as he was concerned. But the lasting effect of the scar was to curb outright laughter from him. People in any case expected so little merriment because of his affliction that he eventually employed less than he had grown up with. The truth was that he had accustomed himself to his disfigurement, and it was up to us to get used to it.

He looked around. ‘What a bloody shower!'

The others laughed, having known him well, but only in the wartime pre-scar days, so that to some extent he was also new to them. Perhaps we did look a shower, with our open-necked shirts and various kinds of jackets. I had a tie in my luggage, and supposed the others had.

‘You may well turn out to be right,' Nash said.

‘I sincerely hope not. You know how the skipper likes us to dress for dinner in mid-flight.'

I laughed with the others.

‘We don't want any crisis during the trip.' In spite of twitting us, he had a gentle voice. He'd grown up in a small farming town on the northern edge of Salisbury Plain, and the pleasant burr to his speech remained. His father, a solicitor, had sent him to the local grammar school to which he had gone as a boy, and a distinction in mathematics for his Higher School Certificate had naturally led Rose to become a navigator on volunteering for aircrew.

He sat with the knick-knacks of his trade: a Dalton Computer, plotting instruments, star-finder, and a Bubble Sextant Mark IX. Maps and charts were spilling from a black bag by his polished shoes. Even Bennett hadn't such knife-edged creases in his trousers. He irons his laces at night, we used to say about such a type. Butter wouldn't melt in his turnups. You could smell his haircream a mile off. How wrong we were.

When the skipper came in, Rose, Nash and the others stood as at a pukka briefing, so I joined them. He looked at us one by one, then nodded. We sat down, and he talked for some time about the allocation of duties. We were informed that Rose, being the navigator and also capable of piloting the plane, was second in command. The flight engineer would, in spite of his cough, be able to control the aircraft and keep it on course during level flight, if necessary. He also knew some navigation. So did the wireless operator. It wasn't unusual for such a crew to learn something of each other's jobs, so we had the equivalent of three possible pilots and two good navigators, which was an advantage, considering what margins of error might develop on our lengthy flight.

The fact that there was one wireless operator gave me some satisfaction, because it meant that the ears of the craft and the transmitter were my own. There would be no one to interfere with me working the dials and clickstops. If I went down with illness or injury Bennett and Rose could do a slow morse speed of six words a minute and tap out an SOS, but only providing the transmitter was on the right frequency.

Bennett pointed at the chart with a piece of stick. ‘The first leg of the trip will be to the Kerguelen Islands, over two thousand nautical miles away. We reconnoitre the straits' – more indication with his baton – ‘between one island and another, to find a certain cove' – a definite stab at that point – ‘for anchorage. Using it as our base, we spend a few days exploring the west and north-west coast – a bit of surveying, you might say – and then set course for Freemantle, 2320 nautical miles further on. On our way to Kerguelen we overfly – or as near as dammit we do, won't we, Mr Rose? – two small inhabited islands, with no facilities, I'm afraid, of either petrol or beer. Also, there aren't any shipping lanes where we're going, which is why we have a navigator like Mr Rose to plot our way. Cruising speed will be something in the region of 120 knots, though the prevailing wind, if it prevails as it should, ought to give us a bit more ground speed, so we'll take about eighteen hours to reach our objective. The end of the second leg will get us to Freemantle, but after refuelling there may be no time to go ashore.'

Such distances deadened my head, imagination unable to register the sight of endless sea. While Rose played with the knobs on his Dalton Computer – ‘You can do anything with it, except fry eggs' – we others were supposed to think up questions. Wilcox, still wearing his hat, stopped coughing long enough to comment: ‘This place seems at the end of our range, Skipper, and the wind may not play ball with us. Is there a fill-up station on the way?'

Bennett smiled. ‘I've stared at the chart till I'm blue in the face and still haven't conjured one up. Nevertheless, I shouldn't worry if I were you. We do have auxiliary tanks to give a range of two thousand five hundred miles, so we shouldn't be forced to ditch on the way. I wish you'd suck some Zubes for that cough, though. When the trip's over we'll send you to Switzerland.'

‘It's only ‘flu, Skipper.'

Nash folded an old
Daily Mail
into his jacket pocket. ‘And where's the juice coming from for the flight to Freemantle?'

‘A ship will meet us in a convenient stretch of calm water.' He waved his stick so that no one could be certain where it was, and I couldn't be sure that he wasn't being sarcastic. ‘All hands will set to with gusto, and stock up the tanks.'

The notion that we would be a flying petrol tank for over two thousand miles gave me a strange feeling in the stomach. ‘Do we have a dummy run to see if we can get off with such a load?'

‘We've got the longest runway in the world, Adcock, a thousand miles, if the sea's calm enough. Let me worry about that. I've worked things out, never you fear.'

‘It's safer to chug along with an extra ton or two of petrol than carry the same in depth-charges,' Rose said to me as he opened a stubby tin of Flowerdew's Cut Golden Bar and refilled his pipe. He smoked contentedly, but to puff such twist in the same room as Wilcox seemed inconsiderate, though I don't suppose he would have coughed much less without it. Bennett advised him to sit by the open window, but he didn't bother, saying his cough was sure to go as soon as the old kite got above the clouds.

Appleyard, one of the gunners, wanted to know how much airborne time we'd need before reaching Freemantle. He had a cousin there. Rose nodded, the scarred side of his face towards the skipper: ‘Thirty-eight hours, give or take a day or two!'

Bennett came out of his reverie. ‘How long we stay at Kerguelen depends on all of you. Intelligent co-operation is what I want, like in the good old days. We're a bit rusty, but we'll shine up. As captain of this enterprise – and God help me with such a shower – even I may have to lend a hand when it comes to picking up the goods at Kerguelen.'

‘What goods?'

‘That's between me and the company. Till we get on board, it's classified gen.'

I asked if there was a W/T met. station on the island.