The Lost Flying Boat Read online

  Bennett’s reactions were needle-quick: sight keen, hearing sharp and muscles in trim. Such flying called for the same skill and co-ordination as steering a large sailing boat single handed. Any deterioration of well-being, even with the best pilot in the game, was dangerous. One false move and the trip would be over.

  Set against the immensity of the sea, the flying boat was frail indeed, but we had settled into our large and wieldy home by the time it gained that peerless sky waiting for us two miles up, the endlessly wrinkled sea scored at one corner by a coal-burning ship. I knew where we were heading, but what about that old steamer? He saw us, and we him but, caught in our own sounds, neither could hear the noise of different engines. Such detachment drove me to the rear turret where I took a back bearing for Rose with the hand compass which confirmed our track.

  Land melted into the haze and, fly as long as we could on the fuel we had, I wondered if after twenty hours we’d find a place by which to put down. Perhaps soil or trees were gone for ever. On my first troopship-crossing of the Arabian Sea I had feared that land would not be found even with the most refined navigation. The world would end as at the beginning, leaving us no choice but to alight on water.

  I glanced at Rose as he laid his ruler straight, turned the Douglas protractor, twiddled the knob of his computer, and worked a pencil deftly over the chart. He sat as cut off at his table as if a door were closed on him. He reckoned his tracks and course in deadly earnest, assembling the many factors by which to decide our most probable position, and the prudent limit of the flying boat’s endurance.

  2

  The plane entered cloud but hardly ever stayed there. Yet it always seemed so. Beads of moisture hung on the perspex. The engines took on a harsher and more vulnerable tone than in clear sky, though this, like a tinnier vibration detected in the airframe, was an illusion. Bennett nursed the kite on its gradual ascent, and my unexplained fear was emphasized by the effect of being in cloud and climbing at the same time.

  Ripples of indistinguishable morse came from God knew where, as if even at this late stage someone was making, though without much hope, an attempt to call us back. The plane shuddered, but ploughed beyond the speed of stalling or hesitation, and we sat at our duties as if we had never left the earth.

  The more we stayed in cloud the more null my senses became, till I seemed to be alive after death, not able to see or be seen. The cloud cotton-woolled us out of existence. Solitude and lack of visibility caused the engines to go silent as I turned the frequency needle of the Marconi more for something to do than in the hope of receiving any vital data, which made it seem as if the world had abandoned us rather than that we had waywardly departed from it.

  After six miles without visibility my bones ached for the emptiness of blue. Nash called from the mid-upper that we would go blind unless somebody turned the sky back on. In such latitudes there was no chance of a collision at least.

  Daylight dazzled the fuselage. Bennett whistled to himself, glad to have made a start. Cloud tops were the surface of another earth whose white soil we had sprung from fully formed, a landscape of spun glass, knobbly obelisks, mushroom columns, wispy stalagmites and, further away, caves suggesting mysterious hide-outs on some polar shore. We gained height till the milky landscape below was like a world in the process of being formed, lit by the sun’s flood but now tinged with grey. There was nothing between us and the universe as, after a hundred miles of gradual climbing to go easy on the fuel, Bennett levelled off and kept us on course for Kerguelen.

  Anyone able to stand on an anvil of cloud would see our flying boat going gracefully through the blue at two miles a minute, with its turrets and aerials, tailplane and vast four-engined wingspan. I would have wanted to wave, much as I had lifted my arms as a boy to trains that went by, craving to be one of its passengers.

  Cloud tops we flew between were like plumes of the Prince of Wales’ feathers. Earphone wire trailing, I tried to rid myself of a feeling of isolation, almost afraid to look out at the wings in case I witnessed them being rent from the fuselage. I wanted to live for ever, whereas on the ground I had not much cared whether I lived at all. Every moment that I was not at my wireless filled me with anxiety, unless I consciously marvelled at how four great engines propelled us along as easily as a bus on a country road. I was only alive when listening to morse while being carried through the sky, ten thousand feet above the sea.

  Bennett stood behind me. The bounce of wireless signals was our lifeline. Whoever heard could write the call sign in their log, and if we vanished into the water of the South Indian Ocean, at least there would be the record of a last message, even if only a call tapped out to reassure the crew that we still had some connection with the earth.

  Sweat fell from my cheeks. We were an hour on our way, with nineteen to go. A coast station tried to get me with a QRZ, so I asked Rose for our position and established contact by the return compliments of a QTH. Bennett smiled at seeing me busy. He had amended the position report, and what I sent, while the correct distance, put us on course for Madagascar.

  He descended to the galley, satisfied at our attempt to obfuscate. The legal situation intrigued me. We were crossgraining all the laws. The sending of false signals was strictly forbidden, and I had committed the first criminal act of my life.

  In the kernel of such detachment, highlighting my lack of connection to whatever in the world had any meaning, I felt allied to something that was not good, almost to a sense of evil. I put my fingers on the morse key and thudded out the call sign of the flying boat so as to imprint our identifying letters on an unlistening void.

  3

  Bennett called for less chat on the intercom. As he got older he wanted more perfection from himself, and consequently only spoke to others when he could be sure of being obeyed. He wished for perfection from them too, so that what he demanded contributed to the standards he had set himself, and thus enhanced his perfection. But if he wanted obedience he had to be reasonable. He had to be right, and because it was getting harder to match the two demands, he gave the impression of being taciturn.

  The price of such individualism was often at the expense of others’ conformity. No one knew it more. But he expected it nonetheless, not only because there was so little about but also because it was part of his nature to strive after perfection. He wanted it from others as well as from himself, as a defensive bastion against all comers. The cost to himself was nil because his value increased the more he acquired it. And as for the cost to others – it was no concern of his.

  He faced the clear blue, getting bumped by upcurrents from cloud tops a few feet below. The boat trundled at 110, plus the push of an almost following wind. The more such windy knots the merrier, caught in the Roaring great-circle Forties, but any speed would have been too slow.

  The furrows in his brow seemed to go into his soul, and cut it into fragments, which was better than merely cleaving it in two, because while many parts were manageable, two would be stalemate. Diplomacy could be brought to bear on many parts, while with two it was a fight to stop them destroying one another. All the same, he did not know which system he was most in the grip of, or in need of, nor even in the end which he preferred. He had long been a battle-ground, but the fight for stability always resulted in a strong and perfect balance in himself which he presented to the world.

  The inner fight to stay firm did not allow for speculation. He was happy with the bargain. He had to be. Pragmatism was the way to survival. There was no point in allowing self-knowledge to destroy you. To keep a balance between knowing yourself and survival might be feasible during a holiday in the English countryside, but on this trip the difficulties could break you if steps weren’t taken to defeat them.

  Sitting for hours at the controls, mulling on chances and pitfalls, it wasn’t easy to stop chaos coming with malicious intent from beyond the horizon. The furrows on his forehead had similarly sharpened as a schoolboy when he crept upstairs to his mother’s bedroom. She had gone, so he opened her Bible as if committing a sin. Thin paper flipped like a cloud of butterflies crossing a turbulent river. He had forgotten the name of that great river. The butterflies had a name from cigarette cards. He read some verses about Isaac and Abraham. They smelled of face powder from the dressing table. The book made him want to die. When he grew tired of opening and closing, he tore out the page and swallowed the pieces as he stood at the window.

  No one walked on the garden path. Beyond rows of lettuces were redcurrant bushes. He could taste their fruit by looking at them. Dahlias and chrysanthemums coloured the fence. Instead of going to school he wanted to spread his arms and fly from the window, reach the bushes before it got dark, when they would leap even redder with their flame.

  The clear and aching light of long summer evenings needed all day before stars came out. His father was up there, his mother told him, but he was under redcurrant bushes where she had buried him. If he flew, he would fall. You couldn’t fly without falling. Not even time to scream, your eyes would drop out before you could see the earth that hit you. You would be too dead to feel it, just as his father was too dead to know anything, whether he was in the sky or under the bushes, because how could he be in two places at once? Maybe he would die from the bits of paper. Either that, or they would make him better.

  Captain Bennett smiled at the enormous hemisphere of the heavens.

  4

  Rose came on the intercom with a course correction for the thirty degree latitude south and forty degree longitude east position. He had released a smoke float to get drift. I swept the ether with a fine tooth comb, going up to eighteen megacycles, then dropping back to search on medium wave. I was tempted to click my callsign to the few audible ships, but radio silence was the order of the day. Everything went in the logbook nevertheless, in case it was useful later. Liking to keep busy during bumps through cloud, I took a gonio reading on a coast station for Rose.

  ‘It’s not much good,’ he said, ‘but they might help one of these days, though I hope I won’t be reduced to such ham-handed navigation. Be the end of us all, if so.’

  ‘Levity is coming back,’ said Nash. ‘He’s a young soldier, Nav, so don’t discourage him.’

  ‘Bound to, once we’re airborne,’ said Wilcox. ‘We get light-headed, don’t we, chaps?’

  Two hours out, and I could relax my tight-fisted contact with the ether. ‘Permission granted,’ Bennett called.

  ‘Got dots and dashes before the eyes?’ said Appleyard as I walked over a heap of parachutes to get to the Elsan. The plane grumbled. ‘What do we need those for?’ I asked Armatage, as I buttoned my flies. It was like being in the cellar of a laundry, except for the smell of last night’s cooking instead of today’s washing.

  ‘You’ll see that hanging up soon enough,’ he said.

  ‘Do sailors like us need parachutes?’

  Armatage hung them in some sort of order. ‘You never know. But I expect the only time we’ll bale out is when the dinghy starts to split after we’re in the drink – if we’re lucky enough to get that far on our way to salvation. Or bailed out of some foreign copshop. But while we’re in this flying bailiwick we’re more than safe, Tosh.’ He tapped one of several packing cases with his boot: ‘It’ll be the others we meet who’ll need bailing out, or to bale out, believe you me.’

  The wood smelt fresh. ‘What’s in them?’

  ‘You’ll see when we open up.’

  ‘And when will that great day be?’

  ‘When, mate? When? When Bennett gives the verbal nod over the speak-tube, just beyond the third-way mark. That’s when we’ll do it. I’m a dab hand with a jemmy.’ Fingers at his left cheek rubbed the smile away. ‘This toothache’s giving me a bit of stick.’

  I was ready to laugh at such a common malady, but it was clearly no joke. ‘You could have had it pulled before we left.’

  ‘I didn’t know, did I? Anyway, it comes and goes.’

  ‘On Antarctic expeditions some blokes have all their teeth taken out, good or not, and steel ones put in. Saves ’em suffering if they’re two years in the wild.’

  His grey eyes turned watery. ‘If I’d told the skipper, he’d have left me behind rather than put the trip off for a day. That’s the skipper all over. One of the best – but no sentiment. Iron Jack, some of us used to call him. I heard that swine Shottermill talking about having too many in the crew and wondering whether they shouldn’t ditch a couple of bods. I can’t think he was genuine, because if the Antarctic ice sticks hard on this white elephant we’ll all be out on the wings melting it off with blow-lamps.’ He smiled when the pain went. ‘And if there’s a bit of a scrap over who gets the damaged goods, there won’t be too many of us on board to handle it.’

  ‘Are we expecting opposition?’

  He sat down and nursed his face at another wicked twinge. ‘Who can tell?’

  I felt sorry for him. ‘It can’t last forever.’

  ‘Maybe. But we’ve got to be prepared.’ We were part of a machine, each at his job to keep the props moving. I sat in my wireless section and spun the needle over coloured markings. In an emergency, one man with ordinary toothache would put us off schedule. He would be as bad as a stretcher case. But I felt as if I’d had a few whiskies, and couldn’t care less.

  An Italian opera from Cape Town or Johannesburg had a hard ride with such bounce and crackle waiting in ambush along the route. I adjusted the wavelength, and poured music for enjoyment through the intercom, vibrating what phones were plugged in.

  ‘We’ll make you the ENSA wallah,’ Bennett said, ‘if you aren’t careful.’

  Nash wanted the Warsaw Concerto. ‘It always gives me a lump in my throat. One of my best oppoes was a Polish gunner, alas no longer with us.’

  I put up the volume.

  ‘A piece of Beethoven,’ Rose said. ‘Much better than your bent bearings. What about Fidelio?’

  ‘Fidelio’s a dog,’ said Appleyard. ‘In quarantine.’

  ‘You mean Fido,’ Bull barked convincingly. ‘That’s a fucking dog, not Fidelio. Get back into your kennel.’

  Wilcox asked for Mantovani.

  ‘You can’t have him,’ Appleyard called.

  ‘It might stop him coughing,’ said Nash.

  ‘Or play Victor Sylvester,’ said Armatage.

  ‘No dancing,’ said Nash, ‘or you’ll be on a fizzer.’

  ‘You’ll bugger up Mr Rose’s sunsights,’ said Bull.

  ‘Cut the language,’ said Appleyard, ‘or you’ll get no tea.’

  One of the gunners booed, Armatage I think. There was rediffusion of flying boat favourites till the music crumpled against a mountain range of static and disappeared.

  ‘Back to business, Mr Adcock.’

  I switched to ships and coast stations. My fingers itched to tap a greeting, but I roamed up and down the wavelength, never long enough on any to get a whole message. What did I expect? No weather report could come from where we were going. If a rolling stone gathered no moss, whose loss is that? It was the pattern of my life, and after so long I thought that nothing could break it.

  We were the filling in a cloud sandwich, two thousand feet of sky through which we droned, a movable feast activated by so many currents of air that the plane had to be ridden rather than driven. A topography of ridges and cauliflower hillocks passed us by. Rose jerked his elbows back and forth. ‘A cold front’s coming from the southeast.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t know. Take it from me. There’ll be a bit of turbulence before we hit the drink.’

  He paced irascibly against the bumps and lurches. ‘Calm down.’ I made myself heard as he came close. A hand covered the scar-side of his face, while the exposed half was pale and leaden. He shivered with cold. I wondered how we would manage if our navigator passed out.

  ‘Maybe something I ate,’ he said. ‘It’s not unusual for me to feel air sick. Every other trip, and I spend half my time staring the bog out.’

  I found a canister of water and filled a mug, spilling some before getting it back to him. Bennett was dodging the black three-dimensional coastline of cumulus, trying to rise to where the kite might be steady enough for Rose to obtain his sunsight. We went onto oxygen at twelve thousand feet, though I delayed as long as I could, hating that rubbery medicated tang that crept into the throat. ‘It’s like the whiff that comes out of a Selection Box of french letters,’ said Bull. A disembodied croak over the intercom agreed, adding that his popsy had given him such a gift at Christmas.

  ‘Shut up,’ Bennett said.

  I hung on, oxygen tacking and veering through my veins. My ears were buzzing, and a bodily nervousness – while at my wireless table – presaged a heavenward lift where all might be well. The impression lasted a few minutes, time for the system to get used to alien air taking hold. For whoever had work, reality reasserted its grip. A ship sent a routine message, faint but readable, which I logged, returning to the illusion that my work and I were inseparable. On this trip we had to be.

  Another ship’s operator, having difficulty reaching a coast station, was sending so slowly that I’d have had time to part my hair between each letter.

  5

  Height was the best aerial, but there was a limit to how far it could be extended. Infinity was not enough, though the higher we climbed the more I could hear. To bring in Madagascar and Mozambique gave a sense of power. I heard Tasmania and Nairobi with pleasure. Rhodesia and the Seychelles were registered with childish pride – yet the world was no bigger than the space between my enphoned ears since, in spite of what I wanted to believe, each place came in of its own accord.

  I heard them all, dots-and-dashes denoting each locality, showing picture-book scenes where I would rather be than in the bucking slum-galleon of a flying boat going to a place that lacked the morse symbols which my imagination could embellish with reality. Without those electrical impulses (affected, as the handbook might say, by keying across a resistance in the high-tension negative supply), a place had no identity. Robbed of a name, it was erased from latitude and longitude, and so was denied existence.