The Lost Flying Boat Read online

  ‘A Super Constellation leaves for Johannesburg in three days.’ We were in his South Kensington flat to settle my travel details and sign articles that, I thought, may not be worth the paper they’re written on.

  8

  On the quayside Bennett introduced me to Nash, his chief gunner. A squall hid the flying boat to which, day after day, a pinnace went out with supplies from Shottermill’s warehouse. I wondered how we could need a gunner, but kept silent. To ask questions was to have curiosity prematurely crushed, and the hope taken out of expectation. In any case I could wait, no matter what risk such a course might put me or others in.

  No landing ground is necessary for a flying boat, and because water covers two-thirds of the earth it has more advantages than any other machine: a combination of Icarus successful and the dolphin tamed. As the huge and handsome boat lifts, its hull bids farewell to the fishes at the same moment that its wings say good day to the birds. The craft meets both and spans two elements, an aerodynamic ark speeding through cloud and clear sky in turn. I had no wish to know what was carried, wanted only to make the flight and collect my bounty.

  A policeman skiddled his stick along the corrugated wall of the shed. Bennett peered intently, as if to bring the flying boat back into clarity. ‘Am I going to take that thing off again? I often wonder how much longer I can do it.’

  Nash’s laugh was the kind that passes between people who have known each other a long time. It was meant only for Bennett. ‘They used to say you could do anything with the old flying boat, Skipper, except make it have a baby.’

  ‘On this trip I’ll need to make it have two – if we’re to get back.’

  Nash knelt to tie his shoelaces, then said: ‘I remember a picture of the old Mayo-Composite before the war. I expect I saw it on a cigarette card. Maybe we should have dredged up one of those for the job.’

  The Aldebaran, of pristine beauty and consummate power, shone almost silver under the sun which followed the squall. Bennett turned: ‘I’m on the wong side of forty, and can’t sweat like I used to. But I couldn’t resist this little job. There’ll be enough in the kitty for no more worries, so I shan’t have to fly again. I’ll be retired, and no one will ask questions. A bit of travel every year, a consultant for some firm or other to bring in a bit extra – that’ll be my life. And if I can’t stand it I’ll come out here, or buy a few thousand acres in Rhodesia.’

  ‘You might as well,’ Nash said. ‘There’s eff-all in Blighty, these days.’

  9

  Nash was a large man with dark hair swept back, thick lips and quick brown eyes. We smoked and talked in one of our narrow rooms after roaming the town at night for a place to eat. His father had been a market gardener in richest Lincolnshire, but Nash left school at fourteen and took any job he could find till volunteering for aircrew in 1940. ‘I wanted to get above it all!’ he said. ‘My feet had been too long on the ground, and I fancied a bit of flying, but I was sent to a station in Scotland to work in the stores. I lacked little, and thought I had a cushy billet for the duration, but two years later I was called to an aircrew selection board. There were so many changes of station to Birmingham I almost lost myself. Then I was sent to St John’s Wood for physical tests. I got through those and went to ITW, a conveyor belt for training aircrew, and I was happy to be on it. We marched at 120 paces to the minute to get speed of reaction, and the infantry weren’t fitter. There was classroom work on meteorology, navigation, engines – you name it, they taught it. I’d never worked so hard, going from one classroom to another, and then to do drill and PT in the hangar. Rain or shine, we never stopped.

  ‘I went on a twenty-four-week air gunner’s course, training on Bothas, Wimpies and Lancasters. I started ops in ’43 as a rear gunner. I got the last of the central heating, and often froze so much I couldn’t move anything but fingers and eyes. Which was all that was needed. I suppose I pissed up more Lanes than any other bod in the service. Apart from anything else I was physically too big for the job. I’m sure they picked big blokes on purpose to stick in those small turrets sometimes for eight hours at a stretch. I got a JU88 above Frankfurt, and damaged another over Holland – shoot first and die later, if you have to. Our luck was ladled out by the Big Dipper. We came home on a QDM from the wireless operator who had a piece of shrapnel in his eye. That was the trip we got the gongs for.

  ‘Me and Bennett had done so many ops we could choose our time for a night off, and on one pass to London the rest of the crew went bang over Cologne, including the CO who’d given us the pass, because that night he was captain. We’d done our turn. Let somebody else sit on the flying bomb racks and flog Sodom and Gomorrah night after night just to get back home and have a fried egg for breakfast. Bennett wangled a conversion course to flying boats and took me as his tail gunner. I was game for a change. Over the Atlantic the stars were where they should be (when they were) and not burning to death on the ground.

  ‘The Sunderlands carried a galley and a steward so that sausages as well as fried eggs could be had en route. A couple of JU88s once nosed too close, but after our gunners played the Browning version the skipper lost them in a cloud.’

  Nash told the story of his life more than once, but I had the feeling that when the rest of our crew got here he would talk less. There seemed to be a gap in his story when he came to his time with Coastal Command. They ‘killed’ one U-boat, oil and dirty water telling of its demise. I knew from his wavering eyes, and disparagement about the mouth, that there was something of this incident that he wanted to tell but couldn’t. I was fitted for the job of listening, and never poked my nose where it wasn’t wanted. The trade selection tests hadn’t been far out in deciding that Bennett be a pilot, Nash a gunner, and me a wireless operator.

  ‘Though the Lord was a man of war, I was man enough to like peace when it came.’ He poured out more of that vile and sickly Van der Hum wine. ‘The first summer after demob was real life at last. A group of us would hire a boat in Boston and go out on the Wash trawling shrimps. We’d cook and eat them, and brew tea on a primus, and spend all day on the water, and come back with mussels by the pound, and I’d tip my share in the bath and throw them a handful of breadcrumbs. The good old days were here again, when you could expect to be alive a week, a month, even a year ahead.’

  He couldn’t sit more than half an hour without needing to piss. His restless eyes settled into a stare, and he stood up with an apology he never made until this malady struck. He had taken pills, powders and potions, but nothing stopped this clockwork aggravation of the bladder: ‘A disease that no quack can cure, and which doesn’t kill, is no disease at all. You’ve got no business having it. The symptoms may be imaginary, but the effect is uncomfortable. If you suffer, it’s your own fault, so it’s no use blaming the doctors, or getting God on the blower, like Job.’

  By the samphire borders of the Wash, he stood on the edge of the boat and sent streams of amber piss into the water while his mates’ backs were turned. A god to Nash would have been one who concocted a pill which allowed him a full night without getting up.

  He would put money made out of the present trip into resurrecting the building firm he had run with his brother. From jobbing work they had, despite chronic shortages (since everything went for council houses and repairing bomb damage), increased their range to bungalows, finding a way through labyrinthine red tape to obtain materials and acquire sites. Difficulties overcome not only brought higher profits, but laid down procedures along which one could afterwards run with the ease of a trolley on rails. A nod, a wink, a gift, a fiver (or more) at a tricky obstacle cleared the hairpin bends like magic.

  For what the judge called ‘a scandalous case of bribery and corruption’ he was sent to jail for eighteen months. Given time to brood, he saw no sense in being penalized merely for using his enterprise in days of such gratuitously imposed austerity. He found ways around the rules. Show intelligence, and you get kicked in the guts. ‘If it hadn’t been for this flying
boat job, I’d have gone down and never come up again. The skipper doesn’t mind that I’ve been in prison. He stands by his old crew. And most of ’em do, which is something to be said for a doomed generation.’

  This remark was the closest he got to self-pity, and I wheeled him out of it by saying I had never believed in such talk. ‘Ours was doomed, though,’ he said. ‘You missed it by a couple of years. Only ten per cent survived a tour of ops. Hundreds of bods fell out of the sky every night.’

  I had often regretted not having been born earlier. When someone told me that a funny bomb had ended the war I called him a bloody liar. Adolescence was War, and suddenly both war and youth ended. Nash had come out with honour but an incontinent bladder.

  He wiped tears from his left eye. ‘Germany’s pin-up boy sealed our doom. They killed whole fucking generations!’

  ‘Each generation is made up of any number of individuals,’ I said, ‘and as one of them I didn’t have, don’t have and never shall have any intention of dooming myself.’

  Then he said, and I was too drunk to ask why: ‘When this flying boat takes off, you’ll come as close to being doomed as you’ll ever want to be. If you team up with Bennett, you ask for all you get.’

  I was always conscious, even at my most obtuse, of being wholesomely attached to life. At the same time I thought that the possibility of being doomed was not something over which I had any control. But we had talked so long that I had to give in and say I was ready for the straw.

  ‘Sleep’ll be the death of you,’ he scoffed. ‘Be the death of me, as well. Trouble with sleep is you might not wake up. Maybe that’s why I get out of bed to piss six times a night. Shit-scared of going so far under I’ll never get back. People spend a third of their lives asleep. Twenty odd years off three-score-and-ten. It’s daylight robbery! You’ll get all the sleep you like when you’re dead, so why rush? If we could go through life without bed we’d live longer, and enjoy the final sleep better when it came. We’d kip so long there’d be no Heaven or Hell, or we’d be too tired to notice it. You only think such places exist if you have too much sleep when you’re alive.’

  We drank the last bottle. ‘You’ve given it much thought.’

  ‘That’s because you think of rum things in that rear turret trying to stay awake and make sure the next second won’t be your last. The navigator and pilot keep us on course, and your Sergeant Backtune wireless operator’s tapping his feet to dance music from all over Europe, but your gunner has to keep himself warm and everybody else safe. Me and the skipper were one mind when it came to surviving. One whisper and the Lanc was in a corkscrew and I was belting the guns at a shadow that tried to follow us down. But sleep is public enemy number one, so you go off for your lethal dose of shut-eye, while I slope away for a leak!’

  10

  I had not expected so much delay in getting the flying boat ready. Waiting released gloomy premonitions, and the problem was whether I should leave to avoid disaster, which I felt was sure to come, or stay to see whether I was right or wrong about my premonitions. If I left I would never know, and feel a fool. If I stayed, I wouldn’t live to tell myself I had made a mistake. Pride on the one hand, and curiosity on the other, had me locked.

  The flying boat had been chosen from thousands of war-surplus planes, and I couldn’t help wondering about its air-worthiness. I questioned the wisdom of placing myself at its disposal, an attachment which began after my inability to bed down into the married state. I had signed a contract as wireless officer for the Southern Ocean Survey Company on board the Aldebaran, and Nash told me during an interminable series of card games that we were to assess anchorage facilities in the Cape Town-Tasmania-Antarctic triangle, for a steamship company that would acquire and recondition a couple of redundant Liberty ships. They would go into the cruise market for naturalists, amateur geographers and middle-aged wayfarers with money, who had not travelled during the war and now wanted to take advantage of the reopening of facilities.

  Nash saw that it would mean almost no change of name for the company when it became known as the Southern Ocean Steamship Company. There would be work for us all in such an enterprise, ‘especially for you,’ he said, ‘as radio officer.’ He reached across the table and nudged my chest, between one game of gin rummy and the next, though my own laugh was due to the unhappy coincidence of both acronyms.

  I believed nothing of what he told me. A lifetime of listening had made me suspicious. A man couldn’t survive seventy-six operations over Germany, as well as a stint with Coastal Command, and not have more cunning than was good for him. Nash knew something about the trip that I didn’t know, and under his phlegmatic aspect was a caution hard to fathom. I had no evidence as to what it was, and my curiosity was so intense that I couldn’t see a way to find out. To ask questions, however circumspectly, would lose me all standing among the crew. I had been left with nothing when Anne went out of my life except that kind of honour which, providing an all-round defence, led me to distrust everything but my own competence – such as it was.

  I asked Nash when the flying boat would be leaving.

  ‘In about a week.’ He licked his finger before picking up a card. ‘There’ll be briefings first, though, and a few circuits around the harbour. Meanwhile, you won’t be needing this.’ He drew one of the gaudy banknotes to his side of the table, then handed me the pack because it was my turn to shuffle.

  I walked to the window. The air in the room was thick with our smoking. Outside there was grit in the wind. Yesterday the houses along the street had been intact, now they were being brought down. How are the mighty fallen! Between gaps the deep blue sea had white tails curling on top. When waves hit the breakwater a geyser of smoke banged into the air and, even at this distance, looking between demolished houses, I could hear that searing rush as the liquid mass came down. Close to midday, half the block was gone. That’s how they move in this country. A date-time is set for doing a job, and then it’s done, without argument or delay.

  I went back to the table. ‘A poor lookout if it’s dead calm on the day we’re supposed to get airborne, with such a load to carry.’

  ‘That’s not your problem. Just deal the cards and pray for luck. You might win if you aren’t careful.’

  According to graphs on Bennett’s table, the wind that prevailed on most days of the year, to any number of the Beaufort scale, when otherwise it was a calm of equal deadliness, was westerly. He’d fly the Aldebaran into the wind for lift, and we would have to rise before colliding with the escarpment on the other side of the harbour.

  ‘They aren’t used to such big flying boats out here,’ Nash said. ‘Only seaplanes. The skipper landed it almost empty, and a double run’ll be needed to get off. If we have to taxi out to the open sea he’ll have to wait for a calm day, and on such a day there’ll be little wind for lift-off. He has his problems. You’ve just got to trust him – like I do.’

  Now that the war was over, I didn’t like to make anyone responsible for my life; yet Nash was right. On the other hand, neither he nor Bennett thought it necessary that I should be told the truth about the Aldebaran’s voyage. I wondered whether the navigator or flight engineer would reveal anything when they arrived, because they too had been part of the old crew. I was the only newcomer, and became more and more conscious of the fact. I had been chosen at random, or Fate had pinned a number on me which was impossible to pluck off.

  If I took a train along the coast to Lessom Bay, and found work as an operator on some tramp steamer sailing to another part of the world, my last notion of honour would go. I would fall through the safety net of self-respect to the lowest state of all, that of breaking my word – the final dereliction of duty. I had been brought up to believe that once you lost that kind of honour you couldn’t atone. I didn’t think much of this precept, for there is such a thing as loyalty to life, which means taking reasonable precautions for survival.

  ‘You should stop thinking thoughts,’ said Nash, when I lost a
gain. ‘It’s not good for you. It never did anybody any good.’

  ‘It’s worry,’ I said, ‘not thought, and it’ll go when I’m flying.’

  ‘That’ll be too late. You’ll have a rash by then. Get rid of it now. Take a tip from me. We can’t afford to have anyone in the crew who thinks.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘you win.’

  ‘See what I mean?’

  ‘I do. So deal.’

  Whatever the reason, for the rest of that day I won every game.

  11

  A man was playing a slot machine by the coat racks. Each spinning drum lit up red and yellow. He put money in and, after pausing to let a bout of coughing rack its way through him (he simply stood upright and looked straight ahead, telling the animal inside to do its worst but for God’s sake to let rip and get it over with even if it intended killing him), pulled at the large handle as if knowing every move of the machinery inside. A juke-box in an adjoining alcove played the world favourite for that year: ‘I’ll Never Forget You …’ A glass of beer was set on the table, and he reached for a drink when his cosseting of the gamble-box brought no results.

  I finished a straw bottle of red before my spaghetti and cutlets, with juicy tomato on the summit, came to the table. The Italian proprietor, Mario Salvatore, who was from Turin, told me he had been a prisoner in South Africa during the war. His young wife looked around the curtain every few minutes, then brought my dessert of meringue crème Chantilly and a cup of black coffee. I left the dinosaur-trail of cream, and read a newspaper, little interested in reports of the Berlin Blockade and the same old ding-dong in Korea. The snowy ridge across my plate was more intriguing, and led me to speculate on the topography of the island that Bennett was taking us to. The future, holding no more anxieties now that I had eaten, existed only insofar as my wondering about it prevented me from feeling conspicuous at supper.