Graham Penders sat in the pilot’s lounge and leafed through Time magazine. Yawning, he glanced at his watch and saw that there was another fifteen minutes to go before emergency drill. He hated time spent in the lounge when he was forced to listen to the asinine conversations going on between the younger pilots around him Worst of all was that fool Dan Tully, boasting, as he was doing now, of some conquest or other. A frown creased Graham’s forehead as Tully’s brash voice continued to assault his eardrums.
‘There’s a certain kind of dollybird,’ Dan was instructing two grinning Second Officers, ‘as soon as she says, “I don’t usually do this kind of thing,” boy have you got it made!’
. There was an abrasiveness about the scene that intruded upon his longing for quiet, offended his sense of what was fitting. He sat in the furthest corner of the room where Tully’s boasting voice was reduced to an irritating burr, and determinedly closed his ears, willing time to pass.
In April Graham was transferring to the trans Atlantic route and shortly before that he was contracted to go on loan to Karachi to fly eastern routes for a while. The most he would have to suffer was another two weeks of this he calculated. He controlled his temper with an effort and got up to change his seat. In the farthest corner of the room, Tully’s boasting voice was reduced to an irritating burr. He closed his eyes, willing the time to pass.
At that moment, Kay and Sally were crossing the tarmac on their way to emergency drill. Inside the huge hangar doors the Vickers Viscount was parked, metal steps pushed against the rear door. The girls climbed in quickly and moved down the cabin.. Behind them the aircraft was filling up as more crew arrived and took their places. A group of hostesses in slacks and sweaters sat in front of them, prepared for the task of sliding down escape-chutes. Neither Kay nor Sally had thought of that.
‘Oh well, they’ll just get an eyeful of underwear,’ said Sally blithely.
Kay grinned, glad she had a good lacy slip on. If they did have to go down the chute she hoped her nylons wouldn’t snag. Although hostesses were allowed two complimentary packs a week, she was always having to buy more
‘Hey, get a load of that,’ Sally nudged her as Captain Dan Tully shot down the aisle brandishing the emergency axe, in hot pursuit of a squealing hostess.
Kay turned to watch. Slim, dark and known as Desperate Dan, Tully was married, in his late forties and, according to the grapevine, so randy that for want of anything better, he would happily court the leg of a chair.
Seeing him in the water at ditching drill in the Marian baths the previous week, playfully tussling with a very tanned hostess, Kay’s heart had done a somersault. She had been convinced he was her pilot with the white Alfa Romeo, but soon realised while both were tall, dark and handsome her pilot was miles better looking.
Now watching Dan Tully stuff a corkscrew down another shrieking hostess’s back, Kay murmured to Sally. ‘He and Orla would make a good pair.’
‘Or Sandy,’ Sally chuckled.
A moment later, Captain Higgins appeared looking spruce and authoritative in uniform. With a smiling greeting, he took up position at the top of the cabin, one hand thrown casually up to grasp the overhead rack, the other dug comfortably in his pants pocked as he addressed them,.
Listening to his attractive voice explaining the mechanics of escape-chutes, Kay was painfully reminded of her own near brush with death on a recent Liverpool flight.
Funny how she hadn’t really been afraid at the time, she mused. It was only afterwards when she began thinking about it and realized how bad it might have been that she had begun to shake. She had attributed her calmness to the fact she wasn’t the only hostess on the flight. Normally on a Fokker Friendship she would have been, but on that particular day she was being checked out by Eva Hendricks.
Remembering, Kay frowned. The Check had arrived on board wearing a huge emerald engagement ring and stood aloofly by as Kay tussled helplessly with the rear door. From the beginning the Friendship door had been Kay’s bete noir. Unlike the Viscount, which had a simple locking device, it had to be hoisted up and positioned in a groove. Where exactly to set it down was the problem. By the time the First Officer had closed it for her, the flight had been delayed for ten minutes – a fact which Eva had lost no time jotting down in her report.
When disaster struck Kay had headed to the cockpit to be told that the port engine was a gonner and they were going to try and put down at the RAF base at Valley Airport. At the time none of it had seemed real to her and she had had the weird feeling that it was some kind of test cooked up between the Captain and Eva to see how she would make out.
A sudden burst of laughter brought Kay back to her surroundings. Guiltily, she fixed her eyes on Captain Higgins, aware that she hadn’t heard a single word he’d said.
‘So, girls, it’s up to you,’ Ben was insisting. ‘Never forget that the passenger is always right and never more so than at thirty thousand feet.’
A roar of protest came from Beattie Burgenhoffer and her supporters at the rear of the cabin.
Ben grinned and held up his well-manicured hands, ‘I know... I know.’ This was the moment he loved, allying himself sympathetically with the lot of the hostesses while, at the same time, in a big brotherly fashion, laying it firmly on the line.
‘You don’t have it easy. Believe me, no one appreciates that more than we do. But look at it this way, if you can keep ‘em sweet - as only you charming girls know how (he threw the sop) - the whole thing can be sorted out later on the ground. Perhaps you don’t know this but flying produces peculiar behaviour patterns in humans. It can trigger epilepsy and migraine and don’t be too surprised that it can also make ‘em run amok.’
‘Just as we thought!’ Sally whispered, referring to their shared opinion that once off the ground, passengers suffered an air change into something, if not rich and strange, at least rare and parched.
‘So think of us poor lads,’ the pilot wound up at last. ‘We’ve enough to do up front without having to worry about what’s cooking at the back. ‘Don’t forget we have the goddamn plane to fly!’
Sally laughed huskily as she got to her feet. ‘I’d like to see him coping with a pregnant woman with four kids under six and they all screaming for the window seat,’ she chuckled, ‘What a chancer!’
Turning to follow her friend, Kay locked eyes across the aisle with Graham Pender. Gripped by his gaze, she was unable to do anything but stare. Crikey, it’s him, was all she could think, a deep blush mantling her cheek. Conscious of his burning look into which was creeping something more intimate still, Kay wrenched her gaze away and moved on.
As she reached the top of the cabin she couldn’t resist peeping back. To her consternation, he was gazing steadily at her. And as he caught her out, he smiled at her with such a knowing glint in his eye that her face flamed hotter than ever.