1
A week of pale winter days, dreary with rain, went by before Judy Hateling flew again. Then she did an hour’s solo, practising figures of eight for her Royal Aero Club Certificate tests, the passing of which entitles the holder to a pilot’s ‘A’ licence.
‘You’ll do your tests tomorrow morning if the weather’s good,’ Robert told her when she landed. On the following morning, however, it was very hazy, so that he telephoned his pupil after he had been up on test, telling her not to come down until after lunch.
He had a busy morning, taking Bearing, Brown and Riseling up for blind flying, giving a new pupil his first lesson and taking an Oxford Groupist for a joy ride. The latter was a large, untidy, don-like figure who slapped Robert heartily between the shoulder blades, gave him his card, mentioned that he was staying at the Deanery and invited him to come in during the evening and ‘have a jolly talk about Jesus Christ’.
‘Lunching in town?’ asked Hawkings, who had been attending a Committee meeting.
‘Yes.’ Robert started up his car. ‘How did the show go?’
‘Fairly well. I got that mechanic the sack for shoving a stick in the front cockpit the other day. I’ve just handed him his notice.’
‘I’m sorry that he’ll be out of a job, but all the same, I’m glad he’s going.’
‘If anything had happened to those two fools that afternoon, we’d be looking for work ourselves. By the by, be back in good time, there’s some extra joy-riding this afternoon.’
‘Right, skipper.’
Three-quarters of an hour later he returned, swinging his Morris through the main gates so that she rolled on the springs with tyres squealing. He noticed a strange aircraft on the tarmac with airscrew turning and wondered who had flown down in the lunch hour. Switching off his engine as he reached the corner of the clubhouse, he let the car coast over the apron and into the corner of the hangar. As he climbed out, Perkins came running towards him.
‘Thank Gawd you’ve come, sir!’
‘What’s the trouble?’
‘It’s that kite. She’s brand new. The bloke wot flew ‘er down shoved off without a word. Now that bloke you said was too dangerous to learn to fly ’as turned up –’
‘Limner?’
‘That’s ’im. ’E says he’s going to take it up alone!’
‘Oh, he is, is he?’ Robert ran out towards the glittering aircraft. When he got within fifty yards of the ‘plane he saw that Limner was already in the cockpit and that there were no chocks under the wheels.
‘Hey! You –!’ but his words were lost in the blast of the slipstream as the pilot opened the throttle and took off. He pulled the aircraft sharply off the ground, only easing the nose down when she was practically stalled. Then he did a wild turn at twenty feet, holding off too much bank with the nose well up.
‘Gawd!’ said Perkins, who had come panting up behind Robert, and then very slowly, ‘as if he wouldn’t die soon enough.’
‘Aren’t any of the Committee or Mr Hawkings about?’
‘No, Mr Owen. They’ve all gone into town to lunch.’
‘I suppose that mechanic we sacked this morning has something to do with this?’
Perkins nodded, his eyes following the aircraft. ‘Do you think there’s a chance of ’im getting down all right?’
Robert watched the ’plane for some seconds and then shook his head.
The aircraft, which had now reached nine hundred feet, began to climb steeply and yet more steeply. ‘What the hell –?’ began the GE, and then stopped as a wing went down and the ’plane began to spin with the engine on. Slowly, easily, it slipped downwards in a tight circle as gracefully as a dead leaf fluttering earthwards. Then came the roar of the crash and silence.
‘Riseling!’ roared Robert as the former came running out of the clubhouse, ‘ring up Dr Towsler, his number’s on the emergency board in the instructors’ room. Tell him there’s been a bad crash a mile north-east of the aerodrome and ask him to get there as quickly as he can! Perkins! take the blood-wagon – will you?’ He ran to the fire-tender, swung himself into the driver’s seat, started and raced the cold engine. As the gears bit and he moved out of the hangar he saw Bearing with two of the mechanics running up the tarmac and, slowing down, motioned them to jump aboard. Turning on to the main road, the back of the tender began to slide against the camber. He swore softly and wrenched the front wheels into the crab-wise motion, killing the skid before it developed. Looking into the mirror he could see Perkins in the tall ambulance hard behind.
Half a mile down the road one of the mechanics began to beat his hands on the roof of the driver’s cab. Robert took his foot off the throttle and heard the boy say that the ’plane had crashed into a field on his left. Bearing jumped over the tail-board to open the gate and when Robert drove the tender slithering through the shiny mud, he noticed a familiar yellow sports car drawn up, empty, at the roadside.
The aircraft had spun into the far corner of the field and as the heavy lorry bumped over the grass he took stock of the damage. Both blades of the airscrew were broken off, the wings were crumpled and only held together by sagging pools of doped fabric. The engine had been torn from its bearers by the force of the impact and lay battered and untidy, some yards away. The main petrol tank had burst, but by a miracle the wreckage had not caught fire.
He pulled the tender up some distance from the crash, seized an axe, small fire extinguisher, sheath knife and hacksaw and ran towards the crumpled fuselage.
Judy Hateling was leaning over the cockpit, trying desperately to lift the pilot’s broken body.
‘Don’t pull him out!’ said Robert quietly, ‘we’ll have to cut the longerons away.’ He began to slash at the fabric. Perkins came up and started to pump fire extinguisher over the petrol-soaked debris. Judy moved away. Her face was white, stupid with fright and anguish, her light tweed coat stained with a large, dark pool of blood.
The pilot’s face was grey with death. He had been trapped by the telescoping of the longerons, the stick had penetrated his stomach and his feet were entangled in a mass of wreckage that had been the front cockpit. Robert worked with deft surety, sawing away longerons, hacking at broken cockpit doors and the splintered instrument board, shouting to the mechanics to stop smoking among the sightseers who were already swarming across the field.
He hated the experience for its melodramatic propensities, the scene for its unreality. He loathed the lust of horrified interest which brought more and more spectators to gloat over the dying boy who became partially conscious, writhing and moaning as Robert strove to free him. He felt a sudden nausea at the thought of hearing again and again the story of the crash, the eye-witness phrase-perfect, pausing for the exclamations of horror which experience would teach him to anticipate, his tale smooth with many tellings, bringing delight to those so blasé that only sudden death could thrill them. He thought, as he ripped and tore with frenzied method, of the reporters who would pester any witness of the accident, fight for turns at the telephone in the control office; of their editors who would splash this splendid story, fully illustrated, into every sensational newspaper. (‘Mrs Limner, on being informed of her son’s death by our reporter, showed considerable emotion. ‘I knew this flying would be the death of him,’ she said with tears brimming her eyes.’) Then there would be an inquest with supercilious coroner, nervous witnesses contradicting each other’s evidence, reporters lusting for further sensationalism, weeping relatives, kindly, thick-headed policemen. And through all these things the ever-present unreality, emanating from the shock which broke down, for a little time, the conventions that wall men’s minds.
In a little while Hawkings came up, and after him the doctor. Between them they got the boy on to the stretcher. He was badly broken up, and the doctor said that there was little chance of his living. As they lifted him into the ambulance he had another haemorrhage and died, the crowd pressing about him.
2
While the chief instructor issued instructions for the removal of the debris, Robert pushed his way through the crowd, searching for Judy. He nodded to Bearing, who was chatting to a tramp.
‘Hawful,’ the latter was saying. ‘I wouldn’t go up in one of them things for a fortune.’
‘Why not?’ Bearing asked. ‘Other things are dangerous besides flying!’
‘’E probably thought that, too,’ the tramp jerked his head towards the ambulance. ‘But now ’e’s dead and ’tis sweet to live.’
‘Seen Mrs Hateling?’? asked Robert. The pupil answered that he thought he had seen her sitting in her car by the gate when he had gone back to help the doctor get his Alvis through the mud. Robert thanked him and pushed through the crowd again. Souvenir hunting had begun, and he heard a mechanic arguing with a fat man, who was trying to lever a pitot head from an interplane strut with his pocket knife. Hawkings caught his arm.
‘Seen Mrs Hateling?’
‘I’m looking for her. Just heard she’s in her car by the gate.’
‘How did she get mixed up in this?’
‘She was here when we arrived. Must have seen it happen as she was passing.’
‘Too bad. It’s knocked her to bits by the look of it. See she gets home all right, will you? Then come back to the ’drome. We’ll have to have a confab over this.’
‘Right, skipper.’
He found her crumpled into a corner of the driving seat, crying bitterly. Two little girls were standing hand in hand in the road, watching her with solemn interest.
When he asked if he should drive her home, she nodded and moved into the passenger’s seat. He cleaned the blood from his hands with a petrol-soaked handkerchief and, turning the sports car, drove towards the city.
‘It’s stupid of me, but I can’t remember where you live?’
‘Straight through the town.’
The shops were brightly stuffed with Christmas toys and presents; the traffic in the main streets turgid so that he had to wait at each crossing. As they neared the Cathedral he noticed that his companion was trembling violently.
‘I say, would you like a drink or something?’
‘‘Fraid the pubs are closed, it’s nearly four, but I’ve got some stuff in my flat – if you don’t mind?’
‘I don’t mind.’
It was already dusk in the sitting-room as he lit the fire and poured her a whisky and soda. There was a service on in the Cathedral and the strains of an Advent hymn fell in flat sheets of noise upon their ears. She gulped the spirit and then another.
‘How do you manage here?’
‘I have a woman who does for me. That is, she cleans, makes my bed, sees to my washing, fixes the fire and reads my letters. I get my meals out.’
She lit the cigarette he offered her and began to walk about the long, low room.
‘All these books – I’d never have believed it of you.’ She glanced at the photographs that stood on the book-shelves. ‘And were you abroad?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know, I’m very vague about you!’
‘There’s nothing much in my past. Parson’s son. Went to a second-rate public school, a place in Surrey for the sons of the clergy. I suppose it’s changed now, but when I knew it there was more dirt there than any place I’ve seen outside Port Said.’
‘And then?’
‘Out of a job for a bit. The Service – and here. Not very exciting, I’m afraid.’
‘Where were you, abroad?’
‘Iraq.’
‘Tell me about it!’
‘Well, the pay’s very good out there. I had two polo ponies …’ he stopped as she began to cry.
‘It was awful,’ she said hysterically, ‘it was awful. I saw it. The noise was horrid. The ’plane just seemed to crumple into the ground. He was screaming when I got there. I hated it. I hated it. The ’plane all flimsy and broken. I knew I hated aeroplanes then. I’ll never fly again. It’s all grey and lonely. I’ve always been afraid.’
‘Nother drink?’
‘This flying was so wonderful. Everyone so happy. You so sweet to me. I’d never been happy before. Not really happy. And now this has broken it. It’s like the rest of life. It was awful. I hated it. The noise was horrid –’
‘Do you know how we used to cool beer out there?’
‘It was awful. The way he moved when I touched him –’
‘We used to make a hole in the sand and then put in as many bottles as we wanted. Cover them with sand, then pour petrol over it, which cools the beer by evaporation.’
‘I’m sorry, RO.’
‘There’s nothing to be sorry about, Judy.’ She went over to the low window and rested one arm against the top of the jamb, looking out at the Cathedral and the prim, tidy houses that ringed the Close, now all heavily shadowed, hazy with blue mist.
‘Doesn’t it depress you sometimes? This Close, I mean.’
‘No. I like it. It’s quiet. And sometimes I go into the Cathedral for a service.’
‘I didn’t know you were religious!’
‘I’m not religious.’
‘Robert!’
‘M’m?’
‘Do you think that when we die –?’
‘We go places?’
‘Yes.’
‘No. I think it will be like sleeping soundly when you don’t dream or anything.’
‘No. If I believed in life after death I would be. But I don’t.’
She lit another cigarette. ‘I can’t, Robert, I can’t.’
‘Can’t what?’
‘Fly again.’
’Oh, yes you can. Why, everyone feels the same after seeing his first crash. I can remember the time when I was just the same.’
‘Can you?’
‘Yes,’ he lied, and then continued, ‘besides, this fellow virtually committed suicide – you heard about him?’
She shook her head, and he told her the story.
‘Now, come down to the ’drome tomorrow and I’ll take you up for a joy-ride.’
She was silent for a little time. Then he drove her home in the cold twilight and caught a ’bus back to the aerodrome.
3
‘That show yesterday shook Judy Hateling up, didn’t it?’ Janet said as she walked with Robert towards the Tiger Moth.
‘Yes. It was very unfortunate that she should have had so much to do with it. Get into the kite and spin her up, will you, please? I want to see Perkins about a dog.’
‘OK.’
The GE was doing a daily inspection of one of the Gipsy Moths.
‘Good morning, Mr Owen.’
‘Good morning. You’ve heard about the storm that’s brewing?’
‘What storm would that be?’ he banged the palm of his hand on a compression strut.
‘About yesterday. Mr Heylead is trying to make trouble about the ’drome not being under proper control. It mostly concerns Mr Hawkings and yourself.’
‘I ’adn’t ’eard. Thank you, Mr Owen.’
‘Not at all. I’m in it too.’
‘It’s cold this morning!’
‘It is. You’ve been upstairs?’
‘Yes. Mr ’Awkings took me up on test.’
When he came out on to the apron again Janet was running up the engine, and the bitter blast of the slip-stream swept dust into his face and blew his sidcot hard on to arms and legs.
He took over control at fifty feet while she pulled the hood up, and then made her climb by instruments to three thousand five hundred. The clouds were high, brushed up into huge towers that reached into the heavens, the oblique rays of winter sunshine giving the silent white hills and valleys a depth of light and shade that intensified their virgin beauty. Sometimes a small patch of cloud would drift towards them, showing a grey, sunless world below as they threaded its cold intimacy. There was snow patchworking the fields on the low hills to the south and the ponds in the quiet farmyards were dull with frost.
Then he told her to fly level and to turn the aircraft through various compass bearings, flying on each for a few minutes.
‘Not at all a bad show, though you’re still inclined to be set on that rudder and to over-correct with the stick. Now, d’you remember what I taught you about spinning and recovering from spinning by the use of instruments?’
‘I think so.’
‘What was it?’
‘Well, to spin your throttle back and keep her straight with the rudder. When the speed drops to about fifty, full rudder the way you want to go and stick right back.’
‘Put on top rudder, look down at your feet to see if it’s on. Then you feel the kite spin t’other way, but don’t take any notice. As soon as you’ve got the rudder on, ease the stick central and forward a couple of inches. The rudder needle goes from four the way you’ve been spinning to about two and a half on t’other side. Then centralize rudder and when the air speed begins to drop – shove the stick central.’
‘Not bad.’ He took a good look below. ‘Now try a young one, will you?’
The Moth went easily into a spin, was kicked into a spiral by the slots. He bent his head backwards and watched the clouds twisting violently upwards. ‘Now,’ he cried on the third time round. Janet brought the ‘plane out pluckily, but in a few seconds they began to climb until the aircraft was standing on its tail. The sound of the wind in the wires died away. Robert grinned as he waited. His pupil was pedalling at her rudder. ‘Look at your pitch indicator! All right, I’ve got her.’ He gave the engine a burst of throttle to keep the airscrew turning and stall turned out.
‘That time you were too busy getting the rudder needle central to watch your ASI. Do you follow me?’
‘Sure.’
‘Otherwise it wasn’t too bad. You’ve got her, carry on climbing. We’ll go up and try a couple more.’
When she had done two satisfactory recoveries he asked how she felt.
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘Shove the umbrella back and have a breather.’
She let the hood flap back and pulled down her goggles.
‘God, it’s cold!’
‘Still feeling sick?’
‘N’no. Better now.’
‘Right.’ He looped and flick half-rolled.
‘RO!’
‘Yes.’
‘You love her very much, don’t you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he throttled down the engine, ‘I can’t quite hear you.’
‘I said … you love her very much, don’t you?’
‘You know how much dual instruction costs?’
‘Yes. Three and fourpence for every five minutes.’
‘Then I suggest that you concentrate on learning to fly and not on my love affairs, or what you consider to be my love affairs. Do a forced landing!’
As she took over he throttled the engine back. She picked a field, got too far down wind, Robert opening the throttle as the hedge came running back at them.
‘That may be your idea of a forced landing, but it’s not mine, and if you do any like that in your tests you’ll be pretty unpopular. It was terrible, a certain crash, enough to make the angels weep. How many times have I told you to pick a field, get down wind, turn up and down always towards your landing ground, judging your drift as you turn. Then overshoot and sideslip the surplus height off when you’re sure you can get in?’
‘I know, but –’
‘And your gliding turns are vile. You must use more opposite rudder coming out. I’ve told you about it, I’ve sworn at you, I’ve shouted till I’m tired. And still you do it.’
‘Don’t you understand that –’
‘Have I given you, “Action in the event of fire”?’
‘No.’
‘The first thing to do is to turn off the petrol. Then push the throttle wide open and sideslip like hell in an attempt to blow out the flames. If you can, use the hand fire-extinguisher. When the firing stops, and not before, switch off both mags. Do you follow me?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Pull the umbrella up and do some more head-in-the-bag.’