Illywhacker (19 page)

It was now twenty minutes past two. The welcoming committee at Colac were already donning their hats and fussing with their bows. I sat down opposite her. She would not look at me. She mashed her ice-cream with her spoon.

“You didn’t even look at it,” I said. “I paid three shillings and you didn’t even look.”

“The Chinaman was watching,” she whispered, keeping her eyes on the puddling mess of ice-cream.

“Chinamen don’t talk to anyone,” I said, “except other Chinamen.” I did not even have the fare for a tram to the Barwon Bridge. I would have to walk all the way.

“Please,” I said. “For God’s sake, have mercy.”

“He
saw,”
she said.

“Oh merciful Mother of God,” I stood up. It was two twenty-three, “save me from the brave talk of little girls.”

“You don’t understand Geelong,” she pleaded and I had to steel myself to stay angry in the face of those liquid green eyes. “It’s not like Melbourne.”

“I understand enough,” I said, looking casually into the next booth and finding the most inquisitive eyes of Mrs Kentwell peering up from a pearly cup of milkless tea.

“Mrs Kentwell,” I said, holding out the hat I was clasping to my chest.

She cut me dead.

As I strode from the ABC I realized that my flying suit was not at the hangar at Barwon Common but at Western Avenue. Stratocumulus clouds streaked feathers of ice crystals in the high blue sky.

I strode up the hill in Moorabool Street with a vigour that demanded attention which is how I got myself written up in the Reverend Mawson’s sermon.

The reverend gentleman was gazing out of his leadlight window at All Saints Vicarage, his pen handle resting on his pendulous lower lip, when he saw a man of such vigour and optimism that he set to work immediately to embalm the image in his sermon. The congregation of All Saints next Sunday would all see and admire me in their mind’s eye, a modern muscular
Christian striding up the hill, his soul bursting with good Anglican intentions.

I brushed through the Reverend Mawson’s demands as lightly as through a spider web. I strode past the Geelong West Fire Station, tipping my forty-shilling hat to the men outside. I passed Kardinya Park where the tramline ended and where I had spent a dismal afternoon with the older McGraths, watching monkeys and worrying about Phoebe who had gone away with some people in a Dodge with a badly timed magneto. I pounded across the bridge on the Barwon River where a strong southerly cooled my sweating face too rapidly.

At Barwon Common I enlisted the help of a nearby cabinet maker to swing the prop. He swung it twice to draw fuel into the engine.

I switched on. “Contact.”

The man (burly-armed, slow-witted) was lucky not to break his arm. I turned around in my seat to see the prop miss his arm by less than an inch.

I taxied down the bumpy common without the benefit of gloves, goggles, flying suit, or even a cap.

I took off into the wind, banked, and followed the road up the Belmont Hill which lead out to the main Colac Road. It was now ten past three in the afternoon.

Flying is normally an interesting enough occupation to soothe the most troubled man, and I am not just speaking of the much-praised beauty of earth and sky, the people like ants, etc., etc. There is a lot of work involved in flying a craft like a Morris Farman, and it is good for a temper, much like chopping wood can be. But on this afternoon my eyes were watering in the wind and my hands were so cold that when I tried to open my fob watch I couldn’t manage it. I did not like the Morris Farman. It seemed a slow, heavy, irritating plane and not worthy of me. This was not snobbishness. It was a fact: the Morris Farman was built as a trainer, and I was a long way from being a student. Ross Smith (who continued to get a three-inch par in the
Geelong Advertiser
every day) would not have been seen dead in it and Bradfield’s B3 was ten years ahead in every aspect.

I set my face into a concrete grin and cursed the head wind. All the way I battled to hold the craft in the turbulent sky. I slipped and skidded and, in the face of angry gusts, sometimes moved backwards rather than forwards.

I found the racecourse in Colac without much difficulty and I was momentarily soothed by the sight of a small crowd. It was only natural that I flew low over the ground (as the Shire Clerk’s horses bolted in terror and carried his screaming wife and blissfully sleeping baby out towards Cemetery Hill) and did a little fancy flying in a belligerent sort of spirit, pushing the craft a little beyond its safe limits. The spruce-wood frame groaned and the rigging wires sang in the wind. If there was anyone below who was knowledgeable enough to sneer at the plane they would know, at least, that its pilot deserved something better.

I brought the craft in for a perfect landing and taxied to the waiting crowd of townspeople whose numbers had been somewhat depleted by the departure of a search party for the Shire Clerk’s wife (the Shire Clerk himself had remained behind, explaining to anyone who would listen that duty compelled him).

Thus a certain confusion greeted me as I jumped from the plane: there were heads turned towards Cemetery Hill, loud shouts, odd cooees, the plucking fingers of the Shire Clerk and the potato farmer’s hands of Cocky Abbot (hands which belied his status) which grasped mine to give me a hearty shake. The Shire Clerk made one or two attempts at an official welcome but eventually gave up and, feigning indifference, began to tweak at the rigging wires like a man called to tune an indifferent piano.

Although he was well past fifty, Cocky Abbot was a man of immense strength, famous for his ability to wrestle a steer and throw a bag of wheat. He had a huge head, a high forehead, a long nose, and a big round chin with an extraordinary dimple that I could not take my eyes from.

I hardly heard a word he said. There was too much noise, much grabbing, small boys likely to damage the craft. All I could think of was the dimple, and what a heavy man he was.

A second dimpled chin presented itself. I did not need to be told (although I was—we shook) that this was Cocky Abbot’s son. This was a different animal entirely. I did not like this son. He wore an AIF badge and an Old Geelong Grammarian’s tie. At the time I did not know what the tie represented, but the camel-hair coat, the military moustache, the way in which cane and gloves were held, all indicated that I was in the presence of an Imaginary Englishman.

The son handed me a small suitcase with the distant eyes of a man dealing with a chauffeur. I placed it in the passenger’s compartment. I pulled a boy from the wing. A man with a bucket in his hand gave me a letter he wanted posted in Geelong. In other circumstances I would have blossomed in the face of these attentions and turned my eyes to meet those of the Colac beauties who hid their meanings beneath the shade of their hats. But I was late, my passenger was far too heavy, and I was cold and lovesick.

I was disappointed in Jack too. How could he make an Australian plane with Imaginary Englishmen? You would think Cocky Abbot a reasonable fellow until you met the son, and then you saw what was wrong with him. It was what happened in this country. The minute they began to make a quid they started to turn into Englishmen. Cocky Abbot was probably descended from some old cockney lag, who had arrived here talking flash language, a pickpocket, a bread-stealer, and now, a hundred years later his descendants were dressing like his gaolers and torturers, disowning the language, softening their vowels, greasing their way into the plummy speech of the men who had ordered their ancestors lashed until the flesh had been dragged in bleeding strips from their naked backs.

The old man was as rough as bags but he was proud because he had sired an Englishman.

I lost the pair of them in the crowd and then turned to find them both sitting, side by side, in the plane. They were busily arranging rugs around themselves.

“What’s this?” I demanded of the old man. “I was only picking up one passenger.”

“I’m bringing the boy,” Cocky Abbot said, producing a silver brandy flask and taking a swig. He wiped his mouth and passed the flask to his son.

“It’s too much weight,” I said. The crowd pressed around, eager to hear.

“If you can’t carry two men,” Cocky Abbot said, “it beats me how you’ll ever carry a bale of wool.”

When I had envisaged an Australian-made aeroplane it was as a weapon against people like this and I felt an almost overpowering urge to walk away and leave them for the crowd to laugh at. I was so overcome by irritation that I did not know what I was likely to do next. I took the small brass rigging tightener from my pocket and walked around the craft. I tightened several struts which had been stretched by the
aerobatics. It was only my desire for Phoebe that brought me back to the cockpit. I seated myself and fussed with the hessian bags to make myself more comfortable.

“I’ll need one of you blokes,” I called back over my shoulder, “to swing the prop.”

“Donaldson will do it,” said the Imaginary Englishman, smiling pleasantly at the crowd.

The representative from the
Colac Times
demanded my attention while Cocky Abbot called out: “Where’s Donaldson?”

The Shire Clerk, scanning the dusty road behind the grandstand for sign of his wife and child, was summonsed to the craft where, to general hilarity, he grasped the propeller in this fingernail-bitten hands.

I was too preoccupied with poor Donaldson to give the
Colac Times
a decent interview. Donaldson was a small man, all bum and pigeon toes, whose beard could not hope to hide the insecurity of his mouth which quailed before authority and cheeky children. He held the propeller and blushed the colour of a nerine plum. He knew that something bad would happen to him.

The crowd gave him no mercy. “Come on, Donno,” they yelled. “Show us your stuff.”

“Push your pen.”

“Swing it.”

He pulled on the propeller twice. Nothing happened. The crowd hooted. They were as ignorant as any crowd: I was simply drawing fuel into the engine and the switch was on “off”.

I turned to “switch on”.

“Contact!” I yelled.

The Shire Clerk did not understand the terminology. He stared at me, bright red with mortification.

“Again,” I yelled, “now!”

Donaldson’s scream of pain must have been drowned by the engine, and it was only later, clipping my pars from the
Colac Times
, that I learned of the unfortunate Clerk’s broken arm. I dictated a long letter to him, apologizing for the injury and discoursing at length on the ignorance of the townspeople. I hope it gave the man some comfort.

“Mr Badgery,” the
Colac Times
of 25th April 1920 reported, “was anxious to return to the air, explaining the uncertainty of winds and the necessity of landing in Geelong before dark.”

For once, I had understated the case.

Due to the weight of the two Cocky Abbots the Morris Farman barely cleared the cypress trees at the end of the racecourse. A second line of eucalypts brushed their sparse umbrellas against the undercarriage.

After twenty miles of labouring hard I could not get the craft above five hundred feet. No tail wind in the world would get us to Barwon Common before nightfall.

I watched the wintry sun as it settled behind a low ribbon of cloud and wondered whether it might not be better to land on a road or in a paddock and ferry the passengers to Geelong by some other method. It was only vanity that kept me going.

I glanced back at them and was pleased to see that they were frightened. They sat in their rugs, staring ahead, not daring to look over the side.

Jack, I reflected, kicking angrily at the rudder bar, had understood nothing. He had gone on in his blundering, amiable way, liking everyone without discrimination, anyone, that is, who was not a Chinaman or a Jew. Jack, who had read aloud the poetry of Henry Lawson, had understood nothing about it. He had let me down.

I flew low across the melancholy landscape of long shadows, stewing in the juices of betrayal.

Of course the night landing was my fault and no one else’s. If I hadn’t hung around Geelong mooning over Phoebe I would have been back in plenty of time.

But when I followed the electric lights down Belmont Hill and found no flares at the Common, all my anger was directed at Jack. There was no moon and the Barwon River was a slick of black beneath the lights of the bridge. I couldn’t even find the hangar on the Common.

I banked and brought the craft on a northerly course, flying low over Geelong itself. The squatters, emboldened by brandy, thankful to be alive, were all agog at this display of lights and life. The blustering wind (which had made them huddle into rugs and clutch at the bench seat) no longer troubled them. They leaned out, tapped me on the back, and shouted. They had no idea what I had in store for them.

I took the Morris Farman out over the bay, above the ships at
Corio Quay, turned, and began my descent. Western Avenue, bright as day, loomed large before the squatters’ eyes. I dropped the craft (none too gently) across the power lines where Western Avenue turns before the park, and skimmed in under the next lot at the Gleason Street corner. I passed beside a Dodge Series 6 whose pale-faced driver swung his wheel, caught in a culvert, bounced out and veered across the road behind the aircraft where Mrs Kentwell saw it lock wheels with a horse and jinker. The jinker’s wheel shattered and the Dodge came to a halt at the top of the steep grassy bank above Corio Bay.

I taxied to the McGraths’ front door. When the engine was turned off the sound of the terrified horse dragging the crippled jinker made a perfect accompaniment to the old squatter’s face.

I was all politeness. I helped the gentlemen from the aeroplane.

Madame Ovlisky, Clairvoyant of Little Mallop Street, Geelong, sat before her smudged charts and confidently predicted a resurgence of influenza. There would be deaths in North Geelong, she said, and the dance halls would be empty. She could not see the canaries her customer had lost, although she was provided with the address (Melbourne Road, North Geelong) from which they had been stolen. She saw murder, she said, that very night, and if her customer was uninterested by this news, Madame Ovlisky did not notice it. As she spoke lightning flickered above the distant You Yangs and she was not dissatisfied.