In the Wet (11 page)

“I’m not the man in other ways,” David said. “I’ve not got the right background. I’m not like you, or Mr. Macmahon. I couldn’t get alongside the sort of people that you deal with here, in this place.” He glanced around him at the panelled walls, at the leaded casement window. “I started as a grocer’s boy in Townsville.” He struggled to express himself. “I mean, this is a social job, where you’ve got to know what to say to a Duchess, or perhaps even the Queen herself. You want somebody who knows the ropes, and not say the wrong thing and make everybody look stupid.”

“We know what we want,” said Cox. “Leave that to us. The chief thing that we want is an Australian who is very
thorough and reliable, and who can take a 316 safely to Australia or any other part of the world practically in his sleep. We’ve been into this with a great deal of care, and our first choice was you.”

“I could find you others who were just as good, born white.”

“We aren’t asking you to find us others,” said Frank Cox. “We’re asking you to take charge of a 316 and train the crew and fly it as required. As for the colour, you can put that out of your mind. We aren’t asking you to marry into the Royal Family.”

David sat in silence. At last he said, “How long would the job be for?”

“Indefinite,” said Cox. “If you take it on, I think you should stay for at least three years. We must have continuity, so that everybody works together as a team.”

“And the main base is here, in England, of course?”

“That’s right,” the Group Captain said. “At White Waltham. We’ve got a hangar at Canberra, at Fairbairn airport, as you probably know. The present plan is that the Monarch intends to spend two months of each year in Australia, and two months in Canada. But the main base is at White Waltham. If you want to set up a home, it would probably have to be in England, near White Waltham. Are you intending to get married in the near future?”

The pilot shook his head. “No. The colour makes that a bit difficult.”

“I see. Well, anyway, the main base is here.”

David sat in silence. He could think of no good reason for refusing this job, nothing more that he could say to excuse himself. He knew that the vast majority of officers serving in the R.A.A.F. would have jumped at the opportunity and he knew that it was a tremendous compliment that the job had been offered to him first, a greater compliment
than any of his decorations. He knew also that it was practically impossible to refuse it, and the thought depressed him, so that he hesitated, and said nothing.

“What’s the trouble?” the Group Captain asked at last.

The pilot raised his head. “I’m an Australian,” he said, “and not out of the top drawer at that. I’m all right in my own country. They understand about people like me there—specially up in Queensland, my own state. I’m glad to have had the chance of this trip home, but I wouldn’t want to spend my life here. It’s just a trip to me, this is. I don’t want to stay and spend my life in England.”

Cox said, “You don’t care about this country?”

“Not much,” the pilot said. “I like a place where everybody’s got the chance to make a fortune and spend it, like people do at home. I like a steak with two fried eggs on it.”

“You don’t like our Socialism?”

“I don’t know much about it,” David said. “That’s one thing that
does
fit me for this job. Harry Ferguson said, if I took this thing I wasn’t to take any part in politics—well, I never think about them much. The only thing I know is that we’ve had mostly Liberal Governments at Canberra for the last thirty years, and you’ve mostly had Labour. And your Conservatives, so far as I can see, are redder than our Labour.” He paused. “I know a Labour Government suits England best,” he said. “Too many people in the country, and so everyone hard up, everything in short supply, and so everybody’s got to pull together. I know that’s where the Socialism comes from. Everyone knows that. But I don’t have to like it.”

“There’s another thing,” said the Group Captain. “You’ve got a lot of our Conservatives in your country, as emigrants. It’s where they like to go. On balance, you’ve moved further to the Right and we’ve moved further to the Left.”

“I know,” the pilot said. He smiled. “I still don’t have to like it.”

“Do you like the Commonwealth at all?” asked the Group Captain. “Do you want Australia to be independent, or to join up with the States?”

David was shocked. Although he took little interest in politics, he had heard of this heresy, and he disliked it very much. “Of course I don’t,” he said. “We’re part of the old country. I only meant that, personally, I’d rather live in Queensland than in England.”

“You feel that England still does something for Australia?”

“Of course,” said the pilot. “You’ve only got to look at the 316, or at Rolls-Royce. We couldn’t get along without England.”

The Group Captain nodded. “I shall be sorry if you don’t join our show,” he said. “Perhaps England can’t get along so easily without you.”

“Without me?” said David.

“You and people like you,” said Cox. He paused. “You think we want somebody in the Queen’s Flight who knows how to talk to a Duchess. One of the Berkeley Boys, but Australian born. Well, that’s not what we want at all. Australia is giving this machine to the Queen’s Flight, and Her Majesty has asked that the crew shall be Australians. She’s no fool … Nigger. When she says she wants Australians, she means real Australians—not ones that have been brought up in Mayfair. She’s Queen of Australia as well as Queen of England. When she says she wants Australians and Canadians in the Queen’s Flight as well as English, she’s got some very good reason. I don’t know what that reason is. I don’t have to know. I only have to do what she wants, to the best of my ability. If you turn down this job, I shall look for another chap like you whose
spiritual home is in Wagga-Wagga or Kalgoorlie. But I very much hope that you won’t turn it down, because I think that you’re the sort of man she has in mind in saying that she wants Australians.”

The pilot grinned. “I’ve got a birth certificate, anyway,” he said. “That’s something.… Can I take an hour or so to think it over?”

“Of course.”

David glanced at his wrist watch. “I’ll give you a ring about five o’clock.”

He left the Palace, and walked along Pall Mall in deep thought. He was vaguely on his way to the club, but when he got near to the R.A.C. and saw the streams of people going in and out, he gave up the idea, and walked on slowly down the street. It was quieter in the street, in that he could think without the chance of some acquaintance bothering him to come and have a drink. He walked on, wondering what Cox had meant by saying that England could not get along without people like himself, what the Queen had meant—if she had meant anything at all. England had plenty of first class pilots in the R.A.F.

It was May, and a warm evening. He came to the National Gallery on the north side of Trafalgar Square and crossed the road, and stood for a time looking out over the square at the corner by Canada House. There was a bus stop near him, and a long queue of white faced, patient Londoners waiting to go home. He thought of the vigour and beauty of the people in similar bus queues in Brisbane and in Adelaide, comparing the tanned skins with the sallow, the upright carriage with the tired slouch. It wasn’t the fault of these people that they looked white and tired; hardships had made them so, and overwork, and the errors of dietary scientists who planned the rationing back in the Forties and the Fifties, when most of them were
children. Badly treated people, out of luck, yet with a quality of greatness in them still, in spite of everything. No reason in all that why he should want to live with them, however.

He turned from them, and looked out over the Square, at the sheer beauty of the new buildings on the other side. The new Home Office between the Strand and Northumberland Avenue, the pillared white grace of the Ministry of Pensions at the head of Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue, the straight classic lines of the new Ministry of Fuel and Power at the end of Cockspur Street, still building but already visible through the steel scaffolding. These people were the greatest engineers, the greatest architects in the whole world, he felt, and now that housebuilding was at a standstill all the energy and talent of their building industry was concentrated on these marvellous public buildings, going up all over England. The new London, with its narrow streets and towering white palaces to house the civil servants, was fast becoming the most lovely city in the world, with Liverpool and Manchester not far behind. Sydney and Melbourne were shabby and old fashioned in comparison, and Brisbane puerile, where housebuilding lagged far behind the immigrants.

He turned, and looked at the bus queue once again. It said in the papers that things in England were on the upgrade after many years now that the population had reduced by twenty-five per cent; there was a suggestion that next year a private citizen would be allowed to buy a motor car and petrol for his own use. It might be so, but looking at the bus queue David felt it inconceivable that these tired people would regain the careless rapture of Australians within his own lifetime. And yet from their poverty and hardships they produced these marvellous things, these shining palaces in London, these superb aeroplanes and aero
engines. Their radio and television programmes were the admiration of the world. Australia had now nearly as many people and Australia was a happy and a prosperous country, yet Australia did not produce one tenth the marvels that came out of England. Perhaps prosperity itself became a hindrance to great creative genius; raised on the stock route David knew that if a cow became too fat it was difficult for her to get in calf.

He could not make up his mind. He hated these people for their lack of spirit, for their subservience to civil servants, for their outmoded political system of one man one vote that kept them in the chains of demagogues. He venerated them for their technical achievements. To spend three years or more in England would be like living in a home for incurables, but not to do so would be to miss an opportunity he might regret his whole life through. Difficult.

He thrust his hand down into his pocket, grinning a little with his brown face. There were three coins there, two pennies and a shilling. He pulled them out impulsively and slammed them down upon the granite parapet beside him, and withdrew his hand.

The Queen’s head gleamed up at him from all three. The shilling was an old one dated 1963 which showed the head of a young woman; the pennies, one of 1976 and one quite new of 1982, showed her middle aged and mature. He stared down at them, smiling quietly; the omens were definite. He was glad it had turned out that way. He would not enjoy three years or more away from his own country, but it was impossible to put aside this job.

He swept the coins up into his pocket with a lean brown hand, and turned, and walked back to the R.A.C. He stood in the telephone booth at the turn of the stairs and rang up the Group Captain in St. James’s Palace. “This is Nigger
Anderson,” he said. “I’ve thought this over, and I’ll take the job if you still want me.”

For the next few months Anderson did very little flying. Deliveries of the 316 could not begin until the prototype was through its trials, and actually it was four months after his appointment to the Queen’s Flight that David took delivery of the Australian machine. In the meantime, however, he found he had a good deal of work upon the ground to do. He consulted with Cox and with his opposite number from Canada, a Wing Commander Dewar, and they set up Canadian and Australian offices in the annexe to the hangar housing the Queen’s Flight upon White Waltham aerodrome. David moved from Boscombe Down to a small flat over a shop in Maidenhead; it was one advantage of life in England that there was never any difficulty now in getting a house or a flat on easy tenancy and at a very low rent from the National Housing Bureau. He began a series of meetings with the Air Attaché in Australia House to get together an aircrew. Then, with Cox and Dewar, he faced up to the problems of accountancy.

Here he found that they were breaking quite new ground. Hitherto all the expenses of the Queen’s Flight had been passed by Cox straight to the Assistant Private Secretary, Major Dennis Macmahon, who had scrutinised them, queried anything that might seem relevant to him, and passed them for payment. Now a new system had to be thrashed out separating the costs of the Canadian and the Australian machines from the basic organisational costs, and passing those to the High Commissioners for settlement; it was complicated by the fact that spares and fuel and oil were held in common for the Australian and the Canadian machines, necessitating a complete revision of the rather simple system of accounting that had existed in the Queen’s Flight up to date. These matters, with a number of others,
were thrashed out at a full dress meeting held in a conference room in St. James’s Palace. It was decided that in principle accounts for each machine should still pass through the Secretaries’ Office in Buckingham Palace for check against the Royal use of the machines, before the separate accounts were sent for payment to the High Commissioners. Within those terms of reference the officers concerned were left to settle the new system in its details.

“Gee,” said Wing Commander Dewar. “This thing ’ll drive me nuts.”

“Too right,” said Wing Commander Anderson.

They had a meeting with Group Captain Cox in Major Macmahon’s office in Buckingham Palace. It was the first time that either Anderson or Dewar had been inside the Palace and they were properly impressed, with a tendency to walk softly and to talk in a low tone of voice. The Assistant Private Secretary had a large, white painted office looking out upon the Park on the north front; he greeted them cheerfully and they settled down to business. He pressed a button on his desk, a buzzer sounded in the next room, and a girl came in, notebook and pencil in hand. “This is Miss Long,” he said. The men got up and bowed. “She’ll be handling the routine work of this thing when we’ve got a system going.”

For an hour and a half they laboured to design a system to deal with matters of accountancy that were simple to the Assistant Private Secretary and Miss Long, but seemed difficult and complicated to the officers. Finally they got it straightened out, and Macmahon told the girl to type a memorandum of the decisions and to circulate it; later he told her privately to make it very simple and to put it in a form that they could refer back to if they had forgotten what to do. The business finished, the three officers got up to go.