Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (4 page)

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh well, I suppose if you’re going to do it at all, that’s got to be the way.’

Peggy showed us to a large tepee that looked like a hospital dormitory inside, with six or seven metal-framed beds lining the walls. I could hear rain on the canvas and thought it would be a pretty cool place to spend the night, just so long as it didn’t leak.

‘Look, Peggy,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow we have to get up to Brisbane where we’re supposed to be hitching a ride in a Spitfire. I know it’s a couple of hundred kilometres but do you reckon there’s anyone here who might give us a lift?’

‘I’m sure there is,’ she told me. ‘Ask around, Charley. Word of mouth is the way here. Just ask around.’

Claudio and I went off to do just that and about thirty seconds later we bumped into Brendan, a tall, barefoot English guy with a few days’ stubble on his chin, wearing a baseball hat with the peak hugging the back of his neck.

‘Sure, I can take you,’ he told us. Then he showed us his Mitsubishi. ‘What do you think? She’s got a little more character than the car you arrived in, hasn’t she?’ He nodded to the bright green evMe. ‘But you might have to push.’ He paused, then added with a grin, ‘I’m joking. We’ll be fine if we park on a hill.’

Brendan’s Irish mate Declan had given him the car just a couple of weeks ago. He told us it was like that at the Factory: people moved on and left things behind for other people, and Declan had left his car. Brendan had come to the hostel for a couple of days, and ended up staying for three and a half months. He lived in a tent, the flysheet reinforced with a blue plastic tarp to help keep the rain out. In fact, the whole of the tented village was a mass of blue tarps - it was reminiscent of some South American shanty town seen through the murk of the day.

Peggy told us that Brendan staying for as long as he had was not unusual, it was that kind of place. The Jungle Hut personified the spirit of the Factory - a sort of tented bar/recreation area packed with people drinking, playing music and sorting through belongings that had been left by other backpackers. I reckoned the average age was about nineteen and it made me feel like some old granddad or something at forty-two. When I was younger I’d not really been into the backpacking scene, but here there was a real community feel and I could see the attraction. We had a good night, drinking a few beers and listening to music, playing a bit of table tennis and praying the weather would change.

Later on, Peggy came by to tell us it wasn’t safe to sleep in the tepee after all. There was a severe weather warning and when it rained as hard as this the water dribbled onto the electrics. It was a pity because I had been looking forward to it, but there was no choice so we opted for cubes instead: a room each with wooden walls that shook a little when you leaned on them. Peggy reckoned the weather would keep us at Byron Bay for tomorrow at least, though we would not be surfing. That was all right; we had a day’s grace if we needed it and things might be brighter come Friday. I really wanted to be on that plane, though. I mean, a Spitfire is always iconic, even if it is a replica built in Brisbane. But an hour or so later my hopes seemed to be dashed completely, when a slightly drunk-looking girl with wild hair told us the road to Brisbane was flooded.

The storm that night was as bad as any I’ve experienced. It poured with rain and the wind howled and in the morning we discovered that some of the backpackers had been flooded out completely. There didn’t look to be any let-up in the rain either, but overnight I had decided I really wanted to try to make it to the Spitfire place. Sam phoned them early to see what the situation was and they told him the weather up there was getting better, though they had had to dig trenches around their hangar to stop it flooding. They could not afford to get any moisture into the alloy they used for the aircraft because it would corrode. If anything got even the slightest bit damp they had no choice but to dump it.

It was much better news than we’d hoped for and after all the stories of disaster we’d heard last night, I had a sneaking feeling this was going to come off. Down here the rain was still torrential, mind you, and although it was warm enough for shorts and flip flops, when we left the Arts Factory in Brendan’s Mitsubishi we had the headlights on. The car was called the Millennium Pigeon. Brendan’s mate Declan had driven up from Melbourne with a whole bunch of people, one of whom was a dead ringer for Han Solo apparently. According to Brendan, Declan had enough body hair to resemble Chewbacca, so you can see how the car got its name.

The weather was foul, every bit as bad as yesterday, and Brendan told us his tent had all but washed away. He was pretty relaxed about it though, just one of life’s little hazards. He was that kind of guy, good company, and for a couple of hundred kilometres we chatted away like old friends. He told me he had been travelling for a year or so, making his way through South America before coming to Australia. He was a photographer and had left college about six years ago, and then worked as an art director for a firm that made wood-burning stoves. He loved the job but one day he just decided to quit. He left the house he was renting and bought an old caravan on a strip of land outside Exeter in Devon. Looking for a simpler existence, he worked at various jobs, saved his money, then bought a plane ticket and eventually ended up here. He was doing his thing and I admired him for it.

The closer we got to Brisbane, the better the weather became. When I finally spotted blue sky I was yelping with excitement. South of Brisbane we had to divert because the road disappeared into a flood plain that extended as far as the eye could see. The water level was gradually going down but it had been a metre deep at one point and the only vehicles getting through were big trucks and jacked-up utes. Brendan was great: he hadn’t planned to go to Brisbane that day, but he took us all the way to the hangar. We had to detour a few times because of the flooding, before eventually turning into a country lane that led beyond some soggy-looking mobile homes to the Supermarine Aircraft Company at Moggill.

‘Brendan,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much, you’ve been terrific.’

‘No worries. If you see me by the side of the road with my thumb out you’ll stop, right?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘we’ll drive right past you.’

 

 

The hangar was open and I could see a Spitfire with a kangaroo wearing a pair of boxing gloves painted on the fuselage. Oh my God, I was tingling. I know it sounds obvious, but it really did look like a
proper
Spitfire. The sun was out and there was no wind - with any luck tomorrow I would be flying up the coast to Maryborough.

A guy in his late twenties was sitting at a desk in the back office with some blueprints spread before him. This was Clint, the bloke we’d been speaking to on the phone. He worked for the owner of the company, Mike O’Sullivan, who had been making these planes for the last nine years now.

‘Clint,’ I said pointing to the plane and stating the obvious again, ‘it looks like a Spitfire.’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’ We shook hands. ‘That’s the Mark 26B, Charley, ninety per cent of the original.’

‘You mean in size?’

‘That’s right, yeah, ninety per cent of the original size. We started with a Mark 25, which was only seventy per cent and a single-seater, but a lot of the customers wanted to take someone up with them, so we made it bigger to accommodate a passenger.’

I took a closer look at where I would be perched in the morning, a tiny little seat behind the pilot; barely enough room to squat. I could feel a rush of nervous excitement: a replica of a Second World War icon, the plane that stopped Hitler. I slid my hand across the surface of the wing, almost stroking it. ‘How long did it take to build?’ I asked him.

‘This one, eight months from when Mike walked out of the office with the spec until it was in the air. When he came down from the maiden flight he reckoned it was as good as it got and we’ve not touched the design since.’

Clint explained that the company supplies these aircraft in kits; they include the complete fuselage, the wings, the undercarriage and everything bar the propeller, paint and instrumentation. They ship the kits to enthusiasts all over the world who assemble them like giant Meccano sets. Everything is prefabricated, right down to the rivet holes and the nuts and bolts. It’s packed in a massive wooden crate then sent to the customer along with the engine. There are three engines you can choose from: a pair of Isuzu V6s, one normally aspirated and the other supercharged, or if you want a 450 bhp V8.

Clint showed me a second-generation Griffin engine that was used in the Spitfires in the latter part of the war. Built by Rolls Royce, it was an enormous 37-litre V12 with a supercharger that produced 2000 bhp. Of course, with all the armaments the original plane was much heavier than the one I would be in, and the Isuzu V8 produced the same amount of power. They had an engine ready for testing now and Clint told me I could start it up.

‘The birth of an engine,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe I’m here at the birth of a Spitfire engine.’

God knows what it weighed but it was sitting well off the ground on a special jig. The propeller was in place and the engine linked to a switchboard and laptop. Clint handed me a set of ear plugs. ‘There you go, Charley,’ he said, ‘you’ll need those.’ I checked that the circuit breakers were in place, flicked four switches, gave it a little throttle and hit the starter. The engine grunted and groaned for a few moments, just about turning over.

‘OK,’ Clint said, ‘at least we know the test battery is flat.’

With another battery fitted, I made sure the prop was clear and tried again. This time it fired, and as the engine coughed into life the gust of wind from the propeller was so fierce it tore at the roots of my hair.

‘It will tick over around 800 rpm,’ Clint yelled above the noise. ‘Maximum revs about 5000; you need 4800 for take-off.’

The company checks everything on the engine before it goes out: the timing, oil pressure, water pressure, temperature, etc. Once they are satisfied, the ECU is locked in and that is it. According to Clint, you don’t need to touch it again.

‘Wow,’ I said when I’d switched the motor off. ‘And I thought I had a good job.’

It was late afternoon now and we had another hundred kilometres to go to get to Cressbrook, north of Brisbane, and Watts Bridge airfield. I was sleeping in the hangar tonight because, if all went to plan, we had a big day tomorrow and would be away early.

Jumping into Clint’s ute we drove north. By the time we got to the airfield it was gloomy, the sun going down and a rainbow in the sky. We picked our way across the field to another hangar, where light spilled onto the grass and a second Spitfire was sitting grinning at anyone who walked by. And I mean literally: the paint job was a shark’s mouth complete with lots of white teeth. Clint pointed out a guy in his forties sitting in the cockpit, checking the instruments. This was Bruce, another of Mike O’Sullivan’s crew. He’d painted the shark’s mouth. This plane took my breath away. The teeth around the fuselage were complemented by zebra stripes on the wings and it looked every bit the Second World War fighter.

‘It’s wonderful that you’re still making them,’ I told Bruce. ‘It keeps the whole spirit of the Spitfire alive.’

Climbing into the cockpit was no mean feat. It was pretty cramped and all I could see from the pilot’s seat were the tips of the prop at the end of the nose that lifted at quite an angle. I wondered how the hell the pilot saw to take off . . . but maybe it was best not to dwell on that too much.

The fuselage was what I would call up close and personal, barely any elbow room, and when the canopy was closed it really felt like I was in a fighter. The joystick was an original, complete with the central firing mechanism and its three-position trigger. The top part was for machine guns, the bottom for cannon, and if you wanted them both you pressed the middle. The recoil on that would stop the plane in the air.

‘Jesus,’ I muttered, ‘that’s incredible.’

‘All they had was eight seconds of machine-gun time,’ Bruce told me. ‘Eight seconds and the ammo was out. What they’d do is get within three hundred yards of the German planes and zutzut’ - he made a firing sound - ‘just a little burst. Hold it for the full eight seconds and you’d be out completely.’

I looked sideways at him. ‘That’s not how it is in the films, Bruce.’

‘Right.’

We went into Cressbrook for some food and Claudio and I took a moment to get some air. It was calm now, almost balmy and a really nice temperature. The town was pretty old and I loved the layout of the streets. The pavements were made of wood with the balconies from the upper floors extending right across to the kerb: it created a wonderful ambience.

‘How’re you feeling?’ Claudio asked me.

‘I’m a bit nervous actually. I think we’re going to do some barrel rolls and loop-the-loops, so I’d better take a plastic bag with me. I did this once before, Clouds, years ago in Africa when I was making a film. I went up in an American trainer plane and when I came down my face was just ashen.’

After dinner we went back to the airfield where Rick, the guy who would be piloting tomorrow, had arrived on his BMW.

‘There are so many pilots who ride, Rick,’ I said, shaking hands. ‘But then I guess it’s the same juice.’

‘I want you to teach me to wheelie,’ he laughed. ‘That’s why I rode down.’

He was maybe sixty-five (he told me that only that week he had received his senior citizen’s card) and British, a gentle guy who immediately put me at ease and told me that tomorrow we wouldn’t do anything that my body would not take. ‘I’m afraid there’s no stick in the back,’ he said, ‘so I’ll have to do all the flying. Unless of course you want me to sit in the back.’

‘Well, I have done eight hours . . .’

 

 

Rick tests the planes for Supermarine. He’s flown these Spitfires in England and at shows in America, and he said that even the Americans acknowledge that the Supermarine kit is one of the best in the world.