Round the Bend (10 page)

I never saw anything of all these countries, hardly, on that trip. I was working all the time when the machine was on the ground, and it was dark each night by the time we could drive in from the aerodrome to a hotel. I got just tantalizing glimpses of brown men and pretty Chinese girls in flowered pyjamas, enough to make me realize what I was missing.

Diento was a huge refinery town of over twenty thousand employees, many of them Dutch. It had a good airstrip, and I put down there about midday after flying in from Palembang. The strip wasn’t much different from any other aerodrome in any part of the world, but the grass was a bit darker in colour. The cars and trucks and roads were all the same. It’s a funny thing about the tropics, I have found. You go expecting everything to be quite different, and there’s so much that’s the same.

My passenger was a young Dutch-American scientist; he knew all about Diento, because he’d been there before. They sent a truck down for the laboratory gear and his boss came down to meet him in a car. We waited to see the stuff unloaded and safely in the truck, and then I went up with them in the car to the refinery offices. That was a big place. It stretched for miles out into the bush and along the bank of a river, rows and rows of storage tanks, and pipes and cylindrical towers and all sorts of things. Full-sized ocean-going tankers came into Diento to take the oil away to ports all over the world.

As I expected, in the office they had instructions to send me to Batavia about a hundred and fifty miles farther on; they thought
there was a small return load waiting for me there, but they didn’t know what it was. I would have gone back to the aerodrome and got off there and then, but the Dutchmen wouldn’t hear of it. They insisted that I stay the night and have a party with them and relax, and after all that flying I was quite glad to. They had a club by the riverside and they gave me a fine bedroom in that. There was a swimming pool and pretty girls out of the offices in it, and a concert and a dance after dinner, all by the riverside with sampans going past, and lights over the water, and flying foxes wheeling overhead in the velvety darkness, and a huge tropical full moon. I drank more Bols than I wanted to, but they were so kind and so pleased to see a strange face, one couldn’t refuse. I got rather tight, but so did everyone. A good party.

They sent me down to the aerodrome next morning in a car. I made a check over the machine, cleaned filters, drained sumps, swept out the cabin, and refuelled. Finally I took off at about ten-thirty for the short flight down to Batavia across the Sunda straits, and found the aerodrome, and came on to the circuit behind a Constellation of the K.L.M. The Dutch pilots were all speaking English on the radio to their own control tower, which seemed odd to me. It certainly made everything very easy, because I couldn’t speak a word of Dutch.

I landed and taxied to the parking position, and locked up the machine and went to the Control and customs for the necessary clearances. It all took a long time because Java was in an uproar with a full-scale war going on against the Indonesian Republicans, and there were military officers in all the offices wanting to see every sort of document. The K.L.M. people had been warned to expect me and were very helpful, and got me through the various offices as quickly as anyone could, and laid on transport for me, and took me into town to the Nederland Hotel.

The hotel was crowded out with military, and the best that they could do for me was a dormitory room with three other beds in it, and other chaps’ gear lying round all over the place. I was used to that sort of thing; we’d had it at several other places on the way. I dumped my stuff on an empty bed and saw the room boy, and went down to the dining room for lunch. I had
been warned by the K.L.M. chap that most offices took a siesta in that hot place after the midday meal; a suitable time to get to the Arabia-Sumatran office would be between three and four. I took the tip, and went up after lunch for an hour on the charpoy myself.

There was another chap in the room now, lying stretched out on the bed under his mosquito net, naked but for a short pair of trunks. I couldn’t see him very clearly through the net. I said conventionally, “I hope none of this stuff’s in your way.”

He turned and looked at me, and then he sat up and lifted the side of the net to see me better. I stood there gaping at him for a moment in surprise.

It was Connie Shaklin.

I
T WAS
thirteen years since I had seen Connie and a lot had happened in that time, but I knew him at once. I said, “Connie Shaklin! You remember me—on Cobham’s circus? Tom Cutter.”

He pushed back the net, got out, and shook me by the hand. He was leaner than I remembered him, especially in the face. In some ways he looked more Chinese than ever, but alongside a Chinese you could see he wasn’t one. He was too tall, too aquiline. His Russian mother was responsible for that. He was a striking-looking man; he reminded me of something, but for a time I couldn’t think of what it was.

He said, “Tom! What are you doing now? Last time I heard was years ago. You were still at Airservice then.”

I offered him a cigarette, but he said he didn’t smoke. I lit it and sat down on the charpoy. “I left them last year,” I said. “I’m on my own now.”

“Still in aircraft?”

“Yes. I’m operating in the Persian Gulf. I came down here on a charter job.”

I was terribly glad to see Connie again. He was a part of my youth, part of the fine time you have before you have to take
responsibilities. Presently, as you go through your life, you undertake so many duties that you haven’t time for making new, close friendships any more; you’ve got too much to do. For the remainder of your life you have to make do with the friends you gathered in in your short youth, and for me, Connie was about the only one I ever had. I started getting serious pretty early in my life, I suppose.

I told him all about my charter service in the Gulf as I stripped my few clothes off and stretched out on the bed. In return he told me what he had been doing. From Cobham’s circus he had gone to California; he had got a job with the Lockheed Company in their service and repair department and he had stayed with them for six years or so. Then the war had come, in 1939. He was a British subject, of course, and England was at war; he felt it was his duty to serve although he had queer ideas about fighting, and so he went north over the border to Edmonton and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as an engine fitter.

“Were you in aircrew?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I think that it is wrong to kill,” he said simply. “I told them that when I volunteered for the R.C.A.F. I told them also that if one could not kill in time of war, one ought to work very hard. I had the American ground engineer’s certificates, of course, for Lockheed and Pratt and Whitney stuff, and they were glad to have me for a fitter on the ground.”

He had spent the whole of the war in Canada working at various aerodromes in connection with the Empire training scheme and, later, on some cold weather research projects at Trenton. He had sat for the Canadian ground engineer’s licences at the end of the war and had got the lot without difficulty, and at the beginning of 1946 he had gone out to Bangkok and had worked for a time as a ground engineer with Siamese Airways.

I opened my eyes at that. Siamese Airways is the national airline of Siam and, I thought, staffed exclusively by Asiatics. “What on earth made you go there?” I asked.

“Karma,” he said smiling. I didn’t understand him, but his old magic was upon me once again and I didn’t interrupt; he knew so much more than I did. “I went back home to San Diego for a few months and worked at the Flying Club, but I couldn’t
settle there. I didn’t really like America, and I wanted to know more, much more, about the Lord Guatama and the Four Noble Truths. I wanted to hear people talk about the Buddhist faith who really
knew
something—not the sort of people you find in Los Angeles. And presently I found I had to go to Bangkok to find out about all that. There was no alternative except the bughouse.”

I grinned. This was the same old Connie, different to anybody else that I had ever met. He had been good for me when I was a callow and an ignorant youth; he was good for me now. I said, “Were you able to get into Siamese Airways?” And then I said, perhaps a little thoughtlessly, “I thought they were all Asiatics.”

He smiled. “Well, what do you call me?”

“You’re British,” I said, wondering.

“I was born in Penang,” he replied. “My father was a full Chinese. My mother was a Russian who got out in 1917, at the time of the Revolution. I speak Cantonese, and a little Mandarin. I spell my name in two parts now that I’m out here, Shak Lin, like my father did. I’m an Asiatic.”

“Not a proper one,” I said loyally.

He grinned. “Proper enough to get a job with Siamese Airways. I think they were very glad to get me; I got to Bangkok just as they were starting up. They bought a lot of disposals Dakotas and had them converted in Hong Kong. I was with them up till about four months ago.”

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

He said, “I’m with Dwight Schafter.”

“Who’s Dwight Schafter?”

“Don’t you know about him?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“He’s a gun-runner,” said Connie. “He flies arms into the Indonesian Republicans, or he did. The Dutch have got him now, here in Batavia.”

“You’re working for him?”

“Yes.”

“Well I’m muggered,” I said in wonder.

As we lay there on our beds in the hot afternoon he told me about Dwight Schafter. Dwight was an American, a soldier of fortune by profession. Wherever there is trouble in the world the
Dwights of all nations foregather. There are not very many of them, thirty or forty perhaps, and they are all supremely competent men because the others have been killed.

Dwight had spent some years in Central and South America, and he had flown for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He had been flying for the Chinese against the Japanese in 1938 and 1939, and he had come into the United States Army Air Force via Major Chennault’s Flying Tigers. He delivered two or three disposals B-25’s from America to the warring Israelites in Palestine just after the war, but by the middle of 1946 he was back in the East, flying loads of sub-machine guns from the Philippines to Indonesia for the benefit of brown men fighting the Dutch.

At that time there was considerable sympathy in South East Asia for the Indonesians in their struggle against the Dutch. In Indo-China the Viet-Minh forces were engaged in a similar rebellion against French rule. In Siam there was sympathy with the Asiatics in both cases, though it would probably be quite wrong to suggest that the Siamese Government connived at gun-running. It would probably be quite right to say that when strange freight aircraft turned up at Don Muang aerodrome outside Bangkok with thin stories of journeys to improbable places, the Siamese Government saw no reason to initiate officious and unnecessary investigations.

Dwight Schafter was a small, quick, dark-haired man from Indiana. He turned up at Don Muang one day flying a brand new Cornell Carrier. The Carrier was a great big American freight aeroplane in the same class as the British Plymouth Tramp; it was powered by two Pratt and Whitney engines of about seventeen hundred horsepower each, and it was very completely equipped. It cost about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the States; quite an aeroplane.

Dwight Schafter said that he was starting an air service with it from Saigon in Indo-China to Manila in the Philippines. He did not explain what he intended to carry between these cities in this expensive freight aircraft, and no one bothered to ask him. He was known at Don Muang. He had a Dakota which turned up from time to time for servicing by Siamese Airways, and he had always
paid his bills with cash on the nail, usually small cubical gold ingots, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply.

He wanted the Carrier serviced with a routine engine check. He said that there were no licensed ground engineers in Saigon, which at that time may or may not have been true; conditions in Indo-China were certainly very disturbed. In any case, he brought the aircraft into Don Muang to be checked over, and Connie Shaklin was put on the job with two Chinese ground engineers to help him. There was about two days’ work to be done.

When Connie told me this, I had not, at that time, seen him at work. I can now say that he was the most thorough and careful engineer that I have ever met. He was quick enough in doing a job, but he would never take the slightest thing on chance; in consequence he added to his work far more than another man would have thought necessary. Dwight Schafter was clearly very much impressed, because on the evening of the second day, when they were in the cockpit together at the conclusion of an engine test run, he said,

“Say, Shak Lin, why don’t you leave this outfit, ’n come and work for me? I’ll need somebody like you to help me run this baby.” He caressed the bakelite control wheel of the Carrier.

Connie stared out over the wide brown stretches of the airfield, glowing golden in the evening light, to the dim blue line of the hills up to the north. “Where are you based?” he asked. “Where would the job be?”

“I run from the Philippines to Saigon,” said Schafter carefully. “But the job’s not there. I’ve got a private strip way out in the country, where we do the maintenance. It’s very quiet there, of course—no Europeans nearer than a hundred miles. But that won’t worry you, because you speak Chinese.”

“I speak Canton,” said Connie. “Does that go at your strip?”

He nodded. “The people that you’d come in contact with understand Canton. Not the peasants, but you wouldn’t have to worry about those.” He paused. “It’s very isolated, but the job will probably be over in six months. Give you eight hundred American dollars a month, and transportation back here to Bangkok.”