Spitfire Girl (23 page)

I tucked him in, gave him some pills and switched off the light. Two minutes later he was back in the bathroom, hawking piteously.

We spent an unhappy night with the lights going on and off like traffic signals. Next morning an Iranian Oil Company doctor pronounced nothing more serious than cramp. By this time, however, it was too late to take off, so Leo rested in bed, Sonny washed his smalls, if such a giant can be considered to have smalls, and Gordon and I took a taxi to the bazaar to buy odds and ends. This was one of those days when he decided to be friendly and charming and we chatted gaily as we escaped the sun and wandered through the cool dark passageways sheltering under canvas roofs. We found a stall that sold Japanese imitation Ronson lighters embellished with voluptuous nudes. Only one appealed to us and we were on the point of bickering once again when I suggested we toss for it. I won, but such is human perversity, I felt little pleasure in my small victory.

The next day Leo felt better, though still weak. To relieve him of the burden of navigation, we persuaded him to let Gordon lead on the next leg to Bandar Abbas. Bandar Abbas had been chosen as an alternate aerodrome as we had received a hint from the British Government, just before taking off from Israel, that we were no longer welcome at Sharja. The local sheik objected to Jewish or ex-Jewish planes passing through his territory.

Before taking off we checked the facilities chart for information on the aerodrome at Bandar Abbas. No one knew very much about it except that it had no radio facilities, had not been used for years and was difficult to find. Doubtfully we checked with the Iranian Oil Company who assured us that petrol had been specially shipped there for us.

We took off soon after dawn with Gordon leading, myself his number two and Leo and Sonny numbers three and four. The weather was perfect and, as we climbed through the heat haze to the coolness above, I felt again the emotion of flight and wondered why such a subject had failed to produce a writer worthy of its elusive quality. The sky, that holds the inspiring grandeur of sunset over the Himalayas, sunrise over the reflecting glaciers of Greenland, that was the stage for tragedy and valour during the war, still awaits its interpreter.

On Gordon’s right and adjusting the throttle to hold this position, I glanced at the others. The sun glinted sharply on the perfect elliptical symmetry of their wings, and provoked a sad reflection on the day when this historic and graceful aircraft disappears from the skies. Gordon looked over to me and waved his map. On his left Sonny straggled behind, determined as usual, to keep a fatherly eye on me.

We climbed to 11,500 feet before levelling off. Below us the Persian coastline grew faint and disappeared, leaving us suspended in a symphony of blue. Only the air-speed indicator registering 195 m.p.h. confirmed motion and achievement. I loosened my straps, wriggled to a more comfortable position on the dinghy seat and wished I had left off my overalls. My parachute straps persisted in slipping off my shoulders and the perspiration struck coldly against my back. Around me the slim cockpit fitted as closely as the latest fashion line. I sympathized with Sonny; he was twice my size.

We flew comfortably above the haze that cut a sharp line on the horizon. Above this line the sky stretched to infinity; below, visibility dropped to a dusty blur that concealed the sea and separated us from reality. I reflected on the slight differences of technique of Gordon’s leadership, slight unimportant differences that pointed out the differing methods of American and British military flying. He flew confidently and his confidence induced me to put away my maps. A foolish act, for should Gordon suffer mishap I, as number two, would take over the leadership.

After two hours we began letting down into the haze and tucked closely together in echelon starboard formation before sweeping over Bandar Abbas at two hundred feet to signal our arrival to the local petrol agent. The small port flashed by in a second before we followed Gordon faithfully as he twisted and turned in unison with the dusty track that straggled across wadis and desert and led to the aerodrome. I got out my maps and tried pin-pointing our position but there was nothing significant enough on the ground to relate to the maps. There was an anxious ten or fifteen minutes before Gordon’s voice came over the R/T.

‘There it is. Spread out. It’s below us now.’ I looked down into a barren wilderness and saw nothing but sand dunes, patches of scrub, and an unherded cluster of black goats.

‘Where?’ I asked peevishly. ‘I can’t see it.’

‘Hello, hello.’ There was a babble of voices and a high-pitched scream over the radio as two of us tried to transmit simultaneously; followed by a mild altercation between Gordon and Leo who felt we were too far north. We broke formation and circled independently like buzzards, until a chorus of ‘O.K., I can see it,’ broke from us all. The field was natural sand and shale distinguished only by whitewashed stones that marked its boundaries. At its northern end a wind-sock hung limply as though asleep. There were no buildings. No sign of activity. To the north, stark, treeless mountains rose sheerly to 6,000 feet. To the south the Persian Gulf shone dully.

We circled at 2,000 feet whilst Gordon flew low over the field and selected the best landing path. ‘It looks O.K. I’ll land towards the south,’ he commented as he lowered his undercarriage and turned in for the final approach. I positioned myself to go in next, my throat parched with thirst, and eyes tired from the unrelenting sun.

‘Christ, he’s crashed!’ Leo shouted over the R/T. My heart pounded. I looked down and saw Gordon’s Spitfire on its nose, the tail pointing grotesquely to the sky. There was no sign of movement. There was silence over the R/T. I was stunned. What had happened down there with such unnerving suddenness?

He needed help.

‘Shall I go in next?’ I begged, over the R/T to Leo.

‘O.K.,’ he answered, not knowing, as none of us knew, the cause of the accident.

Ignoring the niceties of flying, I jerked the throttle closed, turned steeply and, with my imagination conjuring Gordon’s face smashed in a horror of blood against his instrument panel, landed short. Just as I touched down I heard a shout over the R/T that gradually penetrated the wall of heartache and anxiety. It was Gordon’s.

‘Don’t use your brakes, don’t taxi! The other two don’t land!’

Disarmed and trembling with relief I obeyed and slithered to a halt without using my brakes. At the last moment I swung violently through 45 degrees and came to rest leaning heavily to one side. My left undercarriage leg had sunk deeply into the treacherous bog. I looked over to Gordon’s aircraft. Both wheels had disappeared into the mud. The propeller was smashed. He ran over to me, waving violently. I looked at him, at his face livid with anger, and bowed my head in the cockpit, concealing from his agnosticism my thanks, the sign of the Cross. He was unhurt.

He jumped up on my wing, unceremoniously snatched my helmet and spoke over the R/T to Leo and Sonny who were circling warily above. ‘I’m all right. Stand by.’ He turned to me aggressively. ‘What the hell did you land here for? Couldn’t you see there was something wrong?’

I hated him and answered hotly, ‘We thought you were hurt. I didn’t know the field was like this.’

The thick mud on his shoes was mute testimony to the condition of the field. He looked at me stubbornly. I was uncomfortably aware of my shiny nose, the rings under my eyes, my hair flattened by the helmet, lips ungraced by lipstick. He, as usual, looked absurdly immaculate.

‘I think the others should go on to Sharja, don’t you?’ His request for agreement was disguised apology.

‘Yes,’ I answered, travelling half way to reconciliation.

He squeezed my helmet on to his head and spoke to Leo:

‘Hello, Leo. Hello, Leo. You can’t land here. It’s a bloody quagmire. My prop’s smashed... No, I don’t think the engine is damaged. But I’ll need a complete prop unit... Go on to Sharja... To hell with the sheik, this is an emergency. Course about 198... No, only the prop, and tools of course... No, she’s all right. A Roman Catholic built this field... Yes, I’ll send her on to Sharja as soon as the field dries out... Don’t know. A week at least, providing it doesn’t rain again... Push off, you haven’t too much fuel... Good-bye...’

With this he switched off. Leo and Sonny zoomed low over the field, their superchargers screaming with the Spitfire’s characteristic high-pitched whistle, and vanished over the southern horizon, leaving the world to Gordon and me.

‘Get unpacked,’ he ordered. ‘Take everything. We are here for a week at least,’ and he walked over to his own aircraft.

I stripped off my overalls and felt cool rivulets of sweat oozing between my shoulder blades. We were on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf; sixty degrees warmer than Diyarbekir. I looked around me and felt the silence, the isolation, the heat that enveloped us like an exotic flower that closes its petals around its prey. We were completely alone.

A half an hour passed before, with startling suddenness, we were joined by two raggedly dressed sinister-looking peasants who must have appeared from the bowels of the earth. As usual I was the object of intense scrutiny and Gordon, no doubt to his extreme annoyance, was being consistently ignored. I tried looking demure but their eyes were fastened on the more feminine perquisities of my body. Gordon left me for a moment and fiddled around in his cockpit. He returned carrying a bulky object wrapped in a towel. ‘Cartridge pistol,’ he explained. ‘Go and get yours, just in case. Load it but don’t let them see it,’ he ordered conversationally and with an irrelevant smile on his face.

I returned carrying the pistol in my overnight bag. There was a great deal of argument going on. I smiled at Gordon fuming in frustration. ‘Eenglish. Eenglish,’ I shouted helpfully, accomplishing nothing but frankly appraising stares and knowing grins. Gordon was equally unsuccessful and, turning to me in exasperation, shouted: ‘Where on earth is the petrol agent?’

‘Must be in Bandar Abbas,’ I answered.

‘And how do we get there? It must be 12 miles from here,’ he replied.

At this moment of deadlock a lorry appeared in a shower of spray and skidded to a spectacular halt a few inches from my Spitfire. This gratuitous appearance was not to be scorned so as the driver climbed out we climbed in and with an arrogant attempt at
fait accompli
, gesticulated and shouted: ‘Bandar Abbas, Bandar Abbas.’ We were only mildly surprised when we drove off in the right direction towards the south.

We drove interminably over a road mined by nature and neglect. The driver, a maniacal grin on his face, searched diligently for the larger pot-holes and drove into them at furious speed. We climbed precipitously, dived concomitantly and charged with violent impact through swollen streams that cut the road. He was trying to impress his pilot passengers. He did. Gordon with some embarrassment carefully put his arm around my shoulder and protected me from the worst of the jolts. The moment the road appeared tolerably flat, his arm, with scrupulously correct behaviour, lifted from my shoulder and rested on the back of the seat. He looked, perhaps a shade too carefully, straight ahead, glancing at me only when an excessive jolt sent us both bouncing perilously near the roof. Conversation was impossible.

Eventually we arrived at a drab, miserable collection of mud huts sparsely interwoven with more permanent-looking buildings. This was Bandar Abbas or what remained of it. Torrential rains had transformed it into swirling muddy islands, capped by roofless remains of primitive houses. The roads were unnavigable and littered with the debris of collapsed walls and rotting vegetation. Such a pitiful scene in Europe would have provoked relief and emergency aid measures. (In fact the local inhabitants had thought our aircraft had brought such assistance but laughed wryly at their
naïveté
when later they confessed these hopes to us.)

We stopped before a relatively imposing two-storeyed building, home of the local representative of the Iranian Oil Company, and squelched into the mud as native women passed by, one hand holding their skirts, the other balancing the perennial earthenware jug on their heads. Their eyes peeped curiously through the dramatic black masks that concealed their features. We dithered helplessly until a tall, European-dressed figure forced his way through the chattering crowd and held out his hand to Gordon.

‘Good afternoon. I was expecting you two weeks ago.’

‘Sorry,’ muttered Gordon as, leaving our shoes on the portals, we followed our host into his house. ‘We were delayed.’

We sank gratefully into Lloyd Loom chairs and sipped the sweet, milkless tea that appeared with thought-reading alacrity.

‘What can I do for you?’ asked our host, Dustmalchi.

‘About thirty-seven million different things,’ answered Gordon, unhelpfully.

‘Everything,’ I translated as our host looked puzzled. ‘First of all we need a crane...’

‘A what?’

‘Crane, you know the thing that er...’ I appealed to Gordon. With eloquent hands he conveyed our meaning.

‘But why do you need a crane to put petrol into aeroplanes?’

We both laughed.

‘Sorry,’ I explained. ‘Of course you don’t know. Captain Levett crashed on landing.’

A look of horror passed over Dustmalchi’s handsome features.

‘It’s all right,’ interpolated Gordon quickly, ‘nothing serious, but my aircraft is stuck on its nose in the mud and we need a crane to lower it.’

‘But there isn’t a crane for 200 kilometres,’ answered Dustmalchi, ‘and the roads are blocked.’

‘The things I do for Israel,’ muttered Gordon with mock weariness.

‘Look, let’s get first things first,’ I interjected. ‘We will need accommodation for a week or so. Can you arrange it? We will worry about the other things afterwards.’

Dustmalchi eyed us doubtfully. After the drive we looked like ruffians.

‘Yes,’ he answered gallantly. ‘You may stay here with me. There is nowhere else to stay in Bandar Abbas. Come, I’ll show you your room.’

The singular was ominous though its significance did not register immediately as we followed him along a stone veranda that overlooked the surrounding desolation. At the end of the corridor he opened a wire-mesh door, revealing a cool bedroom furnished with two shameless beds.