Spitfire Girl (27 page)

I thought of Gordon returning to Bandar Abbas; to an empty, silent room, as I followed the Trucial Oman coastline until the white sands of Sharja appeared. Parked by the Control Tower and standing out sharply against the bleached sands were the other two Spitfires. I landed, taxied next to them and saw the familiar figures of Leo and Sonny running out to me. Hurriedly I put on my sunglasses and climbed out of the cockpit.

‘Hey, you look wonderful, kid,’ shouted Leo, grabbing me by the shoulders.

Sonny smilingly agreed. ‘Bandar Abbas has agreed with you.’

I forced a smile and left it at that.

I had always liked the remote appeal of Sharja perched
on the shores of the Trucial Oman peninsula and dominated by mountains to the east, but I was in no mood now to enjoy its extravagant colour and exotic beauty as I joined the others in the tiny air-conditioned transient mess. I wore a ubiquitous nylon dress, after a salt-water bath, and knew that I looked my best. Not a particularly exciting phenomenon in Europe but adequate for woman-starved Sharja. Gallantries and compliments fell on me like spring showers. The ‘Doc’, scruffy and unorthodox; the C.O. newly arrived and shy; a locust-control officer sadly reminiscing over his predecessor murdered in nearby Dubai for a few paltry rupees; a bank clerk; a mildly supercilious army officer and a few incredibly youthful air force officers made up the party. I commented disparagingly on the Doc’s moustache. Two minutes later he returned, bloody but unbowed, with half of it shaved off. He raised his eyebrows enquiringly. ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Decidedly better.’ He vanished and returned clean shaven.

‘What’s happening about Gordon?’ I asked Leo during a lull in the dancing. He shrugged his shoulders and pulled out a batch of cables from his tunic. I read them quickly, anxiously.

‘Surely it should have been sorted out by now?’ I said peevishly.

He shrugged. ‘As far as I can make out from the cables they are flying a propeller to Kerman and then by road to Bandar Abbas.’

‘By road!’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s 200 miles,’ I replied, appalled by the thought of driving over those impossible roads with a propeller.

He nodded. ‘They expect to arrive in Bandar Abbas within a week.’

‘How are we going to let Gordon know?’

‘Well, how can we?’ riposted Leo.

‘We could fly over on our way to Karachi and drop a note.’

Leo shook his head. ‘No. We haven’t enough fuel.’

‘We could refuel at Jiwani,’ I pointed out encouragingly.

He smiled mockingly. ‘What are you so anxious about, kid?’

‘Leo,’ I protested, blushing with innocent guilt, ‘he’s marooned there alone. No one to talk to. No idea of what is happening. It won’t be so bad if he knows when he’s going to get out.’

He shook his head firmly. ‘Sorry, Jackie. I don’t want to land at Jiwani, they haven’t got a battery cart. If we can’t start up on our own batteries, we’re stuck.’

‘Couldn’t just one...’ I argued weakly.

‘No. We stick together.’

‘Are we leaving in the morning?’

‘Yes. Dawn. Call at four o’clock. It’s time we went to bed.’

There was a flattering chorus of protests as we left the party. I said good-night to Leo and Sonny, waited for them to retire and sneaked out of the gates of the fort to the Spitfires parked outside. It was a perfect night. The red hurricane lights marking out the parking area gleamed weakly in the liquid moonlight that caressed the aircraft and threw their elongated shadows on the sand. I touched the wing of my plane like a lover. It felt cool and clean; the leading edge as sharp as a knife, ready to thrust its way through to the glittering infinity above. Intoxicated with the night’s beauty I turned north to Bandar Abbas, then west to Taunton and wavered like a compass needle between them both before returning reluctantly to my stuffy bedroom.

The following morning we climbed away steeply to the
east with the sun plunging blindly into our cockpits. After an hour I felt uncomfortable. After two I knew that I shouldn’t have had that second cup of tea at breakfast. After three I was desperate and opened up the throttle to maximum cruise and jumped into the lead.

‘Hey, Jackie!’ shouted Leo over the R/T. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I er... I’ve got to get to Karachi quickly...’

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Leo anxiously. ‘Something wrong?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

I kept eloquently silent. ‘O.K.,’ replied Leo, chuckling. ‘Go ahead, we’ll follow.’

Intently I urged my Spitfire on as the Pakistan coastline crawled sluggishly by. At last Karachi aerodrome loomed up in the haze. I called the Control Tower over the R/T.

‘Karachi Tower. Uncle Baker 437. Three Spitfires approaching from the west. Request landing clearance.’

‘There are two aircraft ahead of you. Stand by,’ they answered.

‘I can’t stand by,’ I answered urgently. ‘I want to spend a penny.’

There was a stunned silence over the R/T before an aircraft replied: ‘After you, madam.’

‘You are clear to land number one,’ ordered Karachi Tower dryly.

I landed, taxied to the tarmac and had to sit, fuming, for three interminable minutes whilst the health authorities let off a D.D.T. bomb inside the cockpit. Officers standing on the Control Tower waved encouragingly as I ran past.

After a brief lunch we took off again for Jodhpur, a relatively short flight of two hours across the barren featureless Thar desert that forms a natural barrier between Pakistan and India. It was an uneventful flight and we landed, parched but content, as the sun threw its longest shadows.

After a prolonged battle of two hours with the Customs authorities who, still unable to understand that Spitfires were fighter aircraft incapable of carrying either freight or passengers, instituted a new form or a new procedure every time we landed there, we checked in at Circuit House, a small quiet hotel nestling in its own grounds on the outskirts of Jodhpur. After a disappointingly European dinner Leo, Sonny and I sat on the veranda overlooking the drive and listened to the unwavering croak of the frogs, the appealing tch-tch-tch of the chameleons and the bloodcurdling howl of the pariah dogs. We were all overtired and spoke desultorily. Leo cross-examined me fitfully about Bandar Abbas, before suggesting that we make it an early night.

At dawn we drove in a jeep to the aerodrome. It was cold and we huddled up in our flying overalls as we passed laden ox-carts plodding steadily along the road, their drivers wrapped in coarse calico sacks and nodding in sleep. Slowly, as dawn lifted the pallor of night and splashed a thin daub of crimson in the eastern sky, brilliant peacocks strutted from the undergrowth, ruffled their feathers in a cascade of brilliance and preened conceitedly. In violent contrast ugly misshapen vultures hopped clumsily in search of carrion breakfast.

We were late taking off. Unaccountably my booster pump had fused and I could not start. Leo fumed irritably over the R/T. ‘I can’t help it,’ I protested. ‘It’s not my fault if the fuse blows.’ I was sorely tempted to add to this but by now I had become reconciled to the others’ tendency to blame me for any hitch in our schedule. We climbed out, found a spare fuse, fitted and checked it and took off in a flurry of perspiring bad temper an hour later.

We cruised at a higher throttle setting to make up for lost time and the indefatigable Merlin engines soon spanned the 400 miles to Cawnpore.

Narrowly avoiding an invitation for a lethargic curry lunch at the officers’ mess we refuelled and took off again in the heat of noon for Calcutta, 600 miles to the east.

The Meteorological officer had warned us of monsoon storms and severe turbulence along the route though, when we levelled out at 11,000 feet, the skies were crystal clear and pacific. Perhaps, I thought cynically, a little too clear and pacific.

My cynicism was well justified, for within an hour I felt the first touch of turbulence that shook our formation in gentle warning like a nanny chastising a too adventurous child. Ahead, blocking our path, towered majestic cumulonimbus clouds in unmistakable challenge. Like gigantic cauliflowers they boiled and blustered into fantastic silhouettes. I tightened my straps and watched Leo warily as he veered left and right in search of an opening. I edged closer to him as though his nearness could help. He gave me a quick look, grinned encouragingly and pointed to his oxygen mask. I nodded, grinned feebly back and turned on my oxygen. We climbed as the storm blackened the sky and loomed closer. Climbed and struggled for height until, at 27,000 feet the Spitfires floundered and responded sluggishly in the rarefied air. But it was futile. The squall leered at us from Olympian heights; we were like salmon battling against Niagara Falls.

‘It’s no good,’ shouted Leo over the R/T. ‘We’ll have to go underneath.’

We spiralled steeply, discarding thriftlessly the hard-won altitude, until we were a few feet from the ground, twisting and turning through the valleys that tossed us like shuttlecocks in an uproar of turbulence and hail. Dimly I could see Sonny, on the other side of Leo, rising and falling sickeningly in a violent series of gusts that threatened to tear loose his long-range belly-tank. The ground flashed by in a series of kaleidoscopic sketches; forests, rivers and the upturned faces of startled villagers. Suddenly, as though a door had closed, we were through and I felt sheepish, like a man who finds himself shouting in a sudden hush, as I still struggled unnecessarily violently with the controls in the magically smooth air.

‘O.K., Jackie?’ asked Leo as we climbed back to cruising level, blinking in the brilliant sun.

‘Yes.’

‘Sonny?’

‘O.K.’

‘Now where the hell are we!’ added Leo.

Being lost seemed a comparatively minor event after the turmoil of the storm and our chatter over the R/T possessed the mild inanity of a drunken trio as we tried to identify the swollen rivers and flooded fields two miles beneath. After we had come to three violently conflicting conclusions Leo surrendered and called for a Q.D.M. from Calcutta. The course that Calcutta gave us to steer for the aerodrome proved all three of us to be conclusively wrong – not, under the circumstances, very surprising.

Calcutta soon appeared on the horizon, looking fresh and clean like a small boy from the heavy showers. The Hooghli river, stained with soil, curled heavily through the city and pin-pointed Barrackpore aerodrome.

We were met by Indian Air Force officers who quickly supervised the manhandling of our Spitfires into the hangar before the next storm broke over the aerodrome, drumming the corrugated tin roof of the hangars with a deafening deluge. Two cows munched placidly on the concrete apron, oblivious of the torrent that bounced off their backs in tiny angry waterspouts and dripped from the tails still mechanically flicking though no flies could survive that waterfall.

‘Only three this time?’ questioned the engineering officer. ‘Who’s missing?’

‘Levett,’ I answered. ‘We left him behind in Bandar Abbas. Have you heard anything?’ I added.

‘Not a word.’

I unpacked miserably.

We stayed overnight in the officers’ mess and were
received with that humble courtesy characteristic of the people of India. The accommodation was primitive, the beds mattressed with lump straw that smelled of damp stables and betokened the fakir’s bed of nails. I stripped and revelled in the cold shower, eyed curiously by a jet-black crow perched impudently on the window ledge. I tried to make friends but he flew away with a haughty flurry of wings. It was close and humid as I flopped wearily on the bed with a towel wrapped around me and dozed fitfully with the roar of the Merlin engine still echoing in my ears like sea-shells. Images of Bandar Abbas and Taunton rose before my eyes as I listened sleepily to the wur-wur-wur of the fan creaking uselessly on the ceiling.

I awoke suddenly to find my bags unpacked, their intimate contents laid neatly on a small table by the window. Standing by my bed was the ‘bearer’ eyeing me gravely and holding a steaming cup of tea:

‘Tea, Memsahib. Your dress will be ready in a moment.’

I snatched hurriedly for the towel but it was unnecessary. I was covered modestly with a coarse white calico sheet. He disappeared as silently as he had come whilst I stared bemusedly at the sheet.

I dressed for dinner and joined the others in the dining-room. Tall bearded Sikhs imposing in coloured turbans, and wiry young officers rose graciously as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a woman to assume equality in their eyes. I smiled at them trying to show that I was aware of the honour they accorded me as we sat down to dine.

I listened happily to the boisterous conversation that took me back to the comradely days of war-time in the A.T.A. Fighter pilots sneered unmercifully at the transport pilots who replied with unkind references to ‘Brylcreem Boys’. Eagerly they talked shop: ‘He’s a damn good pilot... it wasn’t his fault... It’s a lousy aeroplane over 25,000 feet... They collided right over the aerodrome with forty paratroops on board. Only two got out. Their wives and families were watching from the aerodrome. Crashed right in front of them... Peter has got his second stripe at last.’ Obsessed with flying, they looked quickly at me to see whether I was listening and smiled happily when I nodded encouragingly. I felt part of them; my memories theirs. My fears known to them. In each one I knew the tablet of fear that dwelled, deeply concealed in their hearts, of their mistress waiting in the air to whom they must return. A mistress of beauty and moods, sullen in cold grey shrouds or radiant and innocent in a superb ensemble of infinite blue and gold. Demanding, voracious, fickle; luring with a Judas kiss and snubbing with imperial disdain and death those whom she had subjected.

After dinner we drove into Calcutta through streets choked with desperate poverty where naked children playing in filth underlined the grim statistics of death from cholera and smallpox written in our aircraft log-books. India has inherited a formidable burden with her independence. I did some shopping; vulgar brassware from Benares, silks from Kashmir and unlikely trinkets from Birmingham before we went to the Princess cabaret on Chowringhee. We stayed far too late in an exotic atmosphere of lamé saris, determined tourists, and imported English chorus girls that would have brought an appreciative gleam to Gordon’s eyes. We drove back in the early hours of the morning, the streets miraculously empty except for the silent forms, covered in wretched rags, sleeping on the pavements.