The Challenging Heights (26 page)

‘You could soon learn.’ She seemed to be making an appeal. ‘Dicky Boy, can’t you see? Love isn’t just being in the same house together and sharing the same bed.’

‘It goes a long way.’

‘It demands mutual respect, mutual allowance for the other person’s wishes.’

‘Getting me out of the RAF and into business doesn’t seem to indicate it.’

‘That’s different.’

‘How?’

‘Dicky Boy, people are making fortunes from flying.’

‘If that’s what you want, we seem to be different. I’m really not very interested in making a splash, old love.’

‘Come in with me.’

‘Why should I, Zo? For God’s sake, why? Of your own choice, you spend your life as far away from me as you can, but then you tell me, after announcing once more that you’ve no intention of staying with me, that you need me. I find it hard to believe.’

She went into a long rambling explanation. It was confused, almost incoherent. As far as Dicken could make out her need was for acceptance, for people to regard her as a normal woman and not as a freak who knew nothing of anything except aeroplanes. She felt she was different from everybody else, but was still prepared to disappear back to the States. She seemed to want her bread buttered on both sides.

‘If I gave up the RAF now,’ he pointed out quietly, ‘I’d have wasted the last ten years of my life. I’ve not moved as fast off the mark as others – Arthur Diplock, your beloved brother-in-law – has made sure
his
place in the hierarchy’s secure – but the higher ranks are open to me now and I don’t want anything to do with commercial flying. I tried it once and I didn’t like it.’

She was silent for a moment and he saw there were tears in her eyes. ‘I’ve
got
to go back to the States,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to. Won’t you come, too? Just to be with me?’

He kissed her gently on the cheek, affectionately but not with passion. ‘I think it’s most unlikely,’ he said. ‘I’ve put in for a posting abroad.’

He had expected India and when he was ordered to a squadron flying Handley Page Hyderabad bombers he decided someone in Personnel had got his wires crossed.

Zoë was back in the States now trying to find an aeroplane.

‘Miss Zoë Toshack,’ the
Daily Mail
announced, ‘is preparing for her proposed record-breaking trip to Australia.’ ‘Miss’, Dicken noticed, not ‘Mrs’. And ‘Toshack’, not ‘Quinney’. ‘She is at the moment in the States, looking over likely aircraft. She is considering a Lockheed Vega like Amelia Earhart or a Stinson Detroiter capable of carrying five passengers. She claims she would prefer a British machine to anything else.’

And there she was again, smiling at the camera, so that Dicken’s heart jerked uncomfortably at the sight of her.

But he knew it didn’t really matter any more and he’d finally even been to see a lawyer about a divorce. Unfortunately, the following day a letter had arrived begging him not to abandon her and, calling himself a fool, he’d dropped the whole business.

They were an unlikely couple, he decided, with differing temperaments, different aims, different demands on life, and what had held them together for so long he didn’t know. He suspected it was nothing more than familiarity, and that, had he met anyone else, he might have done something about it. But since Nicola Aubrey there never had been anyone with whom he could imagine living the rest of his life so he’d always let things slide, suspecting he’d always be there when Zoë became frightened at her growing wealth and fame and needed a shoulder to cry on.

He was grateful to be flying again, aware of the brightness of the upper air which glowed in a way earthbound mortals could never conceive, aware once more of that feeling of being one of God’s chosen few because he felt the sun before it reached other people, because he’d acquired the skill to support himself in the sky in the way man had always wished to since the Middle Ages. He wasn’t sure what to make of the Hyderabads, however. They were big and clumsy, but surprisingly responsive with their two Napier Lion engines, so that sometimes he was inclined to bank them too steeply on the tight turns.

He had always been basically a fighter pilot and at first he didn’t fancy the prospect of flying with a crew but suddenly he realised he’d been missing something and found an unexpected compensation in the team spirit and comradeship. Especially at night, when the rest of the country was asleep and the sense of loneliness was relieved by the tightness of the little group of men in their black machine high above the earth.

Then Zoë reappeared like a ghost from the past in a paragraph in the newspapers. She was far too photogenic not to have her picture in regularly and she had a gift for getting her personality across. Considering she’d broken only one rather unimportant record which had added nothing to the future of flying, it was almost as if the newspapers were falling over themselves simply because she photographed well.

This time it was because she’d finally decided to buy a British machine for her attempt to fly to Australia, and was debating between one of her Avro tens and a new type of De Havilland.

The Hyderabads began to bore Dicken a little because he felt at times little better than a chauffeur for a group of men whose tasks were more important than his own, which was simply to deliver them from one place to another, but then a squadron leader at RAF HQ in India was killed when a DH9 flew into a mountainside near the Khyber Pass and, with no one of sufficient rank and experience to take his place, Dicken found himself on a ship ploughing through the Mediterranean with a draft of men heading for Egypt.

They left the ship at Alexandria where he was able to visit Tom Howarth who, by this time, was working on a new training scheme in the Middle East and they ate dinner in Cairo, watching the dahabiyas drifting past on the Nile.

‘Egypt gets under your skin,’ Howarth observed. ‘Egyptians bumping their foreheads on the ground to the priest’s chanting, the face of the Sphinx, sunset on the Nile, the silhouettes of the Pyramids at dusk.

‘There are disadvantages, of course. Water has to be filtered and dosed with chlorine – considering the corpses of animals floating in it, Sweet Water Canal’s a complete misnomer – the heat makes the engines erratic, and the windsock’s always in danger of being stolen by the Arabs to make clothing. But the desert can be incredibly beautiful and there are always the Gezirah Club, cocktails on the terrace at Shepherds’, and polo at Heliopolis.’

The journey that followed was an anti-climax – the Red Sea, so calm the sea melted into the sky and there was no horizon in the heat, then the brown sun-baked coast of India. The journey from Bombay by train was monotonously khaki-coloured and heavy with dust, but Delhi was a civilised city, though the formality had to be seen to be believed.

Appointed Squadron Leader Air Staff, Dicken was responsible to his immediate superior, who turned out to be Cuthbert Orr, bigger and more hearty than ever. He welcomed Dicken like a long-lost brother and made their position clear at once. ‘Out here,’ he said, ‘Trenchard’s influence carries no weight whatsoever. The Indian Army runs the show and we’re short of spares – tyres and radios especially – and it’s not so damned long since we announced that for all intents and purposes the RAF in India was non-existent. Out of seventy aircraft only seven were serviceable and half of ’em were 1918 vintage and still had patches sewn over the bullet holes they got in France. All squadrons are up in the North-West Frontier Province but at last they’re sending us two new ones – the first post-war machines we’ve had. Westland Wapitis. Know anything of ’em?’

Dicken smiled. ‘Yes, sir. They had a lot of spare parts for the DH9s so they designed the Wapitis to use ’em up.’

Orr pushed a packet of cigarettes across. ‘Only part of the Frontier Province is administered by us, of course,’ he pointed out. ‘The rest’s controlled by independent tribes who owe us no direct allegiance and live in what’s known as tribal territory with their own laws and customs. We let ’em get on with it, so long as they don’t raid into British India. It’s only six years since one lot attacked an officer’s home at Kohat, murdered him and his wife and kidnapped his daughter. There’s one other snag. We’re expecting trouble in Rezhanistan.’

‘Does it affect us? It’s not part of India.’

‘We have an embassy there. The King made a tour last year of Turkey, Iran, England and a few other places and was so impressed with the emancipation of women he came back determined to carry out reforms in Rezhanistan. Unfortunately religion there goes a bit deeper than it does at Stow-on-the-Wold on a sunny Sunday morning and just lately, the mullahs have been as restless as a lot of fleas. They’re not interested in the King’s lectures at the palace, or the pictures of Lindbergh he put up and it’s surprising no one’s taken a pot-shot at him. But he’s still opening new schools and demanding that young ladies wear short skirts and have their hair bobbed as they do in London.’ Orr grinned. ‘I think the thing that irritates his ministers and tribal leaders most, though, is that he expects them to wear top hats and tail coats. I saw them once. They looked like a lot of out of work undertakers. I reckon they’ll explode any day now.’

Dicken’s arrival coincided with the move from Delhi to Simla in the foothills of the Himalayas for the hot months of the year. It was a dreadful period for those wives and families who were in India only on a short-term tour and had to worry about how to live within their means. His job was to be responsible through Orr and the Chief of Staff to the Air Officer Commanding for operational policy and intelligence, sharing responsibilities for the preparation of the RAF budget, organisation and re-equipping and the provision of answers to parliamentary questions sent from England. One such asked the number of bombs dropped on the frontier since 1919, the number of people killed and the value of the property destroyed by bombing. It took one minute flat to answer. For the number of bombs, he wrote ‘Sixty-five’, which was the first number that sprang to his mind. For the number of people killed, he wrote ‘One’, adding that it was impossible to be certain as bombing usually took place in conjunction with army operations and it was therefore difficult to differentiate between those killed by guns and those killed by bombs. For the value of property destroyed, he wrote ‘Unknown, since there is no value placed on a mud hut, and there are no house agents on the frontier.’ Orr considered it good enough to buy him an extra drink.

Zoë continued to crop up. She had decided finally to buy a machine nobody had ever heard of, its only qualification being, it seemed, that it was British. It was called a Munson Ghost, and there she was in
The Times of India
,
standing alongside a high-winged monoplane with a pair of Gypsy I engines mounted on a single crankcase. She had hired an ex-Merchant Navy officer called Angus Packer, who had transferred to flying and was considered to be an expert navigator. He had flown the route more than once with British Airways and was considered unlikely to make mistakes.

Dicken’s stay at headquarters was short because Almonde, who had been commanding a squadron of DH9s at Kohat went down with jaundice and it was necessary for someone to take over. Since it was a single-squadron station it was a good job because it meant Dicken would also be the station commander, and as the squadron was working with the army in Waziristan it offered a chance of action.

The frontier area was divided into two administrative sections, each with its own provincial government responsible to the government of India. The North-West Frontier Province was roughly four hundred miles long and a hundred miles wide, with Peshawar – known to everybody there as ‘Pshah’ – as its capital. The dominant note about the country was its size. To the north were vast silent mountains cloaked in eternal snow, wild glacier-born torrents, cruel precipices and pastureless hillsides, all the colour purged away by the glare of the sun. Very little was cultivated and, dwarfed by the limitless expanse of rock, glacier and mountain, the fertile patches were the only relief in the monotonous grey-brown of the vast slopes of shale and shingle, while the willows and plane trees and the soldier-like poplars marching across the valleys were the only points of coolness after the fierce light and dust on the hillsides. The cantonment in which they lived was surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by Indian sentries. All movement in or out of the camp was forbidden after sundown and if a married officer was away on duty for a night it was automatic to place an armed guard on his home.

Looking for the Signals Section to send a signal to Simla indicating his arrival, the first person Dicken saw was Babington, who had flown with him in Iraq. He was now a corporal and gave him a grin of delight, while, sitting at the Signals Officer’s desk, was Handiside, a flight-sergeant once more, a little redder in the face these days but still wearing the same grin.

‘The Signals Officer’s gone down with jaundice, sir,’ he said. ‘It seems to be catching. I’m running the show till he gets back.’

It was Handiside as much as anyone who filled Dicken in about the squadron. It had been a long time in India and its machines were as old as its pilots were young. They had all joined since the war and, with many of them inexperienced, it was Dicken’s job to start a series of exercises in bombing, navigation and gunnery.

Despite being operations officer as well as CO, whenever active operations were in swing he managed to take part. His chief task was to impose a blockade day and night on a section of the Bohmand country where difficult tribesmen were living. It was a small area adjoining that of friendly tribesmen, so the blockade called for a high standard of map reading and very careful briefing. Flying mostly at night or at midday when weather conditions were uncomfortably rough and bumpy, he knew that more sensible men were taking it easy and that nobody objected to him flying their aircraft.

Below him the countryside was inhabited by some of the toughest fighting men in India. Moving columns through their mountains was a specialised form of warfare in which inexperienced units could suffer heavy casualties, and the RAF and the army had worked out a system of close support. If trouble was expected, the RAF kept one or more aircraft over the area throughout the hours of daylight, and there were times when they bombed and shot up the tribesmen within thirty yards of an army outpost.