The Challenging Heights (9 page)

As one of the Avros started up with a crackling roar the woman who had climbed aboard as a passenger got into an argument with the pilot and whacked him over the head with an umbrella. As he staggered away, the aeroplane began to move and there was a yell of alarm from the crowd as the woman clutched her hat and began to scream blue murder. The pilot turned and started to run after the aeroplane but tripped and fell and, with the crowd watching aghast, the machine took off in a wobbly lift-off and staggered into the air. As it climbed higher and higher, the spectators yelled with fright, then it plunged downwards with a great gasp of horror from the ground. When it appeared on the point of smashing into the earth it pulled up into a perfect loop, then climbed again and began a series of stunts that took the breath away, and the crowd’s terror gave way to delight.

‘It’s Charley dressed up,’ Zoë said.

The performance ended with a display of wing-walking, a parachute descent and a Gretna Green elopement with Zoë and one of the mechanics dressed as the bride and groom in an old Model T Ford and Charley Wright, as an irate father, chasing them all round the field in an Avro and bombarding them with bags of flour and rolls of toilet paper.

‘It always gets a laugh,’ he said as the crowd finally streamed away. Extracting a hip flask, he took a long swig before offering it to Dicken.

‘Booze doesn’t go with flying,’ Dicken said as they drove away. ‘Does he put much of it away?’

‘Charley’s safe as houses.’

‘Until the day he puts too much away. Do you go up with him?’

‘I’ve done my share of wing-walking.’

‘You’ve what?’

‘I have a harness on that you can’t see from the ground. I can’t fall
off.
Don’t be stuffy. You sound like an RAF wife.’

He knew she disliked the other RAF wives she met and was unpopular with them because she made no secret of the flying she did with Charley Wright, so that they considered she was letting the side down. One CO had even quietly mentioned it to Dicken.

‘They’re so boring,’ she complained. ‘They expect me to go along and drink tea and talk about babies. I prefer coffee and I don’t know anything about babies.’

‘You could soon learn.’

‘Babies would stop me flying.’

‘You’ll have to stop some time.’

‘Why will I?’

‘Well, eventually you’ll want a family.’

‘I’m not so damn sure I will, Dicky Boy. Women in America are beginning to make a business of flying. Ruth Law. The Stinsons. Phoebe Fairgrave. If
they
can make a career in aviation, so can I.’

The disagreement came to an abrupt end two months later. In an attempt to pin her down, Dicken rented a furnished house near the airfield but within two days of signing the contract he received orders for a posting to Iraq.

‘Iraq!’ Zoë stared at him in horror. ‘You said it would be India or Egypt. Good conditions. Lots of servants. Isn’t Iraq what they used to call Mesopotamia? All flat and hot.’

‘That’s about it. The RAF are policing the place.’

She stared at him, pink-faced with anger. ‘I’m not coming with you,’ she snapped.

He shrugged. ‘They wouldn’t let you, anyway,’ he said. ‘Wives are forbidden.’

And rather to his surprise, he found he didn’t feel angry about it.

The ranges to the north, snow-clad crests rising one behind the other, were serried white bastions of inscrutable majesty. As the Bristol Fighter flew at 8000 feet, on the same level stretched the high peaks of Kurdistan, Turkey and Persia, a breathtaking wall of mountain filling the whole horizon and dominated by the pinnacles of the Hakkari Range which soared up into the thin layer of cirrus that filled the sky.

It was largely thanks to Almonde that Dicken was enjoying the view. He was leading a detached flight of Bristols and his job was to patrol the Iraqi police posts strung along the borders of Turkey and Iran where sabre-rattling Kurdish tribesmen were in the habit of appearing from the hills to kill everyone in sight before bolting back to shelter with whatever loot they could grab.

As Almonde throttled the Rolls Falcon engine back and they dropped down to 1000 feet, they entered an area of disturbed air that came from the buffetings of strong winds swirling among the tumbling mountains. Turning in his seat, Almonde pointed downwards. ‘Kash,’ he shouted.

Kash was the most northerly of the police posts and, finding it under the lee of a mountain, Dicken spotted the straight red strips of American cloth laid out in the snow in the form of an E to let them know all was well. From Kash they flew on to Haibu and Harzan and other snowbound outposts before returning to a splashy landing on a field sodden with water after the melting of the winter snows.

After three years on the ground, Dicken had confidently expected a flying job but, once again, had instead found himself riding in worn-out Rolls Royce armoured cars dating from Lawrence of Arabia’s operations against the Turks in 1918. When the League of Nations had handed to Britain the mandate for Iraq, to avoid stationing a large army there, which would always have been liable to ambush as it marched about the sandy wastes, the job of policing the country had been handed to the RAF, because Trenchard had claimed he could do it with a few squadrons of aircraft, a few companies of armoured cars and a few Assyrian and Arab levies.

‘Out here,’ Almonde had explained, ‘Pax Britannica has become Pax Aeronautica.’

The journey from England had been made with 1500 other men on a troopship built to carry 800. Dicken had slept on a settee in a cabin he shared with two other officers who had had the good fortune to arrive first and claim the only bunks, and the conditions were appalling, with hammocks hung three and four deep above each other so that the duty officer making his round at night had to crawl on hands and knees. The smell was nauseating and the outside temperature as they moved down the Red Sea was over a hundred. Having to change into mess kit with stiff collars for dinner every night, Dicken made a habit of slipping out halfway through the evening to change into a fresh collar and place the limp worn one between the leaves of a book for use the next day. From Basra, the journey had been continued by slow train to Baghdad where the group had arrived itching agonisingly from sandfly bites.

The squadrons flew Snipes, Bristols, DH9as powered with the American Liberty engines, or Vickers Vernons, heavy snub-nosed aircraft with twin tails, four wheels, two Rolls Royce Eagle engines and a forest of interplane struts. They looked vaguely like whales with wings, but in addition to the two pilots sitting in an outside cockpit they had a cabin which could hold ten soldiers complete with their kit. Though their cruising speed when fully loaded was little more than that of the armoured cars, they had an endurance of seven hours.

Everybody likely to come into contact with the natives of the country carried what was called a blood chit, a piece of paper printed in Arabic which offered a reward for the return unharmed of the bearer.

‘Known to the coarse-minded as a gooly chit,’ Almonde explained. ‘Because if you have to come down in their territory and get captured, they hand you to the women who take a delight in making a few modifications on you with their knives – such as rearranging the position of those small spherical appendages which usually mean a great deal to a man. The chit promises that if you’re handed over intact, the finder will be rewarded beyond all his dreams, and financial gain usually has the ascendancy over the simple pleasure of mutilation.’

‘But not always,’ he added. ‘The Wahabi are inclined to be a bit fanatical and then the gooly chit doesn’t carry a lot of weight.’

Mosul, from where they operated, was built of white houses rather than the mud brick of the rest of Iraq, because the area around abounded with a local soft marble. It was a maze of narrow streets except in the centre where during the war the Turks had cut a road through towards a bridge over the Tigris. Unfortunately, since the river had changed its course during the building of the bridge, it had never been finished and now terminated in mid stream, with a bridge of boats taking over its function instead. The population was largely Kurdish, straight-featured wiry people quick to use their knives, who wore striped baggy trousers, short jackets and brightly-hued turbans. The place was smelly and busy and in ancient days had been an international crossroads. Xenophon had passed by with his Ten Thousand, as had Alexander the Great on his way to meet Darius the Persian. Nearby was the birthplace of Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria who had defeated Richard Coeur de Lion and his Crusaders, and a group of mounds marked what was left of Nineveh where Sennacherib had ruled.

Among the work of the armoured cars was the guarding of the route across the desert from Cairo to Baghdad and the building of landing areas for aircraft carrying mail. Because the tracks of wheeled traffic could be seen from the air and were used as navigational aids, it had been decided to plough a double furrow the whole thousand miles of the route, with petrol stored at points along it for emergency landings. The country consisted of endless miles of nothing, though after heavy rain it could look green in places and its changing moods had a strange impelling beauty.

Apart from the terrain, the chief problems were raids by tribesmen led by Kerim Fatah Agha, known to the RAF as KFA, a Wahabi outlaw who could raid a village and be thirty miles away over mountain tracks before word of his depredations could reach the authorities; and Sheikh Mahmoud, who was a Kurdish patriot who didn’t care a fig for the League of Nations mandate and carried on a good-natured war with the British without any real signs of ill feeling. Because he gave the RAF so much experience in the planning and execution of air operations, he was known as ‘the Director of RAF Training’.

For the most part the raiders were dealt with by aircraft dropping leaflets on to the villages of the chief trouble-makers, warning them to disappear, and then bombing the villages to ruins so that the raiders would have no base. Since the villages were easily rebuilt there were no hard feelings, but the Bedouin, who lived in tents and couldn’t be harmed by bombing had to be dealt with by the worn-out armoured cars.

Dicken had been in Iraq for six months when Hatto appeared to take Almonde’s place running the detached Bristol flight.

‘News for you, old son,’ he said immediately. ‘Diplock’s on his way here, too.’

‘I’d have thought someone as clever as Parasol Percy would have managed to dodge that.’

‘Iraq’s the RAF’s sackcloth and ashes. Everybody has to do their whack out here to scourge themselves of all vanity. It shouldn’t be too hard for him, though. He only leaves the ground these days to climb into a car. We brought mail, by the way. There’s a letter for you.’

Zoë’s letter had its usual dashed-off look. She was a poor correspondent and most of the time left Dicken only half-aware of what she was doing at home, merely dropping hints as if she preferred him not to know. They left him irritated and frustrated and longing for her to tell him she loved him, but he was beginning by this time to doubt even that and no longer really expected anything more than bare news.

Charley Wright was dead at last, having crashed while trying to fly after having one too many swigs from his flask. Zoë didn’t seem too heartbroken, and the sting came in the last part of the letter. Casey Harmer had written offering her a job and she was wondering whether she ought to take it.

Suspecting Dicken’s misery, Hatto immediately offered to let him get his hand in once more by placing an aeroplane at his disposal, and he was at last able to get into the air again in control of his own machine. The Bristol was a superb machine, the most agile two-seater in the Service, fast, strong, amenable to as many adaptations, alterations and refinements as the squadrons chose to add. In return, he worked with Hatto on his patrols and it was during one of them that they met Sheikh Tafas Hashim Fitna, a loyal chief whose Shammar tribesmen held the northern border for the British and reported the movements of the murderous northern tribes with messages brought into police posts by camel riders.

When a large force was reported approaching from the direction of the Turkish border. Hatto’s airmen identified them as Ikhwani, merciless tribesmen who had thrown their lot in with Kerim Fatah Agha.

‘They’re not just camel rustlers,’ Hatto reported. ‘They’ve got no flocks and no pack camels for the women and children. And since the Shammar tribe’s tents are in that area it could well be intended as a massacre.’

The cars sped north, the crews muffled to the eyes against the flying grit. Because the old-fashioned topee caught on doors and turrets and was difficult to keep on in the wind, they had adopted the Arab headgear of a kuffiyah and argal dyed khaki with coffee. It took up no room in an armoured car and didn’t catch the wind outside, while it also had a good flap over the neck and back to protect against the sun and could be wound round the nose and mouth against the everlasting dust which was often as fine as flour.

Shammar herdsmen reported the Ikhwani just to the north and eventually they spotted a vast straggling line of trotting camels. Controlling the cars with flag signals, Dicken closed the group into a V-formation and led them at top speed over the hard ground.

‘Give them a shot across their bows,’ he ordered and the puffs of dust struck up from the ground by the bullets brought the mass of riders to a halt in a confused tangle of whirling camels.

Through the interpreter, Dicken shouted an order and, after a long impassioned argument, the camel riders sent three of their number forward.

‘Tell your people to go home,’ Dicken advised them. ‘Or we’ll destroy them with the machine guns. Remind them that in Transjordan two years ago Transjordan cars killed six hundred out of a force of thousands who were coming from Nedj to destroy Amman.’

Listening sullenly, the three riders returned to the milling mass of men and, after another long argument, which could be heard in the armoured cars, the huge horde reluctantly swung away. As they set off on their 300-mile journey back to the border, the cars followed slowly until the radiators began to boil.