The Lonely Sea and the Sky (13 page)

  The searchlight beam started moving, flickered round and settled on the aeroplane. I could see waves in the fabric of the top and bottom wings, and a tear in the wing with the strut sticking through. 'Complete write-off,' I thought, and looked the other way. I tried to light my pipe. I was astonished to see the silhouette of a war dance on the wings of the Moth. Dozens of people dancing hard with their legs lifting like marionettes. Presently I heard the thumping of many feet. Then thirty soldiers came running to the ditch separating them from my bank. They rushed off to the side, found a crossing, then rushed up to me all talking to me at once, and pawing me as if unable to believe I was alive. I borrowed a match and set off with them for the searchlight. The commandant took me to a room in the empty mess and produced some wine. I kept on falling asleep as I drank. An orderly took me off to sleep in the room of a pilot away in the desert. Later I woke up and found myself groping along the wall, dreaming that I was flying, and suddenly all visibility vanished and I could do nothing but wait to crash.

  Next morning I went out to find the Moth being wheeled in by a number of soldiers. The NCO in charge, Marzocchi, spoke French, and told me that the aeroplane was undamaged except for a front inter-wing strut and a broken propeller. I just did not believe him; but he was right. My amazement was only exceeded by my joy. I had landed in a dead flat salt pan, covered with four inches of water. It was so flat that coming in steadily I had not known I was down. The wheelmarks could be seen for thirty-five yards before the plane nosed over. This was due to my keeping the tail up in gliding trim.

  I had been flying for twenty-six hours out of the forty hours since I left England, and flown 1,900 miles to Tripoli. Of the fourteen hours when I had not been flying I had had two and three-quarter hours sleep, and the rest of the time had been very strenuously occupied working on the aeroplane and clearing formalities. On top of that I had had little sleep after the strenuous day before leaving Croydon. To put it bluntly, I could not achieve what I had set out to do. My only hope would have been to carry more petrol, and make a twelve and a half hour non-stop flight of 1,000 miles each day. The fatigue and time lost during the midday landing made my plan impossible to carry out.

While I was waiting ten days for a new propeller to arrive, the Italian air force pilots were good to me. They amused me, and I think I amused them. There was Vallerani, for example, who, when he discovered that this was the third propeller I had smashed in four months, suggested a rubber one – perhaps a clever idea. Vallerani was in charge of the engineering section which carried out all the repairs on the aeroplane for me free of charge. There was Guidi, who looked like Adonis with a perfect modern tailor. I called him Topsy. He had a hairnet. I don't know who fascinated me more, the gorgeous Guidi or the ravishing beauties whose signed photographs covered his table and walls.

  At last my new propeller arrived, and the
Gipsy Moth
was ready to fly. I dreaded this moment. The flight out from London to Africa had been almost beyond my powers, and my nerve was shaken. I had never flown in Africa in daylight, and was scared by all the stories I had heard about the air being so thin near the ground that an aeroplane would drop the last ten feet like a stone. The aerodrome officials did not like my going up, partly because there was a fresh wind blowing and the air was sand-laden, and partly because of all the crashes which had occurred since I arrived. The wreckage of Lasalle's aeroplane had been found along the coast, and the bodies brought to Tripoli. Lasalle had set out to fly from France to Indo­China. The Italians gave him a tremendous funeral in Tripoli. All the pilots were there, all the consuls, a large squad of soldiers, a troop of Fascists in their black shirts and tasselled caps, and a big band. The coffins were mounted on gun-carriages, and three Italian Romeos flew slowly up and down above the procession. The French consul asked me to represent British aviators, which I did, feeling sheepish because I only had one suit with me (with plus-four trousers), and every other civilian was dressed in a top hat and long tail coat. In the cathedral where the Bishop of Tripoli conducted an impressive service there was a field-gun, machine guns, and crossed propellers, all covered with wreaths. One of the four censers caught alight, and after burning fiercely for a while exploded with a loud bang which added to the impressiveness.

  There had been three other crashes in the same week; Jones, Williams and Jenkins were killed on a flight to South Africa; Andre, a Swede, and one of their own Tripoli pilots came down in a Romeo whilst looking for Lasalle (the last two pilots had escaped alive).

  My first view of Africa from the air was wonderful; the sea was bluer than I had ever seen it, and away to the south I had my first view of the desert looking like brown liquid which had overflowed from beyond the horizon. I sighed; I wondered if my
Gipsy Moth
was as strong as before the repairs. There was one way to find out; I started doing aerobatics. I went into one loop too slowly. The Moth stood on its tail and stuck there, then started sliding backwards. I imagined the elevators and rudder tearing off, and kept the controls steady. At last the Moth fell over slowly backwards. It was the worst loop I have ever done. I put the Moth into a spin, but she refused to come out of it, and went on spinning. I thought the controls must be jammed. But it was only my bad flying, and at last I coaxed her into a dive. Finally I had to land over the top of the hangars with only 275 yards between them and an open ditch dug across the airfield. A month earlier I would have thought this a joke; but now my nerve was bad, and I was scared of the ten-foot drop I had heard about. I came in too fast, and overshot. I pretended that I had come down only to look at the airfield, and went around again. By now the whole aerodrome staff had turned out to watch the fun, which made me more nervous. At last I side-slipped between two hangars, with the hangar roofs above me at each wing tip, and landed safely. When the watchers ran out and swarmed round the Moth I thought they had come out to see what was wrong with me, and I felt a fool. When they told me they thought I had given a wonderful exhibition of stunting I burst out laughing. Perhaps that foozled loop had looked spectacular!

  On 9 January, 1930, I was up before dawn, bursting with impatience to get started again. The night duty officer said he had not slept a wink, because he was worried about seeing me away safely. I was not properly sympathetic, having slept like a log myself. A mechanic and I pushed the Moth out of the hangar in the dark. I christened my fourth propeller by smashing on the boss a bottle of the best cognac I had been able to find (I felt that champagne was not strong enough). I started the motor, and waited impatiently. The duty pilot arrived at the double to say that I could not start because of a sand-storm at Syrte. I objected; but they refused to let me start, so I went back to my room and had another sleep. At 8.30 I asked them to get another report. Conditions at Syrte were improving, and they reluctantly let me leave. I was in the air fifteen minutes later.

  It was thrilling to be setting off on the 12,000-mile flight alone, to be heading into unknown adventures. For the first 2,000 miles I should be flying over, or near, desert, nearly the whole way. On the coast, there were occasional patches of vineyard and olive grove beside the deep blue fringe of the Mediterranean; otherwise, the brown desert stretched to the southern horizon. At El Agheila, 500 miles from Tripoli, I flew into a sand-storm with a fifty miles an hour wind from the south-east. The Moth sailed along through the murky sand­thickened air, drifting thirty-five degrees to port. The air grew thicker and thicker with sand, until I was down to 200 feet in order to keep a small patch of ground directly beneath the plane in view. I was fearful of its getting thick enough to kill all visibility, and I wondered how I should have got on at night if I had run into such a thing with no blind-flying instruments, because the air was bumpy. Fortunately the sand-storm lasted only for 100 miles, and I flew into the clear at Ghemines.

  I landed at Benghazi after eight hours in the air to cover 570 miles, and I spent an interesting evening with Chaffy, the British consul, Andre, the Swedish pilot, and a local farmer named Bazzan. Andre had lost his aeroplane in an unusual way. He had landed in a sandstorm south of Ghemines, and was holding on to his plane in a gale to prevent its being blown over, when suddenly the sea broke through a sandbank and gradually submerged the aeroplane until Andre had to swim to dry land. Bazzan was an interesting man who had a farm near Benghazi. His farmhouse was square, and a man with a machine­gun kept watch all night at each corner. He said that the Italians had been bombing some Arabs just 10 miles from Benghazi the day before. Unbelievably gruesome stories were told of what happened to pilots who fell into Arab hands. I wonder if Bazzan has survived the Second World War? In the morning Chaffy told me that my wife had died in New Zealand. This was a sad affair, which I could not understand, because although we had been separated for some years, I knew that she was perfectly well when I left New Zealand.

  I left Benghazi at 6.35 with a good tail wind. After 550 miles I crossed into British territory at Es-Sollum. Although I was glad to have cleared the Italian territory after all the gruesome stories I had heard, and could now, presumably, survive a forced landing without being killed, the terrain immediately seemed less interesting. I had said that I would land at Mersa Matruh, which I reached at noon, but I reckoned that if I did I should be unable to reach the RAF airfield at Abu-Sueir, where a cousin of mine was stationed. I still had more than 300 miles to go, and I should be losing one and a quarter hours of daylight through flying east. By the time I reached the Nile Delta I had been flying for eight hours. The engine beat had drummed itself into every nerve of my body. I found myself squirming every few minutes to try to find a fresh part of my body to sit on. It had taken me an hour and twenty minutes to pump the contents of both the bottom petrol tanks up to the top tank between the upper pair of wings. While working the pump with my hand, I had to keep my feet absolutely steady on the rudder bar. My buttocks were sore and aching.

  During the flight I had eaten dates, biscuits, cheese, sardines and tinned fruit, but by now I was too fatigued to eat anything. My brain was weary of so much country. It was like sitting on top of a mountain and watching the view for eight hours on end. From the air, the Nile Delta looked deadly dull, sliced up into countless tiny plots. I was glad when the desert reappeared, like a vast flow of lava invading the fertile delta. When close to Abu-Sueir I saw a tall column of black smoke rising from the airfield. Later, I learned that they were burning the debris of two planes that had collided there, killing four pilots. I landed after nine and a quarter hours in the air to cover 917 miles. When I taxied up to the hangars a small crowd of men stood motionless thirty yards away, as if I had arrived from Mars. This seemed strange after the Italian airfields. However, I clambered out of the cockpit, waddled over to them in my heavy flying-boots, and persuaded someone to look for my cousin.

  My cousin Pat was a burly man who had been heavyweight champion of the RAF and was known as 'Firpo'. He had a gruff voice and a hug like a bear.

  Next morning a telegram from Cairo arrived, ordering me to return there to clear Customs because I had not landed at Mersa Matruh. I had to sign that I had received this order. I detested having to turn back and retrace my route. I took off thinking, 'I'm damned if I'll go back,' and I set off towards Jerusalem along the trail of Moses when he fled from Egypt, (later I was reprimanded for this, and ordered to apologise in person to the Egyptian Prime Minister the next time I visited Cairo).

  Before leaving that morning, I had checked over my motor and had found that the compression in No. 2 cylinder was bad. Evidently a valve seating there was defective. When I landed at Gaza to refuel before crossing the desert to Baghdad, I found that this cylinder was pretty bad. It would have to be fixed that night at the latest. After leaving Gaza I made a mistake in navigation which gave me a shock; when I reached the Dead Sea, with its still surface deeply bedded in hill land, I was 18 miles too far south. A mistake like this could be serious when over the desert, and I could not puzzle out the cause of it. I flew on and picked out Ziza. There were only two or three shacks there, but I could see the scars made by aeroplane tail skids. I altered course to head into the desert. I looked for the wheel tracks of a convoy that had motored through, because I had been told that I would see these, and also some furrows ploughed in the sand here and there beside the track for guidance. Also, there were emergency landing-grounds spaced 20 miles apart along the route, and marked with the letters of the alphabet.