The Lonely Sea and the Sky (39 page)

  For four years I led an easy life. In the fishing season, I used to go off every evening after work to fish dry-fly for brown trout. I suppose it was some of the best trout fishing in the world. Part of the attraction was the wild, lovely, country that the fishing took me to. Once I joined an expedition to an uninhabited island. A distinguished geologist, Professor Marshall, had discovered a new rock-forming mineral, and the expedition was to look for the parent reef. Having no technical value I joined as cook. I had to use an open fireplace between some boulders on the beach, and I fear the culinary standard was not high. One day I grilled some steaks from a 150 lb swordfish; I must admit that they were pretty tough: we had two professors in the party, and they had a dispute; one of them got so angry that he picked up a loaf of bread to hurl it at the other. He was so furious that when he drew back his hand to throw the loaf, it flew out backwards; when his hand came forward there was nothing in it. I thought this was the funniest thing I had seen for years, and doubled up with laughing. Whereupon they both turned on me, and said that it was entirely my fault and that my bad cooking had upset their livers. Apart from this the expedition was a great success. The parent reef was located at the bottom of the extinct crater which the island was.

  In England, Hamish Hamilton, the publishers, offered a prize for a new book. David Garnett was to be one of the judges, and as I had had my best review of
Seaplane Solo
from him, and as I admired his writing, I got the idea of competing. I built a one-roomed hut at the top of the hill on our property, about 900 feet above sea-level, and retired there to write my masterpiece.
Seaplane Solo
had not sold many copies, so I thought that this new book must be made more attractive, like putting ordinary old chocolates in a gorgeous box with satin ribbon. As literary adviser I enrolled Marjorie Tweed, who had an impressive artistic bent. The first thing we did was to put the end of the book, the crash in Japan, at the beginning; there was a vogue for this kind of thing at the time. Then the book had to have an inspiring title; the final choice was
Ride on the
Wind
. Not only did this book not get a prize, but even some of my best friends admitted that they could not read it.

  One day I was visiting Flora and Frank Herrick, some friends of mine who lived on their sheep station on the east coast of North Island, and I persuaded Frank that it would be great sport to fly home to England across Siberia. He agreed enthusiastically, and it was arranged that he should provide the aeroplane, and that I should pilot it. We bought a second-hand Puss Moth, a high-winged mono­plane, with a Gipsy Major engine. It was nearly five years since I had flown, and I started off with several hours of solid landing practice. The Puss Moth was a delightful aeroplane in many ways. It had a comfortable cabin with a splendid view under the wing in level flight. It cruised at around 100mph and did 20 miles to the gallon. Its only drawbacks were that anything circled was hidden by the tilted wing, and it had a bad reputation for tearing off its wings, which had led to several fatal accidents. I accidentally discovered the cause of this. I was flying in to Rotorua at dusk and, having no lighted or even luminous instruments, was anxious to land before dark. Within 10 miles of the airfield I put the nose down, shut off the motor, and started a fast glide. The Puss Moth was well streamlined, and quickly gained speed in a glide. When the time came to level off, I pulled back the stick – but it would not move. I had no parachute, and even if I had I could not have got out of the cabin at that speed, because the cabin door opened forwards. It was a paralysing prospect. If I applied full force to the control-stick, either something would break, or the aeroplane would suddenly shoot upwards and pull the wings off. Feeling that I must do something, I opened the throttle wide. I do not know what made me do this, because the aeroplane was already near its maximum speed, but as I opened the throttle I immediately regained control. The elevators had been blanketed when gliding fast with the engine off. It was easy to see how an accident would occur; if the Puss Moth had glided out of thunder-cloud to find the ground close below it would be natural to wrench back the stick, whereupon the aeroplane would stand on its tail and pull the wings off.

  The Puss Moth was shipped across the Tasman Sea to Sydney, where Frank and I met it, and we set off on a sporting tour by air, visiting various friends of his at cattle stations in Australia. We left Australia from Katherine, on the railway south of Darwin – a very different place from the Katherine I had last flown over in 1930. Now it was on the Imperial Airways airline route.

  We had an uneventful but extremely interesting flight through the East Indies, calling at Timor, Bima, Bali, Surabaya and Batavia before reaching Singapore. Then we went on, touching at various places in Siam and Indo-China, to Hong Kong where we stayed at the (then) new Kowloon Hotel. After this we spent nights at Fuchow, Shanghai and Kiaochow, which is the airfield of Tsingtao, before landing at Peking. I found Peking much the most attractive and romantic city I had been to. I felt marvellously well and vitalised there. This may have been due to the dry, high-pressured atmosphere, charged with electricity – I gave off sparks freely! We were entertained by a Chinese family to a delicious dinner in their house, enjoying traditional delicacies such as bird's-nest soup and 100-year-old eggs.

  I had a charming and delightful Chinese friend whom I used to visit in the old walled city, although I was told that I was taking a big risk travelling through it at night by myself in a rickshaw. This enchanting young lady was so small that my two hands could meet round her waist.

  We waited for some time in Peking, trying to get permission from the USSR to enter Siberia by way of Mongolia if not through Manchukuo. Peking was a disturbed city, and uneasy with the Japanese infiltration to the east. There were shootings nearly every night, and armed guards were to be seen at nearly every establishment. I became friendly with the British Military Attaché at the Embassy, Colonel Lovat-Fraser. One day I flew him out to the Ming tombs, scuttling across the country at hedge-hop height, and inspecting each tomb closely from a few feet above it. Another day we had a flight to the Great Wall, and flew along this a wingspan from it. I was thrilled to see this great work of earth and stone, but I could not understand how it could have been effective; it looked as if it would be easy for a regiment of bowmen with plenty of arrows to keep the guards on top of the wall under cover while some ladders were brought up to scale the wall.

  Our flight to England did not make much progress. One suggested route after another was turned down, and finally we were refused entry via Paotao and the Gobi Desert. This was disappointing, but why worry? The whole flight was a lark, and we turned round to re-cross China and get back on to the ordinary air route to England.

  On the way south we had to visit Nanking to obtain some more permits for crossing China, and then we flew on to Hong Kong. Next, we landed at Hainan Island to refuel, and I got a weather report from the Jesuit priest who operated a meteorological station there. He spoke very fast French, and I misunderstood what he said about a typhoon. We flew on in fine weather until near the coast of Indo-China where the route was barred by a huge snow-white cloud. It looked innocent and I flew into it, but we were soon in trouble; it was a small typhoon. We were in strong gusty winds, which whizzed us up and down. Rain fell like solid water, and it became increasingly dark. I was soon sweating, thinking fearfully of Puss Moths which had had their wings pulled off, for the buffeting we were getting was terrifying. To ease the strain on the wings as much as possible I set the aeroplane to its maximum climbing angle, until it was almost hanging on the propeller. We climbed steadily, 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 feet. At last I surrendered, turned round and worked my way back over our tracks. When we got to the edge of the cloud and flew out into the clear, I turned round to look at Frank. He was huddled up in the rear seat of the cabin, with his raincoat over his head. During the buffeting, the sliding window at the side of the cabin had worked open a quarter of an inch, and the rain had shot in as through a hose-pipe, straight on to Frank. Later, when we landed at Hanoi and I studied the plot of the typhoon's track, I found that we had turned at the very centre of it, and I recalled how the turbulence had seemed a shade easier as we were turning.

  On leaving Hanoi, we crossed the mountains of Laos to reach Vientiane, on the Mekong River, at dusk. When we arrived at the dot on my War Office map which marked the position of the town, I looked everywhere, circled and searched in vain for any sign of it. This was a serious business, with night about to fall, and no suitable place to land. I studied the map, bamboozled, but could not detect what had gone wrong. Then I remembered that at breakfast that morning I had been looking at a French magazine with a map of Indo-China in it. I have always loved maps, and I asked permission to tear this out and keep it. I asked Frank to dig it out of my bag, and when he handed it to me I could see at once what had happened. The dot representing Vientiane on my map was at the wrong end of the name, and at that scale it represented a distance of 45 miles. So I headed west, pushed the throttle full open and raced across to the other end of the name. There we found the town all right and were able to land before dark.

  From Vientiane we cut across the north of Siam to land at Moulmein, in Burma, and from there proceeded to Rangoon. Now we were on the regular Europe to Australia air route, and it seemed tame after our journeys in China and the East. I got some interest out of flying low along the coast of Burma, but we were nearly brought down by a boy on the beach who threw up a hunk of timber which passed between the main wing and tailplane.

  When I was flying high over India, I read a book. We had no permits from the countries ahead of us on this route and had been advised to go to Simla in the hills, where the Government had retired in the hot season. We landed the Puss Moth at Ambala and hired a car to climb the 6,000 or 7,000 feet into the hills to Simla. When we reached a point half a mile below the Hotel Cecil, where we were staying, the car driver refused to go any farther. He proposed to dump our baggage there. I was so outspoken about this that he finally put the baggage back and drove up to the hotel. The next thing I heard was that he had been arrested – only the Viceroy and the Governor of the Punjab were allowed to drive up to the hotel! After living in a modern young country, New Zealand, this looked like a piece of archaism specially designed to antagonise Commonwealth people. I went along to the Chief of Police and said if anybody was to be punished for the driver's offence it was me, because I had forced him to drive up to the hotel. In India then, nothing counted but appearance and no value seemed to be attached to people's actions. The British officials whom we liked best in India were the forestry men; they were efficient, quiet and interesting, whereas some of the army officers and administrative civil servants were sickening snobs. Dealing with them I sometimes squirmed like Stalky at Westward Ho.

  The Persian Embassy in India refused to allow me entry with my existing passport because when I visited Chahbar in 1930 it had been signed by my host, 'In political charge, Chahbar.' To overcome that difficulty I was issued with an Indian passport. But when we reached Bushire in Persia the Puss Moth was arrested, and guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. We could not understand this, until we learned that they thought I was Lawrence of Arabia disguised with a beard, and proposing to proceed up-country to start a revolt. (I suppose they thought that Lawrence's reported death was simply an astute piece of camouflage.) It was intensely hot at Bushire; Frank was very irritated by the heat and hated it. His irritation was aggravated by being shut up and surrounded by foreigners who could speak no English. After five days word came through from Tehran that we were to be released. On walking over to the aeroplane I slipped my watch between my belt and shorts instead of into the pocket, and it fell on the ground and broke. I took this for a bad omen, and considering that it was already 1.30, and that we had a 500-mile flight to Baghdad, I told Frank that I thought we ought to put off the flight until next morning. Frank said, 'Let's get out of this hell-hole at any cost.' The cost was nearly his life. We took off, and proceeded to the head of the Gulf, plugging into a steady headwind of 20mph I expected the wind to die away with evening, but the light began fading when we were half way between Basra and Baghdad, and the headwind showed no signs of dying down. We had now been five hours in the air, and I said to Frank, 'We have not enough petrol to reach Baghdad unless this wind drops. What about landing somewhere for the night?'

  'Oh, let's press on to Baghdad,' said Frank. Night fell, it was dark, and there were no lights in the cabin; nor were any of the dashboard instruments luminous. I hung a torch round my neck and shone it periodically at the compass, the speed indicator and the revolution counter. Before we reached Baghdad the petrol gauge showed empty and I incessantly searched the ground below us for the best place to land if the motor cut. It was possible only to guess at the nature of the surface in the dark, but it is surprising how much one can deduce through experience.

  But we did reach Baghdad, and I located the unlit aerodrome. I did not wait for any airfield lights to be switched on, for I was expecting the motor to die at any moment. I did not even circle the airfield, but changed my approach into a glide and landed directly. The Puss Moth rolled smoothly to a halt, and I said to Frank, 'Take a torch, Frank, and walk ahead of the plane towards the hangar, so that I don't taxi into anything in the dark.' Frank stepped out of the cabin and I called, 'Look out for the prop.' The cabin door opened forward, coming up against the strut between the bottom of the fuselage and the wing. Frank walked round the cabin door into the arc of the propeller. To do this he had to turn sharply round the end of the door, and had it been daylight it could only have been done by a deliberate manoeuvre. I heard a sickening noise, and saw Frank stagger away to the right. I thought that he had been killed, and I had a desolate feeling of misery and despair. When I got to him, he was sitting on the ground holding his arm. His left forearm seemed nearly cut through, and I could see the bone ends. In due course a car arrived and he was driven off to a hospital.