The Lost Flying Boat

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The Lost Flying Boat

A Novel

Alan Silltoe

This story is dedicated to David,

having been promised a long time ago

PART ONE

1

A listener from birth should not be surprised if his first occupation turns out to be that of wireless operator. So with me. I listened through earphones to messages which came invisibly from the sky, and was able to write, though not always understand, any language which used morse symbols.

I listened with the greatest intensity of which two ears are capable. Such willingness opened a way to the inner voice, and twenty-five years later all details of what happened to the flying boat
Aldebaran
and its crew of eight became clear, so it is perhaps as well that I waited before writing my account. By paying attention to the faithful voice I leave out nothing which insists on being told.

2

The trio of Partagas cigars carried in the breast pocket of Captain Bennett's tunic were apt to crumble, so he coated each with cigarette paper as skilfully as if binding the broken limb of a pet monkey. He then puffed his whitened cigar into a simulation of alto-cumulus cloud above the blank spaces of the plotting chart, and gazed through the nebulosity in a way that showed he had his worries.

I had no qualms working for a man so preoccupied. It left me a great deal to myself while waiting for the rest of the crew to gather at the Driftwood Hotel, and that was what I liked. Going once a day to report my presence, I would find Bennett pencilling calculations concerning the range of the flying boat, the petrol its four engines would consume, and the distance to the Kerguelen Islands. At such times he would confide in me because he had no one else to talk to; though I think he wanted to listen to himself a shade more than he needed to hear what I had to say.

As he opened parallel rulers to draw the required track-line on the Admiralty Chart he expatiated on how essential maps and charts were for getting from place to place and for navigating over the water. ‘We must always be aware in which direction we are going. I once knew someone who set out across the world with no more than a few sheets torn from an atlas.'

He looked at me with an enquiring smile, as if to get some reaction as to whether or not I fully understood. I gave no sign one way or the other. He walked to the large window, looked out for a while, and puffed as if to give the inhabitants of this obscure South African port the benefit of his cigar smoke as well. He turned and went on: ‘Must have been an insensitive bod, to commit such desecration. I suppose he felt the need to bring a pretty diagram of his travels home for his children! They make people like that, these days.'

There was a bottle of whisky on the table, and he poured half a glass. ‘Booze confuses, but in my case it reduces the speed of thought. I can then grasp what's in my mind. Otherwise my eyes slide across that vital small print of thought, and refuse to latch on.'

In the sitting room of his suite there were, besides the large rectangular table with a chair on each side, a sofa, a bureau, a separate wardrobe, and two huge armchairs. My cabin-like habitation on the floor above had a coathanger on the back of the door, a sink barely deep enough to get my hands in, and a cot. But it was all I needed.

‘Maps and charts fix our position, and inform us where we can and can't go, Mr Adcock. We little men on earth are constrained by space and topography, God dammit! All we can do is sign on the dotted line, and stand by whatever it is we've half-wittingly agreed to.'

Why he said this I don't know. I had never thought of doing other than carrying out what I was being paid for. The chart of the South Indian Ocean was scored with wriggling fathom-lines and cut by veins of isogonals. Between South Africa, where we were, and the Kerguelen Islands, where we hoped to go, were undersea canyons thousands of fathoms deep; and, mulling on such figures and profundities, I felt myself floating half-drowned through the blackest of killer-whale hideouts.

He showed me a smaller chart on which I was to inscribe the callsigns of radio stations. Wireless bearings obtained along our route would be useful to the navigator, he told me, especially if cloud reached so high that sights on heavenly bodies became impossible. ‘When we cannot see, we often hear.'

‘So I understand.'

He folded the callsign chart and gave it to me. ‘That's why we're taking you – to be our listener. And wireless navigator, if necessary. It'll be a hard job finding what we want. In fact some might call it an expedition no sane person would approve of.'

I found his sense of humour reassuring, and said that, no matter what anyone thought, I was glad to be going. Much more was in my mind, but I felt this to be neither the time nor the place to say it.

‘Don't think for a moment that there's anything shady in our venture,' he added. ‘There isn't, believe you me, though while you're here, Mr Adcock, I might tell you that this little job is more than a godsend to me.'

We had not reached that level of familiarity when he might have called me ‘Sparks', the generic name for all wireless operators, but on my asking why he considered the job to be such a godsend, he resumed: ‘Because the time will never come again when it will be possible to do what we're going to do. You may not have noticed, but let me tell you that the shutters are coming down on any individual with enterprising spirit. We fought the war in the cause of freedom, but as soon as it was over there was no freedom to inherit. Freedom was dying while we fought. The war turned us into slaves, by making the bureaucrat supreme. The only so-called virtues left are idleness and cheating. Show initiative, and you're under suspicion. A spiderweb of red tape is woven around inventiveness. Fall into line, you get your reward – but not unless. A nation wins a war over the Nazis, but what does it signify if your own guts get kicked out in the process? All self-respect gone. Strangled by rules and regulations designed to keep bureaucrats at their posts and people in their place. I'll have none of it, Adcock, not while I have this scheme up my sleeve.'

Because he spoke calmly, his ideas seemed reasonable. I knew they were not, and in my unease hoped for an end so that I could go. He walked again to the window, closed it, and came back. ‘The twentieth century has been poisoned by two bestial systems that have tainted everyone whether they embraced them or fought against them. For myself, I want to push this expedition through so that I can be independent of all systems. To become rich is the only defence against being without hope.'

Glancing over his shoulder at the blameless ocean of the chart, I did not know as much then as I do now. After a final puff he laid the whitened, still smouldering stub in the ashtray and began binding another, which I took as a sign that the conference was over. The last thing that occurred to me before going out was that the word
PARTAGAS
on the cigar box read
SAGA TRAP
backwards. I was going to mention this, but thought better of it.

3

On my way downstairs I passed Shottermill, a big coarse-featured man of about sixty, with thin white hair so wispy he was almost bald. On the middle finger of a huge hand which gripped the banister was a ring crested with the coat of arms of some regiment or ship. When his pale blue eyes saw my glance he withdrew the hand and continued upstairs as if he didn't care to be seen by a younger man as needing the assistance of the banister. His stolid alertness was as if maintained by arrogance, and primed by scorn at any of the world's weaknesses which threatened to infect him. In the Air Force his sort had been the mainstay of the lower ranks, a warrant officer without humour and always aloof.

At first I thought he was just another layabout at the Driftwood Hotel, perhaps an escapee from Attlee's socialism who no longer cared to live with rationing and government controls, and to whom settling at a job in a cold climate seemed a lack of birthright after the war years, when any thought of tomorrow had been obliterated by the possibility that it might never come.

However I might dislike the expressions gathered into the orbit of his face, they were nevertheless of value to him and, his scowl implied, no bloody business of yours. What he had done before the war was impossible to say, but he was now a chandler contracted to provide stores for the flying boat. I suspect he also did smuggling and currency exchange, using his tourist agency as a cover. I sensed something of failure about him, but it was well held in, and perhaps came to me because there was sufficient failure in me at that time to make the connection. I had seen him only for a few seconds, but was young enough at twenty-six to indulge in snap judgements, and sufficiently dense to believe that each one must apply to other people. Now at the age of fifty I risk nothing and learn nothing. Youth only learns because only youth has to.

I was on my way out for a ten-minute walk before going to bed. Since arriving in Ansynk I'd had difficulty getting to sleep, and hoped the exercise and midnight air might lull me into oblivion. But coming back I succumbed to the idea of a last smoke in my room, and on the hotel stairs felt in my jacket for my cigarette case and lighter. On not finding them I thought that an efficient rob-job had been done. My pocket had been picked. But I had passed no one during the walk except a policeman, and he had been on the other side of the street.

I would always distrust others rather than blame myself, which was unreasonable, because though I had lost things I had never been robbed. I was wary of everyone, however, in a minor way, which perhaps explained my painstaking attitude to work, as in those long night watches in the Air Force when no planes risked getting themselves knocked about in monsoon clouds. I would contact other ground stations to test my signals, and sense their anger at being drawn out of slumber for a triviality. But if a kite had been in need of directional assistance, or had been forced to ditch, and air-sea rescue wanted its position, then my attention would have saved lives. Flying Control said no aircraft were about, but a civvy plane might have failed to notify them, which sometimes happened, so I would comb a few kilocycles either side of the frequency, with earphones dutifully clamped.