The Lost Flying Boat (14 page)

One of the gunners booed, Armatage I think. There was rediffusion of flying boat favourites till the music crumpled against a mountain range of static and disappeared.

‘Back to business, Mr Adcock.'

I switched to ships and coast stations. My fingers itched to tap a greeting, but I roamed up and down the wavelength, never long enough on any to get a whole message. What did I expect? No weather report could come from where we were going. If a rolling stone gathered no moss, whose loss is that? It was the pattern of my life, and after so long I thought that nothing could break it.

We were the filling in a cloud sandwich, two thousand feet of sky through which we droned, a movable feast activated by so many currents of air that the plane had to be ridden rather than driven. A topography of ridges and cauliflower hillocks passed us by. Rose jerked his elbows back and forth. ‘A cold front's coming from the southeast.'

‘How do you know?'

‘If I knew, I wouldn't know. Take it from me. There'll be a bit of turbulence before we hit the drink.'

He paced irascibly against the bumps and lurches. ‘Calm down.' I made myself heard as he came close. A hand covered the scar-side of his face, while the exposed half was pale and leaden. He shivered with cold. I wondered how we would manage if our navigator passed out.

‘Maybe something I ate,' he said. ‘It's not unusual for me to feel air sick. Every other trip, and I spend half my time staring the bog out.'

I found a canister of water and filled a mug, spilling some before getting it back to him. Bennett was dodging the black three-dimensional coastline of cumulus, trying to rise to where the kite might be steady enough for Rose to obtain his sunsight. We went onto oxygen at twelve thousand feet, though I delayed as long as I could, hating that rubbery medicated tang that crept into the throat. ‘It's like the whiff that comes out of a Selection Box of french letters,' said Bull. A disembodied croak over the intercom agreed, adding that his popsy had given him such a gift at Christmas.

‘Shut up,' Bennett said.

I hung on, oxygen tacking and veering through my veins. My ears were buzzing, and a bodily nervousness – while at my wireless table – presaged a heavenward lift where all might be well. The impression lasted a few minutes, time for the system to get used to alien air taking hold. For whoever had work, reality reasserted its grip. A ship sent a routine message, faint but readable, which I logged, returning to the illusion that my work and I were inseparable. On this trip we had to be.

Another ship's operator, having difficulty reaching a coast station, was sending so slowly that I'd have had time to part my hair between each letter.

5

Height was the best aerial, but there was a limit to how far it could be extended. Infinity was not enough, though the higher we climbed the more I could hear. To bring in Madagascar and Mozambique gave a sense of power. I heard Tasmania and Nairobi with pleasure. Rhodesia and the Seychelles were registered with childish pride – yet the world was no bigger than the space between my enphoned ears since, in spite of what I wanted to believe, each place came in of its own accord.

I heard them all, dots-and-dashes denoting each locality, showing picture-book scenes where I would rather be than in the bucking slum-galleon of a flying boat going to a place that lacked the morse symbols which my imagination could embellish with reality. Without those electrical impulses (affected, as the handbook might say, by keying across a resistance in the high-tension negative supply), a place had no identity. Robbed of a name, it was erased from latitude and longitude, and so was denied existence.

And yet where we were going was on all maps and charts, and perhaps even shown on those small globes used as pencil sharpeners. Its natural harbours had been known for two hundred years by whalers and seal hunters. Explorers had laid up in them to fair-copy their surveys, piratical merchants had hidden to count the score of their plunder, and the Germans had used the area as a base from which to prey on shipping. But without a wireless station the region lacked a soul. No sound meant no life. No aerial system on high ground conveyed intelligence to other places. We were heading for white space because my earphones could not bring in the necessary signals to convince me it was solid property.

Rose's table took most of the sun as we ascended from the gloom, but a narrow shaft illuminated my log book. Cloud below was flat like the sea, fixed ribs crossing our track. The plane was steady, and Rose got into the 'dome with an Astro-Compass to check the course, while I stood below with his watch and wondered whether, should it become necessary, I could navigate our boat on its trans-ocean flight. Apart from radio bearings, it was not beyond my competence to lay out a course if provided with the wind vector. There was no mystery in sextant and timepiece as long as sun or stars were visible, and a book of Sight Reduction Tables available to work out a position line. You always learned something of the next man's job, occasionally without him knowing, and hardly aware of it yourself.

But the proper exercise of navigation demands arcane knowledge during a long flight over water, as well as subtle judgement when putting together the factors of dead-reckoning, astro navigation and wireless bearings. Therefore I couldn't do it, no more than anyone on board could do my work, though they tended to regard the wireless operator as having the easiest task on the flight deck. His technical knowledge was thought to go little beyond rectifying a few obvious faults, and using Morse Code could not be compared to the arduous work of flying or navigation – both of which are as much an art as a craft.

With senses of a more primitive order, the wireless operator needs experience and patience when pulling in any data for the well-being of the aircraft. He interprets symbols coming into the earphones, and uses the international ‘Q' code as an operator's Esperanto. To take morse at speed calls for the sense of rhythm possessed by a poet – or an African in the bush manipulating his tom-toms, as Rose scathingly said. The wireless operator's brain receives a series of beats which galvanize him into writing words originating from someone else. Others will in turn take down words or initials tapped out by him, both senders and receivers being mediums to transcribe electrical patterns from the sky.

At either end of the contact there is a human touch. If you miss a letter, you either let it go, thereby losing all trace, or you make the correction and then try to catch up with the speeding text, with the risk of missing some which is still to come. If the message isn't intended for you, yet is essential for your wellbeing, and you can't get in touch with the other operator to ask for a repeat, you are in trouble.

Each operator is distinguishable by idiosyncratic sending. Those whose rhythm is of a pleasing regularity are artists at the job, possessing stamina and an infallible sense of style, their evenly spaced strings of dots and dashes being a delight to transcribe. But most operators have mannerisms which make their sound patterns as unique as fingerprints. One can detect a change in operator, can tell when an inexperienced sender is tired, or lazy, or permanently irascible, or inwardly disturbed.

If half a dozen stations are hammering for attention you note their call signs and then, in an orderly manner, bring them in one by one to transact business. When a dead-keen coast station thumps out automatic five-kilowatt morse on eight megacycles, symbols come into each ear like needles intent on pricking your brain in the middle. Your vital interest may be to listen instead to the mewings of an underpowered pip-squeak tramp steamer. His feeble transmitter, so far away, may not realize the strength of the opposition that besets you while trying to read him, for the interference is in your area, and not his. What is preventing you from listening may sound no louder to him than the strength at which you hear him. In any case, the ship's transmitter, being right next to him, drowns all but his own morse.

The onus is on you to assist the weak. Moral considerations overcome any difficulty in the execution of your task. Human feeling encourages you to hear that small voice behind the great bellow, and struggle to bring forth meaning in case the lives of the sender's crew depend on it. The most important article of faith, hidden yet not hidden, without which you would only do your job and not your duty, is that which elevates your purpose and takes your craft close to art.

Your integrity can survive only by the proper rendering of the message onto paper, so you nurture those disjointed sounds, sweat at the finger ends, and tremble, and squint in order to cool yourself – and you may still, for all your effort, lose the thread. You hope for contact to be properly established, and do not give in to the evil of despair, which is too easy to accept and always to be turned from. A lost soul is revived with the belief that it is not finally lost and, rekindling your attempt to hear it again, you force your ears to conquer the bleak static of the ether and double the sharpness of your senses in order to encourage those in peril.

I listened for any such ship within the radius of my receiving aerials. A wireless operator in an aircraft is the lookout man in the crow's nest, the first to hear any manned object in the circumference of sounds. There was self-interest in my endeavours, for whatever I heard proved that we ourselves were not lost, whether the signals were to be of assistance to us, or a threat. Unable to accept that we were totally alone was an imperfection of spirit which should have made me ashamed – but did not. The individual cannot be supreme in an empty world.

Two hours out, I heard a ship send a weather report to a South African coast station. His QTH was a couple of hundred miles north of our onward route, so I noted it as being of some use. The force five wind was westerly, weather mainly fair, visibility moderate or good. I got a bearing on ship and coast station and, allowing for half-convergency, handed the slip of paper to Rose.

When I showed the report to Bennett he jumped as if bitten by a tiger-ant and called Wilcox to sit at the controls. Was there anything about where the ship was coming from or going to? He was disappointed at my answers. ‘Glue yourself to those valves,' he said, ‘and keep listening to that ship. But don't for God's sake send a single squeak on your key. Understand?'

I did. He went down to talk to Nash and his gunners. But if, on this enormous ocean where ships were scarce, aircraft rare, and a flying boat perhaps unique, I heard a vessel in distress, would I keep radio silence as commanded, even though such a policy was vital for our safety? Or would I inform them with alacrity that they were not alone, and relay a message to other ships which might be able to help them?

Bennett's pressure to push on, come what may, in silence and as if invisible, need not clash with the distress of a cottonboat or sugar-carrier. I lived in hope of lesser moral choices, but knew which one I would make if the moment came.

6

Armatage flicked his moustache, and looked as if he had woken up into the Stone Age. He wanted only to get back to sleep, but said: ‘I heard scratching underfoot. From when I closed my eyes to opening them again.'

‘Scratching?'

‘Have you ever heard of rats in a flying boat?'

‘You must be dreaming.'

He got out of the bunk and stretched. ‘Claws were going, ten to the dozen.'

‘Can't hear 'em now.'

‘You wouldn't, would you?'

I laughed at his irony. ‘I would if they made a noise. I can usually hear things like that.'

He rubbed his face. ‘I suppose it was a dream, though I never dream, so it's hard to believe. Why should I, on a flying boat? Makes no sense. Scratching, as plain as anything. I thought claws were going to come through that door.'

I jumped away.

‘See? Gets you, don't it?'

‘When they stop scratching,' I teased, ‘let me know. It'll mean they've left. We'll be in trouble.'

His face was covered in sweat, as if he had been under a shower – and we were freezing at ten thousand feet. ‘Do you want a drink, Sparks?'

I thought he was joking. ‘I'm not thirsty.'

‘I never said you was. I mean a tot of old grouser to steam its way up and down the tripes.'

He winked.

‘There's not supposed to be any on board,' I said.

‘That's all right for such as the skipper. For us it's King's Regulations and Station Routine Orders. He'll have us on bloody square-bashing next. But he's got something else to warm him up, though I'm not sure what it is. But it warms him, all right. You can see the hot spot burning his brain. If I had a tenth of it I wouldn't need a secret bin of firewater to wash my throat in. And besides, he ain't got toothache.'

‘You'll get thrown overboard if he finds out.' His sweat stank of alcohol, but I didn't care how much booze he put into himself as long as it was after we had reached land and the job was finished.

‘I've got my flask,' he said, ‘and I can refill it any time. You've never known a gunner to be without his flask, have you? Even on ops I took one, though I'd have been on the carpet if I'd been caught. Being half-cut on the way back from Nuremberg sharpened my sight. Saved my life a few times, such as it was. This is the last op I'm doing, though, and it feels the longest already.'

‘We've only been out three hours. Still, if you kip down for another half hour maybe you'll” wake up feeling better.'

‘I can't sleep,' he grumbled. ‘There's rats in the hull, scores of the bleeders squeaking and scratching.'

I lost patience. ‘You're round the bend, if you ask me, and halfway up the zig-zags.'

‘I wish I was.' He pulled at my lapel, but I shoved him off. ‘And not only rats. I heard voices.'

‘Voices? You're getting my bloody goat.'

He came close again. ‘In Bennett's wardroom somebody laughed and it wasn't Bennett. They were talking, all gruff and matey. Wilcox was at the controls, you was at your gear listening to Geraldo, Rose was at his table doing noughts and crosses, Appleyard was in the mid-upper, Nash was in the tail, and Bull was sleeping on the parachutes. That left me on my tod – hearing voices.'