The Lost Flying Boat (3 page)

The centre of my solar system was the hut, and I shifted clockwise, taking bearings on its glimmer. I felt a tightness at my left leg after standing longer than the intended five minutes. Aches and pains were not my bane, but I had been as still as wood, and should have expected such a seizure. Jumping up and down to bring the limb back to life might have made me a target, so I resisted. The tightness increased as if a rope were applied above the ankle.

The pressure was uneven, and the few seconds while in the grip of the small and I hoped merely playful snake were longer by far than any spiritual trips I had taken in the empty watches of more peaceful nights. Stillness was life, and yet to breathe might mean death. I saw the shadow of the snake's head but, waiting for the sting, looked at the line of trees. Thought was my worst enemy, but all I wondered, over and over, was: if I touch it, will it turn into a stick? I didn't, nor counted the minutes, but as they passed I grew calm, until the snake unravelled and went on its way.

I was in no mind to linger anymore on midnight wanderings. Oil tins on a pile of stones acted as alarm bells. Between sticks dug in the ground I set a sharp wire to scrape any ankle. If I had read about such tricks, I had forgotten the books. My enjoyment was total, and I decided that to be mature one must be cunning and unafraid.

6

I was unable to make any decisions except the wrong ones, but since they seemed right I enjoyed making them. Life was good because it didn't matter what I did. Carry on sending. Everything would be all right as long as you couldn't care less. Fresh from the troopship, I put on my demob suit and after four years felt very much the jaunty ex-serviceman. I bought a large bunch of carnations and took the train to Mortlake. Anne was in her parlour and, though out of my element, I fell in love again. In three months we were married. I worked in a jeweller's shop and instead of life speeding up as I had expected, it got slower and one day stopped. I fell down behind the counter, and the tray of engagement rings I was showing to a girl and her young man sprayed over the floor. When I was strong enough to stand I walked out.

I said to Anne that the job had been a stopgap. She asked what my long-term plans were. I had nothing to say. Such a question was unjust, and I could only hope that Fate would not let me down. Life did not seem real.

‘It's more real than you think,' she said.

My feet refused to touch ground. ‘I can't make plans.'

‘Others do.'

Her information was superfluous. I knew they did. But where did that get me? And where were they? Whenever she was right she reduced me to silence. Mostly she was right, so mostly there was silence. For some reason this silence annoyed her more than if she had been wrong and we had gone on talking. Reality was when I twiddled the tuning knob of the radiogram and heard morse chirping from the speaker. Whatever was said spoke only to me: news agency reports, ships' telegrams, amateur chat, weather messages. The cryptic spheres washed me clean.

‘You seem tense.'

I nodded, and switched off.

‘Put on some Mantovani?' she asked.

The music soothed her as the morse had calmed me.

‘I'm tired of loving someone who just isn't there,' she said.

‘I am here.'

‘You think so, but you're not. Not to me, anyway.'

I held my hand under her nose. ‘This is me, isn't it?'

She laughed. ‘I do love you, I suppose.'

I curled my hand into a fist. ‘And I love your nice long ginger hair, and your beautiful neat cunt.'

‘I hate it when you talk like that.'

‘Sorry,' I said.

‘You're filthy.'

‘I can't help it.'

‘You're still not demobbed, to say such things.'

‘I won't say it again.' I was as contrite as could be.

She stood, and pushed my hand away. ‘Why don't we go to the Feathers for a couple of hours?'

I belonged nowhere and to no one, so how could I claim to be in love? But I was. Being a girl of wit and perspicacity, she sensed my trouble and decided there was no cure. She was wrong, but I couldn't blame her for not waiting.

She didn't want to believe in a remedy because her own circuit was already shorting. One evening I found the flat stripped to the floorboards. The fireplace shelf in the living room held me up. Staring into a dusty cupboard I didn't feel much of an ex-serviceman any more. I tried to dam the tears, but they found new routes down my cheeks. Four years in the mob, and I wasn't even back where I started. I needed to get on and out and through and up and across and in any direction possible as long as I didn't stay where I was. I had disappeared up my own arse and got lost.

I clung to the mantelshelf as if it were a plank of wood in the middle of the Atlantic, until I remembered the revolver in my attaché case. I spun a coin, saying heads me, tails her. Heads came three times, so I slammed in six and sucked the steel lollipop. I would have dipped it in jam, but she hadn't left any food.

I had been drawn into the lobster pot of marriage, totally unprepared for such an investment. No need to apologize, Anne said. But there was, I insisted, wishing there hadn't been. My face wore a twisted aspect as I looked in the mantelshelf mirror. After setting traps and perambulating the elephant grass to save my life, I had walked into one so obvious that I hadn't even noticed. The same loaded gun was ready to stop me protesting about fate now that I was in a far less dangerous predicament.

I took the gun from my mouth, feeling older than when the barrel had gone in – though not much. In the mirror, I preferred not to recognize myself. Love won hands down over war when it came to making people miserable. There was much to learn, but I wanted to hide so far inside myself that no one would find me and I would be safe for ever.

I walked out with a suitcase and went to a radio school on the south coast, paying tuition fees from my savings so as to get my service qualifications converted to a certificate which would allow me to work on a ship or in aviation. Instead of being a shop assistant, I preferred listening to the traffic of the spheres. Marriage was for those whose emotional seesaw was properly centred. My spirit wanted to reach space where noises multiplied, in the hope that they would provide me with an answer as to why I was alive. I would stave off death by listening for the last message from ship or aircraft, or even while sending one of my own, and forget that I did not know what life was all about.

Anne, accurate in her knowledge, had seen no hope. I walked to one side of the pier and then the other, wearing two jerseys against the east wind. I would not try to make contact, even supposing I knew where she had gone, but hoped she considered me on the right side of forgiveness for whatever I might have done. For myself, I only forgive those I love, and she is still that person.

Separation gave me energy. I made acquaintances, but those at the wireless college who also came from the Air Force knew when to leave me alone. Perhaps a similar madness infected us all. If I went for long walks instead of passing an evening with them in a pub, no remark was made.

7

Some time during my marriage I bought a morse key and, when Anne complained of silence, would take it from the drawer and send insulting messages which she couldn't read, or repeat the SOS signal over and over after she had gone to bed. Another little mannerism which my dear wife pointed out, because she said it drove her mad, was my habit of whistling. I knew that I did it, because on catching myself I would break off in the mid flow of rhythmical notes which came out between a small gap in my upper front teeth. The sound, piercing though not loud, might have been a bird in its death agony under the paws of a cat, or the tentative beginnings of a kettle about to boil before emitting its usual scream. The sound could be picked up in a crowd by anyone with a sensitive ear, even from some distance away.

The habit was harmless, but I tried to cure myself because any messages sent not only made me vulnerable to the world but enraged my wife. So I stopped in mid whistle, and the noise would cease until, forgetting my resolution (there was no pleasure in such mindless whistling, after all) I would catch myself once more, while at a dance or tea party with Anne or, even worse, standing behind the counter of the shop being overheard by the boss from behind.

The habit ended with Anne leaving, or so I thought, but on finishing radio school, and after a spell at sea, and when getting another job seemed impossible, it came back. I walked into a pub in Albemarle Street and ordered a pint and a sandwich. Impatient at having to wait, the five letters of an aircraft callsign formed slowly on my lips, so that though not a wireless operator, Bennett, a mere stranger who stood nearby, was able to interpret the five letters of morse which I sent again and again.

It was a near miracle, considering the noise, but he had ears that could detect the breath of a dying man across a hundred miles of Antarctic peaks. He also put together the co-sign of my moustache, as well as the forward jutting chin and glinting grey eyes that denoted a man who would pick up any signals that were going. There is also something unmistakable about ex-airmen until they lose their youth, and maybe I reminded him of an aircrew member he once knew, perhaps one of those poor-show bods who had his guts splashed across the TRII54/55 above Bremen and yet was brought back to burial on English soil. There was no knowing. We had been born to give no sign, show no emotion, admit to no foreknowledge. Pragmatical we were, and phlegmatic we would stay, no matter how much the inner cauldron boiled.

He looked at me. ‘RAF?'

‘How did you know?'

‘I'm asking.'

‘Yes.'

Lunch came. ‘I can't get the bloody mob out of my head.'

‘Nor can a lot of us.' He smiled. ‘What's more, we don't see why we should.'

‘Funny,' I said.

‘It was a good mob.'

‘Still is.' I offered him a drink.

‘No, you'll have what I'm having.' He called for double whiskies. Such stuff on top of a pint would clog my brain for the afternoon, but I was in no mind to refuse. ‘What sort of wireless were you in?'

I put the beer aside for a chaser, and lifted the whisky. ‘Mainly direction-finding.'

‘The old huff-duff, eh?'

‘The same.'

‘Do any ops?'

‘I was too late.' Lots of aircrew ended in the cookhouse, pushing food out to the queues. I was lucky to get on the radio at all.

‘As long as you can handle the gear in a plane.'

‘What sort of plane?'

‘Flying boat. I need somebody for a couple of months. If you want a job.'

I looked interested. ‘I might.'

‘Did you do a gunnery course?'

‘Only the basics. They didn't even want gunners. The war ended, remember?'

‘Don't I know it?' He kept silent, and left me wondering whether he really had a proposition to make. Then he said: ‘You'll get five hundred a month, plus expenses. And come out with another thousand in your pocket.'

I needed a job like I'd soon need a suit to walk about in. ‘Sounds a fair screw.'

He slid down the other half of his whisky. ‘It's more than eight-and-six a day!'

‘But is it legal?'

He nodded.

Hard to believe, but I was in no state to argue.

‘When can you start?'

I was off my food. ‘I don't know. After you've told me what it's all about.'

‘Now?'

‘If you like.'

‘I'm being set up in a charter business, and need a wireless operator to make up the crew. Do you have a civvy ticket?'

I did.

‘All right. But no questions about legality. I don't like it.'

He was the skipper, so I soft-pedalled the interrogatives – and stopped whistling morse from that time on. He said that the original wireless operator, who had been a member of his old crew, had pulled out on hearing his wife was pregnant. He'd only got the phone call that morning, and was at his wits' end for a replacement.

‘A Super Constellation leaves for Johannesburg in three days.' We were in his South Kensington flat to settle my travel details and sign articles that, I thought, may not be worth the paper they're written on.

8

On the quayside Bennett introduced me to Nash, his chief gunner. A squall hid the flying boat to which, day after day, a pinnace went out with supplies from Shottermill's warehouse. I wondered how we could need a gunner, but kept silent. To ask questions was to have curiosity prematurely crushed, and the hope taken out of expectation. In any case I could wait, no matter what risk such a course might put me or others in.

No landing ground is necessary for a flying boat, and because water covers two-thirds of the earth it has more advantages than any other machine: a combination of Icarus successful and the dolphin tamed. As the huge and handsome boat lifts, its hull bids farewell to the fishes at the same moment that its wings say good day to the birds. The craft meets both and spans two elements, an aerodynamic ark speeding through cloud and clear sky in turn. I had no wish to know what was carried, wanted only to make the flight and collect my bounty.

A policeman skiddled his stick along the corrugated wall of the shed. Bennett peered intently, as if to bring the flying boat back into clarity. ‘Am I going to take that thing off again? I often wonder how much longer I can do it.'

Nash's laugh was the kind that passes between people who have known each other a long time. It was meant only for Bennett. ‘They used to say you could do anything with the old flying boat, Skipper, except make it have a baby.'

‘On this trip I'll need to make it have two – if we're to get back.'

Nash knelt to tie his shoelaces, then said: ‘I remember a picture of the old Mayo-Composite before the war. I expect I saw it on a cigarette card. Maybe we should have dredged up one of those for the job.'