The Lost Flying Boat

by Alan Silltoe

  The last three letters of the callsign PZX were most relevant to our navigator, for they denoted the points of the spherical triangle in the navigation training manuals, whose solution was necessary if the stars were to give our geographical position.

  Thus in cabbalistic fashion I picked the letters of our callsign over and over, eager to find significance, until the meaning I imparted had more symbolic truth than I supposed.

  5

  As I lay on my charpoy after meeting Shottermill I heard the long-and-short blast of a middle-distance motor horn inadvertently signal the letter N, which told me the driver’s name was Noah. Alphabetical dots and dashes had been pressed into my brain like voracious ticks never to be removed, and ever since that time I have picked stray messages from every noise. Three long retorts by the vehicle presumably avoided indicated O for Obadiah, while erratic bumps in the plumbing behind my bed suggested nothing more than the presence of an elusive OOJERKERPIV.

  Sounds had no secrets from me. I was keen to the faintest sign while tuned to a wireless, but deaf to the rest of the world. Living indifferently, I listened in daylight to signals from half the earth that was dark, and then in the dark heard messages from the other half where it was light. My faculties functioned because the heavenly envelope stayed constant, the same constellations fixed in their places when the clouds lifted, brought back by the revolutions of the earth.

  In Malaya my direction-finding radio hut was far from the control tower, and several miles north of the camp. I would sit at my illuminated table with the doors wide open, one hand on the morse key and the other at the dials. If no aircraft were flying I might be reading a magazine, or sitting at ease with a mug of tea which caused sweat to saturate the waistband of my khaki drill trousers.

  Or I would tilt the chair, earphones around my neck, and stare at the wall. Within moments I was beyond noise and seeing into space, at a point without coordinates of either sense or geography, so that I was out of myself and floating through vivid archipelagos of green, tucked into an elbow of the Heaviside Layer, feelings gone and never to return. Then, at the faintest initial squeak of my callsign’s first letter, earphones were on and fingers at the key while the other hand did a square search for a pencil and smoothed the page of the logbook. In switching so quickly from one state to the other I felt controlled by forces other than those which were a fundamental part of me. The transfer from stark duty to transcendental wool-gathering and back again could happen several times in a night. The mechanism of coming and going was not deliberate, and not always desired, but seemed to take place as the spirit required, perhaps as an escape from the weight of listening and a craving to see how far into the other world I could go without being unable to come back.

  When terrorists began murdering planters and anyone in British uniform, I closed the doors and used one light over the set so that any bandit in the trees four hundred yards away would have nothing on which to beam his gun. Sometimes I would turn all lights off, load my rifle, and set out against orders to patrol between the hut and the trees. When a man moved across my track I was unwilling to award him time or warning in a game of him and me. Without calling out I saw him edge towards the wall of trees. He was full in my sights, and for a second, which was a long time, I wondered whether or not to fire. I tightened the sling against my shoulder to steady the aim, and squeezed the trigger. There was no question of not doing so. On hearing the noise, which must have carried for miles, a jeep load of soldiers came racing across the runway.

  Earphones on, I said I’d heard nothing because of atmospherics. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘can you hear anything through that?’ When daylight came there was no sign of a body, but there was blood on the grass.

  The rifle was taken away so that the terrorists could not capture it after killing me. An army patrol would call every couple of hours to see that I was safe, but the possibility of being shot without a gun in my hands was a nightmare. A sergeant at the armoury liked his booze, and on passing him a bottle of Scotch he promised to see what could be done.

  ‘Anything that will fire,’ I said. ‘Even a blunderbuss.’

  ‘That’s not very neat.’ His gnarled fingers stroked the bottle. ‘You want something neat, on your job, something very neat, Tosh.’

  I still wasn’t happy, but there was a chance that with a loaded revolver I would be in a better mood to recognize happiness if it came my way. The Smith and Wesson lay by the graduated scale of the goniometer. Both doors opened showed east and west. If Chang the Hatchet Man came from north or south I wouldn’t hear. You can’t have everything. Daylight made me safe. Visibility is thine, said the Lord. But night was on their side, and I itched at the dials, out of contact by earphones that locked my senses into the stratosphere. The signals officer said we could operate from the camp, safe within its perimeter. No, I said, I liked being on my own, and would let no one rob me of being afraid.

  I shut a flap of each door so that it would be difficult to tell whether I was in or out, then plugged in the loudspeaker so that from a distance I would hear any morse calling me. A scarf of sweat criss-crossed my back. Sharp patterns of equatorial stars decorated the outer envelope of the earth, but I needed only a hundred yards to be in elephant grass and beyond the glow I was assumed to inhabit.

  The ground was my ally, and time on my side. The realization that they also can be deceived who have been in the country all their lives gave me confidence. I would not be picked off like a pig in a kampong, or cut to bits one night after I had nodded into an impossibly expensive dream.

  With a bayonet in one hand and a revolver in the other, I crouched and waited. The cough of water buffalo, bullfrog noises scraping the sky, and the comforting thump of surf half a mile away were pushed into the background. But my crude ambush would deceive nobody. I went into a potent daydream of the night, under a half moon threatening to light up fronds of grass that rendered my body ambiguous in the scrubby landscape. Part of every hour I waited to kill whoever might be creeping up to kill me, my senses synchronized to the extent that they pushed out anxiety and brought happiness.

  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 f
ell 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.

&nbs
p; ‘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.