by Alan Silltoe
Maybe the Spitfire wasn’t the most renowned plane of the war, I said, and that if given time to consider the matter at leisure – as I had while staring at the beer label and sending its words out in morse – I would decide that the Sunderland qualified for that honour. This led us to compare the performance data of the Sunderland with the vital statistics of the Lancaster, and from that point, all things being equal, we went on to correlate the relative sizes of the three planes and, knowing that the Spitfire was the smallest, and the Sunderland the biggest, embarked on a passionate discussion as to how many Spitfires could be parked on the wings of a Sunderland.
Out came pencils and bits of paper. The number increased as more gin was swilled and beer put back. In our cooked brains even the exact wingspan of the Sunderland wasn’t known, never mind the distance from leading edge to aileron. Yet it did not matter, because the Sunderland seemed to grow into the size of the earth itself, and what had peeled off from the original discussion as a technical dispute now became metaphysical. If you folded the wings of Spitfires and packed them close, they would make a platform for other folded Spitfires to be parked on top, and so on, and so on, thus building a tower of aircraft until you reached heaven or the structure capsized and sank without trace.
The sombre picture brought on silence, until in the extended right-turning part of the L-shaped room where Bennett and Rose were having their own pre-flight drink or two, I heard the Skipper say: ‘How do we go, Navigator?’
‘In a straight line, Captain’ – walking between two carpets.
‘There’s no such thing. It’s either a fixed Mercator course, or the shortest distance on a Lambert Conformal. A rhumb line isn’t the shortest distance. A Great Circle is, but can’t be a straight course, now can it, Mr Rose?’
‘Don’t mix me up, Skipper.’
Bennett opened his box of imperfect Partagas cigars and slowly covered a specimen with white cigarette paper. ‘A straight line is the longest distance. A curved line means less miles, but who steers a curved line? And who goes the shortest way? The earth is a funny place when you want to get from point to point. Does your life from cradle to coffin go on a rhumb line or a great circle? Both have advantages. A rhumb line uses more fuel, but a great circle gets you there sooner. A rhumb line is less trouble: you set course and arrive at a certain time, providing there’s no wind, which there always is. On the other hand, a great circle needs more planning, as well as work to make sure you stick to it. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, I’m afraid, because on either system you’re at the mercy of malign tides and tricky winds, and the homely pull of the earth.’
‘I’ll make your course straight enough to do a great circle,’ Rose slurred, ‘which is the best of both systems. Or the best of this one, and that’s a fact – if facts are needed.’
‘They are,’ Bennett said. ‘Believe you me.’
‘I’ll work out the convergency angle, and calculate the different distances.’
‘You’ve been to the right school. The only bogey will be the weather.’ Leaning over the table to unroll his chart, Bennett splashed whisky across the southern half of Madagascar. ‘Whether it’s summertime or not in that land of glaciers and fjords, the weather is the thing. And the compass needle swings fifty degrees out of true.’
Rose turned his face away. ‘The left hand as usual won’t know what the right hand is doing.’
‘Does it ever? It’s immaterial.’ Bennett poured whisky for his navigator, and more for himself. ‘Only the planispherical stars will give anything like true direction, if they can be seen. And only the configurated scratchmarks of land the actual position, providing it can be found.’
‘If only the earth wasn’t round,’ said Rose. ‘How simple life would be! I’d never think about the end, if there was a danger of falling off the edge.’
‘You’re alive as long as you don’t fear dying,’ Bennett told him. ‘Life is full when you aren’t aware of spending your strength freely and yet are doing so. You get the best out of life when you act knowingly, and still don’t know. Being close to revelation is never close enough, though all of us were near it when candle flames burned bright over a city in the process of devastation. In the total trips more than six hundred tons of bombs were unloaded, making nearly a hundred tons for each crew member. The Rubble Churners. The Fire Raisers. The Second Fronters. God’s appointed Wrath.’
‘There is no guilt where I come from,’ said Rose. ‘The Knights of the Apocalypse rode in squadrons of Lancasters to excoriate evildoers. I’ve seen too many perfect knights go down to feel pity for those on the ground.’
‘A thousand Lincolns were being prepared,’ Bennett said, ‘to create a desert from a former empire and call it quits.’
‘What the world’s come to’s no business of mine,’ said Rose. ‘The world made me what I am.’
‘I rather think it was your parents,’ said Bennett. ‘When you begin to scratch, you itch. I’m drunk, Rose, and don’t like it. The life force under the skin crawls and irritates. In the gap between moments you mindlessly scratch, and unwanted words are born. You resent the disturbance that has no name. Where it comes from you neither know nor care, but because you stare and don’t shout doesn’t mean its hooks aren’t there. All in all, I’d like to stick a label on that door that opens onto the maelstrom. I hope the lock’s secure.’
‘So do I,’ said Rose.
Wilcox built up the empties till his tower was a foot from the ceiling. His hand shook on lifting a full glass to drink, but when he set a bottle one stage higher his grip was steady and eye accurate, a liverish tongue pressed into acquiescence by his teeth to stop the coughs breaking.
The structure collapsed, and we each caught an armful without any bottle cracking, though it seemed strange that our laughter didn’t shatter one or two. A clergyman and his wife, a red-faced farmer, and an old English colonel had already evacuated themselves from such aircrew behaviour. Nash remarked that it felt like the pre-ops mood in the worst days at the end of 1943, when kites were dropping out of the sky like coffins. You didn’t even have the heart to go into the bog for a last wank before take-off, superstitious that it might be the last. This over-loud recollection drove the final spectator into the lobby.
Beyond the point of no return, the waiter came with a bucket to empty the ashtrays. He put six more bottles on the table. Bull said it was his turn to pay, and fell down unconscious, clutching the money. Nash thought we had better make our final choices, and I told him I now plonked for the Lancaster, but how final is final?
‘More final than you think.’ Wilcox looked as if he ought to know. ‘The die is cast. I’ll take the Sunny Sunderland.’
Which left Nash with the Spitfire. ‘I’m the tallest, so get the smallest. Always the bloody same.’
We sat on the stairs singing: ‘One step forward, two steps back’, a bitter kind of boozy refrain, which set us grabbing ankles to stop further progress up or down. But we got to our doors and said goodnight. There’s a purpose in hilarity. We were in it together, bespoke tragedians stitching our lives like figures dangling in a paperchain. But in that split second before oblivion I wondered what it was that we were in.
18
Because the oil supply to the port inner engine was giving trouble, it was not until two mornings later that we sat on either side of the motorboat to go on board for departure. Even so, we wouldn’t be airborne for twenty-four hours, till a favourable weather front moved in to see us off.
I felt as pasty as the others looked, a mush-breakfast of coffee and buns like mortar in my stomach. Nash was so stricken by a fit of belching that at one splintering emission Appleyard commented that if he carried on like that he’d come apart at the seams.
Choppy water was like the shifting tiles of a grey roof. I had never been seasick, but felt there was no point in worrying about what might not come. I suppose we all thought the same. ‘If it gets rough, hard-tack will be on the cards,’ said Wilcox.
Bull did not need a sermon to point out his mistake. He winced at the stricture, and spat into the water. A red band beyond the harbour showed the sun, up but not apparent. An area of cloud fused into pink, then merged with a seam of muddy grey. We turned an arm of the inner mole, and were covered with spray as the boat winged from side to side. The horizon was cut from view by the white port-holed flank of the flying boat rising above the lap of water, and Wilcox interrupted his early morning cough to say that you couldn’t go on board without feeling a lift at the bottom of the stomach. ‘Every time, it’s as if you’ve never been on before.’
Appleyard likened the experience to a woman he hadn’t seen for a while. ‘I might not be expecting to go to bed with her, but I’m happy to be close, all the same.’
Sun broke up the rolls of cloud, and Bull smiled at its warmth, out of the hump into which the skipper had put him. ‘Dropped a clanger, didn’t you?’ Nash said in a low voice.
‘I often do,’ Bull answered. ‘Law and Admin’s a bit strong on this trip, though, ain’t it?’
The boat went under the chill of the starboard wing. ‘It’s going to be a hard one,’ Nash said, ‘that’s why.’
A gull swung by the float and looked in at the hatchway, as if knowing that our twenty-five tonner, on coming to life, would lift to heights it could never attain. Or was it scouting for choice leftovers? ‘He’s more like the bloody adjutant than the old skipper,’ Bull grumbled. ‘I only came for a good time.’
‘You’ll end up with a good dose, the way you’ve been going on.’
When he borrowed money from each of us we couldn’t understand how he had spent up so quickly, till he said he’d been and found a nice black woman to pass the time with. We accused him of shooting a line, because you couldn’t do such a thing in this country. But Nash, who knew better, called in disgust: ‘He’d even shag an oak tree felled by lightning.’
Our pinnace nosed under the wing towards the tail, high out of the water. We were going a circle, as if Bennett wanted the man at the tiller to give us a last view until disembarking at Kerguelen. The bird caught the wind and came round again, button-eyes staring side-on at floats, hull, stern, wings and engines as if reconnoitring every plate and rivet on the mindless assumption that sooner or later an explanation would appear as to what connection the Aldebaran had to earth and sky, thus releasing the gull to fly away with curiosity satisfied. When the bird alighted on the cowling of the inner port engine, Bennett said: ‘Get it, Nash. But don’t sink the bloody ship!’
As we swung for the door Nash held a pistol at arm’s length for a steady aim. The crack disturbed a feather of the gull’s head, causing it to lift, roll along the wing then, apparently, recover and fly away. ‘Just as well you missed.’
‘Scared it, at least.’
‘Can’t have it shitting all over the paintwork,’ Armatage said. ‘Shit from a white gull peels it off. Why is the shit of a white gull black?’
The boat bounced against the rubber tyres and Wilcox, with a final landbound fit of coughing, leapt in through the hatch. ‘Because they eat black puddings,’ Bull said.
‘They don’t have ’em in these parts,’ said Appleyard.
‘They do,’ Bull grinned, ‘and they’re lovely.’
Bennett counted us in, the pinnace held firm by Appleyard’s knots. Conscious that the holiday was at an end, I went over. We were on watch from now on. Duty was the word, and work our pastime. He called for all hands to get in the kit and last remaining stores. We were sweating. Armatage threw each piece into my arms, and I passed it to Bull. We were allowed one holdall or case, which Nash promised would go over the side if we developed a weight problem. Wilcox smiled when everything was stowed. During the work he hadn’t coughed. Bennett climbed the ladder to the flight deck as if going up a monkey-climber in the back garden. There was a smell of petrol and stale food, of diesel oil and seaweed, which gave the kite a maritime personality – dead though it yet was.
Fore and aft, from floor to ceiling, the cavern of the boat’s body caused me to wonder why I had waited so long to make its acquaintance. No aeroplane I had been in was so spacious. The cubic footage daunted me as far as getting to know each cranny, yet the size promised comfort and security. The unmistakable smell of a service aircraft, together with the rise and fall of the boat, brought a whiff of sickness as I went up the aluminium ladder. To the right, behind the cockpit, Rose lifted the lid of his navigator’s table to discover a loose screw in one of the hinges, and asked Wilcox, at his knobs and levers panel, to lend a screwdriver.
In my section was the graduated receiver scale and homely façade of the robust Marconi TR-1154/55. I drew my fingers over the multi-coloured transmitter clickstops and pressed the encased bakelite morse key. There was space to stand up and swing my arms, and with little movement get a view of Appleyard going back to shore on the pinnace to fetch last minute necessities from Shottermill on the quay. The sun already warmed the flying boat, and a gentle rocking under foot made the craft less formidable.
The sickness passed. The outside was a picture to be looked at from this convenient vehicle making its way over the water surface of the earth. ‘Plenty of room to work in, eh?’ Nash spoke as if he had been responsible for the design. ‘What do you think of the old cloud-lorry?’
‘People must have felt good producing a plane like this.’ I mentioned loyalty and co-operation, not to say patriotism, and even a kind of love necessary to get such a huge aerodynamic construction assembled from scratch. Almost like building a cathedral. The workers must have felt pride when they saw it newly finished.
He was laughing. ‘Pride? Loyalty? Most of them wanted to earn as much as they could in the shortest possible time while doing as little work as possible as slowly as they could get away with – though I suppose it wasn’t that slow if they got a bonus on top of their pay-packets.’
A flying boat is built by people who guide each strut, float, stringer, tailplane, aileron and leading edge into place, I said. The anatomical diagram is adhered to as a blueprint for every component from a tiny screw to the whole engine. After launching, the flying boat retains the touch of human hands. Even if few felt that they were creating a work of beauty, it justified what I was trying to say – which Nash admitted might be true enough.
Salt water cradled the hull, reflecting an underwing float beyond each outer engine. Extended wings mirrored a shimmering charmed image below, both entities joined by the umbilical surface where one ended and the other began. Though anything utilitarian need not be beautiful, beauty must have its use, and of all man-made artefacts I grew in the next few days to feel that the flying boat was one of his most graceful endeavours, a spiritual extension with a practical purpose.
The sea is its resting place, and when the hull pushes against water during take-off, driven by the engines’ powerful thrust, or first glances the surface of the sea when coming down, designed to alight at a landing speed of less than a hundred miles an hour, it will gracefully meet its natural plain, but in an agitated sea the thin hull can be broken, and take the flying boat to disaster.
Where we were going, no marked area or man-designed breakwater would protect us. A cape might give shelter from prevailing winds and undue current, but guarantees of a safe anchorage were few. Our chart delineated the coastline but told little of the interior except that mountains and glaciers almost filled it. A flying boat was the only aircraft which could visit that to
rtuous terrain. To put a landplane down, Bennett explained, would be like trying to do so in upper Norway; but for a flying boat to alight in a fjord with two or three sharp bends was, for the sort of flying he knew about, a piece of cake.
I sat at my radio desk and took the List of Radio Signals out of my briefcase. There were no fixed stations where we were going, nothing but a few ships perhaps on the great circle route between South Africa and Australia. I stacked the Wireless Operator’s Handbook, a copy of the Weather Message Decode Book, the standard Wireless Equipment on Aircraft, and a folded tracing of the Admiralty Chart.
Rose’s larger collection of printed matter – Sight Reduction Tables, Sight Log Book, Star Almanac, Star Atlas, and the Antarctic Pilot which contained a description of the Kerguelen Islands – found a place in his desk, on top of which he spread the Mercator chart which he had patiently constructed at the Driftwood Hotel. Then came his Dalton computer, a bubble sextant, a marine sextant, a stop watch, a chronometer, and an astro compass for finding true north no matter what the magnetic variation, providing the sun was visible. The reliance placed on the heavenly bodies to guide us to our destination was almost total, and I could only hope that cloud cover would not fox us for the whole trip.
Wilcox in his office, facing the panel of knobs and levers, was simulating a pre-flight check – we would not take off till the morning – while Nash and his gunners were getting in the drogues and upping anchor before closing the hatch for our trip around the roadstead. Bennett started the port inner, and I fixed on my headset, hearing him over the intercom: ‘Taxi-ing. Stand by.’
‘OK this side,’ Nash said.
‘Try your wireless, Sparks, but disconnect the antennae.’