The Lost Flying Boat

by Alan Silltoe

  ‘I don’t sit,’ Harker-Rowe smiled. ‘Do too much of it in my life.’ Neither did his bowler-hatted guards. One stood at the door and the other concealed himself by the window, observing the street so as not to be seen – as if, Bennett thought, he had been an instructor in street-fighting during the war.

  ‘If you don’t,’ Bennett said, ‘I’ll pull out. The crew will understand.’

  The pattern was too late to dismember. Harker-Rowe leaned by the shelf and, looking at himself in the mirror, ceased to smile. ‘We’ve done our investigations. A minesweeper was bought from the Argentine navy three weeks ago, but you’ve a head start because it’ll take at least a month to get seaworthy. Their first stop is Madagascar. We know about them, but they don’t know about us. You can’t help but get there first, with your flying boat.’

  ‘Are you certain they aren’t aware of us?’

  ‘They knew there was a submarine, but assume it was destroyed with no survivors. They may wonder. I credit them with that. But they’re quite happy to believe the best. Like everyone else. Though not us.’

  ‘Madagascar’s a good jumping-off place,’ Bennett said. ‘So why didn’t we think of that?’

  ‘We did,’ Harker-Rowe said. ‘But your story about an exploration company looks good, and it’ll be easier for us to make arrangements for you in South Africa. You do your work, and we’ll do ours.’

  They showed an iron grip in protecting their investment, watching too closely for him to feel secure. Once the gold was on board, the danger would be mortal. Only in flying over the sea would he and his crew be safe. He would land where they would not be waiting for him. If he could get safely to the huge Pacific, the flying boat could land anywhere.

  ‘One more thing,’ Harker-Rowe said.

  He reminded Bennett of a group captain who had come from the Air Ministry to go over the details of a spectacular raid, which would have been written up in the official history if it hadn’t gone wrong.

  ‘For a crew you’ll need a navigator, an engineer, a wireless operator and your old gunner, Nash. That’s five. But take the extra gunners. If there’s trouble, you’ll be glad of them.’

  ‘It’s flying that counts in this job. Nothing else.’

  ‘We think you may want more safeguards,’ the man by the window said.

  Bennett hadn’t come to be lectured by such a pinhead. ‘I know what I need,’ he said sharply. ‘I’m the captain of this flying boat.’

  ‘But I’m chartering, with a half share in the gold,’ Harker-Rowe said. ‘If it’ll make you any happier, choose the gunners from your old crew. Appleyard, Bull and Armatage were in that list you showed.’

  There was no way out. Bennett assumed they had already been approached, and suborned. They would watch our flight crew – and the gold once it was on board. He would take them. A certain amount of digging and carrying would be necessary when they reached the island.

  ‘We knew you’d see reason,’ Harker-Rowe said.

  But did it make sense? He sweated too much to sleep, but losing such weight made him look fitter and more efficient. Having surrounded himself with so many uncertainties in order to find a way out of a labyrinth, he had reached the stage of wisdom which, such as it was, indicated that they only ceased to matter when you stopped thinking and started to act.

  21

  We talked in the galley about being able to swim, and Rose with his scar in shadow said he’d never had the ability. At thirty, he was too old to learn.

  ‘Too lazy to want to,’ Wilcox put in.

  Nash had done too much messing about in boats to think of swimming. ‘I don’t even like to walk more than I’ve got to. Walking makes my feet sore, and swimming would make my arms ache.’

  ‘I tried it once,’ Wilcox said, ‘and started to sink before I could find out whether my arms ached or not. My father yanked me from a premature death by drowning. He was too scared to teach me again.’

  Bull grinned at the memory of a few strokes with an inner-tube around his chest, but the valve opened and he saved his life by a panic-stricken dog-paddle to the bar of the swimming bath, a near-miss he had no wish to repeat. In spite of the dim light I saw his face turn pale. Appleyard confessed that his ambition was to be able to swim. He loved seeing people do the breast stroke, especially champions at the cinema.

  ‘Like Esther Williams?’ said Bull. ‘I’d like to swim up her.’

  ‘It looks so effortless.’ Because Appleyard knew it wasn’t, he got excited at the memory: ‘To make your way through the water must give you a real sensation.’ He was sure it did. Anyone who said otherwise should creep back into his hole and die like a liar. He had in fact been able to swim. ‘You won’t believe it.’ He sounded as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘Perhaps it was only a few yards, so that with practice I’d get better at distance. And I would have. Once you swim you can go on for ever, providing the sea isn’t rough or cold.’

  ‘Belt up,’ said Nash. ‘You give me the horrors.’

  He ignored the slur that he lacked taste. ‘One day when I was sixteen I got cramp, and that put a stop to it. I’d heard about cramp, but never had it, and I wondered what the hell this wrenching pain was in my left leg.’

  ‘It would have to be the left, wouldn’t it?’ Bull sneered.

  ‘I was tied up in a knot. From being happy and lively I was in agony. Luckily a chap knew what was happening, and got me out. So I thought: swimming’s not for me. If you turn to stone when you’re walking, all you have to do is stop. You can’t sink under the pavement. But if you get cramp swimming, you drown.’

  ‘Fucked by the fickle finger of fate,’ said Bull.

  ‘Alliteration will do for you yet,’ said Rose.

  ‘Well, you can sink under the pavement if you get cramp while walking,’ Wilcox said. ‘If some idiot digs a hole and doesn’t rail it off, you’ve had it.’

  Nash looked at me. ‘Can you swim, Sparks?’

  There was an understandable need for us to be united by a common lack, but I did not want to erode our fellow feeling by saying that I could not swim when I could. Like coaxing a half-buried signal from monsoon atmospherics, I sensed that the common purpose among us was still frail. Each was here in the hope that the expedition would mend a broken dream, make it stronger in fact than it had originally been. To expect something better than before was, however, unrealistic. To pursue a dream is to go backwards. To go forward brings more reward than recapturing old dreams. But whatever state they were in, we were going forward nonetheless.

  The life and death realization came too late. Having signed the contract, there was no backing out. But I wasn’t staying on from a sense of honour. Nothing like that. Honour is only a cover for what can’t be rationalized. Even if I hadn’t signed a contract I would have gone if I had really wanted to. We no longer had any minds to make up, could only go to wherever we must, not because our souls or our honour said so, but because we had got into this situation with the single mindedness of a retreat into the Darwinian slime when life on land looked too bleak for comfort.

  I told them that I had been able to swim for as long as I could remember. Rose said: ‘I wouldn’t bank on it saving you.’

  ‘Them as dies will be the lucky ones!’ Nash gloated.

  To claim the skill of swimming in such a company of water-haters would be unfriendly. Perhaps the virtue of a flying boat crew consisted in choosing to scorn such life-saving abilities. A foolhardy courage would always be available when the tumultuous sea threatened to break up the boat. The blue of the glassy millpond would be no kinder. Salt liquid would swallow sooner or later. Only four Pegasus engines horsing through the sky held us from the eternal element of water. In any case, we could all swim.

  When Rose parted the stem and bowl of his pipe, juice came out like a stream of cold tea. ‘Swim or not, it’s the machines that we rely on, plus the skipper’s handling, my navigation, and your tip-tapping on the morse key.’

  They laughed, satisf
ied that though I could swim I was no threat. All we had to do was keep our feet dry. I joined the hilarity. Apart from the millions of square miles that would churn beneath us, and five thousand horse power in the engines, together with the aerodynamic wings and seaworthy hull, there was a force without a name which had a say in our safety. Perhaps Nash had similar thoughts: ‘As long as the Gremlins leave us alone. Can’t have them little buggers icing us up, or unsticking our ailerons, or unscrewing bits and pieces from the engines.’

  ‘On one of our anti-sub patrols,’ Wilcox said, ‘I saw a Gremlin as large as life run onto the navigator’s table, pick up his Dalton computer – Rose was asleep at the time – get out onto the wing, and drop it in the drink. Then he did the same with his sextant – bit of a struggle, that. I’ll never forget the grin on its wicked little face. Stood by the starboard outer, doing a dance on his flippers before he let go. You should have seen Rose when he woke up and found his toys gone.’

  The close night air was permeated with tobacco smoke and smells from the galley. ‘I remember,’ said Rose. ‘You lot hid them. What a bunch of jokers!’

  When more tea was made there was silence rather than talk. Armatage asked me to take a cup to the skipper. The boat rocked as I went up the steps. Bennett was looking at the flight engineer’s panel. The shadowy light showed haggard features as he turned: ‘There’s no end to the homework.’

  He had changed and shaved since the briefing. A dog-tag identity disc hung out from his shirt and clicked against the panel when he moved. That bit of brown bakelite with his name and service number looked ominous. Mine had gone missing – or I had handed it in. I saw a corpse in water, bloated by the power of the sun. The vision went. ‘What if other people are trying to get at this gold, Skipper?’

  The grey, granite-like structure of Bennett’s cheeks and forehead tilted into surprise. Aircrew informality did not go as far as questioning operational orders, but I was curious about the danger that might be in store. It would have been unhelpful to ask at the briefing. No one could dispute that he was our captain. Each man to his work, to which all loyalty goes, but to be involved in a shady enterprise, and have even the geographical factors against you, did not make a good basis for employment. As individuals, we needed either the profit or the adventure – the more lucrative in the first case, and the more dangerous in the second, the better. Nor would a combination of both come amiss. Those in for profit would not baulk at excitement, and whoever wanted adventure might well accept money to cushion their return to the humdrum. But it seemed to me that danger could only be exhilarating when right was on your side.

  He put his tea down. ‘As far as anybody can tell, no one else knows about the hoard.’

  I was determined to say no more.

  Do you want the job, or don’t you?

  I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything.

  It’s not too late to have you taken ashore.

  I had spoken once too often.

  We’ll manage without you. Plenty of others to put in your place.

  ‘Maybe it’s already gone,’ I said.

  ‘Leave the thinking to me, Adcock. If there was a chance that the gold had gone do you think we’d go and look for the bloody stuff? Just sit at your box of tricks and tap out “Best Bent Wire” to the birds on your little toy morse key.’

  I should have acted, but it was too late. One can’t walk from a flying boat moored before take-off. The only way out was at the end of the trip, wherever and whenever that would be.

  In the galley Nash and Appleyard were checking stores. Bull clutched a pack of playing cards to his chest and slept. The flying boat felt leaden, an ordinary squalid habitation that could not possibly fly; but Bennett and Rose were talking fuel figures with Wilcox, and our piratical galleon of the air was being primed for its task.

  Armatage finished cleaning, and was reorganizing the containers of food. ‘Skipper was right when he said we had plenty. Neither a ship nor a pub should run out of grub, as I’ve heard say. And that means a flying boat. Let me tell you, Sparks, there’s nothing we ain’t got on board.’

  Instead of asking what he meant, I stacked each piece of washing-up for putting away, noting the different marks and decorative monograms of railway companies, hotels, officers’ messes and restaurants – all crockery in prime condition. The same with the cutlery. ‘It’s a wonder there was any left when the railways were nationalized.’

  ‘Listen, Tosh, the government’s a big firm.’ He stowed things in the locker. ‘And we know how to make ourselves comfortable. Nothing but the best, that’s what I say.’ He wiped the table and fastened it down, then laid towels across the stoves. ‘If we’re shipwrecked let’s hope we get all this onto dry land. We might have to survive six months, never mind six days.’

  Over the two bunks was a row of paperbacks and copies of London Opinion, and hardcovered library books with the coats of arms of various cities half torn away. I put one called The Knapsack into my pocket, in case sleep was hard to come by.

  At my receiver I pressed the switch and stared at the glass through which the magic eye filled to the brim with green. How many times had that hypnotic light given me pleasure to watch? Operators were saying goodnight. A Lockheed Lodestar was calling Port Elizabeth. One half of the world in my left ear, and the other in my right, were joined by the brain; and this reading of rhythmical symbols oscillating into words at writing speed never ceased to strike me as magical.

  I listened to messages from ship to shore, or from aircraft to earth, none of which concerned us. The transmitter of one ship, asking for a harbour pilot, sounded as if it had been recovered from the sea after accidentally falling overboard, its note farting across fifty kilocycles of frequency. Stations were going off the air as if a slow-moving tidal wave was sweeping the slate clean for take-off in the morning.

  PART TWO

  1

  Rose, having pre-computed the initial course to steer, acted as second pilot during the fraught minutes of take-off. A slight blue-black waterchop grated along the hull as he and Bennett checked the controls. Customs clearance had been given, and the harbour authorities were glad to see us go, because a flying boat was liable to drag its moorings and, being in a place where facilities for such craft hardly existed, could only be a danger to shipping – and itself.

  Wilcox primed the engines, and when port and starboard outers were going, Nash and his bowmen-gunners slipped our moorings. Once clear, the inners were started, and hatches closed. I had already taken sycop gen of four-tenths cirro-stratus, visibility ten miles, pressure 29.8, temperature 71, and wind 280 degrees at 25 knots. A depression centred 300 miles southeast presaged a deterioration in the weather as the warm sector was crossed and the front approached.

  The noise of four engines scoured our minds to emptiness on that nondescript dawn. We were on the move. No more doubts, and not much thought except for the job in hand. Harbour buildings, shabby like everything else from the glass windscreen of a flying boat, were a row of bad teeth lit by a spark of sun. There was a smell of fresh air and dust from the shore, and a saltier whiff from the sea. An amarillic band across the horizon was broken by a twig of steamer smoke.

  We turned to starboard, well clear of shipping, taxied downwind and positioned ourselves between two buoys. The outers were run up, then the inners. Wings and fuselage vibrated, and I gripped the seat to stop my legs shaking like a pair of knick-knacks. All our problems were solved in that there was no turning back. Difficulties would arise, a disaster might occur, but the primary question was no longer valid.

  A green flash from the roof of the harbour master’s office was a dragon wink to warn us away. Engines roared a harmonious answer, and we moved forward. Bennett worked the control column: floats clear of water, stick back, a shade wing-down into wind to stay straight. A rock-bump denied we were up, and I wondered how long the run would be, as we dashed towards the town and high ground.

  Ease stick back. The elements were taking
over. Another feeling as if airborne. The skipper would worry, not us. But bump again as, in my own darkness, I held my breath, and at the roar of labouring motors prayed we’d get unstuck from the water and heave our tonnage into the air. Wilcox said that no flying boat had ever been so laden. Each power unit had to lift three tons of its own fuel, and race us to flying speed along the empty boulevard of water, a runway as hard as concrete should we come back down with too much of a bang. Seconds of time stretched as if made of all the rubber in Malaya.

  I didn’t know whether I heard or felt. The sensation, as of peril at the beginning of any enterprise, was indeterminate. I knew enough about flight to make me uneasy, but only the skipper had sufficient to engage the worry clutch, and the flight engineer to experience proper anxiety, and the navigator – later – the mathematical expertise to feel embarrassment. Perhaps only Nash accepted completely the fiduciary characteristics of the flying boat.

  There was a gravelly scraping under the hull, as if a studiously fashioned fully fingered hand was feeling for the weak spot before punching a hole into which more water would flow than air. If I had kept a diary, the entry of January 1st 1950 would have told how a large war-surplus flying boat (the cheapest that ever was bought, said Rose) took off with eight crew and set course for Kerguelen, 2415 nautical miles to the southeast.

  Instead of sea, the sky flooded in. A glimpse of brown and green land, then a few buildings. We banked before getting closer, and while I hoped God would keep that four-stroke cycle igniting, I tapped a message of departure to the coast station.

  On an even keel the climb began, saying so-long to land and good day to the birds. Rose confirmed our course to steer of 145 degrees, which made us henceforth playthings of drift and track, vectors that boxed us in and styled us airborne. Morse warbled among the atmospherics. One operator pounded his key as if using a transmitter from the stone age. Another sounded like Donald Duck trying to tell us the long and the short of it.