The Challenging Heights

by Max Hennessy

  Dicken shrugged. ‘I’m not sure I can wait. I read the report of the House of Commons. It’s enough to make you go out and cut your throat. They’ve savaged us from 30,000 officers and 300,000 other ranks to 5,300 officers and 54,000 men. Surgery like that makes a man prefer to take a chance in Civvy Street. I’m getting out, Willie. I can’t afford not to.’

  ‘In that case,’ Hatto said, ‘perhaps I can help. Ever heard of Lord Ruffsedge?’

  ‘The newspaper proprietor?’

  ‘The very same. A friend of my Old Man’s. Hamer Quinton before he got his title. His son did a bit of flying during the war and since then the whole family’s become dedicated birdmen. He travels a lot about Europe and he wants a pilot to run his plane.’

  And that was how Dicken came to be in Berlin in October, 1920, contemplating the wickedness of the German capital but not entirely without a degree of pleasure.

  Despite the excellent pay, the job had turned out to be far more dull than he had anticipated. Ruffsedge wasn’t a difficult man to work for, but he was pompous and it involved a great deal of listening to his outpourings on his finances, his politics and himself.

  Within a fortnight of the offer, Dicken had obtained his licence as a commercial pilot and two days later was flying Ruffsedge and a friend to Manchester in a converted DH9a on to which had been built a tiny cabin. But then Ruffsedge had a new idea of flying copies of his newspapers to European capitals for British readers there and within four months, instead of passengers, Dicken was flying London-printed Daily Globes to Paris where he refuelled before continuing, with another refuelling stop near the border, to Berlin. Lord Ruffsedge seemed to have come to the conclusion that air travel was not as comfortable as train travel and Dicken found he had become nothing more than an aerial transport driver.

  There was still a certain lack of respectability about private flying, however, because of the dozens of restless young men who had bought up the old Avro trainers after the war and were putting on shows about the country, risking their necks because they’d been doing it for so long they had no qualms about continuing to do so and could see it only as a means of earning a living with the skills they’d acquired. As the fun went out of Ruffsedge’s job, it grew monotonous, and Dicken began again to feel that restlessness which had driven him out of the RAF. He wasn’t depressed, but he was perplexed and seemed to be suffering from a hangover from the fighting. The war had been a new kind of war with new methods of waging it and there had been an astonishing distrust between the military and political minds and an astonishing state of muddle and confusion. But more importantly, as Hatto had warned, the way in which life as they had known it before the war had disintegrated left him in a void of bewilderment.

  He was in a state of mind he couldn’t fully understand. Conditions were different from what he’d expected them to be and it was hard to adjust. Some men clearly hadn’t. Griffiths had also left the RAF but Archard and Almonde and Tom Howarth had decided to stay in, and of the four who’d debated the subject in hospital on Armistice Night, Coetzee had gone back to South Africa all right but he’d been unable to put flying behind him after all and had killed himself flying into Table Mountain; Noble’s civil flying job had not materialised because he hadn’t had enough experience to command one and he had gone back to his old job and was now already beginning to climb the ladder in a finance house in the City of London; while Charley Wright had bought two old Avros from surplus wartime stock and was among those touring the country putting on displays. Williams had done nothing. On his first venture from hospital he had been attacked by the Spanish flu which had been raging throughout Europe and had returned to die with all his hopes unfulfilled.

  For so many men things hadn’t turned out as they’d expected and when the long-awaited list of RAF officers to whom permanent commissions were to be granted finally appeared it was baffling. First class men with distinguished fighting careers had been left out while men with little or no active service had been included. Men who had been captains during the war were senior to men who’d been majors, while lieutenants were senior to captains. Diplock’s name on the list made Dicken shudder.

  The Berlin hotel where he was staying provided plenty of comfort but he was bored with it and, feeling the need to take his mind off his problems, he telephoned a girl he’d got to know by the name of Janzi Lechner, who lived at Spandau and worked at the American Embassy. She was petite, dark-haired and spoke excellent English and they decided they’d try The Pinguin, a night club she knew. But as they pushed into the smoky atmosphere they found the place in an uproar. A man wearing a flying helmet and leather jacket was riding a motor cycle round the tables and women were standing on their chairs, screaming, while the men were shouting with laughter.

  ‘Oh, Gott,’ Janzi said. ‘That’s Erni!’

  ‘Who’s Erni?’

  ‘He’s a flier. He calls it dogfighting on the ground.’

  The manager, his assistant and the waiters finally cornered the motor cyclist and persuaded him to let them have the machine, but, far from subdued, he picked up a pile of plates from the nearest table and began to juggle with them.

  Janzi began to laugh again. ‘They say that during the war he once sprayed petrol under the tail of the dog of a general who was inspecting them. He caused as much uproar at the inspection as he does nowadays in night clubs and at airfields. The girl with him’s Lo Zink, his wife. During the war he used to have her name painted on the side of his machine.’

  Dicken’s ears pricked at an old memory. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Udet. Erni Udet. He was second only to Richthofen at shooting down planes. But he hates the kudos it gives him. He pretends he’s forgotten all about it and says his reputation will rattle after him for ever like a chain.’

  Suddenly, beyond the smoky atmosphere of the night club, Dicken saw heavens reddened by the evening sun and a whole sky full of Fokkers, Albatrosses, Triplanes, Pfalzes, everything, it seemed, that the German Air Force had possessed, with one Fokker DVII – outstanding among them for the skill of its pilot – with red and white stripes painted like a sunburst on the top wing, the words ‘Du doch nicht!’ – Certainly not you – on the tail surfaces, and letters, LO, on the fuselage.

  ‘I’d like to meet him,’ he said.

  ‘He’s too busy by the look of him.’

  ‘He’ll meet me,’ Dicken said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he once damn near killed me. That’s why.’

  Udet was a small man with a broad grin and he shook Dicken’s hand warmly. He spoke good English but with a marked accent.

  ‘Quinney! I hear of you. How are you? I thought ve had killed you in the var. And I was damned sorry too. You frightened us to death – all forty-two of us – before we downed you. You got two of my boys. Only liddle kids. They were so young they cried for their mother in their first fights. You forced another to land mit his engine stopped and another had to take to his parachute. He kill himself two months after the Armistice, flying into an electric cable, so it doesn’t do him much good. They said that evening that you also knock down a Rumpler. How about you? I was sure we hit you.’

  ‘You did,’ Dicken said. ‘Four times.’

  Udet grasped his arm. ‘Und now?’

  ‘Recovered.’

  ‘Wunderbar! Wunderbar! Killing’s no pastime for a decent man even if flying is.’ Udet seemed to have forgotten his companions, his motor cycle and his juggling, and took over a table in a corner. ‘Here we can talk,’ he said. Janzi Lechner joined them with Udet’s wife and one or two other men and girls but Udet seemed not to notice them.

  ‘Dicken – I call you Dicken, hein?’ Udet smiled. ‘Call me Knägges. Everybody calls me Knägges. It means Titch. I’m not exactly a giant, you see. Come to that, neither are you. What are you doing now? Still flying?’

  ‘Private pil
ot to a newspaper proprietor.’ It sounded better than aerial transport driver. ‘Are you still flying?’

  ‘Displays at Oberwiesenfeld in Munich. Sometimes mit Robi von Greim. He also flies in the war. How did you come out of the fighting?’

  ‘Alive!’

  ‘I mean medals. They make it worthwhile?’

  ‘I got a few. So did you, I heard.’

  Udet grinned and patted his wife’s arm. ‘When they give me the Pour le Mérite, Lo here make me walk her past the home of the King of Bavaria because the guard there always has to turn out for any man mit the Blue Max. She make me do it again und again.’ Udet’s face grew sombre. ‘But there are a lot whose crosses are only made of wood. Broken propellers in a grafeyard mit their names on them. Richthofen – the Rittmeister himself. Wolff. Löwenhardt. Voss. Boelcke. Immelmann. Many of your friends, too.’

  Dicken’s mind flew back. Finding the carpenter in the hangar working on such a headpiece on his return from leave, he had asked, ‘Who’s it for?’ and got the laconic answer, ‘The next one.’ It had seemed to sum up the inevitability of the whole tragedy of war. If it wasn’t today it would be tomorrow.

  ‘These people’ – Udet’s hand gestured at the other people in the night club ‘ – they haf not seen the same things. Once when I am flying I see a man fall out of the clouds above my head, legs and arms going. Yet there is no sign of a falling aeroplane, or a fight, or any wreckage. He must haf been thinking of what it was going to be like when he hits the ground every bit of the way down.’ He frowned. ‘Once I shoot down a Bristol und the observer’s map wraps itself round one of my struts and stays mit me all the vay home. Often an aeroplane goes over my head so close I feel the draught and smell the engine fumes.’ The hand gestured again. ‘These people don’t understand.’

  There was a lot of movement round the table as the band started. Udet shrugged and began to scribble on the menu. ‘Is different now,’ he went on. ‘Nowadays we only get killed doing stupid things. Robi von Greim and I do dogfights at exhibitions. He has an old DVII, I haf a Fokker Parasol. Because we haf both the Blue Max we get the crowds, of course. But it makes me feel ashame, doing something to entertain that we once did in earnest. Besides, the crowds only really look for excitement. Vhen Robi hits a high-tension wire und falls into a lake, they think it is part of the act. I decide to give it up. I’m building aircraft now. Mit an American called Pohl. We call it the Volksflugzeug – the people’s aircraft. Cheap. Easy to fly.’

  ‘I thought under the Armistice terms Germany was forbidden to build aircraft.’

  Udet grinned. ‘You going to tell on us?’

  ‘Good God, no! But how do you get away with it?’

  ‘They think we are building locks. The aeroplane looks like a goose mit epileptic cramps, but it flies. I hear Tony Fokker vent to America. He manage to get all his half-built machines out of Germany before the end came so they are not destroyed like the rest and he has enough to start again. When it finish, they saw up and burn every German aircraft they can find. Only a few vhich are hidden are saved. The hangar at Schleissheim vas filled mit destroyed machines. They make a bonfire of superb aeroplanes.’

  ‘It wasn’t very different in England.’

  Udet shrugged. ‘They call these days the Golden Age of Flying.’ He sounded bitter. ‘The only thing golden about them iss the spirit of the pilots. We fly because ve love flying. I once meet Guynemer, the Frenchman. You know of him? Und when my gun jams he just salutes me and lets me go. Now it’s all politics. The whole of Germany iss politics. They jaw so much a flier can get toothache.’

  He tossed across the menu he’d been scribbling on. On the back was an expert caricature of Dicken sitting in a miniature aeroplane wearing RAF rondels facing a caricature of Udet himself in another miniature plane wearing the German cross.

  ‘You could earn a living at this,’ Dicken said.

  Udet grinned. ‘I prefer flying. Und shooting. Not at men. At targets. You fancy a flip? We haf an old Rumpler. Dual controls. I could fly one half. You could fly the other.’

  What time they left the night club Dicken had no idea. Udet’s wife and Janzi Lechner had both disappeared with most of the other customers, and the waiters were standing in the doorway yawning and waiting to close the place. They had drunk a lot of what Udet called ‘sekt’ – sparkling Rhine wine – and Dicken woke up on a settee to see the numbers of aeroplanes decorating the walls with British and French cockades.

  Udet appeared soon afterwards. ‘Some grosstadtbummel,’ he grinned. ‘Some pub crawl! Lo goes to stay mit a friend. She often does when I am out on the tiles. Let’s get out to the airfield. We’ll pick up coffee there.’

  The German pilots made Dicken welcome, then they went outside to watch Udet perform stunts in an old Fokker DVII marked D-UDET, trailing his wing tip inches above the ground as he howled across the field.

  He seemed to have sobered up when he reappeared – even become sombre. ‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘Lo will leave me. She says she cannot stand my bad habits.’ He stared round. ‘You’re unlucky today. Lothar von Richthofen – the Ritttmeister’s brother – comes in occasionally. Also Bruno Loerzer. He’s around a lot mit Goering, who takes over the Richthofen Circus when the Rittmeister iss killed. The Iron Man, he called himself. All discipline. But he vasn’t a Richthofen, you know, despite what he think. He has gone into politics. Fancies himself as Reichschancellor or something. Let’s haf a drink.’

  Like so many flying men who had survived the war, Udet was restless, edgy, itching for excitement in a world that had suddenly become dull. ‘Born in the war; died in the war,’ he said. ‘That’s us flying men.’

  That night he took Dicken on another round of the night clubs, this time without his wife or Janzi Lechner. At one point, Dicken remembered him shooting a cigarette out of the mouth of one of his friends, who seemed quite confident that he wouldn’t get the bullet through his head. Whatever else could be said of him, he wasn’t dull and, as he landed back in England, aware that the two nights spent in Berlin with him had been the most interesting he’d passed in almost a year, Dicken realised he was hankering after the lost community feeling of being in the RAF. Disillusioned with the whole commercial scene, he needed to leave Lord Ruffsedge, yet he knew if he did he was probably cutting himself off from aviation altogether. Then, as he was walking down the Mall, he realised he was approaching a tall moustached figure he recognised. It was Sir Hugh Trenchard, by this time firmly in his seat as Chief of Air Staff. To Dicken’s surprise, he stopped in front of him. ‘Quinney, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir, it is.’ It surprised Dicken that the great man even knew of him.

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘Flying for Lord Ruffsedge, sir.’

  Trenchard peered at him searchingly. ‘Bit dull, isn’t it? Chauffeur to a millionaire.’

  Dicken smiled. ‘Yes, sir, it is.’

  Trenchard eyed him from his tremendous height, shaggy somehow despite his immaculate civilian clothes and bowler hat. He looked Dicken up and down.

  ‘I was sorry to lose you,’ he said slowly. ‘The RAF could do with men like you. Why not come back?’

  Five

  ‘You must be mad!’

  Clad in surprisingly short skirts and a smart hat, her dark hair done in kiss curls, Zoë Toshack looked more beautiful than Dicken had ever seen her.

  ‘Fancy wanting to go back to that stuffy lot,’ she said, her contempt enormous. ‘All they’re good for is saluting on parade.’

  ‘They do a lot of flying,’ Dicken pointed out gently. ‘Good flying. Better than some of these people who’re getting flying a bad name going round the country giving exhibitions to make money.’

  She stared at him angrily. She had returned from Canada full of excitement. She had found Casey Harmer, who noticeably had not given he
r the job she’d hoped for, and for a time she’d belonged to a group of wildcat young men who had flown round the country barnstorming in the ballyhoo atmosphere of a circus. Since returning, footloose and eager for a challenge, she had drifted into the same background in England and, equally inevitably, since she lived in Sussex and Charley Wright operated along the south coast, had thrown in her lot with him. On the table, for Dicken’s perusal, were Canadian posters she’d brought back, billing her as Zoë Toshack, the Zip Girl of the Sky. The praise she had expected from Dicken had not been forthcoming, however, and she was argumentative and defensive.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with making money out of flying,’ she said.

  ‘There is if it’s dangerous.’

  ‘I’m not afraid.’

  ‘I am,’ Dicken said quietly. ‘You forget I know Charley Wright and I’ve seen some of his machines. They’re badly serviced and badly maintained because he’s neither the money nor the time for anything else.’

  She didn’t answer and he looked at her under his eyebrows. She had grown more attractive as age had fined off the roundness of her features and he suspected now that, instead of her envying her older sister, Annys, she might well be envied herself.

  ‘How’s Annys?’ he asked, trying to change the subject.

  ‘Finding Arthur Diplock a bit of a bore, I suspect,’ Zoë said shortly. ‘I would.’

  ‘Annys is different from you. She goes with Parasol Percy.’

  She grinned at the name they’d given her brother-in-law. ‘I think he feels uniform and what goes with it suits him,’ she said. ‘He’s a squadron leader now and a bit peeved because he feels he ought to have been a wing commander.’

  ‘He should grumble,’ Dicken said. ‘I’m only a flight lieutenant and the amount of war flying he did was virtually nil.’