The Challenging Heights

by Max Hennessy

  ‘He has several languages,’ she pointed out. ‘And he had the Wing Colonel for his best man and as godfather to his son.’ She smiled, her manner suddenly different, and crossed to Dicken to kiss him. ‘I’m sorry I was sarcastic with you, Dicky Boy,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be. You bring out everything that’s bad in me. And knowing you were back where there are aeroplanes – real aeroplanes – makes me mad, because that’s where I want to be. That’s the only thing I want to do. And the only way I can do it is flying with Charley Wright. It fetches the crowds when they learn a woman’s flying. They still don’t believe it possible. Male pilots are rare enough to be a curiosity; when a woman flies it makes news.’

  ‘And when she crashes and kills herself,’ Dicken said dryly, ‘it’s naturally more regrettable and better news than if she were a man.’

  She made a gesture of dismissal. ‘In the States there are plenty nowadays. Laura Bromwell was one.’

  ‘And she’s dead,’ Dicken pointed out quietly.

  ‘There are plenty more. They’re flying all the time over there. They’re famous. I want to be famous, too. Not just somebody’s wife.’

  Dicken didn’t try to argue her out of her ambition. He knew it was impossible. Instead he tried to change her course because he knew that if she stayed too long with Charley Wright and his air circus she’d kill herself. Charley Wright, careless, noisy, hard-drinking, resentful of authority yet curiously attractive to women with his lunatic humour and a flowery manner that could charm the ducks off the water, obviously appealed to her but she was wrong about his skill. She wasn’t even right about Dicken’s proximity to aeroplanes because so far he’d done little since his return to uniform except act as adjutant at No 2 Flying Training School at Duxford. It had come as a shock that the RAF didn’t want him even to demonstrate his skills to newcomers as an instructor.

  ‘You have to be good to become famous,’ he said gently. ‘Are you good?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I’ll show you.’

  From the field where Charley Wright was operating, she took him up in one of the old dual-control Avros, performing tight turns, loops, spins and stalls for him. Though there were parts of her performance – an apparent inability to hold her height in a tight turn and loops that were sloppy at the top – which were lacking in precision, he found he never had to consider grasping the dual controls to help.

  ‘Any good at navigation?’ he asked as they clambered from the cockpit.

  ‘Who’s worried about navigation?’ she demanded.

  ‘Flying’s more than just doing stunts. Suppose you want to get from one place to another?’

  ‘Follow the railway line,’ she said. ‘You can come down at every station to read the sign and check your position.’

  This kind of flying – what was known as flying by Bradshaw, after the name of the railway guide – was looked on with contempt by skilled navigators. He tried to interest her in the subject, even contrived to teach her some of it, but she either didn’t grasp it or was uninterested, though she was willing enough to fly him about the countryside.

  ‘Know where you are?’ he asked her through the speaking tube as they came to the coast.

  ‘Hastings just coming up,’ she said.

  ‘If you take the trouble to look down there,’ he replied, ‘even you ought to recognise Brighton.’

  She was sulky as they landed, and he tried again. ‘If you want to become this famous flier you’re aiming at,’ he said, ‘then learn navigation. The future of aviation’s in long-distance flying. Now they’ve crossed the Atlantic, people are going to find ways of flying to Africa and India. They’ll want to open up the Empire and the people who do it will be those who can get from one place to another without making a mistake. There aren’t any railway stations in the middle of the ocean.’

  She gave him a sideways look that was full of reproach and affection at the same time. It jerked at his heart and left him full of guilt that he had not pursued her as ardently as he felt he should; remorse that, because of it, she had drifted into the wrong company; and doubt – tucked away at the back of his mind – because she had never seemed over-eager to rationalise their relationship.

  ‘Marry me, Zoë,’ he said abruptly.

  Her head turned quickly. ‘Why do you ask me that?’

  ‘Why does any man ask any woman that? I’ve known you since 1914. We’ve been more than friends. You suggested it when I was in Italy in 1918. “Come home and make me an honest woman,” you said. I love you.’

  Even as he spoke, he wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. While they’d still been in their teens they had clutched each other in the Toshacks’ summer house on warm summer nights and had finally become lovers during one of his leaves during the war. But little had come of it because shortly afterwards he’d been sent to Italy and had barely seen her since until now.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she was saying slowly. ‘And I think you’re just asking me to get me away from Charley Wright.’

  He realised she had hit the nail on the head. There had always been something between them but, though he had a feeling it had never been more than a deep friendship linked with a strong sexual attraction, he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. Not now.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I expect eventually I shall get posted abroad. They say in Egypt or India you can live like a lord with hordes of servants, so that wives have a wonderful time. You’d get a chance to fly, too, because quite a few people have private aeroplanes and you can pick up war surplus Avros for a song.’

  ‘What about until you get your posting to India? Would you let me fly with Charley Wright?’

  ‘If you could manage to give his aeroplanes a pre-flight check that’s more than just a kick at the tyres, a slap at the fuselage and a twang on a bracing wire.’

  She laughed and put her arms round him. ‘All right, Dicky Boy,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you want.’ She paused then gave a little laugh. ‘You realise, of course, that we shall have to ask Annys to the wedding, and if we ask Annys, we’ll also have to ask her husband, Poisonous Percy.’

  ‘We’ll balance that out,’ Dicken said, ‘by asking Willie Hatto. His wife, the Hon. Caroline, comes from one of the best families in the country so she ought to more than balance out Percy.’

  The wedding was held in Zoë’s home village, Deane. Diplock arrived at the last minute, looking faintly embarrassed and trying to pretend he’d been held back by an unexpected appointment. Dicken wasn’t deluded. Diplock was wary of him and Hatto, because he knew they were well aware of his cowardice and trickery during the late Great War, and he even seemed to be looking round him for Foote, the American, the third member of the triangle of anarchy that had plagued him during that period. Annys, looking beautiful and self-satisfied, almost as if she wore the rank as well as Diplock and was aware that it was higher than that of the man her sister was marrying, was inclined to be condescending to everybody but the Hon. Caroline, to whom she tended almost to touch her forelock.

  There was a vague feeling throughout the reception that Diplock might try to introduce some alien and uncomfortable note as Hatto, quite unnoticed by Annys, had at Diplock’s wedding, but he seemed to prefer to stay well in the background.

  ‘After all,’ Hatto murmured between the congratulatory telegrams, ‘Parasol Percy hasn’t changed. He was never the type to face up fair and square to anything that might be difficult.’

  Nevertheless, it probably seemed odd to the other guests that two of the three RAF officers present – all in dress uniform and wearing their medals – should totally ignore the third.

  Charley Wright, his red face matching the red carnation in his buttonhole and the red of his eyeballs, insisted on kissing the bride. ‘You haven’t got away with her completely, my old friend and comrade of the desperate years,’ he told Dicken.

&nb
sp; ‘She’s promised she’ll still fly for me on the days when I’m handy. In fact,’ he added, ‘I rather hoped she’d marry me. But then, what has William Albert Charles Wright got to compare with Dick Quinney, who holds every gong in the book except the ultimate, to get which you have to be dead.’

  ‘I meant it, you know,’ Zoë said as they lay in the dark in the hotel in Cornwall where they’d gone for their honeymoon. ‘Love, honour and obey. All that rot.’

  ‘I always thought you wanted to be a liberated woman. I thought you’d insist on leaving that out.’

  ‘I lost my nerve at the last moment. I do want to love, honour and obey. If I don’t always manage it, you’ll try to forgive me, won’t you?’

  ‘It shouldn’t be difficult.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to Egypt and India. It should be fun. Charley Wright’s got nothing to offer like that.’ Zoë paused. ‘There’s just one thing, though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No children.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘For a while. I haven’t done anything yet, except run Pa’s garage while he was away during the war.’

  ‘You’ve learned to fly. Not many women have done that. You’ve been to Canada and the States.’

  ‘That was a disaster, Dicky Boy. I went to find Casey Harmer, you know. I thought I was in love with him but when I got there I found he was married.’

  ‘So you married me on the rebound?’

  She slipped warm soft arms round him. ‘I just realised that there was something about you that Casey couldn’t claim.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Honesty. I don’t think you’d ever lie to me.’

  Dicken wasn’t so sure. He still hadn’t plucked up courage to tell her that he’d once discarded her for Nicola Aubrey, whom he’d felt was everything a man could wish – shy, gentle, kind, well brought up, all the things his mother insisted a man needed in a wife. Yet his own mother had been like that, and his father had run off with one of his typists. Perhaps men wanted more than just shyness, gentleness and kindness. Perhaps they wanted what Zoë had in abundance – vitality, vibrant enjoyment of living, laughter, strength and reality.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked suddenly, her face in the angle of his neck. ‘You’ve gone quiet.’

  ‘Oh, things,’ he said. ‘Things that happened in the war and can’t happen again because, after that one, there can’t be any more wars.’

  ‘What was it really like, Dicken? You never talked much about it.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘A perpetual state of wind-up for most of us,’ he admitted. ‘Cold. Cracked lips. Better than the infantry, though. All that man-to-man stuff with bayonets. Sometimes it came as a surprise to find there was a man in the plane you were shooting at.’

  ‘What about Arthur Diplock? What was he like?’

  ‘Very warlike until he crossed the lines.’ Dicken pulled her closer. ‘But, good God, we didn’t get married to spend our first night talking about what it was like fighting the Germans.’

  ‘Trust a man to ask for seconds.’

  ‘It seems like a good idea to me.’

  ‘All right. Provided you take me to India and Egypt.’

  ‘Done. They can’t keep me in that stupid job I’ve got now after all the flying and experience I have.’

  They were both wrong.

  With Lloyd George so immersed in the details of peace he had no time for anything else, the dissolution of the RAF suddenly appeared inevitable. German air power seemed to be dead and only called for burial, and the peace treaty to be covering that very efficiently by prohibiting military aviation in Germany. Clemenceau, the French leader, was taking no chances and had demanded that the Germans accept the terms without argument.

  Despite Lloyd George’s sentence of death on the RAF, however, Winston Churchill had managed to grant a stay of execution and Trenchard was working day and night to make sure the condemned service had a future. But every man who wore the light blue knew the implacable hostility of the navy and the army, even the contempt with which Wilson, the head of the army, held Trenchard’s suggested new ranks.

  ‘Marshal of the Air?’ he had said. ‘Do you want to bring disrepute to the rank of field marshal?’

  Trenchard was a jump ahead. ‘The word “marshal” exists in a number of contexts,’ he boomed. ‘Provost marshal, court martial, Marshall and Snelgrove, the London store.’ No one had laughed louder than Churchill.

  ‘Even so,’ Hatto observed dryly. ‘Marshal of the Air’s poaching on the preserves of the Almighty a bit, isn’t it?’

  In the end, the rank chosen was Marshal of the Royal Air Force but, as the story went round the RAF messes, the dislike of the army and the navy increased. Trenchard went doggedly ahead, however, building up his staff courses, training colleges and ancillary services, though his belief that in any future war bombing could force the government into the bowels of the earth caused him to be regarded as a crank. And when he claimed that the RAF should take over the navy’s role as the country’s main defence because battleships were out of date, he called down the wrath of the indignant admirals on his head. It was only when The Times revealed that, while France still retained 126 of its wartime squadrons, the 185 squadrons that the RAF had possessed in 1918 had been whittled down to twenty-eight, of which only seven were in England and only three were allotted for home defence, that the pillorying of the RAF subsided.

  Meanwhile, however, the RAF seemed to have forgotten all about Dicken’s war record and while he was soon removed from being adjutant at No 2 Flying School, he was given a second administrative job at the School of Technical Training at Manston in Kent. Willie Hatto was flying Bristols nearby.

  ‘Why are they doing this to me, Willie?’ Dicken demanded. ‘Surely I deserve better than this.’

  ‘Old lad,’ Hatto smiled, ‘when you join the regular forces you’ve got to show you can stand every boring job there is before they start giving you the interesting ones. I did my stint before the war.’

  ‘Diplock’s at the Air Ministry.’

  ‘Toadying round his old friend, the Wing Colonel, now known as Group Captain George Macclesfield St Aubyn. Hold your water. Your time will come.’

  ‘Can you guarantee that?’

  ‘I know how regular brains tick. You’ll get the hang of it before long. Just enjoy yourself and keep your thumb in your bum. It’s considered good for the soul. The idea is that ambitious chaps like you should be able to count beds and knives, forks and mugs, blankets and sheets, without turning a hair while still swotting for the Staff College exam. Are you swotting for the Staff College exam? Because if you’re not you ought to be. New as it is, even the RAF will need staff officers. We might even do it together because the Hattos were never known for their brains.’

  Accepting that Hatto knew what he was talking about and even had inside knowledge that came from a father in the House of Lords and a brother in the Foreign Office, Dicken got down to work. But, even as he did so and just when it finally seemed to have been established that an air force was needed, an election removed Lloyd George from power and the new Prime Minister made no bones about his wish to divide the RAF between the army and the navy. Only the fact that the toughest old sea dog of them all, Jacky Fisher, the very man who had built the battleships, had argued that the development of aircraft could render the fleet useless, saved it. He had long since thrown his weight solidly behind Trenchard, and the fact that aeroplanes were cheaper to build than battleships clinched it. True to time-honoured British methods, committees were formed to look into the question but the outcome was inevitable. The RAF had been saved.

  By this time the war was long past but the haunted-eyed veterans of the fighting were still struggling to find a place in the scheme of things. Survival, which had been the only thought in
their minds in the trenches and had given way to the hysteria of realising they were not only alive but likely to go on being alive, was now back in their thoughts as they struggled to find work in a world that was increasingly lacking in it.

  Once again Dicken began to have doubts. He had a wife to support now and the RAF seemed totally unaware of him. He had entered the war ignorant of life and was almost as ignorant of it when the war had ended. He couldn’t imagine himself doing anything else but fly and, since his experience seemed to count for nothing in peacetime, he started once more to consider what use he might be in business or industry. The answer was not encouraging, yet the dreams of unlimited flying which had drawn him back to the RAF were finally dispersed by a series of unimportant ground jobs which culminated – due to the fact that he had once trained as a wireless operator – as head of a signals and communications department at Northolt. Since he had sergeants and junior officers beneath him, he didn’t even have to use his fading skills.

  Although training had ceased with the end of the war, some of the more senior non-flying officers of the new post-war RAF were feeling naked without wings above the decorations they had received during the fighting for working at a desk, and as they set about acquiring them, by a special dispensation they were allowed to qualify on the Avro, the absolute perfection as a non-combat aeroplane. After flying round Northolt for thirty hours they were allowed to put up their wings, and most of them went back to their desks determined never to fly again.

  The one advantage his job brought Dicken was that he was able occasionally to fly an Avro from the training and communications flight when one of the mighty didn’t need it to put in his required number of flying hours. There followed a period of ferrying Snipes from Rochford, near Southend, to Hawkinge in Kent where Keith Park, who had run up a score during the war flying Bristols, was commanding a dump of surplus aircraft.

  The months passed with only the occasional flight but, because nobody properly understood the RAF’s function in peacetime, nobody had any work to do and the boredom began to affect everybody. A few old faces appeared occasionally – Hatto, Park, Sholto Douglas, Taffy Jones, Hill, Vincent, all of them men who’d done well in the war but were now as bored with peacetime duties as Dicken himself. Seeing little prospect of promotion, several had gone like Dicken into commercial flying only to find the experience enough to make them change their minds so that, again like Dicken, they had been forced to return with a loss of seniority.