by John Harris
‘We can rig a Weston purchase from them beams, Ira,’ he said, jerking a hand upwards. ‘And use Heloïse outside the door for lifting. It’ll save us a precious lot of trouble, and we can get a few coolies under Chippie Wang sawing up logs and wedges to jack her up.’
By the time they got down to work properly, the weather had broken completely, with the rain pounding down in sheets and the days growing steadily colder.
‘We oughta give the engine an overhaul, too,’ Sammy advised, stretching a piece of canvas in a comer of the barn floor and beginning to dump pistons and valves and nuts and bolts on it. ‘Polish the valve seatings and decoke the cylinder heads. We’ll get a better performance out of her if we do.’ The fuselage seemed to have suffered remarkably little harm, though it looked forlorn and naked without its fabric or its engine as it hung from the great beams of the roof. The plywood round the cockpits hadn’t been much strained and what little damage there was they felt they could repair. The longerons, although they would probably have been condemned by any Royal Aircraft Factory inspector in England, were not broken and seemed sound enough to take the new undercarriage.
‘Oil gauge’s all right,’ Sammy said. ‘But we’ll need a new coil and the revolution indicator’s gone and the wheels and shock absorbers are bust.’
They discussed getting new parts sent out from England or the Middle East and arranged for Ellie to take the steamer to Shanghai to persuade Kowalski to find such spares as propellers, gaskets, pistons, tyres, wheels, high-tension coils, streamlined bracing wire, shock absorbers and, above all, plans.
‘The R.A.F.’s still got one or two D.H.9’s,’ Ira said, his mind roving eagerly over the snippets of news he’d heard on his visit to Shanghai. ‘And the Middle East air forces are still flying Fours, so there should be no difficulty. We’ll have finished rebuilding by the time they arrive and be ready to replace the spare parts.’
He stared at the wings, which they’d stripped of linen and laid out on the floor of the barn. ‘Christ knows how many different pieces of wood there are in those wings,’ he said, suddenly awed by the size of the task they’d set themselves.
‘We can do it,’ Sammy encouraged him. ‘We’ve done it before.’
Ira gave him a wry grin. ‘Nothing as big as this, Sammy.’
Sammy looked at him earnestly. ‘Ira,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking at them wings. Last night. I sat on a box looking at ‘em for hours. They’re intricate and we ain’t got many tools, but we’ve got two good wings to look at.’
‘What’ll we need, Sammy?’
‘Nothing we can’t get sent up from Shanghai. I made a list.’ Sammy fished in his pocket and dragged out a greasy piece of paper. ‘Screws. Millions of ‘em. Chisels. Glue. Waterproofing. Dope. Tape. Thread. We can get the wood around ‘ere, I reckon, if we look hard enough. It looks a lot, Ira, but I reckon we’ll pull it off.’
With the change in the weather, all the armies in China seemed to have retired to the villages and towns for the winter. Even Chiang K’ai-Shek, who had set off from Canton to conquer the north for the Kuomintang, appeared to have called a truce on all fronts for the cold months.
The airfield at Yaochow took on a bleak deserted appearance, the wheel marks and skid tracks filling with water and turning to muddy patches. Outside the farmhouse, a dip in the ground had become a large lake that attracted dozens of water birds from the marshy lands by the river, and little flying was done with the clouds almost down to the ground. When Peter Cheng did get the Avro off the ground, it trailed behind it a cloud of spray whipped up off the wet grass by the propeller and splashed through puddles that lifted over the wings in sheets.
With the rains, China seemed dead. No one was prepared to face the weather merely for the implacable jealousy of the military rivals for power.
The money that Tsu owed had still not turned up and Ira wrote numerous letters demanding payment before they got wind through Cheng that Tsu himself was about to appear, and they dropped the work they were doing on the De Havilland and made their way hastily over to the flying field.
Tsu’s cavalcade included Lao and his wife and son, and the usual assortment of yellow-braided assistants. He seemed preoccupied and distant, and Lao explained that General Kwei, far from accepting his defeat as final, had begun to recover his spirits and had been recruiting reinforcements, and with the aid of General Chiang, was reported to be rearming and re-equipping for the next spring’s campaigning. After his disastrous defeat at the hands of Ira, however, it seemed he was making no plans to rebuild his air force and so, it seemed, neither was General Tsu.
Ira sensed what was coming and he was already three jumps ahead of Lao, his mind moving quickly, making plans, weighing up the pros and cons.
‘General Kwei is acquiring artillery,’ Lao explained earnestly. ‘And the Warlord of the South-West must now direct his finances to prevent him gaining superiority in this field.’
Ira nodded and smiled and Lao seemed relieved that he understood.
‘He feels, therefore,’ he went on, ‘that he must terminate all other contracts. You will be paid off and all debts settled.’
‘When?’
Lao gave a shrug of irritation. ‘When the money arrives from Shanghai.’
Ira glanced at Sammy and saw the sudden excitement in his eyes, as though he could already read Ira’s thoughts. He’d been working with a file on a piece of copper tubing and he stood watching and grinning, his clothes covered with bright metallic flecks. Ellie stood alongside him, taller than Sammy, her slacks covered with oil, sensing that plans were forming under her nose, but, without Sammy’s intuition, unable to guess what they were.
Ira drew a deep breath. ‘What happens to what’s left of the aeroplanes?’ he asked cautiously.
Lao shrugged. ‘The General expects to dispose of them,’ he said.
‘I’ve got a suggestion to make. If the General will make over his aeroplanes to me, we’ll forget about the money he owes us.’
Lao looked suspicious and argued with Tsu for a while before he turned again to Ira.
‘The General says the aeroplanes are worth more than the money he owes,’ he pointed out.
‘I doubt it,’ Ira said shortly. ‘And we’ve been waiting a long time for our money now. However, I’m prepared to forget the interest that’s been growing on it--say at eight per cent--in return for the aeroplanes.’
‘Suppose Gendral Tsu needs his aeroplanes?’
‘He can pay pilots’ fees and hiring in the usual way. We maintain them, we pay for them. We draw no salaries, but the aeroplanes are ours.’
There was a long argument in Chinese then they saw that Tsu was glancing at the two battered and patched machines --the Fokker still grounded for lack of a propeller--that were all that was left of his air force, assessing their value and shrewdly working out his profit. He nodded at last and Lao turned to give his assent.
The quick grin that Sammy gave Ira was only half-concealed and he felt Ellie’s fingers touch his hand in congratulation, then Tsu, to hide the fact that he knew he’d been out-manoeuvred, insisted on inspecting what few pupil pilots remained.
While he shook hands with everybody within reach, his ivory face inscrutable, Madame Tsu touched Ira’s arm and drew him to one side. She looked nervous and tired.
‘If I ever need you. Major Ira,’ she said quietly, ‘promise me you’ll come.’
‘Need me, madame?’
She drew a deep breath and went on quickly. ‘As you know,’ she said, ‘I had hoped I might take my son to Europe. But it will not now be this year. However, the General has promised he will retire before long and then’--her sad face brightened--’then we shall be able to go to Paris.’
She paused as Tsu finished his inspection and turned to the cars, and spoke quietly to Ira so that no one could hear.
‘If I need you,’ she repeated, ‘I will send for you.’
Ira nodded, waiting, and she gave a very Gallic shrug that was full of we
ariness. ‘The fighting has only finished for the winter,’ she pointed out. ‘Who knows what will happen next spring when it starts again? General Chiang grows stronger every week.’
Ira still looked puzzled, and she explained quickly.
‘Last year,’ she said, ‘we had to escape from Hwai-Yang by river. But suppose General Kwei controlled the river? There is only one way then--by air. You see’--she gestured with a tired movement of her hand--’I am not concerned for myself and I am not afraid. But I am concerned and I am afraid for the boy. It would be such a waste of talent, would it not, if anything were to happen to him?’
When they’d gone, Sammy grabbed Ellie, kissed her and swung her round in a clumsy, capering dance.
‘We’re made. El,’ he said. ‘We’re made, girl! ‘
Ellie laughed and, escaping, flung herself into Ira’s arms. ‘I don’t know how your airline failed in Africa,’ she said. ‘For a Limey, you’re goddam quick.’
‘We’ve got money in the bank,’ Sammy crowed, ‘two tiptop aircraft and another building. What we all going to be? Ira’ll be the taipan, o’ course. Lawn can be chief engineer and Ed Kowalski can be treasurer. I’ll be chief pilot and Ellie can be secretary and sit in a bloody great office behind all the papers. It’ll be a smashing airline.’
He stopped as he saw that Ellie’s smile had faded and the warmth had gone from her face. The fooling stopped immediately, then, as they were staring after her, puzzled, they saw that Cheng was standing alone, his long Northern face miserable.
Tsu had made no provision whatsoever for him.
With the deteriorating weather the whole countryside seemed to descend into a period of silence and stillness. The last of Tsu’s regiments disappeared from Tsosiehn east, while General Kwei had set up headquarters round Kenli.
It was a remarkably happy period for them all. While Ira and Sammy worked on the De Havilland, Ellie, clad in her cheap cotton dress with her flying coat for warmth, set off down-river on the steamer to arrange for all the things they needed to be sent up.
The weather had suddenly become colder, with periods of wind when the ground dried out and the dust blew in clouds across the plain, and they had to drape the exposed engines with tarpaulins. To warm the freezing barn, they knocked a hole in one end. edged Heloise inside and got Wang to build a shelter round her. One of the younger Wangs was paid to keep her boiler filled and her furnace going, and while she heated the barn, she also kept them in hot water for bathing and, coupled to a dynamo which Sammy’s squirrel-like tendency to collect scrap had gathered to him months before, provided light and instantaneous power for lifting.
In spite of the grey days, Sammy remained excited and enthusiastic about what they were doing, quite undeterred by the knowledge that they had to work to hundredths of an inch. He never seemed to be tired or without a smile on his face, and was never downhearted when things weren’t going according to plan. He was always ready with new ideas, efficient with any kind of tool they put in his hand, whether for metalwork or woodwork, and always chivvying Wang and the coolies to extra efforts with good-natured bullying in a strange mixture of English, Chinese and pidgin.
Tsu appeared to have abandoned the pupil pilots and they heard that Kee, their liaison officer, had gone east. Since Cheng had been as much caught by the flying bug as Sammy, he made no attempt to follow when the other three pupils set off for Hwai-Yang, determined to find glory as infantry officers once more. None of them had ever shown any real aptitude for flying. Only Peter Cheng, out of the lot of them, had produced any real ability, and he was now joined by his younger brother Jimmy, a sloe-eyed round-cheeked civilian of seventeen, who came up from Hwai-Yang and flung himself wholeheartedly into the business of sweeping shavings, coiling hoses, fetching petrol drums and washing off dirty oil with paraffin.
Ira was delighted with the turn of events. They had had a remarkable stroke of good fortune and he went into the repair of the De Havilland wings with a feeling of tremendous confidence. Apart from the smaller strengtheners of the leading and trailing edges, every rib in all four wings was made up of many pieces of spruce, some of them no thicker than cardboard, and each had to be glued and tacked and screwed into the right place between the main spars. But despite the size of the task, he felt sure they could do it and Sammy went off with Wang to find wood, searching the countryside and the stores and the timber rafts along the river bank halfway down to Yung-an-Chou.
The countryside was still quiet as the armies recuperated from the summer campaigning. In spite of the uncertainty reflected in the South China newspapers about Chiang’s growing strength, there was still no sign of activity along the Yangtze and the crews of the patrolling gunboats were directing their energies to shooting at snipe again instead of Chinese insurgents. After the excitement of the summer, when half the European families along the banks had packed up their belongings and sailed for Shanghai, everything seemed to be safe again, and the white women began to reappear with their families to rejoin their husbands who did business round Tsosiehn, and the missionaries began to push out into the country regions once more, heading back to their distant stations, tiny groups of Bible-carrying preachers living on the edge of poverty but driven on by their stubborn faith and a self-immolating belief in themselves. The province seemed on the surface to be settling down again after the summer and Tsosiehn began once more to look like Tsu’s city.
In spite of the calmness, however, it wasn’t difficult for anyone living as close to the Chinese as Sammy and Ira did to see that behind the scenes the agents the Nationalist leaders had planted in every town and village were still at work, and that agitators were whispering in the teashops, converting the area into a quicksand for Tsu. The tenuousness of his grasp on Hwai-Yang began to show again as Kuomintang flags cautiously reappeared and flapped wetly against the walls, then the students, encouraged by the apparent indifference of the Tsu officers to this initial cautious sign of their allegiance, held their first parade along the bund for weeks.
It started with paper lanterns and strings of popping fireworks and ended with a riot. In spite of the derisive comments of the Europeans in the treaty ports, a vast revolutionary feeling was tearing China apart from inside, and the insurgents of the Kuomintang were helping their cause by blaming the white people as much as the warlords. Smouldering feelings were fanned into flames and in a sudden spontaneous combustion of emotion, stalls were upset in the market among the rush-mat booths, and ducks, pigs, chickens and even fish were released because the stallholders had started selling to the returning Europeans again.
Before the day was out, chivvied into action by an indignant deputation of European businessmen, a regiment of Tsu troops marched in from one of the outlying villages and the riot turned into an orgy of murder, and even as far west as Tsosiehn there was a clear nervousness in the air among the shopkeepers and merchants. It was like a farcical game in which, every time Tsu turned his back, the students came out en masse and tried to destroy his influence, and every time they were moved to demonstrate, his officers lashed out in retaliation--blindly, because they never knew who were the ringleaders--so that all became quiet again until they turned their backs once more. Although he still kept his grip on Hwai-Yang, it was clear that what the Nationalists promised held out far more appeal than Tsu’s cruelty, avarice and debauchery, and suddenly no one seemed to have much faith in his ability to consolidate his summer victory or hold back the growing tide of Chiang’s new armies. The whole of south China seemed to be passing into the hands of the Kuomintang.
3
From all the vast events that were tearing at the roots and fabric of Chinese society, the little group at Yaochow were happily insulated by the few intervening miles of paddy field. The tensions of the cities rarely spread beyond their boundaries, but they were glad nevertheless that they had broken with Tsu so that they could regard the war that was martyring China as something that didn’t concern them. As Sammy said, they merely happened to have set up
in business there and the never-ending bitterness that existed between Peking and Canton and between the rival warlords didn’t touch them.
They salvaged from the broken wings what ribs and spars were undamaged and, with Wang to do the skilled work, Ira and Sammy began the hard, uninteresting jobs of screwing.
tacking and glueing. As they laboured, they learned short cuts and, gradually, they were able to work as well as Wang, plugging, measuring, shaving and shaping as if they had been doing the job half their lives.
Ellie watched them, her face sometimes amused, sometimes sad, sometimes with an unexplained frown on her brows, as though she were obsessed with private thoughts that she couldn’t hope to communicate. When she looked at Ira, her eyes were soft and her face calm, but there were moments when she still looked lost and lonely and uncertain.
With a wisdom beyond his years, Sammy guessed that the life they were obliged to live had suddenly ceased to appeal to her and that she had begun to yearn like any woman to push down roots for a settled existence somewhere where there were other white women and European homes and security. Watching her, seeing Ira’s enthusiasm not reflected in her eyes, it was clear to him she had at last become disenchanted with aeroplanes.
She had returned from Shanghai a little subdued and surprisingly affected by the uncertainty which had begun to hit the coast, and had shown remarkably little excitement at the fact that they had already managed to repair the De Havilland’s least damaged wing by the time she reappeared.
On the coast, it seemed, the officials of the International Settlement were beginning to regard the quietness in the interior not so much safe as ominous. The Kuomintang had emerged as the most powerful political and military party in China and rumour had been circulating for some time of rioting, bloodshed and butchery following its advancing armies as the peasants, aware of freedom for the first time, rose behind them against the Europeans. There was no longer any disguising the fact that China was in a state of full-scale revolution and, as in all revolutions, there was little mercy or discrimination as the peasants struck back everywhere with the ferocious brutality of primitive people seeking revenge on their oppressors. The spectacle of looting and massacre, of temples in flames and muddy sandals trampling over cherished patterns of life was an awesome one that was brought nearer home as strikes closed down foreign-owned shipping lines and factories. The news that Chiang was threatening to march on Shanghai itself the following spring and was prepared to risk a conflict with the treaty powers for it had sounded like the hammer of doom on the coast. The stock market had begun to show signs of doubt and, with only an ominous future ahead, more than one business house had closed its China office. When Eddie Kowalski himself had talked of pulling out also, the uncertainty that had gripped the International Settlement had caught hold of Ellie, too.