by Nevil Shute
We reached the car in silence, and bundled in out of the wet. I paused for a moment before pressing the starter.
“You’d better come along back with me to my place,” I suggested.
He seemed embarrassed at that. “It’s very good of you,” he said diffidently. “But I’d rather go straight to the station. I’m … in a hurry.”
“You won’t do much good at the station at this time of night,” I remarked. “There isn’t a train till twenty past seven.”
I considered for a moment, and added: “You’d better come along with me and sleep on the sofa if you want to catch that train. There’ll be a fire to sleep by, which is more than you’ll find at the station.” I eyed him thoughtfully. “There’s nobody else in the house. I’m a bachelor.” I don’t quite know why I added that.
He hesitated again, and gave in. “All right,” he said at last. “I’d like to very much.”
We were about five miles from Under Hall. I lived there, in the Steward’s House, just across the stable-yard from the mansion. It had been the most convenient arrangement in every way. Arner himself was over seventy years old, and too busy a man to occupy himself with the management of his estate; his only son was in Persia.
It was no great shakes as a job, but—it suited me. The screw wasn’t much to boast about, but I had a small income of my own that was getting gradually larger with judicious nursing, and the family treated me as an equal. It’s the sort of job that I’m cut out for. I was articled to a solicitor some years before the war, though I was country-bred. I tried it again for a year after the Armistice, and then I gave it up. I should have made a rotten lawyer.
I drove into the stable-yard at about a quarter-past two that night, left the car in the coach-house, and walked across to my own place with Lenden. The Steward’s House at Under is built into the grey stone wall that separates the gardens from the stable-yard, and the one big living-room has rather a pleasant outlook on the right side of the wall. There are three little bedrooms and a kitchen. It suited me to live there.
They had banked up the fire for me, and left a cold meal on the table with a jug of beer standing in the grate. There was a cold pie, I remember, and a potato salad. I threw off my coat, kicked the fire into a blaze, gave Lenden the use of my room for a wash, and settled down with him for a late supper.
I didn’t eat much at that time in the morning, but Lenden seemed hungry and made quite a heavy meal. I lit my pipe and sat there lazily with my back to the fire, waiting and smoking till he had finished. Between the mouthfuls he talked in a desultory manner about the war. The Squadron was re-equipped late in 1917, after I was shot down. With Bristol Fighters. I had heard that. Later they got moved to a place near Abbeville. He got shot through the thigh soon after that, and his observer was killed in the same fight, and he crashed in our support trenches. He became an instructor at Stamford when he came out of hospital. And afterwards at Netheravon. Yes, he supposed he’d been luckier than most.
“Damn sight better off than if you’d been in Germany,” I said shortly. “You didn’t stay on at all after the war?” I paused. “Someone told me that Standish had gone back,” I said, and watched the smoke curl into the darkness above the lamp. “Short-service commission, or something. I forget who it was.”
He nodded. “He did. But I came straight out at Armistice.” He glanced at me darkly across the table. “I was married. Got married in August, 1918, an’ I wanted to be out of it. Make a home for my girl, an’ all that sort of thing.” He grinned without laughing. “Like hell.”
I nodded absently.
Lenden had finished eating. “Went joy-riding with a fellow from Twenty-one Squadron that summer,” he said. “Early summer of 1919, just after the war. We had an Avro seaplane.” He mused over it for a minute. “My God, we’d got a lot to learn in those days. We took our wives with us, for one thing….”
He leaned his head upon his hands and began to tell me about this joy-riding concern. They spent practically the whole of their savings and gratuity upon this seaplane, and they started in with it to tour the South Coast towns, giving joy-rides at a guinea a head. In the prevailing optimism of those days they thought that they could make it pay.
Perhaps, if they had had a land machine they might have got away with it, in spite of their total lack of business experience. Lenden, with the knowledge that he had gained in later years, had no illusions on that point. But he himself put down their failure to the difficulty of operating the machine from the beach of a crowded seaside resort, and he talked for a long time about that.
“Handling the machine on to the beach. That’s what did us in—properly. Damn it, it took the hell of a time. Days when there was a sea breeze I’d come in to land over the town, sideslipping down over the houses and the promenade. We were always getting pulled up for flying too low over the promenade. They didn’t think about our having a living to get out of their ruddy town.”
He stared morosely at the table-cloth. “The sea breeze was hell. I’d land a couple of hundred yards out, and then turn to taxi in to the beach. Then the fun began, and we’d come taxi-ing in to the beach with a twenty-mile wind behind, blowing us straight on to the sand. We hit the beach like that once or twice when we were new to the game, an’ stove in a float each time. When we got sick of patching floats I used to try and swing her round into the wind again at the last moment, to check her way. Often as not I’d get outside the stretch of shore the Council had roped off for us in doing that, and go driving in among the bathers. That meant stopping the prop for fear of hitting them, and blowing ashore on to the beach. And there was always a row about it afterwards.
“We never got more than three ten-minute joy-rides done in the hour,” he said. “And the engine running the whole time. It meant that we had to make the charge thirty shillings a flight.”
And so it came to an end. They began operations in May at Brighton; by July they were in difficulties, and in September they gave up. They were lucky in that they were able to sell the machine, and in that way they realised sufficient of their capital to pay off most of the bills and to leave them with about fifty pounds each in hand.
“I sent my wife back to her people for a bit,” said Lenden. “That was the first time.”
He relapsed into silence, and sat there brooding over the table. And when he spoke again, I was suddenly sorry for the man. “It’s ruddy good fun having to do that,” he said quietly. “Especially when it’s the first time.”
He went on to tell me that he had been out of a job then for about two months, hanging about the aerodromes and living on what he could pick up. He bought and sold one or two old cars at a profit; in those days there was ready money to be made that way. And so he eked out his little means until he got a job at Hounslow with A.T. and T.
I raised my head inquiringly.
“Aircraft Transport and Travel,” he replied. “On the Paris route. We used to fly Nines and Sixteens from Hounslow to Le Bourget, and get through as best you could. Later on we moved to Croydon.”
I nodded. “I crossed that way once. They gave us paper bags to be sick into.”
“Dare say. It was all right while the fine weather lasted, but in the winter … it was rotten. Rotten. No ground organisation to help you—no wireless or weather reports in those days. Days when it was too thick to see the trees beyond the aerodrome we used to ring up the harbour-master at Folkestone and get a weather report from him. But we didn’t do that much.
“And people used to pay to come with us,” he said slowly. “On days like that.”
He rested his chin upon one hand and stared across the white table into the shadows of the room. “I’ve taken a Sixteen off from Hounslow with a full load of passengers when the clouds were right down to the ground,” he said, “and flown all the way to the coast without ever getting more than two hundred feet up. Time and again. Jerking her nose up into a zoom when you came to a tree or a church, and letting her down again the other side so’s yo
u could see the ground again. At over a hundred miles an hour. Crossing the Channel like that—ten minutes in a cold sweat, praying to God that your compass was right, and your engine would stick it out, and you’d see the cliffs the other side before you hit. And then, at the end of it all, to have to land in a field half-way between the coast and Le Bourget because it was getting too thick for safety.” He paused. “It was wicked,” he said.
They used to carry the much advertised Air Mails. That meant that the machines had to fly whether there were passengers to be carried or not. It was left to the discretion of the pilot whether or not the flight should be cancelled in bad weather; the pilots were dead keen and went on flying in the most impossible conditions.
“Sanderson got killed that way,” he said. “At Douinville. An’ all he had in the machine was a couple of picture postcards from trippers in Paris, sent to their families in England as a curiosity. That was the Air Mail. No passengers or anything—just the Mail.” He thought for a little. “Now that was a funny thing,” he said quietly. “Sanderson hit a tree on top of a little cliff, and he died about a week later. An’ all the time in the hospital he was explaining to the nurse how he’d put his machine in through the roof of the Coliseum and what a pity it was, because there was a damn good show going on at the time and he’d gone and spoilt it all. And presently he died.
“We got a bit more careful after that,” he said.
For Lenden that had been a good job. He told me that he had been making about nine hundred a year while it lasted. He took a little flat in Croydon and lived there with his wife for twelve months or so.
“That was a fine time,” he said. “The best I’ve ever had. We’d got plenty of money for the first time since we were married. An’ Mollie liked the flat all right, and she made it simply great. We thought we was going on for ever, an’ we were beginning to make plans to get into a house with a bit of garden where we could have fruit trees and things. And we were going to have a pack o’ kids—two or three of them, as soon as we got settled.”
There was silence in the room for a minute. “You can’t run a show like that without a subsidy,” he said at last. “Or you couldn’t in those days, with the equipment we had. It lasted on into the winter of 1920. Then Aircraft Transport and Travel—it was a damn good name, that—they packed up. And that was the end of that.”
He was staring into the shadows at the far end of the room, and speaking in a very quiet voice. I had heard something of that early failure in the heroic period of aviation, but this was the first time that I had heard a personal account.
This time he was longer out of a job. The flat in Croydon was broken up and his wife went back again to her people, while Lenden went wandering around the south of England in his search for flying work. The time had gone by when motor-cars could be bought and sold at a profit by those outside the trade, and I gathered that by the end of four months his wife’s parents were financing him. In the end he found a job again in his own line of business, as pilot for an aerial survey to be made in Honduras.
“D’you ever meet Sam Robertson?” he inquired. “He was an observer in the war, and he got this contract for a survey for the Development Trust. Raked round in the city and got it all off his own bat. And he got me in on it to do the flying for him.
“In Honduras. They’d taken over a concession up the Patuca—there’s lashings of copper up there if only you could get it out. Lashings of it. This survey was one of the first shows of that sort to be done. It was a seaplane job. Sam bought a Fairey with a Rolls Eagle in her from the Disposals crowd, and we left for Belize in March, 1921.
“It meant leaving Mollie with her people,” he said. “I could make her a pretty fair allowance, of course. I’d got the money then—for as long as the job lasted.”
I stirred in my chair. “Was this a photographic survey, then?” I asked.
He nodded. “In a way. The contract didn’t run to a proper mosaic of photographs. There wasn’t any need for it for what they wanted, and, anyway, we’d have had a job to line it up because there’s never been any sort of ground work done there to give you a grid. No. We picked up one of their people at Trujillo, a fellow called Wilson who was their resident out there, and he came on up the Patuca with us. We did most of the work with oblique photographs, and each evening he made up a rough map of the country we’d flown over.”
He paused. “It was the copper he was mostly interested in. You can tell it by the colour of the trees, you know. They look all dusty and dried up from the air, different to the rest of the jungle. You can see the copper areas quite clearly that way.”
He said it was the devil of a country. From Belize they had gone by a little coastal steamer, Brazilian-owned, to Trujillo. There they erected the machine, on the beach, in the sun. The inhabitants were a sort of Indian, very quiet and mostly diseased.
“They used to come and sit round staring at us, without saying anything at all,” he said. “And then when we’d sweated a bucket we’d go in to the pub and drink with the Dagoes. It was a rotten place, that. Rotten.”
When the machine was ready they sent a launch full of stores round by sea to the mouth of the Patuca; he told me that the concession was about a hundred miles up the river. Wilson went with the launch; Lenden and Robertson gave them three days’ start and went after them in the seaplane. In a couple of hours’ flight they had passed the launch, and then they carried on up the river to the agreed meeting place—Jutigalpa.
He told me that that was a glorified mud village, with a Spanish-speaking half-caste to collect a few taxes from the Indians. They lived in a native hut, picketing the machine in the shade of the trees on the beach. That was to be their home for the next six months.
They started flying operations as soon as the launch arrived. They had a very fat mechanic, Meyer by name; within the first three days he was down with fever and some form of heat apoplexy, and had to be sent back to Trujillo in the launch. That delayed them for a week. Then they carried on with the flying, and had surveyed about a third of the area when they crashed a float. Lenden, in taxi-ing the machine on the water, ran her over a submerged snag which ripped their port float from bow to stern; he was fortunate in being able to run the machine ashore before she sank.
“And there we were,” he said, “for the next three months, till we got a new float out from England. Wilson went back with Robertson to Trujillo to send the order, and then Robertson came back to Jutigalpa, and we built a sort of palm-leaf hut over the machine with the Indians. And then we just sat on our backsides in that rotten little hole and waited for the float.”
When the float came they repaired the machine and carried on, finishing the survey in about six weeks. From the point of view of the Development Trust it was a success; they had found out what they wanted to know about their land cheaply and accurately.
“We finished the job, and came back to Trujillo,” said Lenden.
The coals fell together with a little crash. It was about half-past three in the morning. I had lost all desire to go to bed; now that Lenden was talking freely I wanted to hear the end of his story. I knew what was coming. Gradually, and in his own way, he was working up to the point of telling me what he had been doing with that Breguet on the down. I wanted to know about that.
I swung round, pitched one or two more lumps of coal into the grate, and poked them up. Lenden got up absently from the table and came and threw himself down into a chair before the fire.
“No,” he said at last. “You wouldn’t have heard about it here. But there was a tornado out there that year. Sam Robertson and I settled down at Trujillo for a few weeks while he got in touch with some of the mines in Nicaragua. We thought that while we were there we might get one or two more jobs of the same sort in that district, and Wilson gave us a whole lot of help in getting them. We’d just about fixed to go down to the Santa Vanua—it was a sort of forestry survey that they wanted there—when the storm came.”
He was staring into
the fire, and speaking very quietly. “It came one evening, quite suddenly. We had the Fairey pegged down upon the beach in the lee of a cliff—it was the only place we had to put her. But no pickets could have stood against that wind. We got the whole town out to hold her down. I dare say there were fifty of us hanging on to her in the dusk, and she blew clean out of our hands and away up the beach.”
He glanced at me. “She was all we had, you know—the whole capital. Sam and I hung on to her after she took charge—and she chucked us off like a horse. Robertson fell soft, but I broke an arm as I went down.” He passed his hand absently up his left forearm. “Yes—she was all we had, and she went flying up the beach till she cartwheeled into a little corrugated-iron hut and knocked it flat, and then on—what was left of her—till she fetched up against the forest. We lay on the beach all that night because we could hear the houses crashing in the town, and Robertson made splints for my arm. And when the morning came and it blew itself out, half the houses in the place were down and Sam was as rich as me.”
“That’s rotten luck,” I muttered.
He nodded. “Yes, it was bad luck, because there was all the makings of a survey business out there. But that finished us, and we came home Third Class.”
And so he gave up aviation. He had been bitten three times, and he’d enough of it. He wanted to settle down, he said, and live with his wife. He told me that he had come to the conclusion out in Trujillo that flying was no good for a married man, and that he must look for more stable employment in the future. He realised that he would have to start at the bottom. Wilson stepped in there and gave him an introduction to a cousin who ran a firm of wholesale clothiers in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and Lenden came home to England to start work in the city on four pounds ten a week. With Robertson he had been getting seven hundred a year.