Love, Death, Chariot of Fire

by Winton Higgins

  Minimising drag is a central principle of aircraft design. Everybody knows that too. So wings should be as thin as possible, surely. At least outboard of the wing roots where the guns and retracted wheels will have to be housed. And why should the wings’ edges be straight? When he feels up to it, he needs to have a serious talk with young Bev Shenstone about wing design. That’s Bev’s forté. He above all knows when to leave the conventional wisdom behind.

  There’s a knock on the door. ‘Come in,’ Mitchell calls.

  Helen enters, balancing her tray of implements on one hand as she swings the door open with the other. ‘Good morning, Reg. Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Yes, thanks to your midnight injection. Had some vivid dreams, too. Some of them don’t bear retelling, though.’

  ‘Well it sounds like they were pleasant enough. That’s the main thing. Now it’s time for a little more morphia before we get you up for breakfast.’

  Tuesday 24 October 1933, 11 am. Mitchell agitates the little bell above the door as he enters the anteroom to William Gabriel’s surgery in Harley Street. He’s undertaken the train journey to London by himself – a step forward in his struggle to return to some measure of independent living. He took a first-class ticket to be sure he had access to a lavatory on the way. The receptionist appears, and smiles at him.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Mitchell.’ She cranes around him to see if she’s missing a companion. ‘You’ve come by yourself?’

  ‘Yes. I’m an adult now.’

  She laughs a little hesitantly, before pressing a button that sets off a buzzer in the surgery proper. ‘Mr Mitchell has arrived, sir,’ she says into a mouthpiece in front of her.

  ‘Ask him to come in, Myra,’ Gabriel’s disembodied voice says.

  The surgeon rises from his desk and extends his hand when Mitchell enters. ‘Good to see you again, Reg. Do take a seat,’ he says, before resuming his own.

  ‘Picken tells me that you’re recovering well. Getting back into normal life as much as possible. Even told me you and Flo recently played a few holes of golf together. Excellent! But I need to hear your side of the story.’

  ‘Picken’s assessment is basically on the money,’ Mitchell says. ‘With Flo’s help I’m learning what I can eat and what I should avoid to minimise the risk of diarrhoea, flatulence and so on. Damned nuisance, the whole thing, of course. And quite a few activities are still painful. But in general, yes, I’m getting on with it most of the time.’

  ‘Recovering from major surgery like this takes a long time. A lot of patience. I get the impression you’re not exactly well-endowed in that department.’

  ‘You’re not the first to point that out to me, Bill.’

  The two men share a laugh. ‘Well, best have a look and see how that stoma of yours is settling down. Could I just get you to lie down on the examination table over there? Pull up your shirt and singlet, and pull down your trousers.’

  Gabriel jots some notes at his desk while his patient complies with his instructions. Then he makes his way over to the examination table, switches on the manoeuvrable overhead light.

  ‘Good God! What the devil have you got there, Reg?’

  ‘Something I knocked up myself. You mentioned resuming conjugal relations at our first meeting. Well, I started feeling so frustrated and needy about all that. You must know what I’m talking about! But I wasn’t at all sure about the standard belts you people recommend to hold the pads in place. They seemed to invite leakage and other accidents. So I came up with this thing. It’s more secure, and more comfortable. For all purposes, but especially in intimate situations. I wrap a silk scarf around it then, of course.’

  He’s not going to tell Gabriel about the sheer urgency that drove him to make it. He’s lived with a sense of guilt towards Flo most of their married life – he’s lavished so much time and attention on his work instead of her, and then never been able to find the words to convey how deeply he loves her. In bed with her it’s been different. They’re such a good match then, and he can show her the profound love he feels. He’s dedicated himself to her enjoyment, to being the best lover he can.

  She seems well pleased with that. But it doesn’t spare the regret that she contributes far more to the marriage than he does. In spite of his disavowals she labours under the delusion that she’s married to a genius, and no amount of sacrifice and forbearance on her part is too much to keep him working at his best.

  ‘I’ve never come across anything like this girdle before!’ Gabriel exclaims. ‘What on earth have you made it out of?’

  ‘An off-cut of Duralumin plate. It’s the light, pliable alloy we skin our planes with at work. It’s easy to curl the edges inwards to hold everything in place. The woollen inner lining softens it a bit more.’

  ‘But the surface is smoother than glass!’

  ‘It needs to be for high-speed aeroplanes. Skin friction slows them down.’

  ‘Just because you make aeroplanes doesn’t mean you have to turn into one! Or turn your surgeon into an aeronautical engineer,’ Gabriel chortles. ‘And didn’t we agree that you wouldn’t go back to work yet?’

  ‘I made it at home. In the garage.’

  Gabriel carefully detaches the metal girdle and holds it up to the light, the stoma forgotten. ‘Ingenious, Reg! Bloody ingenious! I want to quickly sketch and measure it. I’m in the throes of writing a textbook on colorectal surgery, and I think I’ll want this thing in it. Duly acknowledging your design, of course!’

  The surgeon hurries back to his desk. Flattered, Mitchell lies on his back staring up, listening to the rasping of the pencil and the whirr of the spring-loaded tape measure.

  ‘You ought to think about patenting this thing, you know. I could help you with that,’ Gabriel calls from his desk.

  After a couple of minutes Gabriel summons his nurse, and with her at his side taking notes, he’s looming over his patient, now concentrated on his own handiwork.

  After the examination and the nurse’s exit, Mitchell gets up, adjusts his clothes, and faces the surgeon across the desk.

  ‘The medical side of things is going well, Reg. No infections – you’ve been well looked after. The healing is proceeding as best it can. But earlier you said you were “getting on with it most of the time”. What is happening at the other times?’

  ‘I become despondent and feel helpless, I suppose.’

  ‘Can you say more about that?’

  Mitchell looks around the room before answering. ‘Well, until recently my body served me so well. I didn’t have to think about it as I threw myself into my day. All that busyness at work. And I could play a game of cricket, tennis or golf, go rowing or sailing, keep up with my son, do a job in the workshop – all that – without a moment’s hesitation. Or pain. Or worrying how far it is to the nearest lavatory, and whether I smell right. I become overwhelmed by the thought that I’ll never be able to return to that way of living.’

  He pauses. ‘And then there’s coming to grips with my likely early death. With so much left undone. My work. Bringing my son to manhood. Providing for him and Flo when I’m no longer around.’

  ‘Do you talk to Flo about these worries?’

  ‘I try to shield her as much as possible. Things are hard enough for her as it is.’

  Gabriel slowly shakes his head. ‘I’ve seen a lot of men – especially men – struggling with these agonies in my practice. So. If I may be permitted a word of advice, Reg. I’ve come to know both of you during your post-operative care. Take it from me, the last thing Flo needs or wants is to be “shielded”. She’s a strong, mature woman who wants the chance to do her best for you. Give her that chance! Remember your marriage vows? “To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health”? Well, my guess is that’s exactly what she wants to do. So why not let her?’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean she has to bear the burden of all the self-pitying drivel that runs through my head.’
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br />   ‘Yes it does! That “drivel” is like the cancer itself. It has to come out. If you bottle it up inside you it’ll grow and spread. You’ll become dispirited and unable to take advantage of the time that’s left to you. And for God’s sake, man, you have work to do! For all our sakes!’

  The members of the household start taking all their meals around the kitchen table. Mitchell has commandeered the dining room table for spreading out working drawings, especially when Vera comes to take dictation, or senior colleagues from the drawing office come to get his advice and instructions on pressing current projects. Besides, negotiating the stairs causes extra discomfort.

  While he enjoys the collegial visits, the projects themselves bring him little joy. Final design details for the Type 224, which have banked up in his absence, keep nagging at him. This work on the farmyard duck strikes him as pointless, even a travesty. Then there’s the preliminary work on the Stranraer – a further development from the successful Scapa. The new plane will probably be just as successful, but Mitchell finds it difficult to focus once again on flying boats. His heart is now set on a landplane. Type 300.

  In a supreme act of will, Mitchell paces himself. When he feels too tired or uncomfortable to keep poring over drawings on the dining table, he sits down in an armchair with the newspapers in the living room, though always with a sketch pad and pencil beside him. He wants to try to capture some of those spectral forms of the future fighter that momentarily appear in the periphery of his consciousness.

  In the middle of sunny days, when Flo and Eva haven’t whisked him away for a spot of golf, he can sit in a deckchair in the garden beside the pond. But as the autumn weather becomes more insistent and the fallen leaves thicken at his feet, he’s drawn inside. To light the fire in the living room, lean back in an armchair, puff on his pipe, and occasionally listen to the wireless.

  The news is invariably unsettling. Mainly about Germany. Hitler has now consolidated his dictatorship, following the orchestrated hysteria around the Reichstag fire in March, and the national elections six days later. His Nazi Party failed to gain a majority despite all its alternating attempts to seduce and terrorise the German public. But the Nationalists joined the Nazis in the Reichstag to make up the majority necessary to pass emergency laws that suppress all other parties and condemn tens of thousands of anti-Nazis to ‘protective detention’ in concentration camps.

  The Nazi government has been stoking longstanding German resentment at the limitations on the country’s rearmament in the Versailles Treaty. Rumour has it that clandestine rearmament was already proceeding apace anyway, including the establishment of a section of the Reichswehr – the rump German army – that constitutes a de facto nucleus of an air force. Bev Shenstone bore witness to the development of German military aircraft when Mitchell first interviewed him two years ago. Mutt Summers, who maintains his own contacts in German aviation, has confirmed it.

  Hitler’s speeches, and official German proclamations, clamour for German parity with its Great-War conquerors, in land, sea and air forces. Alarmingly, these demands fall on sympathetic ears in the leading ranks of all the major British parties and the National Coalition Government. The same government that withheld the £100,000 necessary to mount a British defence of the Schneider Trophy two years ago is now making a virtue of refusing to fund British rearmament. Rather, it goes on touting the lost cause of international disarmament – even hectoring its French counterpart on the need to drastically reduce the size of the French army and simultaneously consent to German military parity.

  At the moment the 500,000-strong French army is about all that stands between a rearmed and aggressive Germany on the one hand, and the rest of Western Europe on the other. But the British government wants to see it reduced by more than half its present strength!

  There are discordant voices, thank God, albeit few and far between. Mitchell remembers reading a snippet of a speech that the renegade Tory, Winston Churchill, made in the Commons in late March: if Germany is allowed parity ‘we shall surely see ourselves within a measurable distance of the renewal of general European war.’ In the same speech he lambasted the new Nazi regime for its persecution of the Jews and oppression of other minorities, to say nothing of its cultivation of a besotted martial culture, especially among German youth.

  For its part, the League of Nations has proved its futility in its abject failure to tackle Japan’s invasion of Manchuria two years ago, and its establishment there of a puppet state, ‘Manchukuo’. Meanwhile the League goes on hosting the standing World Disarmament Conference in Geneva. Now in October Hitler is withdrawing his country from both the Conference and the League itself.

  In response Churchill is on his feet once more in the Commons. ‘We read all the news that accumulates of the military spirit which is rife throughout Germany; we see that a philosophy of blood-lust is being inculcated into their youth to which no parallel can be found since the days of barbarism.’

  Surely all this will suffice to bring feckless British leaders to their senses and get them to abandon their obsession with disarmament? Apparently not.

  Saturday evening, 9 December 1933. The Mitchells entertain their first dinner guests since Reg’s operation in August. So it’s a festive moment for the household, and they all lend a hand in the preparations. The guests are Bob and Noel McLean, and their grown-up daughters, Annie and the younger Evelyn (‘Bunny’ to her familiars). Mitchell has agreed to clear his drawings and papers from the dining room table, which is formally laid.

  The easy banter between the generations makes for a jovial dinner. Once again Mitchell has to make an effort to pace himself, not drinking or eating too much, not reaching for the strong sauces. But the company compensates him. He notices Gordon being quite mesmerised by the beautiful Annie McLean, who’s embarking on a career on the stage. When she regales the company with hair-raising anecdotes about family life when she and Bunny were growing up in the lap of the Raj in India, the whole gathering is entranced.

  ‘By Jove, you must have given your mother and father a lot of difficult moments when you were growing up, Annie,’ Flo comments.

  ‘You can say that again, Flo!’ McLean laughs. ‘We used to call her “Little Spitfire”.’

  ‘Naughty daddy!’ Annie waves her finger at him. ‘You’re telling tales out of school!’

  ‘Can’t help it, dear! Anyway, talking of school, when we moved back to Britain we tried sending them both to St George’s School for Girls in Edinburgh to knock some of the rough edges off them. A dismal failure, thank God!’

  The meal is over when two well-dressed young men turn up at the door to take Annie and Bunny dancing. Gordon takes advantage of the interruption to sneak off to his room, probably to listen to a favourite BBC serial on his crystal set.

  Flo turns to her husband and McLean. ‘Time for the gentlemen to withdraw and talk shop. I know you’re both bursting to. Eva has the fire burning in the living room for you. Noel and I want to stay put and plan a spring trip to Vienna for the four of us.’

  Mitchell leads his guest into the living room, pours them both a Scotch, and they settle into the two armchairs in front of the fire. McLean takes a silver cigar case from the breast pocket of his jacket, flips it open, and proffers its contents to his host. It’s full of Dutch cigars. They both light up.

  ‘A most enjoyable evening, RJ! Hearty thanks! I must say it feels like a downright miracle given the earlier gloomy news about your illness and operation.’

  ‘Well, thanks for making the evening such fun, Bob. Especially by bringing along those two vivacious daughters of yours. And yes, it feels like I’ve returned to being a social animal tonight.’

  ‘So how are things going for you, really?’

  ‘A lot of the pain has receded. Though by no means all. The inconvenience remains, of course. Always will. Otherwise the sense of things returning to normal is good, but also beguiling. The long-term prospects remain dire. I mustn’t turn a blind eye to that. And i
t weighs on me, Bob. Not so much the dying bit. But leaving Flo and Gordon in reduced circumstances.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean, RJ?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Their way of life depends on my salary, and it won’t be there when I’m gone.’

  ‘You can’t seriously believe that the boards of Supermarine and Vickers would stand by and let your dependents fall into need! I know I have a reputation in some quarters for being a hard bastard, but as far as your family is concerned, I’d move heaven and earth to make sure the boards look after them properly. I’d be disgusted if I met any resistance, frankly. It’s a simple matter of doing the right thing, after all you’ve done for us. And the whole damned country, for that matter.’

  ‘And how would they do that?’

  ‘Make a formal and irrevocable financial settlement on Flo and Gordon. I hope to Christ your cancer doesn’t return, RJ. But if it does, and the moment you tell me it has, I’ll set the wheels in motion. You can put this fear right out of your mind. Permanently. Understood?’

  ‘Understood, Bob. Thank you.’

  ‘Now, let’s talk about something more cheerful. I had a most stimulating lunch with Stuffy Dowding in London on Tuesday… What are you smirking at?’

  ‘Sorry! It just sounds a bit rum – having a stimulating lunch with a man who’s earned the nickname “Stuffy”.’

  ‘Well, the poor bugger has spent the last thirty-odd years in the military. In those circles he’s turned out to be a real stickler. But believe you me, he’s actually a breath of fresh air! He understands the country’s need for a killer fighter just as we do. He’s had a lot of trouble asserting his authority as Air Member for Supply and Research on the Air Council over the last six years, but now his time has come. No doubt helped along earlier this year by his promotion to the rank of air marshal and getting his knighthood.’

  ‘Why has he had so much trouble on the council before?’