by Alan Holmes
We returned to the hangar just as Mormilly descended from his perch on the ladder, saying in a disgusted tone, “I don’t like it, but it will have to do.” He then announced that he would demonstrate the retraction of the landing wheels while the plane was on the ground. As we wondered how this could be done, he summoned two workmen to get des gros chevalets, which turned out to be two very stout sawhorses. These were placed under the wings, just outboard of the landing wheels, along with some other bits of heavy lumber to fill the space between the wings and the chevalets.
Mormilly then impatiently insisted that he wanted des morçeaux de tapis. A man ran off and disappeared for some time, finally returning with a colorful assortment of carpet scraps, which he put between the wing undersurfaces and the chevalets.
Things now seemed to be to Mormilly’s liking, and a mechanic relocated the ladder so he could climb into the plane’s open cockpit. Other men scurried to find some triangular blocks to place in front of the plane’s wheels.
“The plane has no brakes,” Raimond explained quietly to me. “Without those blocks, the plane would just fly away as soon as the engine starts.” I really appreciated Raimond’s comment, for I was watching every move and wondered as to each one’s purpose.
Mormilly shouted the word “contact,” and a mechanic standing on a low platform spun the plane’s propeller a few times before the engine came to life with much sputtering and smoke. After a few minutes of coughing and backfiring, the engine settled down to a noisy idle.
Mormilly gave the thumbs up from his open cockpit and appeared to reach for a lever and pull it. The wheels slowly rose into the wings and came to a stop almost completely tucked into the wings, but still protruding slightly from the lower surfaces. Meanwhile, the plane had descended an inch or two until it rested with its wings bearing on the two chevalets.
Under his breath, Raimond said, “It’s the best that can be done, short of having the wheels protrude through the top of the wings. They’re bigger across than the thickness of the wing, so they have to protrude somewhere. They may as well protrude from the bottom of the wing, where they might do some good in a crash landing.”
Mormilly shut the engine off, and in the sudden silence that followed, announced that he would now demonstrate how he could lower the wheels, even if there were no power from the engine. We saw him lean forward in the cockpit and appear to pump something. Sure enough, the wheels slowly descended, but it took about five minutes for them to do so, after which Mormilly was out of breath and considerably disheveled.
I asked Raimond who would be driving the plane while this wheel-lowering business took place. It had obviously taken all of Mormilly’s effort and attention to lower the wheels.
“Planes pretty much fly themselves—unlike cars which wander off the road if you don’t continually steer them. There are no roads in the sky, so they can’t wander off,” Raimond replied in all seriousness.
Mormilly was now ready for his flight. He stood up in the cockpit, buttoned his great leather flying coat, donned a leather flying helmet and goggles, and snuggled himself back into the cramped cockpit. Three men gathered around the tail and, lifting it, turned the plane around so that it faced the open door of the hangar. Once more, they spun the prop to restart the engine. The wheel chocks, which had been relocated when the plane was turned, were now removed, and the plane started a slow roll out of the shed and down to the far end of the grass aerodrome.
We had all followed the plane out of the hangar, and now heard the engine roar and watched the plane become airborne after a short takeoff run. Still low over the field, Mormilly put the plane into a sharp and prolonged banking turn until his flight path passed right in front of us. At this point we saw the wheels rise into the wings. There was loud cheering and clapping from the assembled crowd as the plane headed for some distant low hills and, before long, disappeared from sight.
We returned to the shelter of the open hangar and waited, stamping our feet to keep warm. In the echoing silence of the empty hangar, Raimond said quite loudly, “He won’t be long coming back. After all, he’s only demonstrating the landing gear. Frankly, I expected him to land right away, after one circle around the field!”
Ten minutes passed—then, half an hour. We all moved out of the hangar, thinking we would be better positioned to hear the sound of the returning plane. The wind had died down, and it no longer felt so cold. A few minutes later, the mechanic foreman broke the silence that now reigned over the anxious crowd and announced that Mormilly must have made a forced landing since he had only enough fuel for a very short flight.
Raimond said to me in a reverential whisper, “The amount of fuel on board was kept small so Monsieur Mormilly wouldn’t die in a fireball if his plane were to crash.”
There were over a dozen cars scattered around the outside of the hangar, and someone decided they should all go out in different directions to search the surrounding countryside for the downed plane. The foreman had a Michelin road map, and he assigned search zones to each able-bodied driver, Father among them. The drivers then scurried to their cars, for dusk was coming on. I was very excited at the thought of participating in this important search, but my hopes were soon dashed. With darkness coming on, they would be out searching “who knows for how long,” said Mother. It might also turn out to be a gory spectacle, too horrible for my young eyes to witness. A thousand objections seemed to counter my supplications.
Raimond asked if he could go with Father on the search. “That way, if Monsieur becomes stuck in the mud somewhere, there will be someone to push him out of it!” Raimond said eagerly, seeming to relish the prospect—not of the mud, but of the search for the downed plane.
A man who seemed to know Mother and who had been conspicuously silent when the call for search volunteers was first issued offered to take Brenda, Mother and me home. He was Thiérry de Tapleine, a close friend of both Mormilly and Father, a charming and diminutive man dressed in an elegant pin stripe suit and a light gray Homburg. He was somewhat of a dandy, and his extremely long eyelashes accentuated his effeminacy, a detail even I noticed. Later, I asked Mother if it weren’t unusual for a man to have such long eyelashes. “It is,” she replied, “and they’re real! The longest I have ever seen on either a man or a woman. Aren’t they absolutely beautiful?”
We drove home in Thiérry’s Delahaye, France’s equivalent of a Rolls Royce at the time. It was an immaculately kept and graceful car, very quiet, and Thiérry’s chauffeur completed the feel of elegance. “Much as I love Mormilly,” said Thiérry as we drove to our house, “I couldn’t see myself getting bogged down on some muddy country road in this car.”
Mother invited Thiérry in for a drink and dinner. Françoise was extremely anxious about the absence of Raimond and wanted assurances from Mother that he was with Father. She was also severely derailed by the idea of serving dinner without Raimond to act as the butler. She eventually put a good face on it, donning a black smock, a white apron and a maid’s cap for the occasion. She, like Mother, seemed to have a soft spot for Thiérry, though probably more for the generosity of his tips than for his eyelashes.
When we rose from the table after the meal, Thiérry asked if he could go to the kitchen to compliment Françoise on the dinner, something no guest had ever done. In the kitchen, Françoise apologized for serving pâté Parmentier (shepherd’s pie), but excused herself on the grounds that she had had no advance notice of his visit; she would have prepared something much fancier if she had known he were coming to dinner.
I interjected indignantly, asking her why she was apologizing. After all, shepherd’s pie was my favorite dish. Thiérry, a consummate diplomat, immediately said, “What a coincidence! It’s mine, too!” Françoise was thrilled, and I felt honored to have tastes in common with a man who owned a Delahaye.
Just as this little ceremony was ending, Father and Raimond returned. They wer
e the ones who had found Mormilly. They had been driving in near darkness when Raimond thought he spotted a small light waving about in a darkened field. They stopped the car, turned off the engine, and called out. Raimond believed he heard a faint reply. A little farther up the road, they found a break in the hedge that allowed Father to drive into the field. They could still see the faint light waving back and forth and proceeded towards it, driving the car up a slight hill through deep grass. The form of the crashed plane eventually loomed in the car’s headlight beams.
Mormilly was still in the cockpit and was waving a lit cigarette lighter. He was pinned in by the crumpled plane and moaned that he thought he had broken both legs, probably in several places. Lest the reader ponder the wisdom of waving a lighted cigarette lighter in a crashed plane, Mormilly explained that he had run out of fuel after only fifteen minutes of flying. As Raimond and Father started the work of extricating him from the crashed plane, he described his mishap.
“When I took off, I headed for the nearby village of Longjumeau, where I have une petite amie (a lady friend) over whose house I did a few manœuvres (aerobatics). It took barely five minutes of flying to get there, and the plane was flying so well that I felt a bit intoxicated! I ran out of fuel on the way back. As the engine sputtered, I immediately set about lowering the wheels by hand and consequently wasn’t able to devote my attention to finding a suitable field for some semblance of a proper landing. I must really do something about that! The pump is too far down in the cockpit and should be placed higher up.
When I had finished lowering the wheels, I found myself heading for this hill at a rather steep angle and, with my engine no longer running, there was little I could do. I’m lucky to be alive! And I’m very glad I had my lighter for signaling, or I would have spent a cold night out here waiting to be found and rescued!”
Raimond and Father worked for half an hour by the light of the car headlights to pry Mormilly loose from the wreckage, a process that required the use of the car’s jack to push apart some bent struts that were pinning him in. As they carried him to the car and then drove to the aerodrome, Father could see that Mormilly was in a lot of pain, although he was trying to conceal it with an uninterrupted stream of wisecracks.
At the aerodrome, they applied crude splints to each of Mormilly’s legs, and gave him a generous slug of brandy before putting him in an ambulance, which someone had thought of calling. Mormilly’s diagnosis of his injuries proved to be correct.
Considering the informality of the test flight procedure, I rather doubt this was a government project. Mormilly and de Tapleine were independently wealthy, and I would guess this was a private venture done in the hopes of selling the plane or the landing wheel technology to the French Air Ministry. I distinctly remember Mormilly boasting that this would be France’s first military plane to have retractable landing wheels. However, Mormilly was by no means an original inventor. Retracting wheels were in use on the Douglas DC-2 airliner, which had been in use by Holland’s KLM airlines for about three years, so the concept was hardly new.
All this activity concerning aeroplanes, as they were then called, started me wondering about how I could bring a little aeronautics into my own life. Before long, it dawned on me that Raimond could perform one more transformation of that old perambulator, which had already metamorphosed first into a gondola, then into a locomotive. I decided it would now become an aeroplane, and I started soliciting Raimond’s views on the possibility of such a project.
One aspect of my existing locomotive was that it could not accommodate Brenda as a passenger. It seemed to me that removal of the flat, circular wood disk at the back of the old barrel, the locomotive’s boiler, would allow Brenda to crawl into the barrel and sit inside it, assuming suitable cushions could be found. Raimond maintained that removal of this disk would cause the barrel staves to cave in. But I kept insisting that there had to be a way to do it, and my persistence drove Raimond to a solution. “I will build a fuselage,” he said, “and the fuselage—instead of the disk—will hold the barrel staves in place.”
Raimond had never flown in his life, to his immense chagrin, but he was an armchair flying enthusiast who read all he could about aeroplanes and knew many important aeronautical words. He made the new fuselage out of lumber from old orange crates obtained at the greengrocer. It was tricky work, but Raimond was a master craftsman. A rudder and tailfins were added to the new fuselage, which had no floor and thus allowed me to stand on the ground while in the cockpit. I propelled the plane by walking and pushing on the cockpit’s dashboard.
After the complexity of the fuselage, the addition of two stubby wings to the barrel was straightforward and easy, as was the addition of a propeller at its front end. The latter turned freely on a nail, so I could spin it before every takeoff, as all pilots had to do in those days. The wingspan was carefully specified in order to clear the chestnut trees that lined both sides of my takeoff runway. A new paint job included portrayal of details such as the exhaust manifolds, wing flaps, ailerons, and windows.
The railroad emblem P.L.M. was replaced by the name “Air France.” I would have preferred “Imperial Airways,” which Father always maintained was a better airline, but Raimond did this part of the artwork during one of the family’s Sunday afternoon drives. It was just as well I wasn’t there to argue over the issue. I think Raimond would have balked at the words “Imperial Airways” painted onto his aeronautical masterpiece.
Raimond even made me a boarding ladder because the cockpit sides (part of the fuselage) came to my chin, making it difficult for me to climb aboard. Once in the cockpit, I pulled the ladder in behind me with a stout string, stowing it inside the empty tail assembly, so that it would be available for exit wherever I “landed.”
Brenda also boarded the airliner by this means and then squeezed into the cramped quarters of the barrel, an accurate portrayal of air travel to come. However, Brenda soon declared that she didn’t care for travel in such cramped conditions. Her decision suited me just fine, as the plane was a heavy push even when she wasn’t onboard. Fortunately, her dolls continued to travel frequently as unaccompanied children, now in uncramped comfort. I was grateful to have at least these paying passengers.
I flew regular flights to various destinations in the garden, wearing flyer’s goggles made from a discarded pair of sunglasses (with one lens missing) and making highly authentic engine noises during the flights. My renditions of the engine starting, complete with sputtering and backfiring, were particularly accurate and provoked much laughter from all who were privileged to hear them.
Raimond was marvelous in the way he managed to accommodate my various requests. Just after this loco-to-airliner transformation, he built me a large platform in the playroom for my electric trains. He did this because someone had eventually stepped on my track layout which, until this mishap, had always been on the floor. The damaged track was beyond repair, even by the versatile Raimond.
The previous Christmas, I had received the first eight “starter” pieces of rail, which formed a circular track for my electric train. Mother had decreed that my model railroad empire would only grow in small increments at each Christmas or on my birthday. She had found the eight pieces of track and a little electric locomotive (missing its coal tender) at the Paris Flea Market. She had purchased my entire rolling stock—just one pathetic little freight wagon, at a proper toy store.
Mother’s rationale for such a minimalist train layout was part of her determination that I should not grow up a spoiled child. By her standards, Charlie Poujet next door was spoilt rotten. The previous Christmas, Charlie had, in one fell swoop, acquired at least ten meters of track, numerous switches, track crossings, and a huge fleet of freight wagons that were pulled by a large and powerful loco, complete with coal tender. I was green with envy and spent most free rainy afternoons playing at his house and enjoying his more lavish setup.
Brenda usually accompanied me on these visits, as she and Monique Poujet shared a mutual enthusiasm for dolls. Although Monique was older, it was Brenda who had the lead in dolls, for she had a peeing doll that required frequent diaper changes, while none of Monique’s dolls peed at all. Monique was always glad to have to change the diapers on the doll that Brenda dutifully brought with her.
Brenda gently cradled the doll in one arm as she clambered over Raimond’s passerelle on the way to the Poujets. She was usually nervous about heights, but with the doll in one arm, she lost all fear. These happy afternoons, usually Saturdays, came to an abrupt stop after I was ostracized for painting my face with ink at school.
About a month before the inking business, Brenda and I were at the Poujet house for Charlie’s birthday party. It was winter and already dark by the time we had to go home. We couldn’t use the ladder overpass for the return trip because it was in an unlighted part of the garden. Mother walked the street route to come and fetch us and stayed a while to chat with Madame Poujet as we kids continued playing upstairs.
As we left for home, the three of us had just set out across the Poujet’s darkened garden on the way to their front gate, when there was a piercing shriek from Brenda, accompanied by the angry snarl and snapping of a large animal. The Poujet’s oversized German shepherd had attacked and bitten Brenda.
Auguste, the Poujet’s gardener, unaware that we were still on the premises, had unleashed the brute, which was supposed to roam the garden on his rounds as a guard dog. Mother struggled to pull the dog away and, with the help of Madame Poujet, who had come running at the sound of the ruckus, they were eventually able to control it.
Brenda, it turned out, had been bitten on the posterior and was bleeding badly. Madame Poujet drove us straight to Docteur Narnier, who gave Brenda a tetanus shot and used four stitches to close the wound.