Flying Finish

by Dick Francis

  I won the race. The well pleased owner gave me a public clap on the shoulder and a drink in the members’ bar, and surreptitiously, round a private corner, forty pounds.

  On the following day, Sunday, I spent the lot.

  I started my little Herald in the garage in the pre-dawn dark, and as quietly as possible opened the doors and drifted away down the drive. Mother had invited yet another well-heeled presumptive virgin for the week-end, together with her slightly forbidding. Parents, and having dutifully escorted them all to Newbury Races the day before and tipped them a winner – my own – I felt I had done quite enough. They would be gone, I thought coolly, before I got back late that evening, and with a bit of luck my bad manners in disappearing would have discouraged them for ever.

  A steady two and a half hours driving northwards found me at shortly before ten o’clock turning in through some inconspicuously signposted gates in Lincolnshire. I parked the car at the end of the row of others, climbed out, stretched, and looked up into the sky. It was a cold clear morning with maximum visibility. Not a cloud in sight. Smiling contentedly I strolled over to the row of white painted buildings and pushed open the glass door into the main hall of the Fenland Flying Club.

  The hall was a big room with several passages leading off it and a double door on the far side opening to the airfield itself. Round the walls hung framed charts, Air Ministry regulations, a large map of the surrounding area, do’s and don’ts for visiting pilots, a thumb-tacked weather report and a list of people wanting to enter for a ping-pong tournament. There were several small wooden tables and hard chairs at one end, half occupied, and across the whole width of the other end stretched the reception-cum-operations-cum-everything else desk. Yawning behind it and scratching between his shoulder blades stood a plump sleepy man of about my own age, sporting a thick sloppy sweater and a fair sized hangover. He held a cup of strong coffee and a cigarette in his free hand, and he was talking lethargically to a gay young spark who had turned up with a girl-friend he wanted to impress.

  ‘I’ve told you, old chap, you should have given us a ring. All the planes are booked today. I’m sorry, no can do. You can hang about if you like, in case someone doesn’t turn up …’

  He turned towards me, casually.

  ‘Morning, Harry,’ he said. ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Very O.K.,’ I said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Ouch,’ he grinned, ‘don’t cut me. The gin would run out.’ He turned round and consulted the vast timetable charts covering most of the wall behind him. ‘You’ve got Kilo November today, it’s out by the petrol pumps, I think. Cross country again; is that right?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I nodded.

  ‘Nice day for it.’ He put a tick on his chart where it said H. Grey, solo cross.

  ‘Couldn’t be better.’

  The girl said moodily, ‘How about this afternoon, then?’

  ‘No dice. All booked. And it gets dark so early … there’ll be plenty of planes tomorrow.’

  I strolled away, out of the door to the airfield and round to the petrol pumps.

  There were six single engined aircraft lined up there in two rows of three, with a tall man in white overalls filling one up through the opening on the upper surface of the port wing. He waved when he saw me coming, and grinned.

  ‘Just doing yours next, Harry. The boys have tuned her up special. They say you couldn’t have done it better yourself.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ I said smiling.

  He screwed on the cap and jumped down.

  ‘Lovely day,’ he said, looking up. There were already two little planes in the air, and four more stood ready in front of the control tower. ‘Going far?’ he asked.

  ‘Scotland,’ I said.

  ‘That’s cheating.’ He swung the hose away and began to drag it along to the next aircraft. ‘The navigation’s too easy. You only have to go west till you hit the A.1 and then fly up it.’

  ‘I’m going to Islay,’ I smiled. ‘No roads, I promise.’

  ‘Islay. That’s different.’

  ‘I’ll land there for lunch and bring you back a bit of heather.’

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘Two seventy nautical miles, about.’

  ‘You’ll be coming back in the dark.’ It was a statement, not a question. He unscrewed the cap of Kilo November and topped up the tanks.

  ‘Most of the way, yes.’

  I did the routine checks all round the aircraft, fetched my padded jacket and my charts from the car, filed my flight plan, checked with the control tower for taxi clearance, and within a short while was up in the sky and away.

  Air is curious stuff. One tends to think that because it is invisible it isn’t there. What you can’t see don’t exist, sort of thing. But air is tough, elastic and resistant; and the harder you dig into it the more solid it becomes. Air has currents stronger than tides and turbulences which would make Charybdis look like bath water running away.

  When I first went flying I rationalised the invisibility thing by thinking of an aircraft being like a submarine: in both one went up and down and sideways in a medium one couldn’t see but which was very palpably around. Then I considered that if human eyes had been constructed differently it might have been possible to see the mixture of nitrogen and oxygen we breathe as clearly as the hydrogen and oxygen we wash in. After that I took the air’s positive plastic existence for granted, and thought no more about it.

  The day I went to Islay was pure pleasure. I had flown so much by then that the handling of the little aircraft was as normal as driving a car, and with the perfect weather and my route carefully worked out and handy on the empty passenger seat behind me, there was nothing to do but enjoy myself. And that I did, because I liked being alone. Specifically I liked being alone in a tiny noisy efficient little capsule at 25,000 revs a minute, four thousand five hundred feet above sea level, speed over the ground one hundred and ten miles an hour, steady on a course 313 degrees, bound north-west towards the sea and a Scottish island.

  I found Islay itself without trouble, and tuned my radio to the frequency – 118.5 – of Port Ellen airfield.

  I said, ‘Port Ellen tower this is Golf Alpha Romeo Kilo November, do you read?’

  A Scots accent crackled back, ‘Golf Kilo November, good afternoon, go ahead.’

  ‘Kilo November is approaching from the south-east, range fifteen miles, request joining instructions, over.’

  ‘Kilo November is cleared to join right base for runway zero four, QFE 998 millibars. Surface wind zero six zero, ten knots, call field in sight.’

  Following his instructions I flew in and round the little airfield on the circuit, cut the engine, turned into wind, glided in at eighty, touched down, and taxied across to the control tower to report.

  After eating in a snack bar I went for a walk by the sea, breathing the soft Atlantic air, and forgot to look for some heather to take back with me. The island lay dozing in the sun, shut up close because it was Sunday. It was peaceful and distant and slowed the pulse; soul’s balm if you stayed three hours, devitalising if you stayed for life.

  The gold had already gone from the day when I started back, and I flew contentedly along in the dusk and the dark, navigating by compass and checking my direction by the radio beacons over which I passed. I dropped down briefly at Carlisle to refuel, and uneventfully returned to Lincolnshire, landing gently and regretfully on the well-known field.

  As usual on Sundays the club room next to the main hall was bursting with amateur pilots like myself all talking at once about stalls and spins and ratings and slide slips and allowances for deviations. I edged round the crowd to the bar and acquired some whisky and water, which tasted dry and fine on my tongue and reminded me of where I had been.

  Turning round I found myself directly beside the reception desk man and a red-haired boy he was talking to. Catching my eye he said to the boy, ‘Now here’s someone you ought to have a word with. Our Harry here, he’s dead qui
et, but don’t let that fool you … He could fly the pants off most of that lot.’ He gestured round the room. ‘You ask Harry, now. He started just like you, knowing nothing at all, only three or four years ago.’

  ‘Four,’ I said.

  ‘There you are, then. Four years. Now he’s got a commercial licence and enough ratings to fill a book and he can strip an engine down like a mechanic.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ I interrupted mildly. The young man looked thoroughly unimpressed anyway, as he didn’t understand what he was being told. ‘I suppose the point is that once you start, you go on,’ I said. ‘One thing leads to another.’

  ‘I had my first lesson today,’ he said eagerly, and gave me a rev by rev account of it for the next fifteen minutes. I ate two thick ham sandwiches while he got it off his chest, and finished the whisky. You couldn’t really blame him, I thought, listening with half an ear: if you liked it, your first flight took you by the throat and you were hooked good and proper. It had happened to him. It had happened to me, one idle day when I passed the gates of the airfield and then turned back and went in, mildly interested in going up for a spin in a baby aircraft just to see what it was like.

  I’d been to visit a dying great-aunt, and was depressed. Certainly Mr …? ‘Grey.’ I said . Certainly Mr Grey could go up with an instructor, the air people said: and the instructor, who hadn’t been told I only wanted a sight-seeing flip, began as a matter of course to teach me to fly. I stayed all day and spent a week’s salary in fees; and the next Sunday I went back. Most of my Sundays and most of my money had gone the same way since.

  The red-head was brought to a full stop by a burly tweed-suited man who said ‘Excuse me,’ pleasantly but very firmly, and planted himself between us.

  ‘Harry, I’ve been waiting for you to come back.’

  ‘Have a drink?’

  ‘Yes … all right, in a minute.’

  His name was Tom Wells. He owned and ran a small charter firm which was based on the airfield, and on Sundays, if they weren’t out on jobs, he allowed the flying club to hire his planes. It was one of his that I had flown to Islay.

  ‘Have I done something wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Wrong? Why should you, for God’s sake? No, I’m in a spot and I thought you might be able to help me out.’

  ‘If I can, of course.’

  ‘I’ve overbooked next week-end and I’m going to be a pilot short. Will you do a flight for me next Sunday?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said: I’d done it before, several times.

  He laughed. ‘You never waste words, Harry boy. Well, thanks. When can I ring you to give you a briefing?’

  I hesitated. ‘I’d better ring you, as usual.’

  ‘Saturday morning, then.’

  ‘Right.’

  We had a drink together, he talking discontentedly about the growing shortage of pilots and how it was now too expensive for a young man to take it up on his own account, it cost at least three thousand pounds to train a multi-engine pilot, and only the air lines could afford it. They trained their own men and kept them, naturally. When the generation who had learned flying in the R.A.F. during the war got too old, the smaller charter firms were going to find themselves in very sticky straits.

  ‘You now,’ he said, and it was obviously what he’d been working round to all along. ‘You’re an oddity. You’ve got a commercial licence and all the rest, and you hardly use it. Why not? Why don’t you give up that boring old desk job and come and work for me?’

  I looked at him for a long, long moment. It was almost too tempting, but apart from everything else, it would mean giving up steeplechasing, and I wasn’t prepared to do that. I shook my head slowly, and said not for a few years yet.

  Driving home I enjoyed the irony of the situation. Tom Wells didn’t know what my desk job was, only that I worked in an office. I hadn’t got around to telling him that I no longer did, and I wasn’t going to. He didn’t know where I came from or anything about my life away from the airfield. No one there did, and I liked it that way. I was just Harry who turned up on Sundays and flew if he had any money and worked on the engines in the hangars if he hadn’t.

  Tom Wells had offered me a job on my own account, not, like Yardman, because of my father, and that pleased me very much. It was rare for me to be sure of the motive behind things which were offered to me. But if I took the job my anonymity on the airfield would vanish pretty soon, and all the old problems would crowd in, and Tom Wells might very well retract, and I would be left with nowhere to escape to on one day a week to be myself.

  My family did not know I was a pilot. I hadn’t told them I had been flying that first day because by the time I got home my great-aunt had died and I was ashamed of having enjoyed myself while she did it. I hadn’t told them afterwards because I was afraid that they would make a fuss and stop me. Soon after that I realised what a release it was to lead two lives and I deliberately kept them separate. It was quite easy, as I had always been untalkative: I just didn’t answer when asked where I went on Sundays, and I kept my books and charts, slide rules and computers, securely locked up in my bedroom. And that was that.

  Chapter Three

  It was on the day after I went to Islay that I first met Billy.

  With Conker and Timmie, once they had bitten down their resentment at my pinching their promotion, I had arrived at a truce. On trips they chatted exclusively to each other, not to me, but that was as usual my fault: and we had got as far as sharing things like sandwiches and chocolate – and the work – on a taken-for-granted level basis.

  Billy at once indicated that with him it would be quite quite different. For Billy the class war existed as a bloody battlefield upon which he was the most active and tireless warrior alive. Within five seconds of our first meeting he was sharpening his claws.

  It was at Cambridge Airport at five in the morning. We were to take two consignments of recently sold racehorses from Newmarket to Chantilly near Paris, and with all the loading and unloading at each end it would be a long day. Locking my car in the car park I was just thinking how quickly Conker and Timmie and I were getting to be able to do things when Yardman himself drove up alongside in a dark Jaguar Mark 10. There were two other men in the car, a large indistinct shape in the back, and in front, Billy.

  Yardman stepped out of his car, yawned, stretched, looked up at the sky, and finally turned to me.

  ‘Good-morning my dear boy,’ he said with great affability. ‘A nice day for flying.’

  ‘Very,’ I agreed. I was surprised to see him: he was not given to early rising or to waving us bon voyage. Simon Searle occasionally came if there were some difficulty with papers but not Yardman himself. Yet here he was with his black suit hanging loosely on his too thin frame and the cold early morning light making uncomplimentary shadows on his stretched coarsely pitted skin. The black-framed spectacles as always hid the expression in his deep-set eyes. After a month in his employ, seeing him at the wharf building two or three times a week on my visits for instructions, reports, and pay, I knew him no better than on that first afternoon. In their own way his defence barriers were as good as mine.

  He told me between small shut-mouthed yawns that Timmie and Conker weren’t coming, they were due for a few days leave. He had brought two men who obligingly substituted on such occasions and he was sure I would do a good job with them instead. He had brought them, he explained, because public transport wasn’t geared to five o’clock rendezvous at Cambridge Airport.

  While he spoke the front passenger climbed out of his car.

  ‘Billy Watkins,’ Yardman said casually, nodding between us.

  ‘Good-morning, Lord Grey,’ Billy said. He was about nineteen, very slender, with round cold blue eyes.

  ‘Henry,’ I said automatically. The job was impossible on any other terms and these were in any case what I preferred.

  Billy looked at me with eyes wide, blank, and insolent. He spaced his words, bit them out and hammered them down.
<
br />   ‘Good … morning … Lord … Grey.’

  ‘Good-morning then, Mr Watkins.’

  His eyes flickered sharply and went back to their wide stare. If he expected any placatory soft soaping from me, he could think again.

  Yardman saw the instant antagonism and it annoyed him.

  ‘I warned you, Billy,’ he began swiftly, and then as quickly stopped. ‘You won’t, I am sure, my dear boy,’ he said to me gently, ‘allow any personal … er … clash of temperaments to interfere with the safe passage of your valuable cargo.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed.

  He smiled, showing his greyish regular dentures back to the molars. I wondered idly why, if he could afford such a car, he didn’t invest in more natural looking teeth. It would have improved his unprepossessing appearance one hundred per cent.

  ‘Right then,’ he said in brisk satisfaction. ‘Let’s get on.’

  The third man levered himself laboriously out of the car. His trouble stemmed from a paunch which would have done a pregnant mother of twins proud. About him flapped a brown store-man’s overall which wouldn’t do up by six inches, and under that some bright red braces over a checked shirt did a load-bearing job on some plain dark trousers. He was about fifty, going bald, and looked tired, unshaven and sullen, and he did not then or at any time meet my eyes.

  What a crew, I thought resignedly, looking from him to Billy and back. So much for a day of speed and efficiency. The fat man, in fact, proved to be even more useless than he looked, and treated the horses with the sort of roughness which is the product of fear. Yardman gave him the job of loading them from their own horseboxes up the long matting-covered side-walled ramp into the aircraft, while Billy and I inside fastened them into their stalls.