Flying Finish

by Dick Francis

  I went up above the cloud into the quadrantal system operating above three thousand feet, where to avoid collision one had to fly on a steady regulated level according to the direction one was heading: in our case, going north west, four thousand five hundred or six thousand five hundred or eight thousand five hundred, and so on up.

  One of the passengers commented on the climb and asked the reason for it, and wanted to know my name.

  ‘Grey.’

  ‘Well, Grey, where are we off to? Mars?’

  I smiled. ‘High hills, low clouds.’

  ‘My God,’ said the weightiest and oldest tycoon, patting me heavily on the shoulder, ‘What wouldn’t I give for such succinctness in my boardroom.’

  They were in good form, enjoying their day as well as making serious use of it. The smell of whisky in the warm luxurious little cabin overcame even that of hot oil, and the expensive cigar smoke swirled huskily in my throat. I enjoyed the journey, and for Tom’s sake as well as my own pride, knowing my passengers were connoisseurs of private air travel, put them down on the Gleneagles strip like a whisper on a lake.

  They played golf and drank and ate; and repeated the programme in the afternoon. I walked on the hills in the morning, had lunch, and in the late afternoon booked a room in the hotel, and went to sleep. I guess it was a satisfactory day all round.

  It was half past ten when the reception desk woke me by telephone and said my passengers were ready to leave, and eleven before we got away. I flew back on a double dogleg, making for the St. Abbs radio beacon on the Northumberland coast and setting a course of one sixty degrees south south east from there on a one five two nautical mile straight course to Ottringham, and then south west across country to Coventry, coming in finally on their 122.70 homer signal.

  The tycoons, replete, talked in mellow, rumbling, satisfied voices, no longer about business but about their own lives. The heaviest was having trouble over currency regulations with regard to a villa he had bought on the Costa del Sol: the government had slapped a two thousand pound ceiling on pleasure spending abroad, and two thousand would hardly buy the bath taps …

  The man sitting directly behind me asked about decent yachts available for charter in the Aegean, and the other two told him. The third said it was really time his wife came back from Gstaad, she had been there for two months, and they were due to go to Nassau for Easter. They made me feel poverty-stricken, listening to them.

  We landed safely at Coventry, where they shook my hand, yawning, thanked me for a smooth trip, and ambled off to a waiting Rolls, shivering in the chilly air. I made the last small hop back to Fenland and found Tom, as good as his word, on duty in the control tower to help me down. He yelled out of the window to join him, and we drank coffee out of a thermos jug while he waited for his Le Touquet plane to come back. It was due in an hour: earlier than expected. Apparently the client had struck a losing streak and the party had fizzled out.

  ‘Everything go all right with your lot?’ Tom said.

  ‘They seemed happy,’ I nodded, filling in the flight details on his record chart and copying them into my own log book.

  ‘I suppose you want your fee in flying hours, as usual?’

  I grinned. ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘I wish you’d change your mind and work for me permanently.’

  I put down the pen and stretched, lolling back on the wooden chair with my hands laced behind my head. ‘Not yet. Give it three or four years; perhaps then.’

  ‘I need you now.’

  Need. The word was sweet. ‘I don’t know … I’ll think it over again, anyway.’

  ‘Well, that’s something I suppose.’ He ruffled his thinning light brown hair and rubbed his hands down over his face, his skin itching with tiredness. ‘Sandwich?’

  ‘Thanks.’ I took one. Ham, with French mustard, made in their bungalow by Tom’s capable wife Janie, not from the airport canteen. The ham was thick and juicy, home cooked in beer. We ate in silence and drank the hot strong coffee. Outside the glass-walled high up square room the sky grew a thick matt black, with clouds drifting in to mask the stars. The wind was slowly backing, the atmospheric pressure falling. It was getting steadily colder. Bad weather on its way.

  Tom checked his instruments, frowned, leaned back on his chair and twiddled his pencil. ‘The forecast was right,’ he said gloomily, ‘Snow tomorrow.’

  I grunted sympathetically. Snow grounded his planes and caused a hiatus in his income.

  ‘Have to expect it in February, I suppose,’ he sighed.

  I nodded in agreement. I wondered if Stratford races would be snowed off on Thursday. I wondered if weather interfered much with Yardman’s trips. I reflected that Janie Wells made good coffee, and that Tom was a sound sensible man. Untroubled, organised surface thoughts. And it was the last night I ever spent in my calm emotional deep-freeze.

  The sky was a sullen orange grey when we took off at eight the next morning from Gatwick, the as yet unshed snow hanging heavily as spawn in a frog’s belly. We were carrying eight brood mares in an old unpressurised D.C.4, flying away from the incoming storm, en route to Milan. Timmie and Conker were back, to my relief, but neither had had a scintillating holiday, by the sound of it. I overheard Conker, a much harassed small father of seven large hooligans, complaining as he loaded the cargo that he’d done nothing but cook and wash up while his wife curled up in bed with what was, in his opinion, opportunist malingering influenza. Timmie showed his sympathy in his usual way: a hearty gear-changing sniff. A thick-set black haired square little Welshman, he suffered from interminable catarrh and everyone around him suffered also. It had been his sinuses, he unrepentantly said after one particularly repulsive spitting session, which had stopped him going down the mines like his pa. The February holiday, Timmie agreed, was not much cop.

  ‘How many holidays do you have?’ I asked, fixing chains.

  ‘A week off every two months,’ Conker said. ‘Blimey mate, don’t tell me you took this job without asking that.’

  ‘I’m afraid I did.’

  ‘You’ll be exploited,’ Conker said seriously. ‘When you start a job, you want your terms cut and dried, wages, overtime, holidays with pay, bonuses, superannuation, the lot. If you don’t stand up for your rights, no one else will, there isn’t a union for us, you know, bar the agricultural workers, if you care for that which I don’t. And old Yardman, he don’t give nothing away you know. You want to make sure about your weeks off, mate, or you won’t get any. I’m telling you.’

  ‘Well … thank you. I’ll ask him.’

  ‘Aw, look man,’ said Timmie in his soft Welsh voice, ‘We get other times off too. You don’t want to work yourself to death. Mr. Yardman don’t hold you to more than two trips a week, I’ll say that for him. If you don’t want to go, that is.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘And if you don’t go, Billy and Alf do?’

  ‘That’s about it,’ agreed Conker. ‘I reckon.’ He fitted the last lynch pin on the last box and rubbed his hands down the sides of his trousers.

  I remembered Simon saying that my predecessor Peters had been a belligerent stand-on-your-rights man, and I supposed that Conker had caught his anti-exploitation attitude from him, because it seemed to me, from what they’d said, that Conker and Timmie both had free time positively lavished upon them. A day’s return trip certainly meant working a continuous stretch of twelve hours or more, but two of those in seven days wasn’t exactly penal servitude. Out of interest I had added up my hours on duty some weeks, and even at the most they had never touched forty. They just don’t know when they are well off, I thought mildly, and signalled to the airport staff to take the ramp away.

  The D.C.4 was noisy and very cramped. The gangways between and alongside the horses were too narrow for two people to pass, and in addition one had to go forward and backward along the length of the plane bent almost double. It was, as usual, normally a passenger ship, and it had low-hung luggage shelves along its length on bot
h sides. There were catches to hold the racks up out of the way, but they were apt to shake open in flight and it was more prudent to start with all the racks down than have them fall on one’s head. This, added to the angled guy chains cutting across at shin level, made walking about a tiresome process and provided the worst working conditions I had yet struck. But Conker, I was interested to notice, had no complaints. Peters, maybe, hadn’t been with him on a D.C.4.

  After take-off, the horses all being quiet and well behaved, we went forward into the galley for the first cup of coffee. The engineer, a tall thin man with a habit of raising his right eyebrow five or six times rather fast when he asked a question, was already dispensing it into disposable mugs. Two full ones had names pencilled on: Patrick and Bob. The engineer picked them up and took them forward to the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit. Coming back, the engineer asked our names and wrote us each a mug.

  ‘There aren’t enough on board for us to throw them away every time,’ he explained, handing me ‘Henry’. ‘Sugar?’ He had a two-pound bag of granulated, and a red plastic spoon. ‘I know the way you lot drink coffee. The skipper, too.’

  We drank the scalding brown liquid: it didn’t taste of coffee, but if you thought of it as a separate unnamed thirst quencher, it wasn’t too bad. In the galley the engine noise made it necessary to shout loudly to be heard, and the vibration shook concentric ripples in the coffee. The engineer sipped his gingerly over the scrawled word ‘Mike’.

  ‘You’ve got a right load there,’ he commented. ‘A ship full of expectant mums, aren’t they?’

  Conker, Timmie and I nodded in unison.

  ‘Are they Italian?’

  Together we shook our heads. Music hall stuff.

  ‘What are they going for, then?’

  ‘They are English mares going to be mated with Italian sires,’ explained Conker, who had once worked in a stud and would be positively happy if one of the mares foaled down prematurely on the flight.

  ‘Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,’ said the engineer.

  ‘No, it’s right,’ said Conker. ‘They have to have the foals they are carrying now in the stud where their next mate is.’

  ‘Why?’ The agile eyebrow worked overtime.

  ‘Ah,’ said Conker seriously. ‘The gestation period for horses is eleven months, right? And a brood mare has a foal every twelve months, right? So there’s only four weeks left between production and – er – reproduction, do you see? And in those four weeks the new foal isn’t fit for travelling hundreds of miles in the freezing cold, so the mares have to have the foals in the stud of their next mate. Get?’

  ‘I get,’ agreed the engineer. ‘I get indeed.’

  ‘That one,’ said Conker admiringly, pointing out in the foremost box an elegant brown silky head which owing to the general lack of space was almost in the galley, ‘that one’s going to Molvedo.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Timmie interestedly.

  ‘Horse box driver told me.’

  The co-pilot came back from the cockpit and said the skipper wanted a refill.

  ‘Already? That man’s a tank.’ The engineer poured into the Patrick mug.

  ‘Here,’ said the co-pilot, handing it to me. ‘Take it to him, will you? I’m off to see a man about a dog.’ He brushed under Molvedo’s future wife’s inquisitive nose and bent down for the obstructed walk down to the john.

  I took the steaming mug forward into the cockpit. The pilot, flying in whiter-than-white shirtsleeves despite the zero temperature outside, stretched out a languid hand and nodded his thanks. I stayed for a second looking round at the banked instruments, and he glanced up at me and gestured to me to put my ear down to his mouth. The noise there made even ordinary shouting impossible.

  ‘Are you the head chap with the horses?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Like to sit there for a bit?’ He pointed to the empty co-pilot’s seat.

  ‘Yes, I would.’ He gestured permissively, and I edged sideways into the comfortable bucket seat beside him. The cockpit was tiny, considering how much had to be packed into it, and battered and dented with age. It was also, to me, very much my home.

  I studied the instruments with interest. I had never flown a four engined craft, only one and two, for the excellent reason that there were no four engined planes at Fenland. As even small two engined jobs like the Aztec I had taken to Gleneagles the day before cost nearly thirty-five pounds per flying hour to hire from Tom, I thought it unlikely I would ever raise enough cash for a course on the really big stuff, even if I could use the qualification once I got it. You couldn’t just go up alone for an afternoon’s jolly in an airliner; they simply weren’t to be had. None of which stopped me for a moment being intent on learning everything I could.

  The pilot, Patrick, indicated that I should put on the combined set of earphones and mouthpiece which was hanging over the semicircular wheel. I slid it on to my head, and through it he began to explain to me what all the switches and dials were for. He was the first pilot I’d flown with on Yardman’s trips who had taken such trouble, and I listened and nodded and felt grateful, and didn’t tell him I knew already most of what he was saying.

  Patrick was a big striking looking man of about thirty, with straight dark auburn hair cut a bit theatrically in duck tails, and light amber eyes like a cat. His mouth turned naturally up at the corners so that even in repose he seemed to be smiling, as if everything in the world was delightful, with no evil to be found anywhere. Nor, I later proved, did the implication of that curve lie: he persisted in believing the best of everybody, even with villainy staring him in the face. He had the illogical faith in human goodness of a probation officer, though in that first half-hour all I learned about him was that he was a gentle, careful, self-assured and eminently safe pilot.

  He tuned in to the frequency of the radio beacon at Dieppe, explaining it to me as he went, and took a weather report there before turning on to the course to Paris.

  ‘We’ll go down to the Med and fly along the coast,’ he said. ‘There’s too much cloud over the Alps to go straight across. Not being pressurised we ought not to go above ten thousand feet but fourteen thousand or so doesn’t hurt unless you’ve got a bad heart. Even that doesn’t give us enough in hand over the Alps in the present conditions, so I’m going the long way round.’

  I nodded, thoroughly approving.

  He checked the de-icing equipment for a second time in ten minutes and said, ‘This bird won’t fly with more than a quarter of a ton of ice on her, and the de-icers were U.S. last week.’ He grinned. ‘It’s O.K., I’ve checked them six times since they were repaired, they’re doing all right.’

  He peeled and ate one of a large bunch of bananas lying on the ledge over the instrument panel, then calmly unhinged the window beside him a few inches and threw the skin out. I laughed to myself in appreciation and began to like Patrick a good deal.

  The co-pilot returned to claim his place, and I went back to the horses for the rest of the journey. Uneventfully we went down across France to Dijon, turned south down the Rhone valley, east at Saint Tropez, and north again at Albenga, landing at Malpensa Airport, Milan, in exactly four hours from Gatwick.

  Italy was cold. Shivering as the open doors let in air thirty degrees below the cabin temperature we watched about ten airport men in royal blue battle dress push the wide top-class ramp into position, and waited while three customs men made their way over from the building. They came up the ramp, and the eldest of them said something in his own language.

  ‘Non parlo italiano,’ I said apologetically, which useful sentence was all I knew.

  ‘Non importa,’ he said. He took from me the mares’ temporary import permits which had been made out in both English and Italian, and his two assistants began going from horse to horse calling out their descriptions.

  All was in order. He gave me back the papers with a courteous nod of the head, and led his shadows away down the ramp. Again we went thro
ugh the familiar routine of transferring the cargo from the plane to the waiting horse boxes, Conker making a great fuss of the mare going to Molvedo.

  With an hour to spare before we set about loading another cargo of mares bound in the opposite direction for the same reason, Conker, Timmie and I walked across a quarter of a mile of tarmac to the airport building to have lunch. We were met at the door by Patrick, looking very official with gold-braided shoulder tabs on his navy uniform jacket, and wearing an expression of resignation.

  ‘We can’t go back today,’ he said, ‘so you chaps don’t need to hurry over your beer.’

  ‘What’s up, then?’ asked Timmie, sniffing loudly.

  ‘A blizzard. Came down like a burst eiderdown in a wind tunnel after we left this morning. It’s raging all over the south and halfway across the channel, and snowing clear up to John o’ Groats. The bottom’s dropped out of the barometer and … well, anyway, my instructions are not to go back.’

  ‘All that pasta,’ said Conker philosophically. ‘It does my tripes no good.’

  He and Timmie went off to the snack bar and Patrick showed me the telegraph office to send ‘no go’ messages to Yardman and the expectant studs. After that we went back to the aircraft, where he collected his overnight bag and I turned homewards the arriving convoy of Italian mares. He waited for me to finish and helped me shut the big double doors from inside at the top of the ramp, and we walked forward across the flattened dismantled boxes, through the galley, and down the staircase which had been wheeled up to the door just behind the cockpit.