Long Flight Home

by Lainie Anderson

  Without a word Robbie scrambled back over the gate, scooped a curly-haired toddler in his arms and ran back to the women.

  ‘Wouldn’t you have loved this as a kid?’ said Benny, leaning on the gate. ‘Swapping the city for this every summer?’

  We stood watching the hop-pickers for a bit. Scores of women were plucking light-green hop cones off long leafy vines and tossing them into hessian sacks stretched over wooden frames like bathtubs. The trailing hop plants grew over wire trellises 15-ft high, making it look like the pickers were working in long green alleyways. Towering above the other workers were men on high wooden stilts, lifting the hop vines off the wires.

  We’d heard all about the ‘hoppers’ from Mrs Borton. Tens of thousands of workers, mostly women and children, migrated from London each summer to work in the hop fields of counties like Kent. They earned good wages but they also gave their kids a couple of months away from the factory smoke and grime of the East End. Hopping work was so prized among poor families it had became known as the ‘Londoner’s holiday’.

  ‘You mind yourselves now, lads,’ the Colonel had warned us. ‘Most of these women are away from their menfolk and like to take “hop husbands”. We’ve seen farm workers get themselves in all kinds of strife when the real husbands turn up at weekends.’

  Many of the workers had babies in their arms, and tiny tackers running underfoot letting off early morning steam. Some wore colourful silk scarves to protect their hair from the sticky hop cones. It was one of the prettiest sights I’d seen in years.

  I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of the Colonel’s old hunting jacket and brought out a penny. Maybe it was my lucky day.

  ‘Let’s not dillydally, chaps,’ called the Colonel as he strode off down the lane. ‘Wilson’s waiting near the top woodland with the guns. And pheasants wait for no man.’

  Benny lengthened his stride to catch up. He still looked odd in civvies. We all did. I’d borrowed a hunting jacket and rubber boots from the Cheveney mud room. Underneath I wore a new wool suit and striped blue shirt tailored for a few quid in India. I’d bought my Herringbone flat cap on sale in Maidstone a few days earlier. Mrs Borton said it looked rather snappy.

  ‘Wal, mate,’ said Ross. I don’t think he’d ever called me mate. ‘I need a quick word while we’ve got a minute.’

  ‘Sure, Ross,’ I said. We were walking past the Colonel’s brick hop kilns, their conical roofs pointing to the sky.

  ‘I just want to warn you that Biffy’s luncheon up in London today is the last roll of the dice.’

  I nodded.

  It was the end of September, two weeks since Benny’s scrap in the Chevrons Club, and we still had no plane. After Vickers rebuffed Ross, Biffy had launched a counter-offensive. He’d scheduled a formal luncheon with Vickers company chiefs, including Brigadier-General Caddell, who’d returned to civilian life after serving alongside Biffy in Egypt. Then Biffy brought in the heavy artillery: Major-General Salmond, who was back briefly in Britain from Cairo. Salmond was by then one of the most powerful figures in the newly formed Royal Air Force, and only too willing to expound on the pioneering flight he made from Cairo to Delhi with one Ross Smith. To Biffy’s way of thinking, taking Major-General Salmond along to the luncheon was the ideal way to enlighten Vickers on Ross’s credentials as a long-distance pilot, and persuade them to loan us an aircraft.

  Ross chewed his lip. ‘If Biffy doesn’t come through, Wal, I might be forced to go with a smaller aircraft.’

  There it was. It had crossed my mind too, this last fortnight. I just hadn’t let myself dwell on it. Race competitors Cedric Howell and George Matthews had both assembled lean, two-man teams. One pilot, one mechanic who also acted as navigator. Ross would too, if it came to that. And if it came to that, I was out.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Ross,’ I said, managing a smile. ‘I understand. I thought it was odd that you hadn’t appointed a navigator. No point, is there, if you’re down to two men?’

  ‘It’s not my preferred option, Wal,’ he said. ‘You’re a damn fine air mechanic. But Benny’s been with me from my first day in the Flying Corps, you know? He’s like family—my bloody mother even sends him Christmas presents.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s okay.’

  ‘But if the worst does happen, we’ll get you on the first ship back to that girl of yours. You’ll probably beat us home—be a newlywed for New Year’s!’

  I tried to force out a laugh. ‘Maybe.’

  Facing the prospect of not making it into the race, I was too ashamed to tell him Helena had broken it off. Besides, he didn’t really need to know.

  Women started singing in the field, the children chiming in with their small voices.

  Oh, they say hopping’s lousy

  I don’t believe it’s true

  We only go down hopping

  To earn a bob or two.

  I plucked a leaf from the hedgerow and tore carefully down the veins as we walked. Lucky penny, my arse. Then I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders. Buggered if I wasn’t going to enjoy the Colonel’s shoot. He’d been talking about it all week—his way of thanking me and Benny for overhauling his cars and fixing the electricity plant that powered Cheveney.

  ‘Do you ever miss Australia, Ross?’

  ‘I miss Mutooroo—Dad’s sheep station,’ he said, pulling out his cigarettes and offering me one. ‘There’s something about the Australian bush that binds you to it.’

  Ross stopped to light our smokes. ‘My brothers and I used to head out on our own, hunting kangaroos and rabbits. Colin was too young to chase down roos but Dad gave him a penny for every rabbit scalp. We’d hide in the scrub and whisper while we waited for something to move. I miss that.’

  He drew on his cigarette and we walked in silence for a while, listening to birds twittering in the hedgerows. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘all through the war I couldn’t wait to get home to Mutooroo. Now part of me’s dreading it. I reckon that’s where it will hit me that Colin’s really gone.’

  I thought about my brother Bill, buried at Pozières. Then I pictured us as kids, all tucked into our one bed with him going crazy if any of us touched his feet. So of course we always did, just to set him off. ‘Do you have any sisters, Ross?’

  ‘Just one,’ he said. ‘Janet. She only lived a month, died before the rest of us were born. How about you?’

  I nodded. ‘Plenty. Mum was Irish.’ I liked making Ross smile. His mouth went a bit lopsided and his eyes crinkled.

  We’d caught up to the others by then, waiting for us at a gate. ‘Colonel,’ Ross called, ‘did I tell you my dad’s sheep farm is three thousand square miles?’

  ‘Good God, man,’ the Colonel spluttered. ‘That’s not a farm, it’s a bloody country!’

  The shooting party bagged a dozen pheasants before noon. I’d never been a bad shot. My brother Jack taught me when I was a nipper, shooting tins with Dad’s .22 down on the flats of the Torrens. But when it came to fixing one of those cheery pheasants in my sights, I didn’t have the heart for it. Not after the last four years. I was happier to help with beating to drive them out. At lunchtime, Mrs Borton arrived with a picnic basket and set out dishes on blankets under an oak tree. We ate Scotch eggs and sausage rolls and drank strong tea, and the Colonel told us how, during the war, they could hear the shells exploding on the Western Front from here.

  On the walk home to Cheveney later that afternoon, we passed the hop-pickers enjoying the sunshine outside a row of old tin sheds. A group of women sat by a campfire, chatting while toddlers slept in their arms. The air was rich with the smell of wood smoke and vegetable stew. A little kid ran up the lane and fell against his mother, bawling his eyes out and saying something about being called a ‘bug crusher’ by the local kids. His mum put an arm around his shoulder and kissed his nose, whispered in his ear. My mum used to do that. One day—I must have been about six—I was bawling about being called Wally Wingnut again by the other kids at school, and she
whispered in my ear: ‘They’re teasing you about what’s on the outside because they don’t know what’s on the inside yet. You keep being my kind little man, and you’ll be just fine.’

  The Colonel waved his cane toward the ramshackle buildings. ‘You know, they all move into exactly the same sheds every year,’ he said. ‘And they do so in exactly the same order as their terraces in East London. Curious creatures.’

  At Cheveney, we took ourselves around the back to the mud room, with its whitewashed walls and low wooden bench opposite a long row of hanging coats and scarves and winter caps. Me and Ross and Benny were sitting on the bench, pulling off our boots and talking about the shoot, when Mrs Borton poked her head around the door. ‘Ross,’ she said, ‘Biffy has asked that you call him at his club.’

  Ross took a deep breath, arranged his gumboots neatly under the bench and walked through the door.

  Benny and I sat there, neither of us wanting to move. I pulled the penny out of my pocket. ‘Heads or tails?’

  ‘Tails never fails,’ said Benny.

  I flicked the coin into the air and slapped it down onto the back of my hand. I groaned. ‘Heads.’

  Benny leaned back against the stone wall, closed his eyes and folded his arms over his chest. I didn’t ask if he and Ross had discussed getting a smaller aircraft. I didn’t want to know.

  A clock chimed five in the hall, and a tractor returned to the sheds outside. Banshee and Marmaduke ran into the mud room, a snuffling, tumbling ball of soft black fur. I ordered them to sit, and kept them still by tickling them each behind an ear.

  Finally, Ross walked through the door. ‘You blokes got any plans for tomorrow?’

  We shook our heads. I held my breath.

  ‘Good, because there’s a Vickers Vimy sitting idle at Weybridge, and she can’t wait to meet you.’

  Chapter 13

  ADELAIDE, 1968

  ‘Gee, Wal,’ says Delvene from behind the bar, ‘that hop-picking sounds lovely.’ The pub’s emptied out, so Delvene’s enjoying a shandy and listening in. One of the young lads asks me to rest up a bit while he goes to the dunny, so I sip my beer and chat to a couple of RSL mates along the bar. ‘Y’know, there were only 500 aircraft in service when the Great War broke out,’ says one. ‘By the end, France and Britain were building 30,000 every month.’ Delvene chips in: ‘And women built lots of them!’ My word they did. I smooth down the bar mat with a wrinkled hand. ‘Yep, that war changed everything.’ It changed how men killed. It changed how men looked at women. It changed how women looked at everything.

  LONDON, OCTOBER 1919

  I couldn’t help but compare her, and she didn’t stack up. Too plain. Too stubby-nosed. Too thin around the middle. She looked like the slightest nudge might snap her in two. My first instinct was to turn and walk away.

  ‘My God, Benny,’ I said. ‘Not her.’

  He folded his arms and scuffed the cement floor with his boot. ‘Well, mate, it’s not like there’s a whole lot of choice.’

  ‘But fancy trying to fly this to Australia,’ I said. ‘She’d never last half the journey.’

  ‘Well, okay,’ he said. ‘But you’re going to have to tell Mr Mountain Man over there.’

  My God, Rex Pierson was huge. I could see him deep in conversation with Ross on the other side of the fuselage, and he had to be nearly seven foot. His thumbnails were the size of pennies and he had a voice like a foghorn. Pierson was the chief designer of Vickers Aviation and had just been awarded an MBE for his service to Britain during the war. He was also our ticket to Australia.

  I forced myself to look again at the Vickers Vimy biplane.

  She was apparently the most advanced bomber in the world. So maybe it was just the time and place. It was Sunday afternoon and we were alone in a vast industrial shed the size of an English football pitch, with raked ceilings made of iron and glass soaring 30 ft overhead. Shoved into a corner was our aircraft, looking forlorn and forgotten. In fact the whole place seemed redundant, with only a few other aircraft bodies in varying stages of construction.

  The Vickers Vimy came too late for war. She’d been designed as a heavy bomber, for either anti-submarine duties or for night-bombing raids on German cities in retaliation for the bombs that killed 1,500 Brits on home soil. But the Armistice was signed as she was coming off the production line, and contracts had dwindled from a thousand planes to just a hundred. Then three months earlier, Alcock and Brown flew a Vimy into the record books across the Atlantic, and suddenly everyone had heard of them. Even so, I wasn’t convinced.

  I ran my hand across her under-wing, feeling the knots of the threads holding in place the linen, which was coated in a plasticised lacquer, or dope, that hardened over the fabric.

  ‘She’s not pretty, is she,’ Benny said quietly.

  ‘Nope,’ I said, shaking my head and hoping our voices weren’t carrying to Mr Pierson and Ross.

  The Vimy had none of the dashing good looks of our old Handley Page. Her fuselage was a crate 40-ft long, tapering from her strange pulpit-like nose to her twin-winged tail. There were three open cockpits: one in the nose where a gunner would have stood; a second directly behind for the pilot; and a third about 12 ft further again where mid-section guns were once mounted. Both the over-wing and under-wing were 68 ft, much less impressive than the 100 ft wingspan of the Handley Page. The only thing going for her were the twin Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines, supported by thick vertical struts either side of the pilot’s cockpit. Each was fitted with a 10 ft, four-blade wooden propeller.

  ‘She looks like a bathtub with wings,’ Benny said.

  ‘More like a casket,’ I muttered.

  We stood for a while, hands on hips. ‘Okay,’ I said finally, taking a deep breath. ‘No point worrying about things we can’t change. How can we modify this bus so it doesn’t kill us?’

  Four hours later we had pages and pages of scribbles. By then Ross was sitting in Mr Pierson’s office at the back of the shed, discussing logistics for the race.

  ‘So what do you think, men?’ he asked, rubbing his hands together. He looked ready to jump in the cockpit and leave today. ‘Isn’t she a beauty?’

  Benny’s eyes widened. ‘Um, we’ve got a few minor modifications, Ross. Can we have a quiet word?’

  Mr Pierson waved us into empty seats. ‘Please take your time, gentlemen,’ he said, as he shut the door on his way out.

  Without saying a word, I handed Ross my notepad. He read the first page and stopped. ‘You want to strip the entire plane back to its frame?’ he said. ‘The wings and the tail fuselage—stripped right back?’

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ I said, glancing at Benny. ‘And we want to replace all the tacks with screws.’

  Ross pointed the notebook angrily at me. ‘The Vimy is a new, superior aircraft—and you want me to tell Rex Pierson to start again? This is absurd.’

  ‘Ross,’ Benny said, ‘she’s been designed to make a few flights to Germany and then come home for an overhaul. We need to get her into the air every day for 30 days. And in some places she’ll be lucky to get an oil change.’

  ‘All the vibration, all those changes in temperature,’ I said. ‘She won’t make it.’

  Ross tossed the notepad onto the desk and sat fuming.

  ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘There’s no point going through the rest of that list until we ask Rex if he’ll strip his machine for us. And whether he can get it done before bloody Poulet’s eating Christmas dinner with the prime minister in Melbourne.’ He ran a hand through his hair before snatching up the notebook. ‘Wait here.’

  Benny pulled a face like a guilty kid, and I waved him to stop in case we started laughing. I looked around the office. Aircraft manuals were arranged in bookcases and a blueprint was spread over a drawing table. The desk was almost empty except for pad of paper, a pen, four pencils and a maidenhair fern.

  ‘Right gentlemen,’ Mr Pierson boomed as he returned to the room. ‘Ross tells me you’d like the Vimy stripped.’


  I coughed. ‘Would that be possible, Mr Pierson?’

  ‘Call me Rex,’ he said. ‘My father’s Mr Pierson. He’s a rector up in Norfolk, and a rector I most certainly am not. We can strip the plane. It’s a fine idea, given the journey you’re about to undertake. How many women do you want?’

  Benny frowned. ‘Women?’

  ‘Men still do the specialist mechanical work, of course, but we had 25 girls dedicated to the build of each and every machine,’ Rex said. He looked at our blank faces. ‘Shortage of men during the war! You can have as many girls as you’d like.’

  Benny looked at me and raised an eyebrow. ‘Will 25 women do you, Wal?’

  It was seven o’clock in the morning, right on dawn, crisp and clear. We were running laps of the Brooklands motor-racing circuit, and I could see Ross out in front on the wide cement track. He was always out in front.

  Hundreds of starlings were singing in huge pines down one side of the circuit. Their whistles and trills made me feel I could take on the world. I couldn’t wait to tell my brother Jack I’d tested the circuit at Brooklands. He’d laugh that I’d done it on two legs instead of on four wheels. I could almost hear him: ‘Trust you to do things arse-about!’

  As young blokes, we’d read about motoring and aviation records being broken at Brooklands. The circuit had opened in 1907 to test British cars at a time when the French were winning all the laurels. Aviation and motor manufacturing companies had sprung up around the track, and one of those companies was Vickers. The huge Vickers Sheds with their rolling doors opened right onto the famous Railway Straight.

  Then 1914 came along and all manufacturing at Brooklands was requisitioned by the war office. By the end of 1918, the race track, 100-ft wide with huge banked turns, was in a sorry state after being used as a thoroughfare for heavy defence vehicles.

  Car racing was due to start again in early 1920, and labourers were busy with repairs. Part of me was sorry we were going to miss it.