‘Sila,’ the foreman said, shaking his head. ‘My wife says the Malay word for please is sila.’
Ross turned to the men and pressed his palms together, like we’d seen the Malays do earlier that day. ‘Sila!’ he said. He pointed to the steel shafting in the lathe and to the wing badge sewn onto his chest, and then he held out his arms like he was flying. ‘Sila.’
I stepped forward and pressed my palms together in front of my chest. ‘Sila.’
‘Sila,’ said Keith, nodding.
Benny stepped forward. ‘Sila,’ he said. ‘Sila, I bloody beg you.’
The workers stared at the ground. The foreman grunted. ‘Told ya.’
Then the man who’d been caned said something in Malay and the four of them returned to their positions around the pulley-wheel, grunting with the effort of getting it turning again.
The foreman started cursing and threatening and ordering them to push harder.
‘Thank you, my good man,’ said Ross, clapping the foreman’s shoulder. ‘You have been singularly helpful. Now, why don’t we let these chaps do their jobs while you show me around this fascinating mill of yours.’
A dozen Malays sweated in relays for five hours until we finally had a piece of steel resembling the tail-skid. We walked out into the night not long before midnight, calling ‘Thank you, thank you.’ The bloke who’d been caned stood silhouetted in the doorway of the mill and put his arms out to fly like Ross had done, then shouted out in Malay as he pressed his palms together in front of his chest. Ross put his arms out like he was flying, too, then he raised his hands to the heavens to thank his own God.
I was desperate to go to bed and close my eye, but on the buggy ride back to the aerodrome, the monsoon we’d flown through earlier that day caught up with us again. All four of us spent the night huddled under the wings of the plane, soaked through as 10 inches of rain fell in a few hours, holding her down during the worst of the squalls.
I kept myself awake by saying ‘never again’. Must have said it 10,000 times.
SINGAPORE, DECEMBER 5TH 1919
‘Listen to this, Ross.’ Benny was lying on top of his cream floral bedspread, in freshly pressed army shorts and socks, in our twin room of the Europe Hotel in Singapore. The top half of his body was hidden behind a pressed copy of the Straits Times, and he was reading aloud in a British colonial accent. ‘Ladies may be interested to know that Captain Ross Smith is 26 and unmarried. It has been remarked that he bears a striking resemblance to Major Norman Black, MC.’
Ross groaned, sinking further into his armchair and checking the bottom of his boots before propping them up on my bed. ‘Newsmen do write the most awful balls, don’t they?’
I looked up from my diary. ‘Who’s Norman Black?’
Benny spoke from behind the paper, still assuming his accent. ‘A fine specimen of a chap, I’d wager.’
‘I’m 27, for one thing,’ said Ross, loosening his tie and unbuttoning his collar. ‘Although, granted, only by one day.’
He’d turned 27 in Singora. Keith said his birthday gift was 200 convicts arriving from the local gaol to dig out the stumps on the aerodrome.
I was sitting on the other twin bed with my back against the wall, rolling my ankles over the side of the mattress and enjoying the feeling of clean, dry socks on my feet. Benny and I had been chauffeured from the Singapore Racecourse to the Europe Hotel the evening before, and our first order of business had been to hand over our sodden, stinking kit bags. Leaning over to the window, I pulled back the lace curtain and looked across the alley to a red brick wall dotted with tiny windows. A woman stared down from one of them, dabbing her forehead as she watched the scene in the street below. She must have seen me from the corner of her eye, because she looked across and smiled the smallest of smiles before stepping back and away.
I let the curtain drop and sat back, frowning down at the blank page of my diary. A hawker yelled, and I could hear the squeaking wheels of his cart.
Ross reached out and whacked Benny’s foot. ‘What else does it say?’
Benny folded the paper and handed it to Ross. ‘All the usual. Dreadful flying weather. Marvellous welcome. Couldn’t have done it without my trusty mechanics. Yes, yes. What, what.’
‘Ha!’ Ross shot him a look. ‘Am I that repetitive?’
‘Well,’ said Benny, lying back on the pillow with his hands tucked behind his head, ‘there’s not a lot else to say, is there? Unless you want to mention that bastard whipping his workers in Singora.’
Ross frowned and shook his head as he began rifling through the paper. ‘Coolies and convicts—lifeblood of the British Empire.’
Benny grunted in agreement, and turned his head to look at me. ‘Short, swarthy bloke like you’d have some convict blood, wouldn’t ya, Wal?’
I blinked, a bit surprised at the question. Wasn’t something polite people asked. Then I smiled, thinking about Mum proudly retelling the Shiers story on special occasions like we had royal blood. ‘I don’t know how much is true, but Mum used to tell us the first Shiers to arrive in Australia was a convict transported to Van Diemen’s Land.’
‘Really?’ said Ross, raising his eyebrows.
‘Knew it!’ Benny pointed at finger at me. ‘I’ve got a knack for guessing convict blood.’
‘That’s not the best bit,’ I said, pausing to add some drama. I could see why Mum liked telling this story. ‘Old man Shiers was one of a dozen convicts to escape Van Diemen’s Land in a small stolen ship. He got all the way to Chile before he was caught.’
‘You’re just making this up now!’ Benny waved a dismissive hand.
‘No, it’s true,’ I said. ‘Well, Mum always said it was true. They were taken back and charged with piracy, but the judge let them off on some technicality, and they only served a few more years. That’s how old man Shiers managed to get to South Australia after it was settled.’
‘That is a fine story, Wal,’ said Ross. ‘My father emigrated from Scotland, and mother had Scottish parents too—rather dull, now, in comparison. How about you, Benny?’
‘Yeah, same,’ said Benny. ‘Granddad McKendrick emigrated from Scotland to South Australia—had a big shipbuilding yard out there.’
We were all quiet for a while, then. I thought about old man Shiers crossing a huge ocean in that tiny ship, probably running out of food and water. Made my own journey seem easy.
Ross started rifling through the paper again. ‘Any word in here on Matthews or Rendle?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about Matthews.’ He and Tom Kay were likely still snowbound in Germany, unless they’d got desperate and tried to fly in that foul European winter and crashed somewhere over the Alps. He’d made a poor choice, heading to Cologne from Hounslow.
In the top right-hand corner of my blank page, I drew a square, and then carefully shaded inside the lines. ‘It mentions Poulet,’ I said. ‘He’s been forced back to Rangoon twice. Been having all kinds of trouble. Sounds like Val Rendle and Hubert Wilkins are the only ones who might stop us from being first to Darwin now.’
‘Yeah,’ said Benny. ‘Just Rendle and Wilkins and 2,500 miles of jungle and ocean.’
A telegram had been waiting for Ross in Singapore, to say Rendle and Wilkins had departed Hounslow on November 21st, and Rome on December 1st. As expected, the Blackburn Kangaroo was making sure and steady progress across Europe, but there was no way they could catch us unless we crashed or were delayed. Ross was more worried about meeting the 30-day deadline than staking our claim to the prize money.
We had seven days to get to Darwin. We’d stayed an extra night in Singapore to rest up and give me and Benny a solid day on the engines. We’d been working on the Vimy at the racecourse all day, in 95-degree heat and the sort of humidity I’d never experienced. This couple of hours at the hotel was like a holiday.
Ross leaned his head back on the armchair and closed his eyes. ‘You blokes don’t know how lucky you are, hiding away in here. You should see how many p
eople are hanging around at the house where we’re staying. I’ve left Keith playing croquet with the Colonial Secretary’s wife.’
Benny snorted.
Ross stared up at the ceiling. ‘Everyone’s always so bloody accommodating. It’s exhausting.’
He didn’t sound like the decorated airman Captain Ross Smith. He sounded like me.
I looked at Benny, expecting him to be as shocked as I was. He didn’t move. He didn’t even open his eyes. ‘I know,’ he said, in the same flat tone he’d used with me in the workshop at Bangkok.
And then I realised Benny wasn’t judging anyone. He understood, because he felt the same way.
‘Me too,’ I said, admiring the neat little square on my blank page.
Ross sighed and closed his eyes. ‘There’s a bloody ball in our honour tonight. Hunkered down in a monsoon one night. Drinking champagne under chandeliers the next.’
Out in the hotel hallway I heard a man and woman talking softly, and then a door opening and closing sharply.
Ross’s mouth sagged open and he started snoring, loud like a motorbike engine. From this angle I could see how much weight he’d lost. His face was gaunt and his lips were chapped and sore. He looked 90.
I chewed the end of my pencil for a minute and wrote ‘Love you I do’ before closing the diary and resting it quietly on the bed beside me. I gently touched my puffy eye. After a cool bath it was feeling better.
SURABAYA, DECEMBER 7TH 1919
We flew into Surabaya at noon on a sweltering December day. By Ross’s reckoning, we only had two more stops before Darwin, so close you could almost smell the eucalypts. For two days the weather had been glorious as we flew along the east coast of Sumatra and began hopping across a chain of turquoise-rimmed islands leading us east and home. Benny was so happy he’d sometimes stand in the cockpit and do a little jig.
From the air, the Surabaya aerodrome looked perfect—a half-decent stretch of flat, firm ground, clear of stumps and not so much as a puddle in sight. But the second the Vimy rolled to a stop, her four wheels dropped through a thick layer of crust and sank to the axles in mud.
It was land reclaimed from the sea, and for half a mile in all directions, liquid black sludge sat just below the surface.
After six hours in the boiling tropical sun, with help from 200 villagers and Dutch soldiers, we’d managed to haul the plane onto a little platform of bamboo matting at the end of the aerodrome. Ross knew there was no way he could take off. The wheels would sink the second we left the matting.
It was a lousy feeling, stuck in the mud just 1,200 miles from Darwin. A Dutch engineer from the Harbour Board suggested bringing in soil to lay a roadway, but that would take days, weeks maybe, and we only had four of our 30 days left. As the sun dropped in the sky, Ross said he’d sleep on the idea, and sent everyone home.
Working by the light of lamps from the engineer’s motor car, he and Keith started refilling the tanks with petrol and oil while me and Benny checked the engines. Then the four of us turned our attention to the two tyres punctured by long nails in the matting, and realised we should have attended to them first, before refilling the tanks and adding the weight of hundreds of gallons of petrol. Just as we got one wheel jacked up, the ground sank underneath the Vimy’s six-ton weight and the jack broke. So we dug her out and borrowed a jack from our new friend’s motor car. The ground broke underneath us again and the Vimy sank to its axles, breaking that jack, too.
‘To hell with this!’ Keith was kneeling beside the wheel, thigh-deep in stinking mud.
‘No more,’ agreed Ross, flicking black sludge as he threw up his hands. ‘If I spend one more minute on this aircraft tonight, I’ll torch the damned thing.’
Benny and I set up a campfire by some nearby warehouses to ward off the bugs, and kept an ear out for anyone going near the Vimy. She was somewhere just out there in the blackness, forlorn and flat bellied. The engineer gave Ross and Keith a lift into town, to send a telegram ahead and share a meal with local dignitaries.
We were resting back on our kit bags, having a smoke after finishing the last of the bully beef in our emergency kit, when Ross and Keith turned up. The engineer had lent them his car.
Ross handed Benny a small bottle of scotch as he sat down and peered out into the darkness. ‘If this is the day our race ends,’ he said, ‘this is where I want to be.’
We all sat silently for a while, watching the flickering fire.
Benny lit a smoke. ‘What are we gonna do?’
‘Dunno,’ said Ross, biting a twig between his teeth.
‘We’ll think of something tomorrow,’ said Keith.
‘Always do,’ I said, nodding into the flames.
‘I dunno,’ said Ross, shaking his head. ‘Can’t see a way out of this one. Not in four days.’
I walked over to our small pile of kindling and placed a few sticks on the fire. It crackled and sent out sparks. The smell of smoke took me back to Egypt, sitting around the fire with Westy and the lads. ‘Maybe the mud will dry out in a few days?’ I asked, settling back down.
‘We don’t have a few days,’ said Ross.
‘Besides,’ said Keith. ‘It’s wet season—we’re likely to be hit with more rain, not less.’
‘Ever the optimist, eh Keith?’ said Ross, shaking his head.
Keith frowned. ‘You said it yourself in town, half-hour ago.’
‘I know, Buck. Sorry.’ Ross picked up another twig, cracked it in two. ‘We could still be sitting here in another fortnight, watching Rendle and Wilkins fly right over us.’
We all stared at the fire. I thought about how close we were. How far.
‘Fuck,’ said Ross. ‘I should have pushed her harder. Gone the extra 400 miles to Bima.’
‘That’s my fault,’ I said, not taking my eyes off the flames. I’d been pretty forceful in persuading Ross to make smaller flights, now that the engines had been running so long without a total overhaul. I wouldn’t have suggested landing in Surabaya if I’d known the condition of the aerodrome.
‘Bullshit, Wal,’ said Benny. ‘We both warned against long flights for this last bit. She’s not up to it.’ He opened the scotch bottle, had a swig and offered it to Ross.
‘Thanks.’ Ross said, taking his own swig and handing it to me. ‘Bloody hell, Wal, I was so close to getting you home to your girl for Christmas.’
I coughed as the scotch burned my throat. ‘Yeah,’ I said, studying the label to avoid his eye. ‘Ah, well.’
‘You still haven’t told him?’ Benny was resting his elbows on his kit bag. I frowned at him and he stared back, eyebrows raised.
‘Told me what?’ asked Ross.
‘Helena,’ said Benny. ‘She dumped him at the end of the war.’
‘What?’ Ross looked from Benny to me.
‘Ahhh,’ I said, my face burning. ‘Nothing, it’s, y’know …’
I handed Keith the bottle and he took a long swig, stared right through me in that way of his. ‘Ross said you’d been together for years.’
‘I thought you were engaged,’ said Ross.
I was silent for a moment. ‘I got a letter from her at Cheveney.’
Ross rifled through his pockets and got out a cigarette. ‘You should have told me, Wal.’ He took a stick from the fire to light his smoke. ‘Must be hard for women back home, waiting for years on end.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, thinking that would be the last of it. I reached out my arm toward Keith. ‘Can I have another swig of that scotch?’
‘It was our fault,’ said Benny.
I rolled my eyes. ‘Leave it out, Benny, will you?’
‘How was it our fault?’ asked Keith, looking at Ross.
‘Wal promised her he’d be home as soon as the war ended,’ said Benny. ‘She’d booked the church and everything. But by then me and Ross had talked Wal into flying to India. And then we signed up for the race.’
I picked up a handful of dirt. ‘No one talked me into anything.’ I stared at th
e fire, feeling stupid.
Somewhere nearby a frog croaked.
‘Well, Wal,’ said Ross, sitting up straight and resting his elbows on his knees. ‘I am sincerely sorry to hear that.’
‘Mmmm,’ said Keith, nodding. I felt uneasy about him hearing all this.
‘But you’re gonna get her back. Right, Wal?’ said Benny.
‘Enough.’ I pointed at him. ‘I’m warning you now, Benny.’
‘How?’ asked Ross, drawing on his cigarette.
‘Yes, how?’ asked Keith.
‘He’s …’
I glared at Benny. He was grinning.
‘ … writing her a poem.’
‘How about we just concentrate on the Vimy?’ I said, knowing that’s what Ross and Keith would be thinking too.
Ross shook his head. ‘I am sick to the back teeth of the Vimy. And this flight. And our next landing site. And fuel and oil supplies. And wondering what the fuck I’m going to do with my life if we ever get back to Australia.’ He took a pull of his cigarette. ‘What have you written so far? And hand me that bottle, would you please?’
Benny cleared his throat. ‘There was a young girl from Narrandera …’
‘Benny!’ I said. There was a silence filled with frogs.
‘Is that it?’ asked Keith, frowning. ‘A limerick?’
‘No!’ I said, my face burning with embarrassment.
‘He couldn’t think …’ Benny snorted.
‘Please, mate,’ I said, hating the whine in my voice.
‘He couldn’t think …’ He started to giggle.
‘Mate!’
‘Of a rhyming word …’ He laughed some more, ‘ … for Narrandera.’ He doubled over in the dirt.
I tried not to smile.
‘How about …’ Keith rubbed his chin, deadly serious, ‘philanderer?’
Benny roared with laughter. ‘That’s what I said!’
They were all laughing now. It was good to see Ross’s eyes crinkling at the corners again.
‘Okay, okay.’ I grinned. ‘You’ve had your fun.’ I got up and grabbed another couple of twigs for the fire.
‘So what else have you written?’ asked Ross.
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