Boom.
Boom.
Every second an eternity.
Then she stepped into view, looking tiny behind her huge bouquet of garden flowers, and delighted with herself behind her pink veil. God, she was lovely.
She’d had to borrow it all, bless her. The white velvet wedding dress adorned with little pearls. The teeny white pointy shoes. The light-pink veil that flowed into a train sweeping along behind her on the lawn. She’d given up the chance to wear the gown she’d sewn so we could be married today and have a few days in the Blue Mountains before I flew south to Melbourne. She’d given it up for me.
And there was Freddy Houdini, walking beside her in uniform, with his crook arm and weary soul. Dear old Fred. He gave me a nice big smile and a wink, too, and I wanted to walk forward and hug them both, to say how proud I was, to take away some of the sadness of losing their mum. They’d buried her the day I was in Delhi, dealing with those silly Fairweathers.
When Helena was at my side, Benny and the blokes came in behind us and everyone pressed in. I could feel them all at my back. Waiting. Wanting.
Photographers jostled for position, urging everyone to move in closer. A bit closer. A little more. I was hot in my uniform. My collar was too tight.
Then Helena tucked her hand into my arm, and looked up and whispered, ‘Hello, Wally Shy-ers.’
I noticed her tiara was made of orange blossom. As I leaned in closer, the scent washed over me. ‘Hello, my orange blossom girl,’ I whispered.
Captain Chaplin Wilson started the ceremony and I stood there in a happy daze. Helena on my left. Ross on my right. My best man. The best of men.
The padre mentioned something about true love standing the test of time and distance, and then Benny piped up, ‘Yes, about 11,000 miles!’
Before I knew it, the padre pronounced us man and wife. ‘And may I suggest,’ he said, glancing around at the crush of men in uniform, ‘that you get in quick to secure the first kiss.’
And then it happened—quick as a flash.
Sir Ross leaned over and kissed my new wife.
Heroes roared and cameras clicked.
His mother gasped—‘Ross Macpherson Smith!’—like he was a little boy in big trouble.
Then Helena had her tiny hand behind my head, pulling me into her huge blue eyes, and we were kissing and laughing and everyone was cheering and I was home.
Postscript:
What Happened Next
ADELAIDE, 1968
Every story has an ending. Some have two or three. I dig in my pocket for my old blue hanky, and remove my glasses to dab the moisture from my eyes. I sip the last of my scotch, enjoying the heat in the back of my throat, and picture Helena all shy smiles and secret curves in our swanky hotel room at the Jenolan Caves, where we spent four nights after the wedding. I catch Delvene’s eye and stretch out my arm for a refill, giving thanks to that young Dunstan chap for bringing in 10 pm closing and giving a bloke time to tell a decent tale. Then I square my shoulders. And it only takes a moment for the questions to roll in like the tide on Bondi Beach.
‘So what happened then, Wal?’
‘Where’s Benny now? And Ross? And Keith?’
‘Did Poulet make it?’
‘Who else got home?’
So I start at the beginning of the end …
How we flew into Melbourne and got the cheque from the Prime Minister, Billy Hughes. How Ross handed him the keys to the Vimy, as he’d been instructed to do, and then caused a controversy by asking for them straight back so we could fly across to Adelaide. There was no way Ross wasn’t flying all the way home.
We landed north-east of the Adelaide city centre on March 23rd 1920. I told some young bloke to get his hands off the plane before I realised he was my younger brother Arthur, all grown up. Jeez we polished off some Southwark bitter that night. Benny said he’d never seen a family drink like the Shiers mob.
Ross and Keith took us into Elder House in Currie Street to split the prize money into quarters, like they’d promised. For the next few months I made a few bob speaking at country shows and the like, too. Ross even did some talks in England, met King George and Prince Albert. He was as famous as any movie star but he didn’t like it much. He was dying to get back in the air and away.
But it was a big story, for a while at least.
Only one other crew made it home. That was Ray Parer and John McIntosh in their Airco DH9 PD. They didn’t leave England until a month after we landed in Darwin, but they wanted to do it anyway and set out on a journey that took them nearly seven months. We got to calling Ray Parer the ‘Repairer’, on account of how many times he needed to fix the old Dung Hunter during the flight.
Poor old Matthews and Kay did eventually escape the snow in Germany, but they were forced to land the Wallaby on a pig farm in Yugoslavia and ended up imprisoned for four days, suspected of being militant Bolsheviks. They made a break for freedom while their guards were sleeping off a night of heavy drinking, and took off in a blaze of bullets. They overcame sandstorms, survived dengue fever and spent weeks fashioning their own spare parts, only to crash out in Bali, just a day away from Australia. Poor bastards.
Hubert Wilkins, Val Rendle, David Williams and Garnsey Potts crashed out, too, with their Blackburn Kangaroo coming to rest in a ditch near a lunatic asylum on the island of Crete. They were keen to carry on despite major damage to one of their Rolls-Royce engines, but we’d already made it to Australia by then, so Blackburn pulled the pin. They were a good bunch of blokes. I was sorry for them.
Cedric Howell and George Fraser crashed and died off the island of Corfu. People reported hearing their cries for help but the seas were too rough to send out a search boat that night. Howell’s new wife was travelling home by sea at the time. They didn’t have the heart to tell her until the ship docked in Adelaide. Howell’s grieving dad campaigned for a long time that he’d met with foul play on Corfu, and even released a pamphlet accusing Ross of rigging the race to his advantage. Ross demanded a public trial to clear his name, but Dicky Williams—our CO at No. 1 Squadron who was later sent to London to oversee the air race—wrote a long rebuttal on the integrity of the process and that ended the matter.
There were two inquiries into how Roger ‘Dodger’ Douglas and Leslie Ross crashed to their deaths just six minutes after leaving Hounslow. Mabel Woolley, Douglas’s fiancée, caused a stir in the press by claiming the Alliance Endeavour had been badly damaged two weeks earlier and hadn’t been properly tested. Others blamed the enclosed cockpit—reckoned it might have impaired Dodger’s vision—and in the end the crash was called an accident.
So six Australian crews left England. Two crews died. Two more crashed out. Only us and the Repairer made it home. His plane’s in the Australian War Memorial. They took our Vimy for a while too, until the place got too full after World War II and they mothballed it because no Vimy actually flew in active service in the Great War. We were ropable when we heard about that—had the plane moved to Adelaide. She’s still sitting pretty as a picture out at the airport, in a hangar the people of South Australia had specially built for her. That’s despite some idiot flicking a cigarette butt and torching half the thing on the back of a truck on the way down from Canberra. An RAAF inquiry never proved it was a cigarette butt, but I reckon I know the truth.
One of the young lads at the bar stands up to stretch, says it’s his round and asks who else wants another. ‘Wal,’ he says, ‘I need to take a leak. Don’t say anything until I get back. I want to hear about Poulet.’ I nod, and another lad says: ‘Yeah, and Biffy. What happened to Biffy?’
When everyone’s settled back down, I tell them.
Poulet never did make it to Australia despite getting as far south as Batavia with Benoist in a second aircraft funded by his friends back in France. He lived and worked across Asia until he was well into his 60s, spending years as the aviation advisor to the Chinese government. He was a leader of the French underground in Asia during Worl
d War II and interned for a time in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Died back on his home soil at the age of 70 in 1960, with a stack of French honours to his name but bugger all recognition outside aviation circles.
Good old Biffy has lived long and well, too. He’d be in his 80s now. Married a woman he met on our first flight from Cairo to Calcutta, and retired in 1933 as an Air Vice-Marshall with the RAF before setting out to lose the family fortune on failed business ventures. Bit by bit the estate was let go until eventually Cheveney was sold to a Texas oilman. You know, it wasn’t until we got back to Australia that we learnt he and the Colonel had painted GODSPEED right across the main lawn for us at Cheveney—we’d missed it on account of the heavy fog the day we left Hounslow. A fine family, that one.
Delvene wipes up some spilt beer on the bar. ‘What happened with you and Helena, Wal?’
I fall silent, rubbing the tip of my thumb on my wedding band. Could never bring myself to take it off.
Helena and I moved to Sydney like we planned. Thanks to my prize money we bought a little house in Dover Heights and a garage at Bondi Junction. It was just a stone’s throw from the beach where we’d eat fish and chips on the rocks and watch the surfing on a Sunday afternoon. Fred moved up to Sydney, too. Found himself a lovely wife and was content, on and off, until his death in ’29. We lost our Freddy Houdini far too early—for some blokes there was just no escaping that war.
Helena and I never did have kids, but we were happy, for the most part. Had lots of pets, Pomeranians mostly. And we always had lots of friends around, too, with Helena topping up the sherry while I recounted my tale. She never once told me she couldn’t bear to hear the story again. Never once in 32 years, bless her.
I was formally discharged from the AIF in 1920 and granted the honorary rank of lieutenant—Benny was too. I eventually got my pilot’s licence, even had a crack at flying back the other way from Australia to England in 1930 with a young chap by the name of Dave Smith—yet another Smith, would you believe? We made a forced landing in Western Australia, on the first day out from Sydney, and crashed again in Siam and called the whole thing off. Bloody daft idea, that was. I stuck with aviation, though. Got a job as chief engineer with Airlines of Australia. I tried to re-enlist in the Air Force in World War II, but they found me some work overseeing the manufacture of parachutes instead. Made me proud knowing I was making our boys a bit safer in the air.
Helena died in ’51, but not without a damn good fight. We used to joke that cancer had never come across a woman so stubborn—it obviously hadn’t seen the way she’d stood her ground when I flew to India with Ross Smith. And that’s how I’ll always remember her: the beautiful girl who got me through a war and across the world to home. I was proud the Narrandera Argus ran a little obituary for her, talked about her work with a number of patriotic bodies during the Great War. But then they went and said I’d flown from England to Australia in the Southern Cross with Charles Kingsford Smith. Can you bloody believe that? Old King Dick was as famous as Phar Lap by then for flying across the Pacific.
Not too long after I lost Helena, I got smashed up in a motor car. That’s when I moved to Adelaide, to live just around the corner from here with my brother Arthur—in Bennett Street, funnily enough. Been with Dorothy for a few years now.
‘I want to hear about Benny and the others!’ the new lad says.
‘I know, son,’ I say. ‘Almost there.’ Suddenly I’m bone weary. Feel a bit woozy too. I reach out to put down my scotch, and the glass nearly topples off the bar.
‘You right, Wal?’ There’s a familiar note of concern in Delvene’s voice. ‘Maybe that’s enough for one day …’
I shake my head, give her a reassuring wink. ‘S’oright Delvie. We’re nearly done.’
Keith married Anita Crawford in 1924. They never had kids either. He was the Vickers representative in Australia and was on a stack of aviation company boards including Qantas until cancer got him too, in ’55. Left me a hundred quid in his will. I was touched by that. Only saw him rarely after the race and what came after, but from afar I was always proud of what he went on to do. Given what happened.
I take a deep breath.
‘As for Ross and Benny …’
I rub the watch given to me by Rolls-Royce after the race. Get out my hanky again, just in case.
Ross, Benny and Keith returned to Weybridge in 1922. They hoped to circumnavigate the globe in another Vickers aircraft—this time the amphibious Vickers Viking. I didn’t go on account of me being a married man by then.
It was all going so well. The press loved them. The route was all planned. Excitement was building across the globe.
Then Ross and Benny did a test flight—right over the Brooklands racing circuit.
At first, everyone thought Ross was doing one of his stunts, but the Viking got into a spin at 1,000 ft and he never regained control.
I pause. Along the bar there’s silence. ‘They dropped out of the sky and crashed behind trees lining the track …’
A cry goes up. ‘Nooooo!’ And again I feel the unbearable weight of people learning the truth for the first time. It’s a burden I’ve carried for 48 years.
I nod my head slowly, staring at my old man’s hands. ‘Yeah. Sorry.’ I wish I could end it another way, but the lie wouldn’t be fair to Ross and Benny.
Ross and Benny. I reach for my drink and take a sip to stop the sob rising in my chest.
‘Both of them?’ asks a quiet voice.
I nod again. Crushed from head to foot.
Keith had been delayed on a train that morning, and got to Weybridge just in time to see the plane spiralling to the ground. Can’t imagine how he must have felt cradling his broken younger brother in his arms. Very alone, I suspect. And a long way from home.
I was repairing a busted hub on a motorcycle at Bondi Junction when I heard. Pulled the roller door closed behind me and wandered off God knows where.
Helena and Fred found me on Bondi Beach, sitting on the sand, staring at the horizon. She wrapped her arms around me and held me tight.
I said I should have been there with them. With my hero and my friend.
She said the greatest men always leave one good man behind, to keep their story alive.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Wally Shiers died of heart failure in his brother’s Bennett Street home on June 2nd 1968. His death was reported on the front page of the Advertiser the following day, with a small photograph and seven paragraphs under the headline, ‘Last Flier In Pioneer Crew Dies’.
Notes
CHAPTER 1
When I reached the house, I stopped and leaned my overnight bag against the fence.
Although there’s no exact street address, records show Helena lived on Arthur Street with her mother and Fred before World War I. The Narrandera Railway Station is at the top of Arthur Street, so it’s where Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA) workers like Wally would have arrived every Saturday for a weekend of sport and drinking. Alcohol was prohibited in the MIA, and trains returning workers home of a Sunday evening were known as ‘The Drunks’ Express’. I like to imagine Wally got off the train one Saturday in late 1914 and was wandering down Arthur Street when fate brought him to Helena. The egg-throwing incident is fiction. Helena’s father was born in Germany, but obituaries in the Narrandera Argus reveal both parents were highly respected, and John Alford was a ‘staunch Britisher’. He’d arrived in the district in the 1870s, making him one of the earliest pioneer wheat growers.
The Narrandera boys must have got a wicket.
In the early years, ‘Narrandera’ (pronounced Narran-dra) was sometimes spelt with one ‘r’. I’ve used the double ‘r’ throughout for consistency. The cricket oval, with its white picket fence, is still on Cadell Street.
I thought I’d miss the red dust when I left the mine in Broken Hill, but the Riverina suited me fine.
The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Trust actively sought to capitalise on miner unrest in Broken Hill by re
cruiting miners to the district after 1910. Wally would have been among scores of mine workers who made the hot and dusty journey across New South Wales by horse and wagon.
He was positive the magician Harry Houdini had been the first man to fly over Australian soil in 1910, but I knew for a fact that a South Australian by the name of Custance had beaten Houdini by a day.
In Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men, biographer Peter FitzSimons explains that a number of Australians including South Australia’s Fred Custance had fleetingly left the ground before Harry Houdini, ‘but it was some time before these feats became widely known’. In the meantime, master self-promoter Ehrich Weiss, aka Harry Houdini the magician, stole the glory as the first man to fly in Australia.
And then it happened—my run-in with the Sydney copper.
In a taped interview with Hazel de Berg in 1966 (held in the National Library of Australia’s oral history collection), Wally talked about travelling to Sydney to buy some fruit trees and how a Sydney policeman handed him the Kitchener postcard. Wally recalled the policeman saying to him, ‘There’s thousands more like you, my lad, I’ve issued it to.’
CHAPTER 2
Blokes heading off to the Front figure their sweethearts might as well be listed to receive a widow’s pension.
Wally’s Soldier’s Pay Book, issued on April 19th 1915 and now held in the National Library of Australia (NLA), lists Helena as the ‘Person to whom Allotment or Compulsory Stoppage is payable’. Curiously, it also lists Wally’s age of enlistment as ‘23 and three quarters’, which suggests he was born in 1891. His birth certificate, also held in the NLA, shows he was born on May 17th 1889, or two years earlier. Even some of the most basic truths can be hard to pin down.
‘Walter Shiers, sir,’ I said, nice as pie, back straight and eyes forward like they taught us in the Barrier Boys’ Brigade, my old cadet group back in Broken Hill.
Long Flight Home Page 27