The Atlantic Sky

by Betty Beaty

  ‘That uniform is really quite fetching,’ Cynthia said, standing on the tips of her size four shoes so that her 6/5 eyes would be enabled to scrutinize each square inch of the blunt-nosed crew car and the row of faces.

  ‘No, I wasn’t talking about the uniform,’ Patsy said, ‘Oh, there she goes, let’s wave to her! But about—’

  ‘Properly worn, that is,’ Cynthia added with some severity.

  ‘—about Janet,’ Patsy said warmly. ‘I think despite what she’d like us to think, she’s really rather sweet.’

  ‘You always were charitable, I imagine,’ Cynthia murmured. ‘Of course, you’d need high heels to set off that slim skirt.’

  ‘And I really think...’ Patsy went on. The crew car still hadn’t moved off, and they kept their eyes glued to it all the time, ‘that we’re all going to fit in very well.’

  ‘Of course,’ Cynthia said, walking to the mirror and examining her face, first this way and then that, ‘we need slightly different hair-do’s to set off that cap. But Patsy, my child,’—she swirled round dramatically—‘you took the very words out of my mouth.’

  True to his word, Geoff Pollard had phoned, and then, the day after Janet left on service, had followed it up with a call.

  Just, as he told Patsy when she opened the door to him, so that the Company could be satisfied that they were both nicely settled.

  ‘And we are,’ she said. ‘We couldn’t be more comfortable. Come in and see!’

  Geoff took off his blue uniform cap and hung it on the large antlered hat-stand in the hall. ‘Quite a big-game hunter, your landlady,’ he said, exchanging stares with a fish in a glass case, and at that moment, from her back ‘snuggery,’ came Mrs. Waterhouse in person. ‘I thought I heard the door ... oh, you’re there, dear!’ she said to Patsy, but her eyes were on Geoff.

  ‘Mrs. Waterhouse,’ Patsy said politely, ‘this is Mr. Pollard.’

  In that easy way of his, Geoff put out his hand and said, ‘How d’you do?’ while Mrs. Waterhouse murmured that she was delighted.

  ‘From World-Span Operations,’ Geoff explained. ‘I phone the flying staff for duty and...’

  But Mrs. Waterhouse shook her neat grey head to stop him. ‘Mr. Pollard,’ she said with a smile, ‘you have no need to tell me.’ She squared her diminutive shoulders with maternal pride. ‘Though Miss Morley, who’s still with me, was my first World-Span girl, I’ve had many ... a great many airgirls staying here.’

  ‘So,’ Geoff Pollard said, ‘there’s not much you don’t know about running an airline?’

  ‘Not much?’ There was gentle reproach in Mrs. Waterhouse’s motherly eyes. ‘Not much,’ she repeated, and shook her head. ‘Why, nothing, Mr. Pollard!’

  As Patsy told Cynthia later, when the three of them sat over a pot of tea, ‘Geoff and Mrs. Waterhouse got on like a house on fire.’

  ‘She a dear, isn’t she, Geoff?’ Patsy said. ‘We’ve been awfully lucky to get someone like Mrs. Waterhouse.’

  ‘I think we have been, too,’ Cynthia agreed. ‘But what keeps revolving in my brilliant brain is—what happened to all the other stewardesses who stayed here?’

  ‘Perhaps they were posted,’ Patsy said. ‘Or got other jobs.’

  Geoff gave them both an enigmatic smile. ‘I’ve a pretty good idea,’ he said. ‘And you two had better be careful! What happened to them might happen to you!’

  ‘Well, if Janet survived, I reckoned I can too,’ Cynthia declared.

  ‘Mm ... mm,’ Geoff pursed his lips. ‘Janet Morley looks to me like a very smart girl.’

  Patsy asked, ‘D’you know her, Geoff?’

  ‘Only to phone her for service. And I’ve seen her around.’

  ‘Wait till you meet her,’ Patsy prophesied. ‘You’ll really like her.’

  But when they did meet, some two weeks later, for cold Sunday supper in Mrs. Waterhouse’s dining-room, Patsy was disappointed. It was one of those times when Geoff had taken Mrs. Waterhouse up on her vague invitation to drop in any time, we always have cold buffet on Sunday evenings. And Janet was just helping Mrs. Waterhouse to arrange the slices of beef and tomatoes that constituted it.

  ‘Hello, Patsy,’ she smiled as Patsy came into the diningroom. And then added a much cooler ‘Hello,’ to Geoff behind her.

  ‘Of course, you two know each other...’ Patsy said by way of introduction.

  ‘Of course,’ they both echoed simultaneously.

  Then Janet went into the kitchen to get the kettle, Mrs. Waterhouse murmured happily that she was sure they could manage all right now, and how nice it was to see Mr. Pollard, but he would excuse her wouldn’t he, and she knew he’d be well looked after. Cynthia breezed in and said, ‘Not beef again?’ and ‘Hello, Geoff,’ in the same breath, and began to hand round the plates.

  A sudden silence seemed to fall on the table. And it was left to Patsy to try to keep the conversational ball rolling. They talked for a few minutes about a concert that they’d all been to, and then there followed an intermittent, rather edgy conversation. Geoff was not at all like his usual light-hearted self.

  ‘My goodness,’ she said, after they’d cleared the dishes away in the kitchen (because Sunday was a time they tried to let Mrs. Waterhouse take it a bit easy) and had come back to find Geoff sitting staring moodily into the fire, ‘it is getting late.’

  Now, she thought, he can say yes, time I was on my way.

  But it didn’t seem to penetrate. He agreed that it was, and when she added, ‘Think of getting up at six-thirty tomorrow again!’ he only said, ‘And I’ll be getting up at six.’

  To give him his due, in between these brief remarks, he did try others. But whatever he said, Janet seemed to pounce on and tear it to pieces. When he said there was a lot of work in World-Span for stewardesses to do, and added sympathetically that other lines employed stewards as well so that there were two of them for every thirty passengers, Janet commented acidly, ‘Heaven forbid! The idea of a man pussyfooting round my galley!’

  When he finally did leave, Janet said, ‘Be seeing you,’ in a rather bored tone, as though she hoped she wouldn’t.

  But her lack of interest was amply made up for by Mrs. Waterhouse. She came into the dining-room, the moment the front door clicked, and said to Patsy, ‘Was that Mr. Pollard just going, dear?’

  ‘That’s right, Mrs. Waterhouse, and he asked me to say thank you. He didn’t want to disturb you; we knew your sister had probably popped over.’

  ‘Such a nice young man!’ Mrs. Waterhouse clasped her hands together. She nodded her head approvingly at Patsy. ‘Very good-looking,’ she said. ‘Really handsome, I should say.’ She moved nearer to the window, and spied the headlights outside her own front gate. ‘And he’s got a car.’

  ‘So I hear,’ Janet said, as a raucous popping and backfiring began.

  But Mrs. Waterhouse took no notice. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be back, I know,’ she said encouragingly to Patsy as the noise reached a crescendo and then began to die away.

  ‘Not before he gets that silencer fixed, I hope,’ said Janet sincerely.

  Mrs. Waterhouse looked at the expression on the girl’s face with motherly understanding. ‘Never mind, Miss Morley,’ she said consolingly, ‘he’s just the sort of nice young man who’s got a lot of nice young friends.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  For the next few weeks, the thin pointed baton with which Mr. Crosbie used to lend emphasis to the more abstruse points of his lectures and the delicate niceties of what he euphemistically called his ‘kitchen practicals’ seemed to Patsy to have a certain magical property. It took the idea, which every one of them secretly nursed through these fledgling days, of flying over wide blue oceans to clean and majestic cities, of freedom and adventure and travel, and set it before them in, a vastly different reality.

  The oceans were there—but they were the grey greasy oceans of huge vat like sinks. And the cities were never-ending, nightmare phantasy piles of plastic cups. And freedom was f
ive-thirty when, morning chores and afternoon lectures over, the whole flock of girls could hurry out of the airport gates and catch the buses to Mrs. Waterhouse’s or Mrs. Taylor’s or Mrs. Jenkins’, and eat their high teas, and kick off their shoes, and sigh a little wistfully for the office or the hospital or the shop where life now seemed so much more rewarding than it had done at the time.

  The first day that Patsy did any waitressing was mercifully in the staff canteen, and her shift was at twelve, when the less influential members seemed to eat. She served a reasonable quick meal to two typists, three traffic girls, a man who worked in the pay section and an elderly radar operator.

  And all her customers were quite extraordinarily helpful. ‘No,’ one of the traffic girls said to Patsy’s red and flurried face as she tried to pop the roast pork in front of her for the second time, ‘not for me, I’m at the sweet—but Ted ...’ she craned her pretty head down the table towards the man in the pay section. ‘You said pork, didn’t you? I’m sure I heard you ... well,’ with gentle chiding, as though he was keeping it waiting, ‘here it is.’

  The staff canteen appeared by now to have got used to these untrained waitresses, and were thankful to escape with only lesser misfortunes. Even as Patsy hurried from table to serving hatch, she could see other more unlucky colleagues furtively mopping up soup and gravy with the folded napkin if they’d got one, but usually rather pitifully with a handkerchief, or even the edge of an overall. Inevitably they looked around to see if Mr. Crosbie or his particular S.S. man of the day was watching. Inevitably he was.

  Even the afternoon lectures began to be less of a respite than they had been, for instead of sitting in their safe little desks and drowsily listening to the various instructors, the embryo stewardesses began to have to do the things they were taught.

  It was no use, in answer to the long-suffering doctor’s question, to say that you’d bandaged a passenger’s knee in a criss-cross circular manner, you had to come to the front of the class and do it. Then, too, there were those catering forms the bar accounts that were designed, it seemed, not to balance. The changing of escudos into pounds and pounds into dollars.

  But the days went by. They began to understand more. Soon the subjects caught their attention. They listened with genuine interest to the physical laws whereby fifty-ton monsters could be supported in thin air: the network of customs barriers and international regulations which still covered the shrinking world: first aid ... how to bandage ... how to recognize the signs of serious illness ... what to do if the aircraft was forced down in the desert or in the sea ... what to do if it crashed ... even how to deliver a passenger’s baby: and the more everyday and therefore perhaps more important occurrences ... food and how to prepare it in the mock-up galley next to the main kitchens ... and then, just as essential, how to serve it. They looked at diagrams of the covers to lay for five-, six- and seven-course meals. They were given pro-formas of the bar accounts, and had to fill in imaginary items. They were told of the weather and what caused its violence and fluctuations ... and then, as the course sped by, the conditions they would find on the routes they would be flying.

  That routine went on day after day, week after week—work in the kitchen or the galley mock-up in the morning, waiting at table during lunch, lectures in the afternoon, sometimes further waitressing at tea or in the evenings. All day, they heard aeroplanes—taxiing, running up, taking off, or flying overhead. But the only view they had of them was through the windows of the classroom, or when, their day’s work beginning or ending, the girls passed the apron on their way in and out of the airport. And when the kitchen practicals started to get more frequent, exasperated frustration among the embryo stewardesses increased in exactly the same proportion, until Cynthia observed cynically, ‘It’s a hoax ... that’s what it is! They can’t get domestic help, so they invent a gigantic blind called No. 8 Air Stewardess Course.’

  And then unexpectedly, one Monday in mid-September, Mr. Crosbie started off the afternoon’s lectures with the magic words: ‘The aeroplane you will soon be flying on ‘When, Mr. Crosbie?’ cried half a dozen eager female voices. ‘Today?’

  The Catering Officer looked up from his notes on the layout of the Mark IV Astroliner. ‘No, ladies, not today. We have yet,’ he pointed out to them, ‘to do your practical cabin instruction in an Astroliner on the ground. Captain Prentice has kindly promised us an aeroplane and an engineering officer to instruct you in the very near future.’

  ‘But, Mr. Crosbie,’ they wailed at him, ‘when are we going to fly?’

  ‘Ladies, it is more difficult to arrange than you think. All the aeroplanes normally are either on the route or in the hangar under maintenance. Since the running cost of an Astroliner is one thousand pounds,’ and he paused dramatically, ‘an hour, to have one for ourselves alone is out of the question. So we must wait until Captain Prentice has some pilot training to do at the same time. Then he may be good enough to allow us to use the vacant cabin to begin our airborne syllabus.’

  So it all boiled down to Prentice again, Patsy thought bitterly. He would say when they would be allowed even to become familiarized with the cabin interior and layout. And he would say when they would fly.

  They did, however, see the inside of an Astroliner two days later. At Mr. Crosbie’s bidding, they followed him out of the classroom and on to the hangar tarmac, looking like a brood of mixed-breed hens amongst the smart dark uniformed and white-shirted magpies of the permanent staff.

  Thankfully, Mr. Crosbie handed the sixteen girls over to Mr. McWhirter, one of the assistant engineering officers. Doubtfully, Mr. McWhirter accepted them in his charge and led them (at last) up the steps and into an Astroliner.

  He was a taciturn man, Mr. McWhirter. He never spoke unless he had to, and when he did he explained things in the simplest, slowest manner, as one talking to foreigners. He showed them where the escape hatches were and how to work them, the location of the life-jackets and how to put them on. He watched speechlessly while Cynthia pirouetted round like a model at a fashion show in one of them inflated. He pulled out one of the twenty-seater dinghies in their neat packs, arid indicated the lever that would inflate them from the compressed air bottles. He undid a dinghy pack so they could see the rations of Horlicks tablets and boiled sweets, the chemical sets that made salt water into fresh. He made them crank the handle of the dinghy radio, tactlessly mentioning that it was known as the Gibson Girl because of its beautiful shape. He let them practise adjusting the passenger seats and pulling out the beds that folded into the roof of the cabin. He swept them swiftly through the flight deck, where he plainly thought it was hopeless trying to explain things to them, for he merely indicated the two pilots’ seats, the navigator’s desk, the engineers’ panel, the radio officer’s position, and, just beyond, the pilots’ rest-compartment with its two bunks, before taking them back to what he obviously considered the proper place of the humblest crew member, the galley.

  There he explained the gleaming ovens and hot-plates, the water and heating systems. Then the fuses, where they were located and how to change them. Finally he led them to the heavy rear door, and explained how it had to be lifted upwards on its rollers before it could be opened. ‘Safety measure,’ he said.

  All this information he gave them in a competent, unsmiling manner. But at least he asked no questions to see if they knew anything, until suddenly he shot at Patsy the query, ‘How would you evacuate the cabin away from the apron?’

  Taken aback, she said, ‘You mean ... without passenger steps?’

  Mr. McWhirter nodded.

  ‘I suppose if they jumped—’ Patsy suggested.

  ‘Older people. Children. The sick.’ With a quick movement, Mr. McWhirter flung open the cabin door. Grouped round it, they all gazed down at the ground, eighteen feet below.

  ‘You mean they might—’ Patsy said.

  ‘Might?’ Mr. McWhirter grunted. ‘Would!’ He leaned out of the door, and gave a great bellow, ‘Cross-bee!
’

  Mr. Crosbie emerged from the hangar office, and Mr. McWhirter added, ‘Chute!’ Then he dived behind the back seat and produced a cloth-covered pack, which he unzipped to reveal a fluttering long white envelope. ‘Escape chute,’ he ' said. ‘Nylon. Shoes must be removed when used, lest they damage the fabric.’ Then unexpectedly, he turned to them and grinned. ‘Well ... who’s number one?’

  It was obviously Mr. McWhirter’s treat for a good class. While he fixed the chute to the door, the girls chatted and jostled, holding their shoes obediently in their hands. Down they went, one by one. Patsy heard a soft whooshing noise as she slid, and then Mr. Crosbie above her saying. ‘Eight.’ The last girl was Myra Yorke. ‘All yours,’ Mr. McWhirter called out, not without relief.

  ‘Sixteen,’ Mr. Crosbie said to himself, and then to the girls, who were giggling and laughing as they put on their shoes, ‘Now ladies, we’ve had our bit of fun. Back to work! No more skylarking, if you please,’ and away he led them to the stuffy classroom for the rest of the afternoon.

  The very next day, to everyone’s surprise, Mr. Crosbie announced, ‘Ladies, airborne training will commence ... today.’

  However, he was wrong. The aeroplane was unserviceable, and didn’t fly.

  ‘Ladies,’ he said three days later, ‘airborne training will commence ... today.’

  But once more he was wrong. Fog came down suddenly, and flying was suspended.

  So it wasn’t surprising, when after the weekend again he began by telling them that today was the day, that a murmur of doubt and faint derision ran through the class.

  ‘When today, Mr. Crosbie?’ Cynthia asked cynically.

  Mr. Crosbie smiled triumphantly. ‘This minute, Miss Waring,’ he said, and led the way to the tarmac, just beside Operations.

  It was a boisterous autumn day. Alternate clear skies and windblown swift-moving cloud chequered the airport with sunshine and shade. They stood in the doorway of World-Span Operations, excitedly watching the mechanics moving over the silver wings of an Astroliner.