The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘The connecting rods,’ she said.

  ‘Is that an accusation?’ he said swiftly, almost before the words were out of her mouth.

  ‘You know I was doubtful about them …’

  ‘You need to keep those thoughts to yourself,’ he said. ‘De Havilland wouldn’t be amused to hear that.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with him. He wasn’t working on the plane.’

  ‘I take it you can’t pay anything towards the damage?’ When she shook her head, he said, ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world, I suppose. I’m afraid I’m out of it. I’ve just bought a rather nice Lanchester, it needs a bit of work on it. I’ve been playing around with that.’

  ‘A car. You’ve bought a new car?’

  ‘New old. More fun. I might get around to another plane later on.’

  He didn’t say that he had recently met Mary Swan, whose family owned the Swan kettle factory in Swansea. Jim Mollison took the opportunity to tell Jean this when she finally showed up at Stag Lane. He gave her a wink, with one of those ‘There’s something you need to know’ expressions. Earlier in the year, Mollison had flown from England to Brazil in three days and thirteen hours, stopping over in Africa. It was a record time, and the first solo flight to Brazil. The word was that he and Amy were planning to attempt a record flight over the Atlantic.

  The morning after Victor’s engagement was announced in The Times, Jean collected up the half-empty bottle of Chanel No. 5, the silk panties and other gifts Victor had given her, and took them in a brown paper bag to the gate of Oakleigh. ‘Feel free to check the contents,’ she said to the attendant who had once opened the gates for her and Victor as they swept through, seated behind the family chauffeur.

  She kept the white flying helmet. Who knew whether it might come in handy again one day?

  THESE WERE NOT THE ONLY THINGS THAT HAPPENED in 1933. There was hunger, but then, as Nellie remarked, they were not alone in this. The year was memorable for the meals she and Jean didn’t eat, rather than the ones they did, for the way they eked their way through the summer, dreading the onset of winter, and the cold. It was a year when Nellie feared for her daughter’s life more than she had when she was missing in the desert. The old demons of despair preyed on Jean, so that she would sit for days at a time, barely moving, her dreams again haunted. The resolve to fly again had evaporated. ‘I feel nothing,’ she said, more than once. She felt quite worthless.

  ‘Is it because of Victor?’ Nellie asked gently.

  ‘I thought he loved me.’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘I liked that he seemed to love me,’ Jean said. ‘I liked the house, and the family, and the idea that he wanted to take care of me. But of course he didn’t at all. He should have got in quick with Amy Johnson if he wanted a famous flying wife, shouldn’t he?’ She gave a sour laugh. ‘I hear Amy had a black eye the other day. The joys of being Mrs Mollison.’

  This was gossip she’d heard on what would be her last visit to the clubhouse for some time. Her subscription had run out. Besides, in July, Amy and Jim had flown across the Atlantic to the States, but crash-landed at Connecticut after they’d run out of fuel. The charitable view was that the black eye had happened in the crash. And, crash or no crash, the couple had still won themselves a ticker-tape parade in New York.

  Over in Australia, Charles Kingsford Smith had established a commercial airline between New South Wales and New Zealand, carrying mail and freight, and a small number of passengers.

  In August, John became a father. This, too, Nellie and Jean discovered by reading The Times. The newspaper was the one luxury Nellie allowed them. Indeed, she said it was a necessity of life, given what it told one. Madeleine had given birth to a daughter. This followed hard on the heels of her latest book, fittingly entitled New Soul. In one of her many interviews, she gushed that while motherhood was both wonderful and inspirational, and she and her husband were thrilled about the baby, domesticity wouldn’t stand between her and her vocation as a writer.

  ‘Touching,’ Nellie said. ‘Such a brave, enlightened little creature.’

  Towards the end of the year, a letter came from Frank Norton demanding that Jean repay the money he had lent her for her flying lessons. Five hundred pounds. He wanted it right away. He’d heard she had a rich new boyfriend.

  Jean wrinkled her nose with disgust. ‘Frank Norton,’ she said. ‘He can’t even keep up with the gossip. Men.’ She screwed up the letter and threw it hard at the opposite wall.

  The last day of the year was dark and freezing. The weather had driven seagulls up the Thames to London, where they gathered in Kensington Gardens, unable to pierce the ice for fish. Passers-by fed them. Nellie and Jean didn’t have bread to spare.

  But another letter would arrive before long.

  CHAPTER 21

  IT WAS THAT COLD SNAP THAT BROUGHT JEAN out of the depths. All through the autumn the sounds of the Moths overhead had been driving her further into herself. She barely seemed to notice the cold when it arrived. Nellie said that she wasn’t going to go to bed freezing.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we’re going for a walk, get our circulation going. I mean it. Stand up, Jean. Walk with me.’

  Jean got to her feet and, with Nellie’s help, pulled her coat around her. They walked out into the brisk air, Nellie stamping her feet all the time. A breeze stung their faces. Jean shook her head as if to clear a blockage, and looked at her mother with surprise, as if she hardly knew how they had got there, as if the frost was biting through the blanket of misery with which she had surrounded herself.

  Next morning, she got up and began to write letters. She wrote again to Viscount Wakefield, to newspaper reporters on Fleet Street who had singled her out earlier in the year, asking if they could make appeals on her behalf — after all they had had some good stories out of her disasters — and to the aircraft manufacturers. Although all her entreaties appeared to fall on deaf ears, it was as if a spring had been uncoiled.

  On a day when snow was still falling, and she and Nellie had shivered through another night without heating, she dressed herself in her fur-lined flying gear, and walked to Stag Lane. She wondered what would have happened if she had walked into the clubhouse. Nobody would have turned her away, she believed, but there would be awkwardness, now that she was no longer a member. In all likelihood, Victor Dorée would be back there. And she preferred not to see Amy and Jim again. Amy would probably have given her a hug, or a warm handshake at least, but Jim had already let her know that she was a failure, without saying it outright. In the air, as well as in love. Instead, she chose to stand on the edge of the flying field, where she watched takeoffs and landings. There had been new intakes of trainee pilots in her absence.

  As she was watching a hapless young man swerving all over the field, a voice behind her said, ‘We all have to learn, don’t we?’

  It was Geoffrey de Havilland, his smile as warm as the morning she had left England. He asked how she was, without making reference to the crash.

  ‘I’m well enough, sir. Thank you.’ She supposed she must say something about what had happened, but nothing came to mind. ‘He just has to learn not to be afraid of the takeoff,’ Jean said, indicating the student pilot. ‘You can see, he’s avoiding the moment.’

  ‘You’d make a good instructor,’ de Havilland said.

  ‘Not me, I’m too selfish. To be honest, I’m in it for myself.’

  He gave her a long look. ‘You’ve done remarkably well, it seems to me.’

  ‘Me? I’ve made a pig’s ear of everything.’

  ‘You had a faulty connecting rod?’

  ‘It’s my own fault. I should have stood my ground. I wasn’t happy with them when I left for Australia.’

  ‘I think you did very well to survive. Very resourceful. What are you doing about getting another plane?’

  ‘I’ve really got nowhere to turn,’ she said. ‘I’ve written to Viscount Wakefield, several times in fact, but he doesn�
��t answer my letters.’

  ‘A lot of aspiring pilots write to him.’

  ‘But he was so kind when he got me out of India. I hadn’t asked him to help me then.’

  ‘I think you’ll find he has a file on you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He keeps an eye on young up-and-coming pilots. He’s already talked to me about you. He’d made a note that you’d phoned Wakefield House, and written to him. What were his words? Oh yes. A young lady of strong determination, as well as charm. And even though you didn’t succeed on your last flight, he reckoned you had it in you to succeed. Gutsy, that’s what he called you. And damn pretty to go with it.’

  ‘He didn’t really say that?’

  ‘Well, yes he did. Would you like me to write a letter of introduction?’

  ‘Would you?’

  De Havilland gave her a grin. ‘I reckon he’s onto something.’

  It didn’t happen straightaway. After some weeks had passed, and just at the point when Jean was beginning to think she had imagined the conversation with de Havilland, an envelope whispered through the door by the morning’s first delivery. It was a letter from Viscount Wakefield’s secretary. Although his employer wasn’t prepared to fund her in full, he would advance her four hundred pounds, which he assumed would be a fraction of what she needed.

  Jean pored over advertisements in aircraft magazines searching for a plane that might come in under this sum. She discovered an early model Gipsy Moth in an aerodrome at Berkshire, advertised for two hundred and forty pounds. When she saw the machine, her heart sank. It was in a semi-derelict state. The wings were propped against a wall, the stripped fuselage of the plane with a four-cylinder engine stored in a wooden crate beside it.

  Feeling sick with disappointment, she stood back and surveyed these various remnants. This was hardly a plane that would carry her to the other side of the world. The owner, seeing how dismayed she was, offered to restore it for her, bring it up to the standard required to get a certificate of airworthiness.

  ‘Can you lend me the logbooks?’ she said. ‘I need to think about this.’

  At home, over the following several nights, she discovered the plane had had four owners, and several crashes in the four years since it had been built. One of the owners was a French woman pilot, Madeleine Charnaux, who had crashed in a desert and survived to tell the story. Charnaux had a reputation as a sculptor, before she turned to aviation, and for a turbulent love life. This seemed to Jean like a portent — an artistic woman who had survived against the odds.

  The plane’s engine appeared undamaged, but the machine had a top speed of only eighty miles an hour. She did some calculations, and worked out that if she took a shorter route to Australia, she might still beat the women’s record. The Moth didn’t have the power to break the overall record. None of this was ideal, but she could see no way to acquire another plane at such a price.

  She phoned the owner and said that, yes, she would buy it, and would he please paint it silver.

  On the morning when the plane was ready to take delivery, she whistled on her way to the bus stop, causing passers-by to turn their heads in her direction. She caught a bus that took her to within two miles of the aerodrome, and walked the rest of the way. After the terrible winter, an early spring illuminated the landscape. As she swung along the country lane, she drew great breaths of fresh crisp air into her lungs, feeling how good it was to be alive. When she arrived at the hangar, she saw that the Moth had been completely recovered with fabric. The silver paint gleamed, the registration numbers picked out in green: G-AARB. Just add an O, she thought, that’s me. Garbo. The thought pleased her. The plane was hers, and she thought it beautiful. She paid nineteen shillings and sixpence for a tankful of petrol. Snow was falling lightly when she took to the air, her first flight for several months.

  While the restoration was taking place, she had registered at the Brooklands Flying Club. There were triumphs to remember at Stag Lane, and people like Herbert Travers and de Havilland himself whom she would miss, but there had been frustrations and humiliations that were better forgotten. She admired the stylish rectangles of the art deco clubhouse at Brooklands, a long, low slab structure sitting close to the ground, bisected by a tower, the whole building painted bright white, broken only by a scarlet entrance.

  It was to this aerodrome that she flew her new plane. That afternoon, she began the process of preparing the machine for its flight to Australia. To her added delight, the plane had been fitted with new connecting rods.

  When she arrived home, she sat down and wrote a curt note to Victor. Do you have any use for the large tanks that were fitted to the Moth I flew to Karachi? If not, I wish to have them. We were, you might recall, in partnership. She felt hardness in her when she wrote this; it was the very least he owed her. If he parted with them, she would have a large tank with a twenty-seven-gallon capacity to place in the front cockpit, while the fifteen-gallon one would fit in the luggage locker. As with the first plane, this would give her enough for ten hours’ flying or a range of eight hundred miles.

  After she had posted the letter, she said to Nellie, ‘Now read me the registration papers, please. Aloud.’

  When Nellie came to the part reading, Name of owner: Jean Batten, she felt another surge of delight, and had Nellie read the whole thing over again.

  Victor replied: Do what you like with the tanks. They are of no further use to me.

  Frank wrote to her again, demanding money. I’ll show you up for what you really are, just a little gold digger.

  WITHIN DAYS OF HER REGISTRATION at Brooklands, Jean attracted the attention of a divorced stockbroker called Edward Walter. Ted, he liked to be called. One of his forebears had founded The Times. He flew a Gipsy Moth the same vintage as hers in the weekends, if the weather was good. He had to admit that he was not a very brave flier. She allowed him to drive her about, and she and Nellie were glad to eat at good restaurants again, although Nellie told Jean he bothered her in a way she couldn’t explain. He was said to be the black sheep of his family. There was something desultory about Edward. He was thirty-three, and a stockbroker, he said, because it ran in the family and a man had to do something for a living. He loved aeroplanes. He had parts of them all over his bedroom, he told her proudly. Some day he would put all the bits together.

  Nellie decided that she ought to seek John out and meet her granddaughter. When she phoned the Elmstree Film Studios a receptionist told her Mr Batten was not currently working on any films, but she had a phone number for him. Nellie’s call was answered by John, only he gave the name of a plastic surgeon in Hampstead, and asked how he could be of assistance.

  ‘John, why are you answering this doctor’s phone?’ Nellie exclaimed.

  ‘I work here,’ he said. ‘Is that you, Mother?’

  ‘Of course it’s your mother. What work?’

  ‘I’m the receptionist.’

  There wasn’t much film work on offer right now, John told her, although he hoped to resurrect his career the following year. He didn’t think this was the right time to meet Madeleine and the baby.

  BUT A SUCCESSFUL MEETING was at hand: Jean was about to meet Viscount Wakefield.

  She had written to tell him of the purchase of G-AARB, and all the work she had had done on the plane, how she had made his gift stretch to cover almost all her costs, except for the price of the fuel she would use on her journey. By return mail, a note of invitation arrived, requesting that she call on him for afternoon tea the following day.

  The office of C. C. Wakefield stood in Cannon Street, dominated by Christopher Wren towers, exuding a sense of weathered elegance. Jean alighted from the train and made her way through the huge glass-domed concourse, and out into the street. She had walked through this thoroughfare before, but today it had special significance. She shivered in her thin winter coat, as she made her way towards the tall Castrol building.

  Viscount Wakefield of Hythe was waiting for her, standing f
acing the window, his hands folded behind his back. Charles Cheers Wakefield, former Lord Mayor of London, and head of Castrol, the biggest oil company in the world. He was seventy-five, with a round face and thin wisps of hair brushed back from his forehead, but his bearing was that of a younger man, and his dress was immaculate. His shirt was high-collared, his tie held with a subtle silver pin. She had heard that his friends called him Cheers. He turned from the window and observed her as she came into the room. After a long, studied look, he beckoned her to the window to stand beside him.

  ‘So, Miss Batten,’ he said, ‘you are going to fly to Australia?’

  ‘I hope so, sir,’ she said. ‘I plan to give it my best shot.’

  ‘Why would you want to do something so daring and fraught with danger?’

  ‘Because I believe that the future of transport is in the air, and that its possibilities have barely begun to be explored.’

  ‘I see. I understand you come from New Zealand?’

  ‘Yes, and perhaps that has something to do with my desire to travel further and faster across the world. My family is British, but it’s hard to feel as if one is truly so when we’re so far away. New Zealand is at the edge of the world. It takes many weeks, and considerable hardship, even now, to travel from one side of the world to another. I want to demonstrate that there are faster routes, better ways to accomplish global travel. I hope to fly from England to New Zealand some day.’

  ‘Really? Not this time round, though?’

  ‘No, sir. The plane I’ve bought doesn’t have the capacity to fly across the Tasman Sea, the last barrier on the journey between here and my country. But if I’m successful with this flight, then I hope to convince the world that I’m worthy of their support in that endeavour.’

  Wakefield continued to stand at the window. She wondered if she had said something wrong.