by Nevil Shute
After a time I decided I should have to have another aeroplane. Gujar Singh was used to flying the Airtruck by that time, though I did most of the work on it myself and let him fly the Fox-Moth. Now things were piling up on us. There was still far more work than we could tackle, and the Fox-Moth was due for its annual overhaul for the Certificate of Airworthiness. I had engaged an Iraqi ground engineer with “A” and “C” licences called Selim, but I didn’t trust him much and anyway he wasn’t licensed for complete overhauls; I should have to do that myself. I wanted another Airtruck, and that meant another pilot.
I was up to date with my payments on the first Airtruck, and had about two thousand pounds profit again in hand. I wrote to Harry Ford and told him how I stood and sent him the accounts, and said, what about another Airtruck on the Never-Never? I think they must have had a lot of trouble selling them, because he wrote back at once and said, come and get it. It wasn’t very suitable for ordinary charter operators, perhaps, but it fitted my work like a glove.
I had a talk with Gujar Singh about another pilot then. He didn’t himself know of another Sikh pilot. In ten days’ time, however, we had to take a load to Karachi, a trip which I proposed to do myself in the Airtruck. He suggested that he should come with me; he knew Karachi very well, of course. We went together and stayed for a couple of days. At the end of that time we found quite a good pilot called Arjan Singh, with another big black beard and another iron bangle just like Gujar; he had been instructing on Harvards at Bangalore in the war and had done a bit of time on Dominies. I took him on and put up Gujar’s salary to three hundred rupees, and we all went back to Bahrein together. I started Arjan on the Fox-Moth and turned over the Airtruck to Gujar, and went back to England in a chartered Halton that had taken a ship’s propeller shaft out to Singapore and was on its way back with a load of silk goods.
I was only home about four days that time, because the second Airtruck was all ready and waiting for me on Basingstoke Aerodrome. In fact there were eleven of them standing in a row, unsold; I kicked myself that I’d got to have credit and so had to pay full price. However, it was better to have it so than to get outside money in; I wanted to keep the show in my own hands. I still wasn’t a company, and I didn’t see any reason why I should become one, for the time being. There’s no income tax in Bahrein.
I stayed three of the four days with Dad and Ma as usual, and took them up for a joy-ride in the Airtruck. Then I was off again back to Bahrein. I was getting to know the route by that time, and I was a much better pilot than when I went out first with the Fox-Moth.
When I got back to Bahrein I started in to put the business on a proper basis. With the two Airtrucks flying all day long and the Fox in for overhaul for its Certificate of Airworthiness, I had to take on a good bit more staff. I got another ground engineer, an Egyptian who’d been with me at Almaza, and two more Arab boys under Tarik, who was shaping quite well; these boys worked as loaders when we wanted labour. Sometimes we parachuted loads down instead of landing if the ground was bad, especially to stranded trucks, and these boys went along then in the aircraft to put the stuff out of the door frame; for those jobs we flew without the door.
I had to start an office going, too. I found a young Bengali clerk called Dunu who could work a typewriter and keep books; he came from Calcutta and was working in a shipping office in the town. I managed to lease a disused hutment from the R.A.F. on a strictly temporary basis, and I set the office up in that.
From that time onward my own work began to change. I had to spend more time on the ground, because I was the only ground engineer in the show who was licensed for aircraft overhauls; I couldn’t be away all day piloting while a machine was in for its annual overhaul, and with three machines coming up for annual overhaul in turn it was clear that I should have to spend a lot more time in the hangar. Having to do that, I was able to attend more to the book-keeping and costs, and it was about that time I set to work to get the prices down. It had been all very well to charge a high figure for my transport in the early days, but I knew that if I went on doing that the oil companies would start to kick, and either get their own aircraft or else, much worse, encourage someone else to start up at Bahrein in competition with me. Within a month of my return with the second Airtruck I cut my own prices by twenty-five per cent, and let them all know what I’d done, and why I’d done it.
I still did all of what one might describe as the pioneering flying. Whenever we had to make a landing at a place we hadn’t used before, I used to take the machine myself if possible, sometimes with Gujar or Arjan with me in the machine so that they could see it and get the gen. That was the position some months after I got back to Bahrein, at the end of November, when Evans of the Arabia-Sumatran rang me up and asked if I could quote for taking a load of fifteen hundred pounds of scientific instruments and one passenger from Bahrein to Diento, in Sumatra, where they had another refinery.
Diento is in the south of Sumatra, about four hundred miles south of Singapore, not very far from Batavia in Java. It was by far the longest haul that had come my way, and I regarded it as something of a compliment and as a sign of confidence in me that they had asked me to quote. It meant a flight of about five thousand miles all through the East, across India and Burma, through Siam and down Malaya, into Sumatra and past Palembang to this place Diento. I knew I could do it in an Airtruck and I was determined to go myself, of course, for an important job like that. I had a lot of difficulty with the quotation, though.
The trouble was in finding a return load. If I charged him for the double journey the figure came out so high that it frightened me; I wanted to do the job very badly, but I wasn’t going to do it and lose money. In the end I took my figures to him and put the cards on the table. I told him he would have to guarantee payment for the return journey to Bahrein, and I suggested he should put his Sumatran organisation to work to find me a return load either from their own requirements or else from Batavia; in that case we would set off anything that we could get for the return load against his invoice, with appropriate mileage adjustments if the return load was to a destination off my direct return route. We thrashed out an agreement on these lines. He told me that he would send a copy out to their office in Batavia and I should probably receive instructions in Diento to go on there for whatever freight load they could get together for me.
I started almost immediately, in the new Airtruck. I’m not going to say much about that first hurried journey through the East; this isn’t a travel book. It took me a week to get to Diento, flying seven or eight hours every day and servicing the aircraft in what was left of the day. We got good weather all through India and Burma, but we struck a lot of monsoon rain in what they call the Inter-Tropical Front as we went through Malaya; it got to be fair weather again by the time we reached Diento.
I never saw anything of all these countries, hardly, on that trip. I was working all the time when the machine was on the ground, and it was dark each night by the time we could drive in from the aerodrome to a hotel. I got just tantalising glimpses of brown men and pretty Chinese girls in flowered pyjamas, enough to make me realise what I was missing.
Diento was a huge refinery town of over twenty thousand employees, many of them Dutch. It had a good airstrip, and I put down there about midday after flying in from Palembang. The strip wasn’t much different from any other aerodrome in any part of the world, but the grass was a bit darker in colour. The cars and trucks and roads were all the same. It’s a funny thing about the tropics, I have found. You go expecting everything to be quite different, and there’s so much that’s the same.
My passenger was a young Dutch-American scientist; he knew all about Diento, because he’d been there before. They sent a truck down for the laboratory gear, and his boss came down to meet him in a car. We waited to see the stuff unloaded and safely in the truck, and then I went up with them in the car to the refinery offices. That was a big place. It stretched for miles out into the bush and along the ban
k of a river, rows and rows of storage tanks, and pipes and cylindrical towers and all sorts of things. Full-sized ocean-going tankers came into Diento to take the oil away to ports all over the world.
As I expected, in the office they had instructions to send me to Batavia, about a hundred and fifty miles further on; they thought there was a small return load waiting for me there, but they didn’t know what it was. I would have gone back to the aerodrome and got off there and then, but the Dutchmen wouldn’t hear of it. They insisted that I stay the night and have a party with them and relax, and after all that flying I was quite glad to. They had a club by the riverside and they gave me a fine bedroom in that. There was a swimming pool and pretty girls out of the offices in it, and a concert and a dance after dinner, all by the riverside with sampans going past, and lights over the water, and flying foxes wheeling overhead in the velvety darkness, and a huge tropical full moon. I drank more Bols than I wanted to, but they were so kind and so pleased to see a strange face, one couldn’t refuse. I got rather tight, but so did everyone. A good party.
They sent me down to the aerodrome next morning in a car. I made a check over the machine, cleaned filters, drained sumps, swept out the cabin, and refuelled. Finally I took off at about ten-thirty for the short flight down to Batavia across the Sunda straits, and found the aerodrome, and came on to the circuit behind a Constellation of the K.L.M. The Dutch pilots were all speaking English on the radio to their own control tower, which seemed odd to me. It certainly made everything very easy, because I couldn’t speak a word of Dutch.
I landed and taxied to the parking position, and locked up the machine and went to the Control and Customs for the necessary clearances. It all took a long time because Java was in an uproar with a full-scale war going on against the Indonesian republicans, and there were military officers in all the offices wanting to see every sort of document. The K.L.M. people had been warned to expect me and were very helpful, and got me through the various offices as quickly as anyone could, and laid on transport for me, and took me into town to the Nederland Hotel.
The hotel was crowded out with military, and the best that they could do for me was a dormitory room with three other beds in it, and other chaps’ gear lying round all over the place. I was used to that sort of thing; we’d had it at several other places on the way. I dumped my stuff on an empty bed and saw the room boy, and went down to the dining-room for lunch. I had been warned by the K.L.M. chap that most offices took a siesta in that hot place after the midday meal; a suitable time to get to the Arabia-Sumatran office would be between three and four. I took the tip, and went up after lunch for an hour on the charpoy myself.
There was another chap in the room now, lying stretched out on the bed under his mosquito net, naked but for a short pair of trunks. I couldn’t see him very clearly through the net. I said conventionally, “I hope none of this stuff’s in your way.”
He turned and looked at me, and then he sat up and lifted the side of the net to see me better. I stood there gaping at him for a moment in surprise.
It was Connie Shaklin.
3
WE TRAVEL NOT for trafficking alone: By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned: For lust of knowing what should not be known We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
James Elroy Flecker
It was thirteen years since I had seen Connie and a lot had happened in that time, but I knew him at once. I said, “Connie Shaklin! You remember me — on Cobham’s Circus? Tom Cutter.”
He pushed back the net, got out, and shook me by the hand. He was leaner than I remembered him, especially in the face. In some ways he looked more Chinese than ever, but alongside a Chinese you could see he wasn’t one. He was too tall, too aquiline. His Russian mother was responsible for that. He was a striking-looking man; he reminded me of something, but for a time I couldn’t think of what it was.
He said, “Tom! What are you doing now? Last time I heard was years ago. You were still at Airservice then.”
I offered him a cigarette, but he said he didn’t smoke. I lit one and sat down on the charpoy. “I left them last year,” I said. “I’m on my own now.”
“Still in aircraft?”
“Yes. I’m operating in the Persian Gulf. I came down here on a charter job.”
I was terribly glad to see Connie again. He was a part of my youth, part of the fine time you have before you have to take responsibilities. Presently, as you go through your life, you undertake so many duties that you haven’t time for making new, close friendships any more; you’ve got too much to do. For the remainder of your life you have to make do with the friends you gathered in in your short youth, and for me, Connie was about the only one I ever had. I started getting serious pretty early in my life, I suppose.
I told him all about my charter service in the Gulf as I stripped my few clothes off and stretched out on the bed. In return he told me what he had been doing. From Cobham’s Circus he had gone to California; he had got a job with the Lockheed Company in their service and repair department, and he had stayed with them for six years or so. Then the war had come, in 1939. He was a British subject, of course, and England was at war; he felt it was his duty to serve, although he had queer ideas about fighting, and so he went north over the border to Edmonton and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as an engine fitter.
“Were you in aircrew?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I think that it is wrong to kill,” he said simply. “I told them that, when I volunteered for the R.C.A.F. I told them also that if one could not kill in time of war, one ought to work very hard. I had the American ground engineer’s certificates, of course, for Lockheed and Pratt and Whitney stuff, and they were glad to have me for a fitter on the ground.”
He had spent the whole of the war in Canada working at various aerodromes in connection with the Empire training scheme and, later, on some cold-weather research projects at Trenton. He had sat for the Canadian ground engineer’s licences at the end of the war and had got the lot without difficulty, and at the beginning of 1946 he had gone out to Bangkok and had worked for a time as a ground engineer with Siamese Airways.
I opened my eyes at that. Siamese Airways is the national air line of Siam and, I thought, staffed exclusively by Asiatics. “What on earth made you go there?” I asked.
“Karma,” he said, smiling. I didn’t understand him, but his old magic was upon me once again and I didn’t interrupt; he knew so much more than I did. “I went back home to San Diego for a few months and worked at the Flying Club, but I couldn’t settle there. I didn’t really like America, and I wanted to know more, much more, about the Lord Gautama and the Four Noble Truths. I wanted to hear people talk about the Buddhist faith who really knew something — not the sort of people you find in Los Angeles. And presently I found I had to go to Bangkok to find out about all that. There was no alternative except the bughouse.”
I grinned. This was the same old Connie, different to anybody else that I had ever met. He had been good for me when I was a callow and an ignorant youth; he was good for me now. I said, “Were you able to get into Siamese Airways?” And then I said, perhaps a little thoughtlessly, “I thought they were all Asiatics.”
He smiled. “Well, what do you call me?”
“You’re British,” I said, wondering.
“I was born in Penang,” he replied. “My father was a full Chinese. My mother was a Russian who got out in 1917, at the time of the Revolution. I speak Cantonese, and a little Mandarin. I spell my name in two parts now that I’m out here, Shak Lin, like my father did. I’m an Asiatic.”
“Not a proper one,” I said loyally.
He grinned. “Proper enough to get a job with Siamese Airways. I think they were very glad to get me; I got to Bangkok just as they were starting up. They bought a lot of disposals Dakotas and had them converted in Hong Kong. I was with them up till about four months ago.”
“What are you doing now?” I asked.
He said, “I�
��m with Dwight Schafter.”
“Who’s Dwight Schafter?”
“Don’t you know about him?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“He’s a gun-runner,” said Connie. “He flies arms in to the Indonesian Republicans, or he did. The Dutch have got him now, here in Batavia.”
“You’re working for him?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m muggered,” I said in wonder.
As we lay there on our beds in the hot afternoon he told me about Dwight Schafter. Dwight was an American, a soldier of fortune by profession. Wherever there is trouble in the world the Dwights of all nations foregather. There are not very many of them, thirty or forty perhaps, and they are all supremely competent men because the others have been killed.
Dwight had spent some years in Central and South America, and he had flown for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He had been flying for the Chinese against the Japanese in 1938 and 1939, and he had come into the United States Army Air Force via Major Chennault’s Flying Tigers. He delivered two or three disposals B.25s from America to the warring Israelites in Palestine just after the war, but by the middle of 1946 he was back in the East, flying loads of sub-machine-guns from the Philippines to Indonesia for the benefit of brown men fighting the Dutch.
At that time there was considerable sympathy in South-East Asia for the Indonesians in their struggle against the Dutch. In Indo-China the Viet-Minh forces were engaged in a similar rebellion against French rule. In Siam there was sympathy with the Asiatics in both cases, though it would probably be quite wrong to suggest that the Siamese Government connived at gun-running. It would probably be quite right to say that when strange freight aircraft turned up at Don Muang aerodrome outside Bangkok with thin stories of journeys to improbable places, the Siamese Government saw no reason to initiate officious and unnecessary investigations.