Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  The Cornell Carrier was parked just off the middle of the strip by the two European houses. I put the Airtruck down and taxied to park her by the Carrier; as I did so men and women came streaming from the village. I swung the Airtruck quickly into the parking position and stopped the propellers in case the natives came crowding round, but they formed a sort of circle round the aircraft at a safe distance, waiting for us to get out.

  I turned in my seat, and said to Connie, “It’s a pretty little place.”

  He smiled. “I am glad to see the Carrier still here. I was worried that some war lord might have gone off with it.”

  We got out of the machine, and he introduced us to his two mechanics, U Myin, the Burmese lad, and Chai Tai Foong, the Chinese from Hong Kong. U Myin spoke no English and seemed a bit dumb generally, but Tai Foong could make himself understood in English and seemed brighter all round.

  We went at once to have a look at the Carrier. The people parted to let us through; they were mostly men and children, some of the men very old. Such young women as were there were, I think, the mistresses or housekeepers of the engineers. Relations were evidently very good with these people. They paid little attention to me or to Gujar, but when Connie spoke to any of them, or even when he turned his head, they touched the right hand to the forehead and bowed to him.

  The Carrier was in very good order. She was only four or five months old, of course, and she had only done about three hundred hours flying — nothing in the life of a machine like that. In the cabin, or hold, where the load was carried, she had had rough usage, but externally the paint was hardly scratched, and in the pilot’s cockpit everything looked new. She had been very carefully maintained by Connie and his boys; in the cockpit everything was spotlessly clean, the windscreens newly polished, the safety belts folded neatly across each seat as if for an inspection. I was amazed that fortune should have brought so fine an aeroplane into my hands. The only thing now was — could I fly her?

  She was only half full of fuel, which suited me for a first solo. We had a meal of rice and little side dishes of curried fish and chillies, served by the girls in the house of the two engineers, and then Connie and I went out to the Carrier to try my luck. We spent about an hour on the machine together, mostly in the cockpit, till I knew all the controls by heart. Then, with Connie by my side in the co-pilot’s seat, I started up the engines, ran her warm and ran them up to power for the engine check. Then I throttled back to idling and eased the brakes, and taxied out on to the strip.

  A queer thought came to me then as I taxied down to the far end, in that lovely place. I leaned over to Connie by my side in the wide cockpit. “We’ve come a long way since we used to drive that Ford in Gretna Green, in Cobham’s Circus,” I said. I had not sat beside him since, that I could recollect.

  He smiled. “Those were good days.”

  I turned the machine at the end and the strip lay stretched out before us; there was little or no wind. I was in no hurry. I sat there for a few minutes doing the final cockpit check and getting comfortable; then when I was ready to go I raised my head and had a good look round. About half the people, including Gujar Singh and the two engineers, were standing watching under the shade of the wing of the Airtruck, but the rest were kneeling in front of the Buddha on his throne under a little palm thatch roof. It was all very bright and colourful upon that aerodrome.

  I said to Connie, “What are they doing there? Praying?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “For me, that I’m not going to make a muck of this?”

  He laughed. “For us both. Probably more for me than for you.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s nice to know somebody cares.” And with that I pushed the throttles open and we took off down the strip.

  As Connie had said, she handled just like any other aeroplane, except that she had better manners than most. I climbed her slowly straight out over the sea to about five thousand feet, then turned and came back over Damrey Phong. I played about with her up there for twenty minutes till I had the feel of her with engines on or throttled, flaps up or down, and then I brought her down and did a circuit and made a long approach. The landing went all right; the undercarriage was so good it didn’t seem to matter how you put her down. I took her off again; in all I did four landings on her without incident. When I taxied in beside the Airtruck I was very pleased with myself. I could fly that thing.

  Fuelling at Damrey Phong was quite a business. The petrol was in forty-gallon drums in a store down by the river, and these drums had to be rolled up by hand to the machine, a distance of about half a mile. We needed about six hundred gallons to put into the Carrier, and about twenty-five more drums to load into the cabin to be taken with us on the flight. There was a small portable motor pump to lift the fuel from the drums twenty feet up into the wing tanks, but even with this help the work was severe and lengthy. Damrey Phong, though healthy, is a humid place, and we were all sweating in torrents before long.

  We could not get it done that evening. As the sun went down I told Connie to knock off the men; we would finish in the morning. I had an idea that he would want some daylight for his worshipping before the Buddha, and we couldn’t go on working after dark, anyway. I walked across to the house that had been occupied by Dwight Schafter and his co-pilot Seriot, which was where I was to sleep, and threw off my wet shirt and trousers, and stood under the kerosene-tin shower, and put on dry clothes.

  When I came out, it was evening. There was still a golden sunlight on the big hill by the strip, but overhead the sky was getting blue, and the light was going. I had guessed correctly about Connie. He was standing in front and to one side of the Buddha, and all the people were kneeling in front of it, with flowers in their hands, as Dwight Schafter had said.

  I strolled up closer to see what was going on. I could not understand what he was saying, but it was clear that he was leading them in prayer. One phrase of four words was continually repeated, as in a litany. Connie would say a sentence or two, facing the statue, and the rest of them would then repeat this phrase with him, very reverently.

  It was with something of a shock that I saw Gujar Singh kneeling there amongst them, his turban on his head, a flower in his hands beneath his great black beard. I was the only one who was not praying, the only one from the West in Damrey Phong.

  Perhaps, like Dwight Schafter, I didn’t want to be snooty. Perhaps it was that I couldn’t bear to be left out. It couldn’t do any harm, in any case. I went forward and went down upon my knees in the last row; I couldn’t understand what it was all about, but that didn’t seem to matter. There was an Asiatic by me, a coolie who had been rolling barrels all the afternoon; he had a sheaf of gladiola blossoms in his hand. Quietly he parted them, and gave me two to hold.

  Beryl had put her head in the gas oven because I had been proud, and righteous in the eyes of other people, and unkind. That had set my life upon the course that in the end had brought me to this place, far from Southampton docks and my own people, worshipping with natives in an Eastern village. Beryl had died because I was proud and unkind. How many other people should I kill like that before I died too?

  Presently I realised that Connie was speaking in English. He had not altered his posture or his tone, but he was saying, “It is written in the Dhammapada, ‘You yourself must make the effort. Buddhas only show the way. Cut down the love of self as one cuts the lotus in the autumn. Give yourself to following the Path of Peace.’” And then he repeated, and the others with him, the phrase that I had noticed before, Om Mani Padme Hum.

  I stayed there on my knees with them till it was nearly dark.

  4

  O SPIRITUAL PILGRIM rise: the night has grown her single horn: The voices of the souls unborn are half a-dream with Paradise.

  James Elroy Flecker

  We got the loading finished next morning and got the fuel drums lashed down in the cabin. I had no intention of flying the Carrier by night till I was more used to her, and so we made
the first day’s stage to Bangkok only. We had to stop there anyway, to load the cargo that I had left there back into the Airtruck.

  On Connie’s advice I engaged Chai Tai Foong to come with us to join the staff at Bahrein; he was a good lad who spoke a little English, and he knew the Carrier. The other one, U Myin, I had no place for, but I offered him a passage in the Carrier to Rangoon, where we should land after Bangkok. I didn’t quite know how Gujar would get on in foreign countries and I meant to stay with him as far as Calcutta, where he would be on his own ground. After that I would leave him and go ahead, because the Carrier was much faster than the Airtruck and had a much greater range.

  We had a meal at midday, and got off for Bangkok after lunch. It was affecting in a way, because the people of the village were so deeply grieved to see Connie go. He had his service at the Buddha in the morning before starting work and most of the village turned up for it, women as well as men; there must have been over two hundred people there on the strip. It only lasted about ten minutes. The people hung about the strip all day. They paid no attention to the rest of us, but their eyes followed Connie everywhere. A curious thing was that three monks turned up in yellow robes, with shaven heads and bare feet. They made the same obeisance to him that the villagers made, touching their fingers to the forehead and bowing low. This seemed odd to me, but I was sorting out the maps with Gujar at the time and didn’t take much notice of what they were doing. The trouble was that we had only one set of maps for the two aircraft, which made things a bit tricky. We couldn’t fly in company, because the Airtruck cruised at a hundred miles an hour and the Carrier at a hundred and fifty. At the cruising speed of the Airtruck the Carrier would have been just about falling out of the air.

  There was quite a good assortment of spares for the Carrier in Dwight Schafter’s house, and several valuable bits of ground equipment — towing bars, hydraulic jacks, and all that sort of thing. In all there was over a ton of stuff. We put this in the Airtruck for the flight to Bangkok as the Carrier was loaded to the limit, meaning to transfer it at Don Muang when the Carrier had used up some of her fuel load. In this way we managed to take with us everything of importance that Dwight Schafter had at Damrey Phong except about four tons of petrol; that we had to leave in the store for the benefit of whoever came along.

  We taxied down to the end of the strip together and took off in turn, Gujar Singh first in the Airtruck with the two engineers; I followed in the Carrier with Connie by my side. I turned after taking off and followed Gujar round upon a left-hand circuit before getting upon course, and having raised the flaps and throttled back the boost and set the revs I glanced out of the window at the strip on my left side. The whole village seemed to be standing by the Buddha looking up at us; they were not waving. They were just standing there motionless and sad, watching us as we flew away.

  We flew past Gujar Singh and waved at him, and went on on a compass course that would bring us to the Menam river between Bangkok and the sea. I had given our one map to Gujar, having made a few extracts from it on a sheet of paper. The Carrier had an automatic pilot, and at our sector height and on our course I put this in and sat for ten minutes watching that it was working all right. Then Connie and I left our seats and went to the wireless, and found Bangkok broadcasting station, and took a series of bearings on it to check our course. In the course of an hour the bearings gradually crept round from 319 degrees to 357 degrees magnetic, which should have brought us to the river, and when we got to that point and stood up to look out of the windscreen, there was the river. It was as easy as that. We landed at Don Muang about an hour ahead of Gujar Singh. The Siamese Control officers knew the Carrier well; they were most tactful, and asked no questions.

  We transferred the loads next morning and took off about midday for Rangoon, flying by the Three Pagodas Pass and the line of the Burma-Siam railway made in the war with the labour of Asiatics and prisoners of war at a vast cost in human life. Again we got to Rangoon an hour or so before Gujar, plodding along behind us at a hundred miles an hour. I was able to raise some more maps at Mingadon airport; we stayed the night in the hostel there and said good-bye to U Myin and went on at dawn next day. That day we landed to refuel the Airtruck at Chittagong after flying up the coast of Arakan, and took off in the early afternoon for Calcutta.

  At Calcutta I left Gujar to follow on behind at the best speed he could make, and went ahead with Connie in the Carrier. We made one long hop to Karachi in the day, flying right over India at about ten thousand feet, stayed there the night, and left next morning for Bahrein direct. We got there in the early afternoon and circled the familiar airport in our new large aircraft. There was the other Airtruck parked outside, and Arjan Singh with the ground staff standing looking up at this strange freight aircraft that was coming in to land. They didn’t know it was a new addition to the fleet.

  In the next few weeks I had a lot of work. I reorganised the ground staff and put Connie in charge of all maintenance. I wanted to get Gujar Singh on to flying the Carrier as soon as possible, but I was resolved that he should do a hundred hours on it with me as co-pilot before taking it on alone. With two of us off nearly every day in the Carrier, because there was a lot of business for it from the start, it was urgently necessary for us to get another pilot. By that time I was getting letters in almost every mail from British pilots wanting a job, but I was getting on all right with Asiatics at a quarter the salary and probably harder working. I got an Iraqi called Hosein who had been an officer in the Iraqi Air Force; he could fly twin-engined stuff and so Gujar put him on the Airtruck right away. I now had four aircraft all going hard, and so I found I had to get another boy clerk and more labourers. It was getting to be quite a business.

  There was work for the Carrier, more work than we could handle, from the first day. For the first time we had an aircraft in the Persian Gulf that was really designed to carry heavy commercial loads; we could take a motor pump out four hundred miles into the desert, or a concrete-mixer, or a truck. We could fetch a crashed aircraft from Sharjah or Kuweit and take it to Egypt in a few hours for repair, and we did that more than once, returning with loads of cases of machinery or engineering stores. There was all manner of work for a big freight aircraft, we discovered, in the Persian Gulf, and it showed no sign whatsoever of getting any less.

  In Batavia, Dwight Schafter came up for trial by the Dutch, and got three years imprisonment; his co-pilot Seriot got twelve months. I wrote to Schafter about that time saying that the Carrier was safe and earning its keep, and I should be willing to negotiate with his attorney to buy it at my own price by instalments over a period. So far as I could see, the thing would have paid its cost in about two years; if I could spread the instalment payments over that time I should get it without having to put down any capital at all. Dwight Schafter, I felt, wouldn’t need the money till he’d done his sentence; it might well be that he would agree to such a scheme.

  In the hangar, Connie got the organisation into order in a very short time. I had increased the staff by the Chinese, Chai Tai Foong, that we had brought from Damrey Phong and by another Iraqi, so that I now had Connie, four licensed engineers, and five engineering labourers, the latter all Arabs from Bahrein. I had suggested to Connie that I should get him into the radio operators’ chummery with me, but he wouldn’t have it. “I am an Asiatic,” he said. “It would lead to difficulties.”

  “I don’t see why it should. You’re only technically an Asiatic, after all.”

  He smiled. “Perhaps. But I should prefer to live in the souk. I must learn Arabic now, and anyway, I shall feel freer there.”

  He had a great ability to learn languages, I was to discover; three months seemed to be quite enough for him to become fluent in any Eastern language. “All right,” I said. “I don’t want to press you to live on the station. Where are you staying now?”

  “Gujar Singh has found me a room near his place,” he said. “A room in the house of an Arab merchant who sells silks.
I shall be all right there.”

  “It’s a good long way from the hangar,” I said. “What will you do — walk it?”

  He grinned. “Do what Gujar Singh does — get a bicycle.” My chief pilot came to work each day on an old rusty lady’s bicycle, his black beard flowing fiercely in the breeze.

  All this expansion made a considerable stir on Bahrein aerodrome. Practically every month I had to go to the R.A.F. and ask if I could lease another building. Although in theory I was making money hand over fist, there was never any of it in evidence; it all went back into aeroplanes and tools and spares — into various capital accounts. I should have been hard put to it to find the money to erect the simplest wooden hut, but fortunately there were plenty of empty buildings belonging to the R.A.F. that had been put up in the war and had been empty ever since. The accountant officer was very helpful; whenever I wanted a new store or office he could usually produce something, although on a very short-term lease. I was lucky in the officers I had to deal with, perhaps; certainly without the help and encouragement of the R.A.F. I’d never have been able to build up the business in those early years.

  I had no time, of course, for any social intercourse, nor could I have kept my end up in such matters. I got my education at the fitter’s bench, not at a university. The Persian Gulf states are advised by a British Resident, Sir William Faulkner, who lives at the Residency in Bahrein with Secretaries and whatnot from the Foreign Office; I saw these people sometimes as they came and went in aircraft at the aerodrome, but I never spoke to any of them for years. I never did any work for them because my business was freight alone. I’ve never put a passenger seat into an aeroplane unless its weight was charged for, or employed a stewardess, and I hope I never shall. I went into that business to make money, not to lose it, and my sort of aircraft weren’t the sort to carry diplomats about the place.