by Nevil Shute
I was very angry. ‘I never heard such nonsense. At a time like this things have to be stretched a bit.’
She picked up her bag. ‘I don’t know anything about flying,’ she said. ‘I only know what they were saying in the hotel – people who do know about it. They think you’re crazy. I think that, too, because Johnnie Pascoe simply isn’t worth it. That’s what I came to say, and now I’ll leave you to your bed.’
She moved towards the door, but I stood motionless. I didn’t like her spite against her father, but there might have been a twisted element of kindness in her visit, kindness to me and to my family. I stood in thought for a moment, and my eye fell upon the portrait photograph on the wall behind her. ‘Was your mother’s name Judy?’ I enquired.
She looked at me curiously. ‘Judy Lester,’ she said. ‘That was her stage name. You must remember her.’
Vague memories of childhood flitted across my mind. ‘I think she was a bit before my time,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard the name.’
‘Our real name was Lichter,’ she said, ‘but she didn’t use that on the stage. Why did you ask?’
‘Only because there are three photos of her in this room,’ I told her curtly. ‘That’s a funny thing, if he’s the sort of man you say.’
She was startled. ‘Where?’
‘On the wall behind you.’
She turned and looked at the many photographs, and then her eyes fastened on the portrait. She moved close and squinted at it a little; she seemed to be short-sighted and afraid of the disfigurement of spectacles. ‘That’s my mother,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a copy of that photograph somewhere.’
I did not speak. I stood there thinking what a fool I was to have interested her in the pictures. She would probably stay half an hour longer.
She looked at the picture of the girl posed in a golfer’s swing, and said, ‘That’s her, again. Of course, she was much younger, then.’ And then her eye wandered to the one of Johnnie and Judy in front of the rotary engine of the biplane fighter, the laughing one. She looked at it for a moment or two, and then indicated the laughing boy in the R.F.C. jacket with the drooping wings and the two medal ribbons. She turned to me and asked, ‘Is that him?’
‘Of course it is,’ I said. ‘That’s Johnnie Pascoe. Don’t you know him?’
‘I was only two when he deserted us,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember him.’
‘Didn’t you ever meet him – when you grew up?’
She shook her head. ‘We lived in Gardena, Los Angeles – that’s where I was brought up. Ma went there for the movies, and then when her contract ended she kept a rooming house. That was after she divorced my stepfather.’ She paused, and then she indicated the photograph. ‘He lived in England in between the wars.’
‘You’ve never met him at all?’
‘I flew by AusCan once from Vancouver to Sydney,’ she said. ‘Coming back from England, about three years ago. He was the pilot from Honolulu to Nandi in Fiji. They change crews there, or something.’
‘Did you make yourself known to him?’ I asked.
She laughed shortly. ‘I wouldn’t demean myself. Dennis thought I ought to say something, but I said, better not. All I’d have had to say would have been that he deserted my mother, her and me, and we’d got on very well without him.’ She paused. ‘But it was interesting, seeing him. I saw him once upon a newsreel, too. Opening the airline, from some place to another.’
I made another effort to unstick her so that I could go to bed. ‘Well, there it is,’ I said. ‘He’s kept those photos forty years.’
Her lips curled a little. ‘Evidence of a conquest.’ She glanced around the room. ‘He’s got quite a few others to keep her company. Evidence of other conquests, I suppose.’
She was looking over to the photograph of Brenda Marshall, standing by the Moth in her white overall with her smile and her short, curly hair. I disliked this woman very much, her attitude, her cynicism, her whole way of looking at things. I didn’t like any part of her, and she was keeping me out of bed. ‘He’s over sixty years old,’ I said. ‘If he likes to keep photographs of women who’ve been kind to him all through his life, that’s nothing to do with us. We’ve no right to be in this house anyway, but I’ve got to use it because I’ve got to get some sleep. I’ll have to ask you to go away now, and leave me to it.’
She asked, ‘Can I use your telephone to call a taxi?’
I glanced out of the window; momentarily the rain had stopped, but the clouds were still scudding low before a high wind. ‘It’s not raining now,’ I said. ‘You can walk it into town in ten minutes.’
She flushed angrily. ‘All right, I’ll go and leave you to sleep. When you wake up you’d better think of going back to the mainland. I don’t suppose any of the doctors here will want to fly with you.’
I showed her out, and she marched up the road picking her way between the puddles, an arrogant, slightly absurd middle-aged woman in a blue suit and high-heeled, black patent leather shoes, most unsuitable for country walking. I went back into the sitting room and poured myself another whisky from Johnnie Pascoe’s bottle with a hand that shook with irritable anger. I sat down in his chair before the fire and lit a cigarette, to cool off for a few minutes before I went to bed. I knew I wouldn’t sleep if I went to bed as angry as I was just then.
That was a bad, spiteful woman, and I mustn’t let her get under my skin. Be objective, recognise her for what she was, and then the barbs would cease to rankle. To tell a pilot of my age and experience that his flying was unsafe, that doctors didn’t want to fly with him – that was a shrewd one, the stab of a woman in the habit of hurting. The worst of it was that it was very nearly true. I had stretched things to the limit of safety that morning, and perhaps a little bit beyond. Surely one had a right to do that when a man’s life depended on it? Surely one had a right to call up all one’s capital of skill? If I was prepared to take a chance myself, surely I had a right to make the doctor take it with me? He hadn’t seemed to mind about it at the time.
I took another drink and blew out a long cloud of smoke. In spite of my efforts I had achieved nothing, nothing at all. All I had done had been to lose the doctor’s suitcase with all his instruments in it. God only knew when he would get that back. To take my mind off my own troubles I got up and moved around the room. I set his barometer, and then I went on looking at the pictures. There were other photographs of Johnnie Pascoe in the First World War that I had not examined. There was an informal group of about a dozen pilots standing in a meadow in summer weather, probably on the edge of an aerodrome because a quaint, old-fashioned Nissen hut with a boarded end showed in the background. All the men were very young, and all of them were in Army uniforms. Three of them wore the R.F.C. tunic, double-breasted. One seemed to be an American, for he wore a single-breasted khaki tunic buttoned close up round the neck and the wings upon his chest were the unswept wings of the American Army. The rest of them wore normal British Army tunics with wings, and these wore khaki collars and ties; three of them wore Sam Browne belts, and one was wearing riding breeches and puttees. Scrawled on the bottom of the photograph were the words, ST. OMER 1918, in white ink that had faded to yellow.
I looked at it closely, and decided that Johnnie Pascoe was standing on the right, one of the pilots in an R.F.C. tunic. He had something round his neck that flopped down in a light streak on one shoulder, and I puzzled over this aspect of his uniform for a few moments. It looked for all the world like a silk stocking.
There was a very good photograph of a rotary-engined biplane fighter, taken broadside-on and in flight. It had the R.F.C. roundels and a design of black and white chequers on the engine cowling and the front fuselage. It was a very small machine, to judge by the size of the pilot’s head, with a single pair of struts between the wings. I guessed it to be a Sopwith Camel, but I was by no means sure, because I never saw one. It had two machine guns mounted on the top cowling. The pilot’s head was turned towards the camera and it migh
t have been Johnnie Pascoe, though it was difficult to say. The aeroplane was doped a khaki colour, very clean and smart. It looked like a brand-new aeroplane, taken by some official photographer.
So many photographs of the First War, all framed and hung close in a group upon one wall! There were too many for me to take them all in. All dated from before my earliest flying days, but they brought back for me the memories of that first enthusiasm that has lasted from my boyhood. They brought back memories of slow-revving engines blipping on the switch, of clouds of castor oil sweeping in blue clouds, of the slipstream over the grass, of taut doped fabric drumming beneath one’s fingers, of the smell of acetone in the hangar. They brought back memories of the rush of air over one’s head beyond the leather of the flying helmet, of the freshness on one’s face as one put up the goggles before going in to land, of carefully judged gliding turns on the approach, of the final sideslip in over the hedge, of soft landings upon grass. So many joys that lay behind me, half forgotten, a part of my youth.
They had been part of Johnnie Pascoe’s youth, too, even more than mine. He must have learned to fly, I thought, in 1916 or thereabouts, fourteen years before I did. If I still sensed the drama, the adventure of it all – how much more must he! Probably that enormous pusher two-seater with the engine behind the pilots was what he had learned to fly in – would that have been a Farman? A Rumpety? That thing with the long skid in front of the undercarriage – well, I knew that one. That was an Avro 504K. I had been up for a joyride in an Avro when I was a boy of twelve, the first flight that I had ever made. When Johnnie Pascoe learned to fly it was probably still a front-line operational type, with a top speed of about seventy miles an hour.
When he had learned to fly, flying had been the greatest adventure the world had to offer, an adventure that led almost certainly to death. In the First World War the casualties in training pilots had been staggering, because the aeroplanes were cheap and easily made, the pilots were needed in a hurry, and nobody understood much about flying training. When they were sent to France they were sent as soldiers, and the duty of a soldier was to fight and go on fighting. In that war there was no relief for a pilot after a fixed number of missions. A pilot went on flying two or even three missions on every fine day till he was killed, or else so seriously wounded as to need a spell in hospital. That had been the pattern of Johnnie Pascoe’s youth – the greatest and most stimulating adventure in the world leading to death willingly accepted. That had been the mental pattern of his life when that laughing photograph with Judy had been taken, in front of the rotary-engined fighter. Everything that he had done in his first youth must be related to that pattern. I could just get an inkling of it, perhaps, because I had entered the same world myself fourteen years later. Marian Forbes would never have a clue, not if she lived to be a hundred.
She was a bitter, spiteful woman, but she was so because it was beyond her capacity to understand. Whatever had happened between Johnnie Pascoe and his Judy had happened very soon after the First War. It must have meant enormous readjustments in his mind when the war ended. When the promise of death, willingly accepted, was withdrawn – what had there been to take its place? Johnnie Pascoe had gone on flying, anyway; I had never heard that he had done anything else.
I was growing sleepy now, and ready for bed. Marian Forbes had ceased to worry me, for she was something different, like an Eskimo. I threw the butt of my cigarette in the fire. There were a couple of thick logs smouldering together but there was no flame; the fire was safe and it would probably last till morning. There were still a couple of mouthfuls of whisky left in my glass; I stood there finishing them, looking at the photos in that corner. That, the single-seater with the top wing of the biplane sprouting from the fuselage at the pilot’s seat – that must have been a Sopwith Dolphin. That, with the backward stagger, might have been a D.H.5. How he had loved those days of early youth, to keep so many photographs!
I went through into his bedroom, for I was very sleepy by that time. Unknown to me, Mrs Lawrence had been in the house, for someone had removed the bedspread and turned down the bed; there was a pair of clean pyjamas, Johnnie Pascoe’s, laid out on the folded sheet. I had brought with me only a haversack filled with warm clothing and a few essentials and my flying helmet; there had been no room for pyjamas and I could get on without them for a night or two. Now Johnnie Pascoe was providing them for me, as he was providing everything else in this room.
His razor, his hairbrushes, his washing things, his towel, were there for me to use if I wanted them. His pictures were there for me to look at and to savour his early life, even in this room. There was a very large framed photograph of the earliest Handley Page bomber, the 0.400, with a Camel flying beside it, perhaps to show the scale of the big aircraft; the Camel had the same chequered markings that I had seen on the photo in the other room. There were two pictures of biplane fighters that I could not identify at all, and one of an S.E.5. His bed was there for me to sleep in, his pyjamas for me to wear.
I threw off my clothes and got into his pyjamas, washed my teeth at his washbasin, and got into his bed. I put out his bedside light and settled down to sleep, tired after thirty-six hours on the go. Outside the wind was high and the rain still beat against the side of the small, exposed house, and drummed on the corrugated iron roof. Later on I would ring Sheila, when I woke again. She wouldn’t be worrying yet because it was only about five o’clock, though it was now quite dark.
We must get help to Johnnie Pascoe the instant there was a break in the weather. I didn’t know how long a man with a fractured skull could live without attention, but no more than a day or two. I should have asked the doctor, I thought, how much time we had, and yet it would not have made any difference to events. I had failed in my first mission, failed because I had forgotten about the door. I knew that Johnnie would not hold that one against me, for we all have finger trouble now and then, but the onus was on me to get help to him and repair the error. I would do so even if I had to tie that doctor hand and foot and shove him in the aeroplane, for Johnnie Pascoe was dying.
I was very near to sleep now, in his bed and on his pillow. If he were to die, at any rate he would know that we were doing everything we could to help him, for he would come back to this small house beside this minor aerodrome, if a man goes anywhere beyond his death. This was his home, the only home he had, the shrine that held the treasured relics of his life. Somewhere in this bedroom with me would be … would be the Military Cross, in one of the drawers of his chest, perhaps. Somewhere there might be souvenirs of Judy … a silk stocking he had worn around his neck when flying, forty years ago.
Those rotary engines … the Le Rhones, the Monos, and the Clergets! They made a sort of crackling hiss, and always the same smell of castor oil spraying backwards down the fuselage in a fine mist over your leather helmet and your coat. They were delightful to fly, the controls so light, the engines so smooth-running. Up among the sunlit cumulus under the blue sky I could loop and roll and spin my Camel with the pressure of two fingers on the stick beside the button switch which I used as little as possible. Looping, turn off the petrol by the big plug cock upon the panel just before the bottom of the dive, ease the stick gently back and over you go. The engine dies at the top of the loop; ease the stick fully back and turn the petrol on again as the ground appears so that the engine comes to life five or six seconds later.
She would climb at nearly a thousand feet a minute, my new Clerget Camel; she would do a hundred and ten miles an hour. She would be faster, I thought, than anything upon the Western Front. There was the aerodrome, turn off the cock and put her into a volplane. Turn it on again to try the engine at a thousand feet, and turn it off. Volplane turns downwind from the hedge, S turns keeping the aerodrome in view. Try the engine once more with the cock. A turn to the left in the bright sun, keeping the hedge in sight through the hole in the top plane. A turn to the right. Now turn in, a little high, stick over and top rudder, the air squirting in up
on you sideways round the windscreen. Straighten out, over the hedge, and down on to the grass. Remember that the Clerget lands very fast, at over forty miles an hour, and with that great engine in the nose the tail was light. Watch it … Lovely.
I came to rest upon the grass in the bright sunshine; for an April day it was terrific, right out of the box. I turned the petrol half on, set the mixture, and pulled my goggles down again to taxi in to the tarmac. She was throwing a light mist of castor oil over the fuselage, the windscreen, and me, just the right amount, not too much and not too little, but you don’t want to get it in your eyes or you know it for the rest of the day. I glanced over my shoulder and took off again, and flew her over to the hangar in little blips of engine on the switch, my foot working hard. I put her down right on the edge and rolled forward on to the gravel and stopped just outside the Bessoneau. Cochran was doing that at London Colney in a Spad but he was going too fast and ran into a support of the hangar and brought the canvas roof down on top of him, and then the gas tank burst behind his back and the whole lot went up in flames. There wasn’t much left for the funeral. Was the C.O. mad!
I let the motor die and pushed up my goggles and wiped the oil off my face with my silk scarf. Donk was on the tarmac with a lot of other people, girls, some of them. I jumped out of the cockpit and the oil was just right, even all the way round the cowling. It made her glisten, so that she looked wonderful. I told the mechanics to wipe her down before the dust got on it, and then to drench out each cylinder with paraffin.
Donk and Bose and Jerry came up with the girls. Bose said, ‘Meet the Hounslow Wonder. Flies upside down a darn sight better than right side up. Flies backwards, too, so the breeze can cool –’
Donk said, ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s not got over last night.’
‘I wasn’t,’ said one of the girls. ‘I know it.’ She turned to me. ‘You were just wonderful.’
‘Don’t tell him that,’ said Jerry. ‘Now he’ll go and drop it. Remember Butch?’