Читать книгу Round the Bend - Nevil Shute Norway - Страница 3

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Some men of noble stock were made, some glory in the murder blade,

Some praise a Science or an Art, but I like honourable Trade!

James Elroy Flecker

I came into aviation the hard way. I was never in the R.A.F., and my parents hadn't got fifteen hundred pounds to spend on pilot training for me at a flying school. My father was, and is, a crane driver at Southampton docks, and I am one of seven children, five boys and two girls. I went to the council school like all the other kids in our street, and then when I left school dad got me a job in a garage out on the Portsmouth Road. That was in 1929.

I stayed there for about three years and got to know a bit about cars. Then, early in the summer, Sir Alan Cobham came to Southampton with his flying circus, National Aviation Day, he called it. He operated in a big way, because he had about fifteen aeroplanes, Avros and Moths and a glider and an Autogiro, and a Lincock for stunting displays, and a big old Handley Page airliner for mass joy-riding, and a new thing called an Airspeed Ferry. My, that was a grand turnout to watch.

I knew from the first day that to be with that circus was the job for me. He was at Hamble for three days, and I was out at the field each day from early in the morning till dark. The chaps fuelling and cleaning down the aircraft let me help them, coiling down a hose or fetching an oil drum for them to stand on; when there was nothing else that wanted doing I went round the enclosures picking up the waste paper that the crowd had left behind and taking it away to burn in a corner of the field. It was fun just doing that, because of the aeroplanes.

I got the sack from the garage on the second day.

On the evening of their last day, I went to the foreman of the ground crew and asked him for a job. He said I was too young, and they were full up anyway. He said that he was sorry.

I went home all down in the dumps that night. I must say, Dad and Mum were good. They didn't lay in to me for getting the sack from the garage, although they might well have done. I'd told them airily that I was going to get a job with the circus, and when I went home I suppose they saw by my face I hadn't got it. They were ever so nice; Ma opened a small tin of salmon for tea to make a bit of a treat for me. The show was going on to Portsmouth, twenty miles away, and when I told them I was going over there next day, all Dad said was, "That's right. Keep trying."

I went to Portsmouth on an early bus and I was out at the airport long before the first machines flew in, helping the ground crew to put up the first enclosures round the edges of the aerodrome. The foreman scratched his head when he saw me, but they were always shorthanded so they didn't turn me off. He must have said something to Sir Alan, though, because while I was holding a post straight for another chap to hammer into the ground, Sir Alan himself came up behind me.

"Who are you?" he asked. "I thought we'd left you behind at Hamble."

"My name's Tom Cutter," I said.

"Well, what are you doing here, Tom?"

"Helping to get this post in, sir," I said. I was a bit shy at being talked to by a knight.

"Haven't you got a job?"

"Got the sack day before yesterday," I said. It sounded bad, but I didn't know what else to say.

"Is that because you spent so much time out here with us?"

"I suppose so," I said reluctantly.

He snorted. "Well, don't be such a young fool. Go back and ask to be taken on again. There's no work for you here. What was the job?"

"I was in a garage, sir. I can't go back. They took on another boy."

"Well, we can't take you on here. We're full up. I've got hundreds of boys writing to me for jobs every day, hundreds and hundreds. I've got no jobs to give."

"Mr. Dixon told me that there wasn't any job," I said. "I just thought that if I came over while I'm doing nothing, I could help, picking up the paper and that."

He stared at me so long in silence that I felt quite awkward. I know now what a good answer that was. "I'm blowed if I know," he said at last, and turned away. I couldn't make head or tail of that.

I went on all that morning helping put up the enclosures, and when dinner time came round the foreman said I'd better go and get my dinner in the mess tent with the rest of the men. It was good of him, because being out of work I hadn't got any money to chuck around. I went and helped park the cars in the car park when they started to come in for the afternoon show, and then I watched the show again. They had stunt displays, and wing walking, and a parachute descent, and a pretty girl flying a glider. They had a public address loudspeaker system rigged up, and the announcer stood up once and said that Sir Alan Cobham had offered to let any pilot of the last war try his hand at flying again. A pilot dressed up as an old tramp came out of the crowd and did a bit of clowning with the announcer, and tripped over his umbrella and fell flat, and got into an Avro back to front and took it off the ground facing the tail, holding his hat on, waving his umbrella, and shouting blue murder, and went into the best bit of crazy flying ever seen in England, bellowing all the time to be told how to land it as he went crabbing down the enclosures three feet up, and the announcer bellowing back to him. My, that was fun! They finished up with a Gretna Green elopement of a couple in a terrible old Model T Ford, with father chasing after them all over the aerodrome in a Moth and bombing them with little paper bags of flour and rolls of toilet paper. I'd seen it all before, but I could have watched that show for ever. I'd go and see it again, even now.

I went and helped unpark the cars and get them away after the show. Sir Alan had been flying the Handley Page himself most of the afternoon, joy-riding, taking up twenty-five passengers at a time. He handed over to another pilot at about five o'clock and came through the car park to his caravan for his tea. He was always in a hurry, but never in too much of a hurry to notice the humblest detail of his big concern, and he checked when he saw me.

"You still here?" he asked.

"I been helping park the cars and that," I said.

"Oh. Get any tips?"

"Three and six," I said.

"Fair enough. Want to earn five bob?"

I grinned and nodded.

"I'll give you five bob if you'd like to do the girl in Gretna Green this evening. Think you can do it?"

"Oh, aye," I said. "I can do that all right. Thank you, Sir."

I was young, of course, and I'd got a fresh, pink and white face in those days, so I could make up as a girl quite well. All I had to do was to dress up in the most terrible women's clothes and drive about on the aerodrome in the old Ford, trying to get out of the way of the Moth. The Ford was driven by a boy about my own age, Connie Shaklin. Connie was short for Constantine; he was a cheerful, yellow-skinned young chap with straight black hair who put me in the way of things. He was dressed up as a young farmer in a sort of smock and we did the turn together; we never turned that Ford over, but we came bloody near it sometimes. It was good fun; we wheeled and skidded the thing all over the aerodrome, shrieking and hugging and kissing while the Moth dived on us and bombed us. The show ended, of course, with my skirt getting pulled off and me running off the field in a pair of red flannel knickers, covered in flour and with streamers of toilet paper all over me, while the crowd laughed fit to burst.

I got the five bob and Sir Alan himself said I'd done very well. That was the first money that I ever made in aviation.

I made eight and six that day in all, and when I got home I'd got four and twopence left, clear profit, after paying for my bus fares and my tea. I showed it to Dad and Mum and told them I was going over to the show again.

Next day they let me do the Gretna Green girl in both performances, and gave me ten bob for the two. For the rest of the day I picked up paper and carried things about for the ground engineers; there was always something to work at. Then I helped in the car park again and got some more tips, and when I went back home that night Dad said I was getting my nose in.

The show moved on to Winchester and I followed it there, but after that it was going to Newbury and that was too far for me to go over every day. I asked the foreman about a job again then, and he said he'd speak to Sir Alan for me. Next day was a Saturday and Dad was off in the afternoon, so I got him to come over in case they said I was too young again. Sir Alan saw Dad for a minute and said I was a smart boy, but if I came I'd have to be laid off in the winter. Dad said he thought it was best for me to do what I was keen on, and we'd take our chance about the winter. When we got on to the bus that night to go back home I'd got my job in the air circus, four quid a week, which was more than I'd been getting in the garage.

Thinking back over my life, I know of two or three times when I've been just perfectly, radiantly happy. That was one of them.

I went all over England, Scotland, and Wales with the show that summer, from Falmouth to Inverness, from Kings Lynn to Swansea. I did labouring work and Gretna Green, and helped with the aeroplanes whenever I got a chance. That was mostly when some passenger had been sick on the floor. From that I got to washing off the dirty oil with a bucket of paraffin and cleaning down generally, and by the time the season ended I'd picked up quite a bit of knowledge about those particular aeroplanes, just by keeping my ears open and working on them whenever I got the chance.

I got laid off when the show packed up for the winter, but Mr. Dixon said that I could come along next year if I wanted, and if I turned up or wrote in the first week of April there'd be a job for me. Sir Alan himself came round on the last evening and shook hands with us all and thanked us, and when he came to me he asked what I was going to do.

I said, "I'll get a job of some sort for the winter and come back again next year, if that's all right."

"Mr. Dixon tells me that you want to be a ground engineer," he said.

"That's right, sir," I replied. "I was going to go to evening classes in the winter."

"Fine," he said. "If you do that, bring along some kind of a report with you next spring. If it's a good one, I'll see you get a bit more to do with the aeroplanes."

I went back home, and I got a job with a coal merchant, going round with the driver of one of those chariot coal carts drawn by a horse, delivering coal at the houses. It was all right as a job because it didn't tire your mind, and I got off sharp at five every evening with plenty of time to clean up and have tea and go out to my classes at the Southampton Polytechnic.

I did mathematics and mechanics and engineering workshop that winter, and it kept me pretty busy. On top of that I read two technical books about aeroplanes that I got out of the library, and understood about a quarter of them. When the spring came round I got a good report, and I took it along with me in April when I went to Littlehampton to join up with the circus again. I showed it to Mr. Dixon and he showed it to Sir Alan, and he sent for me and asked me if I'd like to be an apprentice with the ground engineers. That meant I'd be working on the aeroplanes all the time. My, I was pleased, and so were Dad and Mum when I wrote home. I liked humping the coal all right, but it wasn't half as much fun as working on an aeroplane.

Being an apprentice didn't mean that I did anything very difficult upon the aeroplanes. I still had the job of cleaning out the cabins and washing off the oil from fuselages and wings, but there were also sparking plugs to be cleaned and filters to be checked, and as time went on I got to working with the ground engineers more and more. I still did the Gretna Green girl with Connie twice each day although I had begun to shave, and this brings me to Connie.

When I joined the show the first year, it never struck me that there was anything unusual about Connie. After all, the whole show was a bit unusual from start to finish, and Connie was a part of it; the fact that he looked strange was just another one among a mass of new, strange things. He looked a bit foreign. He was about my age, but taller and rather thin. He had straight black hair and a yellowish tinge to his skin; in spite of that he had firm, well cut features. He was a good-looking, striking chap. He was a darned good friend to me, right from the first.

Once one of the pilots, irritated over something that Connie had or hadn't done, said, "Where's that bloody Chink?" It was a surprise to me at the time, but when he said that I thought of the Chinese laundry at the corner of our street at home, and I could see what he meant. Connie was much taller than either of the two men in the laundry and he'd got a leaner look about his face, but he did look a bit Chinese, when you came to think of it. Still, that didn't mean a thing to me; Connie was just like any other boy except that he knew a good bit more than most of my other friends.

He was an apprentice like me, but he'd started a bit higher on the ladder; he'd been to a good school. Sir Alan had had some trouble at Penang on his first pioneering flight out to Australia, and Connie's father had helped him, I think; that's how Connie came to be an apprentice in the air circus. Connie and I became very close friends, perhaps because our backgrounds were so different. Our Gretna Green turn brought us very close together in more senses than one; we were always thinking up new gags for it, most of which Sir Alan stopped us doing after the first time because he said they were too rude.

Again, that second summer we went all over the British Isles, staying a day in each place and giving two shows each day. There was never a whole day off; in an air circus like that you take your week-ends in the winter. We were improvising all the time to keep the aircraft in the air; we had plenty of tools and good materials to work with, but all the work had to be done out in the open field. It was a grand training for an engineer, because in each emergency you had to work out quick what was the best way to tackle it with the facilities at your disposal. I've changed an engine many a time in the lee of a haystack, by lashing up a sheerlegs of scaffold poles over the nose of the machine and borrowing the farmer's tractor to pull the wire rope, like a crane.

It's not quite true to say that we had no time off, however. We often stayed at the same place over the week-end. We had the afternoon and evening shows on Sunday as usual, but there was never very much to do on Sunday morning. Connie sometimes used to go to church, but Connie was unusual; I can't remember that anybody else did.

I knew more about church than most boys in our street, because until my voice broke I was a choir boy at St. John's. I never talked about it on the circus because it sounds a bit sissy to say you've been a choir boy, but I was. I wouldn't have been, but for Mum. She said that if I'd got a good voice it was my duty to use it, and she made me go. I never got anything for it but the outing to the Isle of Wight each summer, and when my voice broke I got out of it. If I'd been working in Southampton Mum would have made me join up as a tenor when my voice steadied down, but the air circus got me out of that, of course. It wasn't worth doing just for the winter months.

The thing that interested me in Connie's church-going was that he just went to any old church there was. He went to the nearest, whether it was Anglican or Methodist or Presbyterian or Roman Catholic. He went to a synagogue one time, at Wolverhampton. If it was raining or if we'd had too much beer on Saturday night he wouldn't go at all, but if it was a nice fine morning and nothing particular to do, he'd ask somebody where the nearest church was and go to it.

I asked him once if it was all right, just going into any church like that. He grinned and said, "Blowed if I know. I've never been chucked out."

"I'd be scared of doing the wrong thing," I remarked. "However do you know what to do in a synagogue?"

"Just sit at the back and watch what other people do," he said. "If they start doing anything comic, like going up to the altar or anything like that, I just sit still and watch."

"Don't they mind you doing that?"

"I don't think so. A Roman Catholic priest came up one time as I was going out and asked me who I was. I told him I was just looking, like in a shop. He didn't mind a bit."

He collected churches, like another boy might collect cigarette cards or matchbox covers. The gem of his collection was at Woking, where he found a mosque to go to. He had a bit of a job getting to that one because the big day at a mosque is on a Friday, but he was a very good apprentice and a hard worker, so the foreman let him go.

Once, I remember, I asked Connie what he really was, Church of England, or Presbyterian, or what. "Blowed if I know," he said. "I was born in Penang and my father was a Buddhist. But he died four years ago, and then we came to England. I was Church of England at school."

I stared at him. "Where's Penang?"

"Just by Malaya," he told me. "But we don't live there now. Mother brought us to England when my father died. She was born in Irkutsk, so she's Greek Orthodox."

Connie knew an awful lot more than me, of course, and I didn't want to go on looking stupid, so I let Irkutsk go. The Greek part stayed in my mind, and I remember months afterwards looking at a map of Greece in the Public Library, trying to find Irkutsk where Connie's mother had been born. But all that came later; at the time I only asked him, "Is your mum in England now?"

He shook his head. "She's in California, at a place called San Diego, with my sister. Mother got married again."

It was quite outside my range, of course: California was somewhere abroad where they made Syrup of Figs. "Oh ..." I said vaguely.

I was young, of course, and I was loaded down with new experiences. Until I joined the circus I'd never been more than five miles from my own street in Southampton, and I'd got an awful lot to learn. I must have seemed slow at times, because it wasn't till that second season was half over that I realised what being an apprentice meant. It meant that I'd got a regular job, that I wasn't going to be laid off in the winter, like I had before. Connie and I were going to spend the winter at Littlehampton working on the aeroplanes, overhauling them for their certificates of airworthiness so they'd be all ready for the spring.

The circus ran for four years and that was the end; the last season wasn't so good as the first three had been, and it looked as if the public were getting a bit tired of it. Sir Alan packed it up, and went on with his development work on refuelling aeroplanes in flight. He was very good with us apprentices. He went to a great deal of trouble to find us jobs in other places in the aircraft industry. He got me a fine apprenticeship with Airservice Ltd. at Morden aerodrome, just south of London, overhauling and repairing aeroplanes in a big way in a grand, modern shop. I owe a great deal to Sir Alan over that.

I had to say good-bye to Connie then. Like me, he wanted to go on and take his ground engineer's tickets, but neither of us could do that till we were twenty-one years old. He was going out to California to his mother; he told me that there were aircraft factories out there in San Diego and he wanted to get into one of those. I was very sorry to part from Connie, because we'd been together for three and a half years and had a lot of fun; although he knew such a lot more than I did, he was never stuck up about it. Being with him in those early years was very good for me. We said we'd keep in touch by writing, and of course we never did.

I went to Airservice in the autumn of 1935, and I stayed with them for ten years. It was a good firm to work for, and I got on well. I got my A and C certificates for the maintenance of engines and airframes as soon as I was old enough, in 1936, and I got the B and D certificates for complete overhauls in 1938; by that time I was earning over ten pounds a week, including overtime. I didn't spend it on girls, and I didn't spend much of it on beer. I spent it mostly on flying. The firm had a scheme that gave cheap flying instruction to its staff, and I took my first private pilot's "A" licence in 1937. By the middle of the war, when pilots were short and regulations lax, I was test flying the Tiger Moths we had rebuilt after a crash as a regular thing. I used to finish the inspection in the shop and then just take it out and fly it. It saved such a lot of time and bother looking for a test pilot.

I stayed a civilian all the war, working at my normal job of repairing crashed aircraft. I was put in charge of a repair section in 1940 and got to foreman's rank. In 1943 the firm had to strengthen the repair side of their branch in Egypt, and they asked me if I'd go out there for a bit. I was twenty-eight years old, and up till then I'd never been out of England. Of course I said I'd go.

It was on account of that I married Beryl Cousins.

I've not said much about girls up till now because, to tell the truth, I never had a lot to do with them till then. I was so stuck into my job and so keen on aeroplanes and flying that girls passed me by, or I passed them by, whichever way you look at it. Till I got my B and D tickets I was working at classes three or four evenings every week; then when I'd got them, and might have had time to look around a bit and have a bit of fun, the war came. That meant that I was working overtime every night till eight o'clock and sometimes later than that, which sort of limits the time that a chap has to look around and pick himself a girl. Maybe when it's like that he's apt to pick the first that comes along.

I lodged in a suburban road at Morden and Beryl lived two doors up the road from me, and worked in the stores at Airservice Ltd. She was a sort of clerk there, working on the inwards and the outwards files. She was a slight, pale girl with ash-blonde hair. We used to walk to work together in the mornings. We got to having lunch together and tea if she was working late, all in the works canteen, and Saturdays I'd take her to the pictures, or we'd go dancing at a Palais. After six months of that we came to the conclusion that we were in love, and we'd get married when the work let up a bit. We didn't realise we both loved something better than each other. I was in love with aeroplanes, and she was in love with love.

I heard about this job one morning, and when they said they wanted me to go out to Egypt they said it would be for two years and I'd have to go in about three weeks' time. I met Beryl at our usual table for lunch with other people all round us in the works canteen, so I said to her, "Eat up quick. I've got something to tell you, but not here."

We walked out on the grass up the aerodrome hedge when we'd finished; it was September, and a lovely sunny day. I told her all about it as we walked along by the scrap dump of wrecked airframes and engines, and she said, "Oh Tom! Have you really got to go?"

I hadn't got to, but I wasn't going to miss that chance. "They put it to me pretty firm," I said. "You don't get much choice, these days."

She turned to me, and her eyes were full of tears. "I thought we were going to get married about Christmas. That's what we said."

I was a bloody fool, of course, but one does these things. I couldn't bear to see her cry. I took both her hands in mine. "I know," I said. "What say if we get married now, before I go?"

She said softly, "Oh Tom! Do you want us to be married?"

I wasn't really sure I did, but I was twenty-eight and I'd never got that far with any girl before. I said, "Do I want to!" and took her in my arms and kissed her.

After a bit we got to thinking about ways and means. There wasn't time for doing it the regular way with banns called in church and all that. We should have to do it with a special licence, and I found out pretty soon that Beryl knew all about those. Girls study things of that sort more than men. I wouldn't be able to set her up in a house in the time we'd got, and she didn't want to leave her job at Airservice because if she did, and didn't have a baby, she'd only have got directed into something else since it was wartime. So we fixed that we'd get married as soon as we could and she'd go on working just the same, and living with her people.

We went and saw her dad and mum that evening and told them all about it. They were pleased all right, because I was making good money and I think they felt that I was likely to get on. Next day was Friday, and I asked for the day off and took Beryl down to Southampton and introduced her to my folks, and ten days after that we got married at a registrar's office.

We got a week at Southsea for our honeymoon; it was a fine September that year so that although there wasn't much to do we could sit on the front and look at the ships going in and out of Portsmouth harbour, and the Bostons and the Spitfires going out on strikes. I think Beryl was happy, and if I was thinking of the work more than a man ought to do upon his honeymoon, well, it was wartime and the flying schools were waiting for the Tiger Moths I mended, to train pilots. Beryl understood—at least, I think she did.

Looking back upon it now, it must have been a poor sort of a honeymoon. It was wartime in England, and everything was short. There was complete darkness at night, of course, there on the coast, and the cafes and the dance halls and the picture houses were full of men and girls in uniform; a civilian didn't get much priority. You couldn't get down to the beach to bathe except in one little place because of the anti-invasion barbed wire and tank obstacles and land mines, and there weren't any motor coach tours or steamer trips or concert parties on the beach, or anything like that. This was all normal to us because that's the way things were in England then, and we didn't grieve over what we couldn't have, but when I think about the sort of honeymoon I could have given her if it had been in peacetime, I feel a bit sore. It might have made a difference.

It was better for me than for Beryl. I had Egypt ahead of me. I was going out to an important job in a warm, spacious country, into all the glamour of a successful war in North Africa. There would be luxury in Cairo, and sunshine on the desert, and the Pyramids, and the Nile, and travel to our various outstations in Africa and Persia and Iraq. For me, this week in Southsea was the last of the drab misery of war in England. Ahead of Beryl was a long, indefinite vista of it, cold and monotonous in the same job, and lonely with me away. We neither of us thought about it like that—or, if I thought of it, I didn't talk about it. But that's the way it was.

We didn't look ahead. I can't remember that we ever discussed where we were going to live after the war, or anything like that. It didn't seem to be much good, with things as they were. The war had been going on for four years; for four years we had been directed where to work and we were getting out of the way of thinking about our future for ourselves. This job in Egypt was to be for two years, and after that I should come back to wartime England, so we thought, and it would be the same except that everything would be scarcer and more difficult than ever. We never looked ahead to think about the peace, that I remember.

I was flown to Egypt by B.O.A.C. It wasn't possible for Beryl to come and see me off because the time and place of departure were secret. The best that she could do was to come down with me to Morden Underground station late one afternoon as I carried my suitcase down from the digs. We walked silent together down the suburban streets; on that last walk we didn't seem to have anything left to say to each other. Maybe she was only realising then what the separation was going to mean. She hadn't got a lot of imagination.

By the entrance to the station we stopped and looked at each other. It was raining a bit, and the red buses starting and stopping at the halt just by us made a great clatter with their diesels. I put down my suitcase and took her hands. "Well, girl," I said, "this is it."

She was pretty down in the mouth. "Write to me a lot, Tom," she said. "I'll be ever so lost without you."

"Cheer up," I said. "I'll write as soon as ever I get there, but don't get worried if you don't hear for a while. If they're sending letters round the Cape it might take anything up to six weeks."

"I won't be able to sleep till I hear."

I grinned. "Bet you do. Tuck a bolster in beside you and make believe I'm there, and you'll sleep all right."

She smiled, though she was very near to tears. "Now stop it ..."

I took her in my arms. It didn't matter that there were people all around at the bus stop; you saw this every hour of every day, with people going off on draft. "It's only for two years, girl," I said softly. "It'll soon be gone."

"It sounds like as if it was for ever," she said miserably.

There was no sense in prolonging the agony; it was only making things more difficult for her, and we'd said all that there was to say. We kissed, and kissed again, and then I said, "I'll have to go now, girl. Look after yourself."

She released me. "You look after yourself. Cheer-oh, Tom." She was crying now in earnest.

I squeezed her hand clumsily. "Cheer up, girl. It's not for so long." And with that I turned and picked the suitcase up and left her, and went and got my ticket. I looked back over the turnstile and she was there waving good-bye to me with tears running down her face, and I waved back to her, and then I had to turn round and go down to the train.

I went in a Liberator, squashed in with about twenty others in the rear fuselage. We took off at about ten o'clock that night from an aerodrome somewhere in the south; we didn't know what aerodrome it was, nor where we were going to. We flew on for about eight hours, and then in the dawn we landed. We couldn't see anything out of the aeroplane, and when we got out on to the tarmac we found that we were in a sandy sort of place with palm trees and white houses. They told us it was Tripoli.

We weren't allowed outside the aerodrome; they gave us breakfast in a tent while the Liberator was refuelled, and we took off again for Cairo. We landed at Almaza in the middle of the day and it was good and hot; I had English clothes on, and I envied the chaps working on the aircraft in just a pair of shorts and no shirt. I got passed through the various formalities, and then I went and reported to the manager of Airservice Ltd. on the aerodrome.

That two years was a fine experience for me. I was in charge of airframe repairs and general maintenance. I lived in a small hotel about a mile from the airport, and I had my office at the back of the hangar. We operated a large number of aircraft all over the Near East and North-East Africa, and I was responsible for keeping them in the air, all except engine overhauls, which were the business of another chap. If a Rapide ran off the runway and bent its undercarriage at Luxor or at Lydda, the responsibility for getting it into the air again was mine. If it was a simple and straightforward repair I would send one of my ground engineers to it by air or truck, but if it was a difficult or complicated job I would go myself and see the work put in hand the way I wanted it. We had an old Hornet two-seater that I used to go in if the journey was anything less than five hundred miles, but there was always a difficulty about finding a pilot who could spare the time, and after a while the firm agreed that I should fly myself about in this thing. It wasn't worth much if I crashed it, and I didn't want any flying pay or insurance.

On these repair jobs, flying myself or being flown by a pilot, I travelled very widely in the last two years of the war. I went to Beirut and Baghdad and Aleppo and Nicosia, and down south as far as Khartoum and Addis Ababa. I got to know about Syrian and Iraqi and Egyptian aircraft hands, what they could do and what they couldn't, what days they had to take off for their religion or their festivals, and why. I tried to learn about all that. It's no good going round and saying that those boys are just a lot of monkeys, that they aren't reliable and you can't use them. You can use them all right if you take the trouble to learn about them, and if you do that you'll find the work is liable to come out a good deal cheaper, because their wages are much less.

I got some experience of negotiating with officials, too. That was a type of job I'd never done before. Whenever parts for a repair had to be taken into Syria or Lebanon or Iraq there were Customs duties to be paid or talked out of; in the usual way I'd get to Aleppo or some place like that and find that the repair parts I'd sent up had got stuck in a bonded warehouse, the Government were asking for a hundred and fifty pounds before they would release them, and the ground engineer had got angry and had insulted the Minister for Air. There was nobody to straighten all that out but me, and I got into the way of taking it easy, going to drink a cup of coffee with the Minister, saying what a happy little town it was and how my wife would like it if we came to live there, and sending over a big bouquet of flowers for the Minister's wife. I'd usually get the parts next day without any trouble at all, and nothing to pay. The most I ever had to do was to fix up a joy-ride for the Minister's children when the aircraft was flying again.

I used to write to Beryl regularly once a week wherever I was, telling her as much about what I'd been doing as I thought would pass the censor. She used to write to me, but not so often. It was once a week at first, but then it got a bit irregular and sometimes I wouldn't hear anything for three weeks, and then two letters would come together, written within a couple of days of each other. She never seemed to have much to say, but that was natural because life in England was all just the same. Often most of a letter was about some film she'd seen.

There was one of those long gaps in her letters, nearly a month, about October 1944, when I'd been out in Egypt just a year. Air mail was coming through all right. I got a bit angry, because I'd written regularly myself and I didn't see why she couldn't find time to write to me, so I sent her a sharp one. Nothing happened for a bit, and then about ten days later I got a letter from her dad.

It read:

"Dear Tom,

"We've been having trouble here, I'm sorry to say, and Beryl wants me to write and tell you before she writes herself, and her Ma and I think that's best too. It's been very dull for her since you went away, and she went up to the West End some time ago and got in with some Polish officers, very nice and well behaved, she says. She took to going about with one of them, a Captain Wysock, and the long and the short of it is, Tom, she's going to have a baby in January.

"I know this will be a great blow to you, and I can't tell you how sorry we all are. Captain Wysock has been down to see us and we had a long talk. He was heartbroken about you, but we talked it all out and we thought that it would be best if there was a divorce and he was to marry Beryl; they are very much in love and that is what they want. Beryl will be writing to you in a day or so, but we thought I had better write and tell you first.

"Captain Wysock comes of a very high-born family. His father is a Count and has big estates near a place called Jabinka and a town house in Warsaw. He has been very generous to Beryl, and we feel that as things have turned out a divorce would be the fairest thing all round, and I hope you will think so too.

"Beryl wants me to say she sends you her love, and we all send our sympathy in what must be a shock to you. But I am sure that it will all be for the best.

"Your affectionate father-in-law,

"Albert Cousins."

I was at Damascus when this letter came to Cairo, and I didn't get it till I got back to Egypt a few days later. By that time the letter from Beryl had just come in, so I got them both together. That one read:

"Darling Tom,

"I saw Dad's letter before he sent it off and I have waited a bit before I wrote so as you should get his first. I don't know what you must be thinking, Tom, and believe me I wouldn't have had things happen like this for the world. It's such a mix up. But I'm sure the best way to get it straight now is for you to divorce me. I couldn't come back and live with you again not after what has happened, not even if you wanted me which I suppose you don't, not now. Feodor and I are very much in love and we want to get married, so if you divorce me that will be best and you'll be free to look for someone else. I'm so terribly sorry it's turned out like this. I never thought a thing like this would ever happen to me.

"I wish you could meet Feodor, Tom—he's such a dear. His family is terribly rich with a big castle in the country and everything; I do hope they'll approve of me. He hasn't seen them since the war began, but he knows they're all right. After the war, when we're married, we're going there to live. He's given me the most lovely engagement ring, diamonds and emeralds, but first of all we've got to get the divorce.

"Don't be miserable about all this, Tom. I know it's all for the best.

"Your loving,

"Beryl."

I was up to the eyes in work at that time. I read these letters through with my mind half occupied with the problems of getting enough aircraft serviceable to maintain our scheduled services, and they were just another thing to me. It was like when you're counting on an aircraft being finished for the morning flight to Khartoum, and an engineer comes up at six o'clock in the evening and tells you he needs a right-hand contact breaker and they've only got left-hand ones in the store and they've been telephoning all round and there aren't any right-hand ones in Cairo. Beryl and her boy friend, in my mind, took their turn in the queue with all my other worries, and must wait for attention till I got the decks cleared a bit. At the same time, I was sick and angry when I got these letters, because there'd been a lot of this sort of thing going on in England. Somebody once told me that ten per cent of the wives of men serving overseas had been unfaithful to them. Now I was in with that ten per cent.

In the brief moments that I had to think about my own affairs that day I wondered how in hell she expected me to set about a divorce in a foreign country like Egypt, in the middle of all my work, in war time. And then I wondered if they were all mad to go believing such a transparent, cock and bull story as this Polish soldier had told them, about his father being a Count, and huge estates, and all that. It was a crazy, miserable business that they'd written out to plague me with; the only thing to do was to put it out of my mind and get on with the work.

I had to go to Luxor next day, where a young fool of a pilot had run one of our Ansons into the tail of a Dakota of Transport Command. I had to clear up the accumulation of paper work on my desk before going off again in the morning; I worked on late that night. It was after ten o'clock when I had time for my own affairs and I was dead tired, but I had to write to Beryl because I should be away for another two or three days. I got the letters out and read them through, and I was bitterly angry once again that they should plague me so.

I pulled a sheet of paper to me, and I wrote:

"Darling Girl,

"I got your letter and your Dad's together when I got back here after being away for a few days. I won't say what I think because you probably know that, but I'll say this. I think you must be bloody well daft, all the lot of you.

"First of all, I'll bet you a hundred quid to a sausage that this Polish officer's father isn't a Count and that he hasn't got any estates and that the ring he gave you is either stolen or phoney. For God's sake snap out of it and act like a grown up woman, and tell your Dad to do that too. You've been sucked in and fallen for the oldest story in the world, my girl. That's what's happened to you.

"Now about this divorce you want. I don't know how in hell you expect me to get you a divorce from here even if I wanted to, and I've not made up my mind about that yet. What do you think this is—the Court of Chancery, with lawyers going round in wigs and gowns and that? I'll tell you what it is. It's a bloody hot, dirty, dusty aerodrome, no fans and blinding sun, and grit all over my desk. I've come five hundred miles from one just like it today, and I'm going off to another like it tomorrow. There's no English lawyers here and no English law. If it's a divorce you're thinking of, you'll have to wait till I get back to England in a year from now, and then I'll see if I'm prepared to give it you. Some of you girls seem to think you can get a divorce just by putting a penny in the slot.

"You think this over a bit more, and then write and tell me how you're going on. If I was in England now we'd soon find out if this Polish officer is a Count or not, and you'd find out what the end of a strap feels like, my girl. I'm not at all sure that you'd find out what a divorce feels like. You can't just pick up being married and put it down, like that. You think it over a bit more.

"Ever your loving husband,

"Tom."

Considering this letter, it seems to me that I said everything that was in my mind, except that I still loved her. I didn't think to tell her about that. Perhaps I thought she knew.

Nothing much happened then. She didn't write again, and nor did I. I was very sore about this Polish officer, and till that was all cleaned up I hadn't got much to say to her. If I'd been in England I'd have cleaned it up fast enough. I did sit down once or twice to write, but I never finished a letter. I could never think of anything to say that wouldn't be pleading with her for our marriage, and I was damned if I'd do that.

I had an arrangement to send her money through the bank, deducted from my salary when it was paid in, and this went on as usual; she still took my fifteen pounds a month in spite of her Polish Count with his large estates. I was content to leave the matter so. I was far too busy in those Cairo years of war to bother about any other girl. I used to wonder sometimes if I was married or not, and how it was all going on, and then I'd put it out of my mind. Time enough to start and sort out that one when I got home. I think I felt that so long as she went on taking my money there was nothing that couldn't be ironed out when finally we got together.

The end of the German war came, and the end of the Japanese war, but there was still a vast amount of transport needed in the Near East, and I had to serve my full time out. It wasn't till the middle of November 1945 that I finally got a date for my air passage home, and then I wrote to her quite shortly and told her I was coming and I'd come and see her at her dad's house as soon as I landed in England, probably on the Tuesday of the following week.

I landed in England on the day I'd said, and went up to London on the airline bus. It was pretty late in the afternoon when we got in to Town, and I decided to stay in London that night rather than go down to Morden there and then; I didn't want to have to stay in the same house if this Polish officer was living with her or anything like that. I took my bag to a hotel I knew about just off the Euston Road, that wasn't too expensive, and I got a room there.

I went out and walked about the streets after my tea, down Tottenham Court Road to Cambridge Circus and to Piccadilly. The V-bombs had made a good bit of blitz damage since I was there, but London seemed much the same as ever. I was the one who was different. When I left England I hadn't been too sure of myself; I was good enough on the bench or in the hangar, but it always seemed to me that other people knew much more about the world and business than I did. Coming back after my two years in the East, I felt self-confident. I knew that I could hold my job alongside anyone, and teach them a thing or two besides. When I worked in England I was just Tom Cutter in Airservice Ltd. When I left Cairo I'd been Mr. Cutter to everybody for a long time, from the managing director down.

I was looking forward to meeting Beryl again, and I wasn't much worried about this Pole. I reckoned I could sort out that one without too much trouble. She couldn't be married to him, and now that the war was over he'd be going back to his own country. The baby might be a problem, but I don't think I really held that much against her. I was still fond of Beryl and quite prepared to make the best of things and fall in love with her again. There wasn't any other girl.

I went down by Underground after breakfast next morning and got out at Morden station and walked up through the streets to her home. It was a fine morning for the end of November, with a pale, wintry sort of sun. I was still in light clothes and a raincoat only, and I remember walking quick, because it was chilly. I went in at the little front garden gate and knocked on the front door, and her young brother came and opened it.

"Morning, Fred," I said. "Remember me?"

He hesitated, and I looked at him more closely; it was almost as if he had been crying. And then he said, "Oh—yes. How are you, Tom?"

"I'm fine," I said. "Beryl in?"

"Wait a mo'," he said. "I'll go and tell Mum." And with that he turned and fairly scuttled off into the kitchen at the back of the house.

I waited at the door. It was bound to be a bit awkward for them, but I didn't care; I hadn't made the awkwardness. I could hear a lot of whispering going on in the kitchen and then her mother came out to me, wiping her hands nervously upon her apron. And when I saw her face I knew that she'd been crying, too, and for the first time I felt fear of what was coming.

"Morning, Tom," she said hesitantly. "You didn't get our letter?"

I shook my head. "No."

She opened the door of the sitting-room. "Come in here." She led the way in. "I wish Father was here to tell you, but he's just stepped out."

"What is it?" I asked her. I think I knew by that time what it was.

"It's Beryl," she said. The tears began to trickle down her cheeks. "She did it with the oven, with the gas, some time in the middle of the night when we was all asleep."

She was weeping unrestrainedly now. "Her dad told her it'ld be all right," she sobbed. "We all told her. But she was terribly afraid of meeting you."