High Road to China. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ We usually fly from Boston down to our winter place in Florida. We were planning to do so next month.’ She heard herself already speaking in the past tense; and tried to sound more resolute. ‘We can buy a machine here and fly to China. How far is it?’

      ‘I don’t know. Seven, perhaps eight thousand miles as the crow flies. But you wouldn’t be flying as the crow flies. It’s out of the question, Miss Tozer – ’

      ‘Nothing is out of the question, Mr Henty, if it will save my father’s life. Unless you can think of an alternative?’

      Henty thumped his stick on the carpet in frustration. ‘No, I can’t. But such a flight – ’ He trailed off helplessly.

      ‘Some men – what was their name? Smith? – flew out to Australia only last year.’

      ‘Ross and Keith Smith. But there were four of them, they had an engineer and a mechanic and they flew a Vickers Vimy bomber. Even so they took longer than eighteen days. A month at least, I think. And another half a dozen chaps have tried to follow them and got less than half-way.’

      ‘China is not as far as Australia and the Smiths were not as hard pressed for time as I am.’

      ‘I wish there were some other way – ’

      ‘There isn’t,’ said Eve. ‘Where can I buy an aeroplane?’

       2

       Extract from the William Bede O’Malley manuscript:

      George Weyman always said he could read my sky-writing better than he could the handwritten notes I used to leave for him in our office. Perhaps that was because he suffered from what we now call dyslexia; or perhaps it was because the only sky-writing contract we ever had was for Oxo, the meat extract. Or more correctly, nearly had. Because at the time I am writing of, we were no more than on trial. The first sky-writing had been attempted by an American way back in 1913, but nobody had yet come up with a formula for keeping the smoke coming consistently out of the exhaust pipes of our machines. Letters kept breaking off in mid-stroke; if the world at large had been able to read Mr Pitman’s shorthand we might have been successful. There were plenty of advertisers waiting to use our services once we proved, as it were, that we were not illiterate. That summer we had been approached by a sweets manufacturer who wanted his name, plus a gumdrop in green, sketched above half a dozen seaside resorts. The producers of the motion picture Why Change Tour Wife? had also been in touch with us; they wanted the name of their film in purple smoke and that of the delectable actress, Miss Gloria Swanson, in red, hung, as one of their publicity men described it, on God’s marquee. The thought of Miss Swanson in cirrocumulus across London’s sky had excited me, but reason had forced us to say no to them. There was no point in taking on a 35-letter contract when I still hadn’t succeeded in spelling out Oxo.

      This weekend was our last chance and our luck was running its usual course. George and I had stood in our shed all morning watching the rain; as soon as it stopped I took off. The clouds were still too low for good sky-writing, but that couldn’t be helped. The writing, if I managed to get it out of the exhaust, was going to be just that much lower to the ground. The shortsighted citizens, if not the executives of Oxo, would be pleased.

      I finished the first O, shut off the smoke and took the Sopwith Camel up to begin the first stroke of the X. But half-way down the stroke I knew our luck had finally run out; there was nothing but a dribble coming from the exhaust. I did a half-loop and climbed back up again, rolled over into another dive. But it was no use: Oxo was no more than a giant cypher in the sky, drifting west towards Berkshire, a county not noted for Oxo drinkers. I cursed the smoke mixture, the weather and God Himself and headed back towards earth and bankruptcy.

      I took the Camel down over the Thames towards Waddon aerodrome near Croydon. I passed over the Oval. Surrey was playing Notts that day and play had started; spectators sat around the ground in their raincoats and watched the flannelled fools on the mud-heap out in the middle. I hoped Surrey was batting and I waggled the Camel’s wings as an encouragement to Hobbs and Sandham. Cricket is, or was then, a peaceful game; but none of the cricketers down there knew the peace I sometimes felt up here in the sky. Excitement, too; but mostly peace these days, as if the air was my one true element, the one to be trusted. Debts were never airborne with me, nor any other worries. That gave the sky a certain purity, if nothing else did.

      Waddon aerodrome came up on my starboard wing and I banked to go in, making sure there were no other machines with the same idea at that particular moment. I could see four or five machines at various heights around the aerodrome; they would be the joy-riders, ten minutes for ten bob. There was a control tower at Waddon, but they had little control over you if you chose not to look in their direction. It was the days before the bureaucrats began cutting up the sky into little cubes with aeroplanes’ markings on them. Too many damned people flying these days. Egalitarianism should never have been allowed to get off the ground.

      I came in over the long sheds of the Aircraft Disposal Company. I always wanted to weep when I thought of what stood there beneath those long roofs. Hundreds of aircraft, like birds that had died at the moment they had spread their wings for flight. Pups, Camels, SE5a’s, Bristols, DH4’s and 9’s, Handley Pages, even some Spads and Nieuports: the no-longer-wanted chariots of a war everyone was trying to forget. The Aircraft Disposal Company had brought them all here when the war had ended. It had been expected there would be a rush to buy them, everyone wanting to be airborne on the euphoria of peace and a cheap aeroplane. But it had turned out that the wartime pilots had other, more pressing things to do with their money. Such as getting married (what use was a Sopwith Pup to a couple intent on adding to the postwar baby boom?), buying a house if you could find one (the housing shortage wasn’t a recent invention), emigrating to Canada or Australia: money went no further in 1919-20 than it does now. There’s just more of it now, that’s all, like promiscuity. The satisfaction with what you get hasn’t been increased.

      There were a few of us who felt no immediate need of a wife, a house or a new country. I had no nostalgia for the war, none at all. But two years of tossing an aeroplane about the sky, uninhibited but for a natural desire to avoid German bullets, had worn threadbare any yearning for what the editorial writers were then calling the fruits of victory. Already they, the fruits not the editorialists, looked speckled. Though come to think of it, what those editorialists wrote had the sound of second-hand words in which they didn’t truly believe, the harangue of men caught at a corner where they weren’t sure from which direction came the echoes they could hear. In that year the Roaring Twenties was still just a distant whisper. In the meantime some of us flew aeroplanes, ignored our debts and called Waddon home.

      There were two landing fields at Waddon in those days, separated from each other by a public road, Plough Lane. I put the Camel down on the grass of the field called Wallington, holding it against the cross-wind. Landing was usually no problem, if you watched the wind; but taking off, a cross-wind could sometimes flip you over on your back. You don’t get that sort of thrill these days in those damned great cattle trucks they call jumbos. I swung the machine round at the end of the field and taxied back towards the level crossing over Plough Lane, feeling as I always felt when I came back to earth, deflated. I’ve heard it likened to post-coital blues, though personally I never felt any such blues till I was too old to be coital.

      I crossed the road, waving a royal hand to the envious and resentful motorists and cyclists waiting beyond the gates, and taxied towards our shed near the ADC’s hangars. George Weyman was waiting for me, ready to put the Camel away as he always did. George still flew, but he was the mechanic of the two of us and he looked after our single machine as if he, and not the Sopwith Company, had given birth to it. He loved it as an aeroplane, but he also loved it as our only asset.

      ‘Someone has just been on the СКАЧАТЬ