High Road to China

‘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 telephone,’ he said when the Camel was safely stored away in the shed that was its hangar, our office and our home. We could not afford a telephone and I knew he must have been called over to the ADC’s office. ‘Chap named Henty. He said you would remember him, Arthur Henty.’

‘We were in the same battalion together, before I transferred to the RFC. What did he want? Not some bloody regimental reunion, I hope.’

‘He said something about wanting to buy an aeroplane. Or maybe two.’

‘We’re not going to sell him the Camel,’ I protested in anticipation. ‘We’ll pay off our debts some other way.’

‘What other way? I saw what just happened to Oxo.’ He nodded up towards the sky. The O I’d written was now just a flat dim vowel in the greyness. ‘You’re not thinking of taking up joy-riders, are you? They’ll expect a seat, not be standing out on the wing.’

George Weyman was a big man with a high voice and a low boiling point. He never went looking for a fight or an argument, but somehow he seemed to spend half his time swinging his fists to defend a point or holding someone down to force an argument down his throat. He was prickly with prejudices and one had to be careful one didn’t rub against them; which was not always easy to do, since they seemed to cover the whole spectrum of human bias. So why did I choose him as my friend and partner? Because he was loyal, honest, good company when he wasn’t arguing and the best damn aeroplane mechanic I’d ever come across.

‘Did Henty say why he wanted to see me? If he wants a machine, why doesn’t he just go over to the ADC?’

‘He said he’d like your advice as an old army mate.’

‘Henty would never use the word mate.’

‘Righto. Friend. He said he’d be down within the hour. What are you thinking about? You’ve got your swindler’s look again.’

I was staring across at the ADC’s sheds. ‘How many cheques do we have left in our cheque-book?’

‘Four. There’s just one snag. We don’t have any money in our account. They closed our overdraft on Friday.’

‘Today’s a bank holiday. If I write four cheques, who’s going to be able to call the bank to see if there’s any money in our account to meet them?’

‘What are you going to write four cheques for?’

‘Deposits on four machines. We’ll give Henty a choice – you said he wanted a machine, perhaps two. You said he also wanted my advice. My advice will be to buy from us, not the ADC. We’ll be more expensive than the ADC, but he won’t know that.’

‘I don’t know how you got your commission as an officer and a gentleman. I was only a bloody sergeant and I’m twice the gentleman you are.’

‘You’re wrong, chum. Honesty has nothing to do with being a gentleman – that’s a myth put out by gentlemen. Simmer down, George. I’m not about to do something they can send me to Wormwood Scrubs for. All I’m going to do is put our name – ’

‘Your name. Not mine.’

‘Righto, my name. I’ll sign the cheques and leave them with the ADC. If Henty buys a machine, or two, I’ll cancel the deposits on those he doesn’t want. I’ll get him to give us his cheque today and we’ll be down at the bank in the morning when it opens to deposit it to meet the cheques we’ve paid out. Now what’s dishonest about that?’

‘It’s not what I’d expect of a gentleman, that’s all.’

‘That’s because you’re not a gentleman. You socialists always expect more of us than we claim for ourselves. You secretly wish you had our honest hypocrisy.’

Half an hour later we saw the Rolls-Royce pull up outside our shed. It came down the perimeter of the field as if the chauffeur wasn’t quite sure that he wasn’t going to be attacked by the aeroplanes coming in and taking off. Arthur Henty got out, steadying himself with a walking-stick. He turned and helped out a girl. Even through the dirty windows of our office one could see she was a stunner, an absolute beauty. I know I’m looking back through a rose-coloured telescope and the girls of an old man’s youth always have an aura about them. But Eve Tozer was not only beautiful, she had what was later known as It or, still later, sex appeal; and she also had what is now known as class. Even through the grime of that office window and the rheum of an old man’s eyes, I can still see her that afternoon fifty years ago and still remember the feeling that, up till then, I had only experienced when looping the loop. And not in bed.

‘Holy Moses, did you ever see such a girl!’

‘They’ve got a bloody Chink with them,’ was all George said. He was only slightly prejudiced against women, but he had a consuming aversion to all the world’s populace who weren’t white, especially those outside the Empire. ‘We’re not going to sell any machine to him! Those buggers want to conquer the world.’

‘Let me do the talking, George. Just don’t declare war on China till we hear what Henty has to say.’

We went out to meet them. A Chinese had come round from the passenger’s side of the front seat and stood by the rear door behind Henty and the girl. As we walked towards them I whispered to George, ‘The Chinaman looks like a butler. Stop worrying about the Yellow Peril.’

Henty introduced himself and Miss Tozer, ignoring the Chinese, and came straight to his point. ‘Miss Tozer needs an aeroplane for a long-distance flight, O’Malley.’

The O’Malley was a measure of the sort of friends we had been. We had been fellow officers sharing a mess and several trenches together, but he had been wounded and demobbed before we had been through enough to get down to first-name terms. ‘How did you know where to find me?’

‘I saw that piece in the Illustrated London News on your attempts at sky-writing. I cut it out and kept it. One likes to keep track of chaps one knew in the army, y’know.’

It wasn’t a liking of mine, but I was glad it was one of his, if it meant he brought Miss Tozer to meet chaps he’d known in the army. ‘How long is the flight you’re planning, Miss Tozer?’

‘To China.’ I felt George start beside me. ‘I’d like to leave tomorrow at the latest.’

‘Are you serious?’ said George, starting to boil. ‘We don’t like having our leg pulled.’

‘I’ve never been more serious in my life, Mr Weyman. I am an experienced pilot, I know what I’m attempting should have more preparation than a day’s notice allows. But I just don’t have the time. I am flying to China because it is urgent, terribly urgent, that I get there by a certain date.’

‘How soon?’

She looked at Henty, then back at us. ‘21 August. I’ll need an aeroplane with maximum range and a good cruising speed. One that will carry myself as pilot and a passenger.’

I glanced at Henty and he shook his head. ‘Not me. Mr Sun Nan.’

The Chinese behind them stared at George and me. I almost said inscrutably, but there was a certain nervousness about him, tiny cracks in his mask. ‘Does Mr Sun Nan fly?’

‘No,’ said Henty. I became aware that he and Miss Tozer did not want to take me and George into their confidence. This flight they were talking about was no eccentricity, no madcap adventure by a bored rich girl; they were far too serious for that, too strained-looking. But I was certain that Miss Tozer, for all her claims to being an experienced pilot, really had no idea of what lay ahead of her. Henty must have seen the sceptical look on my face, because he went on, ‘On our way down here I’ve been talking to Miss Tozer about taking a second machine and pilot with her.’