High Road to China

‘Mr Henty vouched for you as a pilot and a gentleman,’ said Miss Tozer.

George coughed and ran his hand like a crab over his mouth. I wasn’t sure that Henty knew anything about my value as either a pilot or a gentleman; but he was one of those, now almost all gone, who believed that if a man came from a certain class he was taken as a gentleman until proven otherwise. He had told me so one night in our mess at Salisbury, before we had gone to France and found the Germans made no class distinctions as they shot at us. He knew nothing about my cynicism: that had developed after we had parted company.

‘What would the pay be?’ I said, ungentlemanly.

‘We could come to terms,’ said Miss Tozer. ‘There would be no quibbling on my part. My only concern is to get to China as soon as possible. And I think we are wasting time even now. May we look at the aeroplane you suggest I buy?’

‘It’s over there in the ADC sheds,’ I lied. ‘They let us store our machines there. We have four.’

‘Five,’ said George, determined to get a grain of truth in somewhere. ‘We have a Sopwith Camel, but that would be no good for your purpose.’

Mr Sun Nan stayed with the chauffeur and we led Miss Tozer and Henty across to the Company’s sheds. Being a holiday there was only a skeleton staff on duty; no salesman followed us as we made our way down past the long lines of parked aircraft. The first machine I showed Miss Tozer was a Vickers Vimy. It could carry four people and extra fuel tanks could be fitted; it had been a good bomber in the last days of the war. George had not come across with me to look at it when I had paid one of our rubber cheques as a deposit on it; but ten minutes’ inspection now told him it would need at least a week’s work before being ready for any long-range flying. It was the same with the De Havilland 9 and 4 on which I had also paid deposits; I could see our quick profits disappearing even quicker than that O in Oxo. We were left with only the Bristol Fighter at the end of the line.

‘There’s another DH4 at the other end of the shed.’ George suddenly sounded as if he had been a used aeroplane dealer all his life. ‘But I’d take the Bristol over it. The range is about the same, but the Bristol is about five miles an hour faster and it can climb about five thousand feet higher. You’ll be crossing a lot of mountains, I suppose.’

‘What’s the range?’ Miss Tozer asked.

‘The Bristol will stay up for three hours,’ I said. ‘I flew one for a while during the war. Say about three hundred miles or a little over.’

‘We could stretch that by fitting extra tanks,’ said George. ‘Assuming you cruise around ninety to one hundred miles an hour, with the extra tanks you’d probably get another hundred, possibly more, to your range. Let’s say four hundred and fifty miles maximum.’

Miss Tozer stared at the Bristol Fighter. It had been a great warplane, a two-seater almost as manoeuvrable as any single-seater and twice as effective because it had carried two guns, one fired straight ahead by the pilot and the other able to be fired in a complete circle by the observer. George and I had flown as a team in one of them and in three months we had brought down nine Huns. Miss Tozer walked round the machine, then came back to us.

‘Mr O’Malley, could you get us some maps? I think we need to sit down and have a talk. Perhaps we could go back to your office?’

Two people in our office crowded it; a four-person conference would have split it at the seams. ‘We’ll go back to our shed – we can find a spot there where we can have a talk. George will have to scout around for some maps – all we have are some of England and some old war maps of France and Belgium. But before he goes scrounging – ’

‘Yes?’

‘This machine won’t do for what you have in mind. For one thing, it can carry only you and Mr Sun Nan. There won’t be room for a second pilot. You mentioned the possibility of a second machine, but all we have is our Camel. It wouldn’t have sufficient range.’

She was quiet for a moment. She had a habit, that I was to come to recognize later, of holding her chin in one hand, almost as if she had a toothache; but it was her pensive attitude, as if she were holding her head steady while she deliberated. Then: ‘How many other Bristol Fighters are there here?’

‘At least half a dozen,’ said George. ‘Two of them are in as good condition as this one.’

‘They happen to be two on which we have an option,’ I said.

‘I thought you might have,’ said Miss Tozer, and suddenly I knew she had already begun to doubt Henty’s recommendation of me as a gentleman. ‘How much would they cost?’

I almost quoted the ADC price; but then I thought, nothing risked, nothing profited. ‘Roughly £750 each. How many were you thinking of buying?’

Miss Tozer looking at George, the honest broker. ‘What would you say they would cost, Mr Weyman?’

George swallowed, didn’t look at me. ‘By the time the extra tanks and everything had been fitted, about £750.’ There went our profit: I had forgotten all the extras that would be needed. ‘It’s a fair price, Miss Tozer.’

‘I’m sure it is, Mr Weyman,’ she said, not looking at me. ‘Do you have a pilot’s licence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll buy three.’ She took her hand away from her chin; she had all her thoughts sorted out. ‘I’ll fly this one and you and Mr O’Malley can fly the other two. We’ll fit extra tanks to each of them – we can put an extra tank on the top wing, can’t we? – but your two machines will also have extra tanks in the rear cockpits. In other words we can carry our own emergency supply dump.’

I was amazed at the calm, cold efficiency of this beautiful girl who, without benefit of maps, with no knowledge of the route she would have to fly, had already anticipated some of the basic problems such a trip would present. It was as if she had had a satellite’s view of the world between England and China. Except, of course, that in those days anyone would have been locked up who had suggested such a view was possible. Only God’s eye was the empyrean one then and I’m sure He occasionally shut it in disgust at what He saw.

‘Could you find some maps, Mr Weyman? In the meantime, Mr O’Malley, I’d like some tea.’

George, looking slightly dazed, went off. I said, ‘Pardon me for mentioning it, Miss Tozer, but I don’t think George and I have yet agreed to accompany you. I’m not taking off at twenty four hours’ notice to fly all the way to China and not know why I’m going.’

‘You’ll be well paid. Isn’t that a good enough reason for going?’

‘It’s a good reason, but it’s not enough.’

We had now walked back to our shed. The Camel stood in the middle of it, the star lodger. Against one wall were the camp beds of the other two lodgers, George and me. Near the beds were a kitchen table, two chairs, a cupboard with a sagging door, a stove that looked like something that had fallen off George Stephenson’s Rocket; pots and pans hung on nails on the wall, like the armour of the poor, and a length of old parachute silk was a curtain that hid the rack on which hung our skimpy wardrobe. In the far corner there was a chipped bath and a rough bench on which stood a basin and a large bedroom jug. The bench continued along the wall, holding all George’s tools, till it came up against the cubby-hole that was our office. The only hint of affluence in the place was the Camel and it already showed the pockmarks of the surrounding poverty.

Miss Tozer looked around her. ‘Who lives here?’

‘We do.’

Even Henty looked stunned, as if he had bought a ticket for Ascot and found himself in the Potteries. He rushed to our defence: ‘It’s only temporary, I’m sure.’

‘That’s what we said when we moved in here over a year ago. Don’t apologize for us, Henty. We’re broke. Kaiser Bill could raise more credit at our bank than we could.’ Since George had already wiped out the profit I’d been anticipating, I could afford to be honest; it was about all that I could afford. I turned to Miss Tozer, took a nose-dive. ‘Never mind the reason why you want to fly to China. We’ll go with you. As you said, the money is good enough reason.’

‘I admire your honesty, Mr O’Malley.’ But she sounded as if she was surprised by it, too. She walked out again to the open doors of the shed, stood staring off into the distance – towards China? Perhaps: she was looking east. She took something from the pocket of her suit, fondled it without looking at it: it was a gold watch and chain. Then she came back to us. ‘I’ll tell you why I have to fly to China.’

Which she did, her voice faltering only once, when she mentioned that her father would be killed if we did not reach Hunan by the deadline date. My ear faltered, too, because I found it hard to believe what she was telling me. But the proof was there in her face and in that of Henty behind her.

‘It may be dangerous, Mr O’Malley. Perhaps now you won’t want to come.’

‘She needs your help,’ said Henty before I could volunteer to be a hero; then looked at his crippled leg with hate. ‘I wish to God I could go!’

George came back, one big hand clutching a roll of maps, the other holding a school atlas. I told him why Miss Tozer wanted us to fly to China with her. He listened at first as if I were telling him about a proposed joy-ride to the Isle of Wight; then abruptly he exploded. He swung round, pointing a rifle-barrel of an arm at Mr Sun Nan still standing beside the Rolls-Royce.

‘Is he part of this? You mean you take that sort of threat from a – a damned Chinaman? I’d kill the swine!’

‘If we kill him, Mr Weyman, we’ll probably also kill my father. If you dislike the Chinese so much, perhaps you’d better not come with us.’

‘He’ll come,’ I said. ‘We need him. We’ll go with you, but it will cost £500 for each of us and our return fares.’

‘Five hundred each!’ Henty, I hadn’t suspected, had a bookkeeper’s mind. ‘That’s preposterous! You’re making money out of someone else’s difficulty!’

‘I’m not going to bargain – ’

‘Neither am I!’ Miss Tozer was suddenly fierce. ‘You sound as if you’re putting a price tag on my father’s life!’

‘On the contrary. I was putting a price on our lives. I don’t think I’ve over-valued them. We’re cheaper than the machines you’re buying.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I had the idea that Miss Tozer was not accustomed to apologizing. I also had the idea I had hurt her and that hadn’t been my intention. ‘I’ll pay whatever you ask. Now may we please get down to planning the trip?’

I made tea, got out our four cracked and only cups, pulled the chairs and two boxes up to the kitchen table, spread out the maps and got down to planning an 8000-mile trip to China, everything to be ready within 24 hours. Moses, Columbus and Captain Cook, three other voyagers, would have laughed at us. The roll of maps George had scrounged took us only as far as Vienna. The rest of the proposed route, over which we had some argument, was sketched out on a school atlas on which the inky fingermarks of its former owner, some unknown juvenile, were sprinkled like a warlock’s mockery. I began to wonder what George and I had let ourselves in for. I felt like Columbus or Magellan, heading for the edge of the world, flying into an unknown sky.